Virginia Bruce, Hollywood Horror Star and Horsewoman: Halloween Edition

Tobi Lopez Taylor

This essay is part of the ongoing Halloween Horror Horsewomen series, which also includes a profile of Martha O’Driscoll.  Future essays will focus on actresses Marguerite Churchill, Frances Drake, and Evelyn Ankers.

Just in time for Halloween🎃, here’s the story of another actress from the Golden Age of Universal horror films who also made her mark as a racehorse owner and breeder: Virginia Bruce (b. 1910, d. 1982). (Some of the information about Bruce included herein has been drawn from Scott O’Brien’s 2008 book, Virginia Bruce: Under My Skin, the only full-length biography of the actress.) 

Born in Minnesota as Helen Virginia Briggs, she attended high school in North Dakota and moved to Los Angeles with her family in 1928. One of her first film appearances was a bit part in the 1929 Fox Studios drama Fugitives, which starred Madge Bellamy—who also has a horse connection via a former lover she attempted to shoot:  Albert Stanwood Murphy (see my post on the matter here).

In 1932, Bruce worked alongside Walter Huston and Lupe Velez in the MGM horror drama Kongo. One reviewer remarked in Photoplay, “Walter Huston in a role unsuited to his personality; Lupe Velez with little chance to act; Virginia Bruce's prettiness sacrificed to a sordid part.” Bruce would later partner with Huston’s son John in the racehorse business.

During production of Kongo, Bruce married her first husband, silent film star John Gilbert (b. 1897, d. 1936), on the MGM studio lot. The union proved to be short lived, and the couple divorced in 1934. 

In 1936, Bruce starred with Edmund Lowe in MGM’s The Garden Murder Case. The plot revolves around the death of a jockey in a race. The racing sequence was filmed at Santa Anita Park.

Three years later, Bruce married J. Walter Ruben (b. 1899, d. 1942), a screenwriter, film director, and polo enthusiast who wrote the screenplay for MGM’s Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937), a racetrack musical that was the first feature film to pair Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney. One member of the Bruce-Ruben wedding party was Gene Markey, who later married Lucille Wright, the owner of horse racing’s legendary Calumet Farm, which produced two Triple Crown winners, Whirlaway and Citation. 

Ruben and Bruce purchased a home in Pacific Palisades that they called Wildtree. Ruben directed his wife in only one picture, the 1937 MGM western The Bad Man of Brimstone (aka Arizona Bill). Bruce co-starred with Wallace and Noah Beery, Dennis O’Keeffe, and Bruce Cabot. The latter was a first cousin of noted California Arabian horse breeder Frederic E. Lewis II, who established Diamond Bar Ranch.

Bruce credited the 1939 MGM film Let Freedom Ring with helping her get over her fear of horseback riding, which stemmed from a fall she’d taken many years earlier. Around this time, Bruce and Ruben purchased some racehorses for their Wildtree Stable. These included Big Ed (*Bright Knight – Codetta, by The Porter), who racked up some victories at Santa Anita as well as at Agua Caliente, and the non-winner Eternal Lady (Okapi – Rose Penn, by Upset). Bruce bred Eternal Lady to Morvich, the 1922 Kentucky Derby winner, and got Lady Morvich, who broke her maiden at Del Mar, paying $214 to win.

Bruce’s best-known racer was a half-sister to Lady Morvich. This was the bay filly Lady Bruce (*Sierra Nevada – Eternal Lady, by Okapi), a homebred she owned in partnership with director John Huston and his wife, actress Evelyn Keyes.

According to Keyes’s memoir, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister, when Lady Bruce made her racing debut, Huston, an inveterate gambler, instructed his wife to wager $1,000 on the filly, but to first ask their trainer whether to bet it all to win, or to bet across the board. The trainer indicated the latter. When Keyes told her husband that Lady Bruce had won, paying $26 to win, he was elated—until she told him how’d she placed the bet. He hung up on her and didn’t come home that night. 

Lady Bruce’s biggest claim to fame was beating the stakes winner Speculation, a well-bred son of *Mahmoud, in an allowance race at Hollywood Park. 

Bruce appeared briefly, along with fellow racehorse owner Bing Crosby, in a 1938 short film about Santa Anita.

One tantalizing bit of information in O’Brien’s biography of Bruce is that the actress collected horseshoes that had been worn by well-known racehorses. Unfortunately, O’Brien does not provide any of the horses’ names. Could she have possessed the shoes of, say, Seabiscuit, *Kayak II, Rosemont, or Stagehand? 

The year 1940 saw the release of Invisible Woman, with Bruce in the starring role. Her co-stars included John Barrymore and John Howard. The third film in the Invisible franchise, it garnered mainly favorable reviews and grossed $600,000. The film proved controversial at the time because, although Bruce’s character was invisible, she was also nude. One recent reviewer, critic Glenn Erickson, observed that Invisible Woman was “one of the few vehicles to make use of [her] talent.”

In 1946, Bruce sold her home in Pacific Palisades to actress Deanna Durbin. By this time, Bruce was taking on few acting roles and was no longer raising or racing Thoroughbreds. Her last film appearance was in the 1960 Columbia Pictures release, Strangers When We Meet. She died in 1982 at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Retirement Home in Woodland Hills, California. Her obituary in the New York Times observed that she was “a popular leading lady of the 1930s and ’40s, appearing opposite such leading men as “Robert Taylor, James Stewart, Fredric March, James Cagney, Robert Montgomery, Nelson Eddy, William Powell, and Melvyn Douglas.” 

Doing Time: How Two Arabian Horses in Arizona Came to Be Owned by Convicts, Part One: JEREMAH 144

 Tobi Lopez Taylor

An Arizona Horse History Project essay

Photo by Sean Foster, 2012, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

The Spur Cross Conservation Area, in Cave Creek, Arizona, today consists of more than 2,000 acres of desert wilderness that contain a rare year-round spring-fed stream, stands of majestic saguaros, and dozens of prehistoric archaeological sites. However, few visitors realize that, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, this land—known then as the Spur Cross Ranch—was also home to two of the earliest Arabian horses to live in Arizona—Jeremah 144 and Amar 767.

            In April 1928, the University of Arizona, in Tucson, held a horse show. University president Byron Cummings was on hand to present medals and trophies. Captain R. C. Woodruff—whom I have written about elsewhere—gave a demonstration ride on his Quarter Horse mare, Sprite. In addition, a young man named Jacob Franz Fishter exhibited a grey Arabian stallion named Jeremah, on behalf of the horse’s lessee, Captain Edward M. Joyce. The latter had quite an unusual excuse for not attending the show: he was in prison in Florence, Arizona. 

             Joyce—a World War I veteran, horseman, and proprietor of some Southern Arizona guest ranches, including the Carlink Ranch—had made headlines four years earlier, when he shot and killed a ranch hand who was paying too much attention to Joyce’s wife. Although Joyce was initially charged with murder, his attorneys successfully advocated for the lesser charge of manslaughter.  

I also happened to learn, while doing research for this essay, that my great-great-uncle, William “Billy” Rhodes, worked for Joyce and was a witness to the shooting. Billy Rhodes was no stranger to violence, as he grew up during the era of Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War (c. 1882–1892), a deadly feud between the Tewksbury and Graham families in which Billy’s father, John Rhodes, was a participant who was nearly killed in a Tempe courtroom. (For more about the Rhodes-Lopez family and the Pleasant Valley War, see here.)

Joyce and two fellow inmates in Arizona’s Florence State Prison used their jail time productively: they met often and, after their release, planned to open a guest ranch north of Phoenix, in Cave Creek. Joyce would provide the ranching experience, Phillip Lewis had some financial expertise (he was a former bank president serving time for tax evasion and embezzlement), and the third, unnamed, convict helped to underwrite the enterprise.

Jeremah Comes to Arizona

Joyce was still in prison when he leased Jeremah. The stallion had already traveled by train from the East Coast to the West Coast and had changed hands at least twice (see below) before arriving in Arizona. Jeremah was born in 1913 at Peter Bradley’s Hingham Stock Farm in Massachusetts.

Breed historian Carol Woodbridge Mulder noted that Jeremah was “a very nice, typy horse with an outstanding pedigree, which included Kars, the founding stallion of Crabbet Stud in England.” Jeremah’s sire, the influential breeding stallion *Hamrah, had been imported from Syria by political cartoonist Homer Davenport, and his dam, Nanshan, was a valuable daughter of *Nedjme, the first horse registered in the Arabian Horse Club of America’s studbook. About Jeremah, Mulder observed that this “very handsome horse is said by the 1927 studbook to have been marked with a blaze that covered his left nostril, left front fetlock, right front pastern, left hind stocking and right hind fetlock. As has often been mentioned in previous articles, *Hamrah 28’s habit at stud was often to sire animals that were quite beautiful, and better than he was himself. Jeremah was one of these.”

Jeremah and Carl Raswan

Jeremah was in a group of Arabians sold by Bradley in 1924 to Carl Schmidt (later known as Carl Raswan), who acted as the buyer’s agent for industrialist Chauncey D. Clarke, then living in California. Clarke had made a fortune from his family’s Illinois distillery business and from his mining interests in Arizona. Unfortunately, his health began to fail, and in March 1925 Clarke sold his horses to cereal magnate W. K. Kellogg, who was establishing his own ranch in Pomona, California. Clarke passed away the following year. (His widow, Marie Rankin Clarke, a philanthropist and a founder of the Hollywood Bowl, outlived him by more than two decades.)

Curiously, a short article in the August 29, 1927 issue of the Pomona Progress Bulletin noted that Kellogg was leasing Jeremah to Chester A. Wortley of Onyx, California, “for breeding purposes.” Presumably the lease agreement fell through, as Jeremah was in Arizona, leased to Joyce, by the time the breeding season would have begun in 1928. (Wortley, a cameraman and wilderness guide for film producer Jesse Lasky and author Zane Grey, died in March 1931.)

It is unclear what, or who, motivated Joyce to lease Jeremah. Presumably he heard about him, or Arabians in general, through Fishter, who owned two Arabians from the Kellogg Ranch, *Razam and Wardi. Homer Smith, a neighbor of Joyce’s in Cave Creek, wrote a colorful, not always accurate, memoir titled From Desert to Tundra that mentioned Joyce and Jeremah. Smith claimed that Kellogg had been a guest at the Spur Cross, that Joyce had borrowed money from Kellogg, and that Kellogg had “given” Jeremah to Joyce.  I have found no evidence for any of these assertions. If Kellogg had visited Spur Cross Ranch, his visit would most certainly have been covered by the Phoenix newspapers.

            Interestingly, the one time that Kellogg is known to have visited Arizona during this period was in November 1924, just weeks before Joyce was arrested for killing his employee. Kellogg stayed in Tucson’s Santa Rita Hotel, where Joyce’s friend Jacob Fishter would later take a job as a clerk. Kellogg was much impressed by the area’s abundant sunshine, telling a reporter, “I have just returned from a trip to Europe and prefer your climate to anything I found there.” (Arizona Daily Star, 11/18/1924) The Santa Rita Hotel, constructed in Mission Revival Style by well-known Southwest architect Henry Trost, was considered the finest hotel in southern Arizona. It was owned by a partnership whose members included former Tucson mayor Levi Manning—the first breeder of purebred registered Arabians in the state of Arizona—and businessman Federico Ronstadt, grandfather of singer Linda Ronstadt, who was herself an Arabian horse owner.

In early 1928, when interviewed about Jeremah, Fishter (or the interviewer) got some basic facts wrong. He claimed that Joyce owned (rather than leased) Jeremah and that “Kellogg paid $12,000 for the stallion, which he purchased from [Bradley’s] Hingham stock farm.” In truth, Kellogg paid Clarke, not Bradley, $18,000 for a package deal of 11 horses, one of which was Jeremah. 

Jeremah 144

Arabian horses were still extremely rare in Arizona in the 1920s; there were only about a dozen in the entire state, and most were in the Tucson area. In addition to Jeremah, these included five Arabians owned by the previously mentioned Levi Manning (El Jafil, Jarad, Kalub, Saraband, and Shiloh); Fishter’s colt and filly *Razam and Wardi; the colts Hasan  and Desert Song, owned by Pearl Gray Clyde of Phoenix;  Faris, a stallion belonging to the U.S. Remount Service, who stood at Arizona congressman Bert Colter’s ranch in Springerville in 1927, and then went to Lewis A. Bailey, at the Grand Canyon, from 1928 to 1931; and Barzin, also a Remount stallion, who stood at various locations throughout Arizona from 1929 to 1938.

Spur Cross Ranch

After their release from prison, in 1928 Joyce and his partners established the Spur Cross Ranch north of Phoenix, on the west side of Cave Creek near the defunct Phoenix Mine. They reportedly reused materials from the mine in the construction of the ranch and worked so quickly that the Spur Cross was able to welcome visitors by at least July 1928, as noted by a columnist for the  Arizona Republic, who wrote: “Mrs. Vernon Martin and her daughter Verna and Miss Ida Smith spent several days at the Spur Cross ranch last week.” These visitors would not have met Joyce, however, as he remained at the Florence prison until October of that year.

            A March 1929 promotional article by Philip W. Jones in Progressive Arizona and the Great Southwest noted, “One could seek all over the southwest without finding a more ideal location than that selected for the Spur Cross Ranch. A splendid highway leading out of Phoenix through fragrant orange groves and beautiful dwelling houses winds gently upward across a great stretch of desert to a mountain pass which is the gateway to the Cave Creek district.” Three horses were singled out: “The herd is headed by Jeremiah (sic), a purebred Arabian stallion sent to ‘Cap’ [Joyce] by W. H. (sic) Kellogg, the breakfast food manufacturer, from his Arabian horse ranch in California…‘Patches,’ probably the best educated horse in Arizona, is another member of the Spur Cross equine family and frequently entertains the guests with his numerous tricks, as does ‘Pancho,’ a beautiful black gelding, who delights in doing funny things for the amusement of his onlookers.”

The main source for information on Jeremah during his years at Spur Cross is the previously mentioned unreliable narrator Homer Smith, who first saw Jeremah in about 1930, when the stallion was 17: “Even at his advanced age he was a magnificent animal.” (Smith, p. 127.) He was much less impressed by Captain Joyce’s abilities as a stockman. Smith penned a harrowing story of several Spur Cross broodmares, either in foal to Jeremah or having just produced foals by him, who died of water founder thanks to gross mismanagement. As Smith trenchantly noted, “That ended the horse breeding ‘division’ of the Spur Cross spread.” (p. 134).

Snooper, a part-bred son of Jeremah

            Smith himself raised a part-bred colt by Jeremah, named Snooper, who was out of a mare called Nugget: “[Snooper] was a superb animal, inheriting the color and conformation of his dam, and the grace, style and endurance of his sire. He was the most tractable animal I ever saw, and imparted this characteristic to all his offspring: we never had to ‘break’ them, we just started riding and training them.” (p. 134).

Smith went on to note that “some months later, in fact it was the following spring [in 1932], that I was riding over on Cave Creek, and stopped in to pay a casual visit to the Spur Cross….It was apparent that things were not going too well. Jeremiah [sic] had died during the winter.” (p. 137.) Jeremah’s death—on December 2, 1931—is confirmed in the records of the W. K. Kellogg Arabian Horse Library.

            Unfortunately, the handsome, well-bred Jeremah sired only two purebred Arabians: a colt out of Killah that died soon after his birth in September 1925, and the 1927 grey filly Zoba, out of the excellent producer Hasiker. Zoba—who was sold to Oklahoma in 1929—was a half-sister to some other Arabians in Arizona, including Kalub (by Ziki), a stallion owned by Levi Manning, and Hasan (by Antez), owned by Pearl Gray Clyde. Amazingly, although Zoba produced only two foals (the fillies Daud and Feisal), she still has many well-known descendants. These include El Jahez WH, 2023 U.S. National Champion Senior Stallion and 2024 Scottsdale Senior Champion Stallion; Katalena Bey, dam of multiple National winners, including Alada Lena, a mare with more than 20 National titles in dressage and sport horse classes, and Royal Atheena, stakes winner and Darley Horse of the Year. As a matter of fact, when Royal Atheena came to Arizona in 2006 for her induction into the Racing Hall of Fame, she spent the night in Cave Creek, at Brusally Arabians—less than three miles from Spur Cross Ranch.

 

After Jeremah died, Joyce leased another stallion from Kellogg in 1932. This was Amar (*Nasik x *Rasima), a 1930 bay colt, bred by Kellogg, of all Crabbet bloodlines. He was also a half-brother to Jacob Fishter’s *Razam (by Hassam). Mulder described Amar as “beautifully marked with a strip and four three-quarter stockings.” As was the case with Jeremah, Amar sired no registered purebred get for Joyce.

In early 1930, Captain Joyce made the papers again—this time in Phoenix. He was arrested at the ranch and spent time in jail on a “statutory charge” involving the underage daughter of a local businessman. He also got crosswise with his business partner Phil Lewis, who foreclosed on him around 1932. Joyce gave up the dude-ranching business and by 1950 he was employed as a letter carrier, living in a New York tenement with his second wife, two children, and his mother-in-law. He died in 1956. The Spur Cross changed hands a few more times over the next several years, and it ceased to be used as a dude ranch in 1953.

1951 advertisement

At some point, perhaps around 1940, Amar came into the hands of Yvette Ward—wife of Charles Ward, the other convict in this saga. Amar’s story will be explored in Part Two.  

Trinidad Lopez, the Naco Cemetery, and Arizona's Pleasant Valley War

Tobi Lopez Taylor

 An Arizona History essay

The tiny border town of Naco, Arizona, made the news some years ago because a historic cemetery there was slated to be destroyed in advance of construction of an RV park. In 2006, I was doing research on Naco for an upcoming issue of Archaeology Southwest Magazine when I happened upon a list of the people interred at the cemetery that had been compiled by historian Robert Silas Griffin. To my surprise, one of the names matched that of my maternal great-great-grandmother, Trinidad Lopez, about whom I knew little at the time.

Trinidad’s daughter, Clara R. Acton,
with her son Edward, 1904.

Trinidad was born and baptized in Ures, Sonora, in 1850. By 1864, she and her younger brother, Rafael, were living in Tucson with some of her mother’s relatives, the Heredias. Around 1867, she married Ramon Leon, of Ures, and with him she had at least four children.

Sometime before 1885, Trinidad became involved with John Rhodes, a cattleman from Texas who fell in with the brothers Ed and John Tewksbury, two of the major players in Arizona’s Pleasant Valley War. This feud—also known as the Graham-Tewksbury War, lasted about a decade and was responsible for the deaths of dozens of men. It has been called the bloodiest range war in U.S. history.

John Rhodes in 1916.

Trinidad and John do not appear to have ever married or even set up house together, but between 1885 and 1888 they had three children in Tucson: Juan Francisco (John Frank) Rhodes; my great-great-grandmother, Clara Ernestina Rhodes; and William Robert “Billy” Rhodes. The elder two children were baptized at San Agustin Church in Tucson. There is no record of Billy Rhodes having been baptized.

In December 1888, about a year after some members of the Graham faction killed John Tewksbury, Rhodes married his compatriot’s widow, Mary Ann Crigger Tewksbury. At some point in the next few years, Rhodes traveled from Pleasant Valley to Tucson and demanded that Trinidad turn over the three children to him. Juan, Clara, and Billy, who were bilingual, were then forbidden by their father to speak Spanish again. (Many years later, one relative recalled hearing Clara speaking in Spanish with her cousin, rancher Antonio “Tony” Lopez, in Winkleman, Arizona.)

In 1892, Rhodes and Ed Tewksbury ambushed Tom Graham (the last of the Graham men) in Tempe, less than a mile from the still-standing Niels Peterson House. Rhodes was arrested and put on trial for murder. While in the courtroom, Rhodes was nearly killed when his victim’s widow, Annie Graham, attempted to shoot him. One witness—named Rafael Lopez—who corroborated Rhodes’s claim that he was nowhere near the scene of the crime, may have been Trinidad’s younger brother. Rhodes was ultimately acquitted.

After the trial, Rhodes seems to have become a more-or-less model citizen: he signed up at age 56 as an Arizona Ranger, and in 1907, he became a Pinal County Livestock Inspector. He died in Phoenix in 1919. His widow, Mary Ann, lived until 1950.

Trinidad died in Naco in 1920, perhaps either while coming back to Tucson or going to visit relatives in Ures. Her son Juan Francisco Rhodes was killed in 1911 during construction of the copper mill in Hayden, Arizona. Her only daughter, Clara, married Frank Acton—son of George Acton Sr., who co-owned a butcher shop in Benson—and they raised their children on the Acton Ranch near Mammoth. Clara died in 1968. Billy Rhodes worked for Edward M. Joyce on the Carlink Ranch, near Redington, and in 1924 witnessed Joyce intentionally kill his employee, Jess Whiteley. In 1930, Billy married Rosa Ronquillo, the first postmistress of Redington, Arizona. Billy died in 1971, and Rosa passed away in 1982.

It’s ironic that it took the potential destruction of the Naco Cemetery to bring so much attention to the people who have been interred there for so many decades. Thanks to the residents of Cochise County and other interested parties, the individuals in the cemetery continue to rest in peace—que en paz descanse.

(A previous version of this essay appeared in Archaeology Southwest Magazine in 2006.)

*HALIM, the Arabian Stallion Who Chased After Pancho Villa—and Wound Up in a Museum!

 Tobi Lopez Taylor

An Arizona Horse History and Crabbet Chronicles essay

An article in the January 23, 1932 New Yorker, titled “Skeleton-Maker,” profiled S. Harmstead Chubb—whose name and childhood experiences sound as if they were concocted by Edward Gorey: 

“[At] the age of seven [Chubb] found a dead cat. He examined it with great interest, and then dissected it. In this pursuit, he was not encouraged by his parents.” 

Chubb (b. 1863, d. 1949) grew up to be “the sole person of the department of Specialized Osteology at the [American] Museum of Natural History, and he has free rein. He has specialized in horses.” The article went on to observe that

“he has a workshop on the sixth floor—a round room lined with cabinets containing his circulating library of bones….Among the items on file is Halim, the celebrated Arabian horse that General Harbord used to ride. Among judges of horseflesh, Halim was generally regarded as the world’s most perfectly balanced horse. Mr. Chubb hasn’t got round to putting him together yet.” 

Who was Halim—or, more specifically, *Halim (AHA No. 282)—and how did his remains end up in Chubb’s round room? *Halim’s story starts in Sussex, England at the Crabbet Stud of Lady Anne and Wilfrid  Blunt (for more essays on the Blunts, see here, here, and here). The bay colt, foaled in May 1906, was a son of the Blunts’ important stallion *Astraled and was linebred to their foundation mare Queen of Sheba. 

In 1908, *Halim was purchased from Crabbet Stud by Colonel Spencer Borden (b. 1848, d. 1921), an influential American Arabian horse breeder, and was shipped to his farm, Interlachen,

near Fall River, Massachusetts. Borden—who was related to the notorious Lizzie Borden as well as the inventor Gail Borden, of condensed milk fame—came from a wealthy textile-printing family, was educated at the Sorbonne, authored books, and worked with Thomas Edison to bring electrification to New England. 

Starting in the late 1800s, Spencer Borden owned various kinds of horses, including the well-known Morgan stallion Ethan Allan 3rd. He began breeding polo ponies in the 1890s and purchased his first Arabians from England in 1898. His positive experiences with the breed led him to believe that Arabians would be well-suited for use by the U.S. military. As he wrote in 1920, “Having for many years followed the development of ideas used in the most successful studs of nations where cavalry horses are bred…it was found that, without exception, Arab blood was the basis on which all the best horses had been established.” To encourage the U.S. government to use Arabians in its cavalry, Borden held long-distance riding tests and also gave some of his Arabians to cavalry officers, who rode them on patrol and into battle.  

*Halim was one of the Borden Arabians to be tested privately and ridden in combat. In 1912, he participated in a 26-mile riding test from Providence, Rhode Island, “over pavements and hard road,” to Borden’s Interlachen Farm. Ridden by Major George Byram of the Tenth Cavalry, *Halim finished the ride in three hours, despite carrying 200 pounds and losing a shoe en route. 

The following year, *Halim completed a 55-mile ride. He was ridden by Captain Frank Tompkins (b. 1868, d. 1954), also of the Tenth Cavalry, from Fort Ethan Allen to Northfield, Vermont, and covered the distance in nine hours and 20 minutes. It was noted that this was “3 miles more than the direct distance, caused by roads covered with ice cakes from the breakup of the Winooski River, compelling a detour.”

U.S. soldiers camped on the border with Mexico. Naco, Arizona, 1916.   Courtesy Library of Congress.

By January 1914, *Halim was in Naco, Arizona—on the U.S.-Mexico border—with Captain Tompkins. As Arabian horse historian Carol Woodbridge Mulder noted, it would have been quite a change of climate for him, having come from England, then relocating to Massachusetts, and traveling thousands of miles across America to the desert Southwest. Notably, *Halim appears to have been the first purebred, registered Arabian horse to live in the state of Arizona, as he arrived more than a decade before Tucson Mayor Levi Manning’s Arabian stallion El Jafil was purchased from California in late 1925.

Stationed in Arizona, Tompkins wrote:

“I am using Halim for all my patrolling and ‘distance’ work….Halim has never been tired yet, and I am beginning to feel that he never will be. The horses here [at Naco] are without shelter. Halim stands out like the rest and takes everything that comes along in the way of weather. The last four days we have had a fierce wind and sand storm, followed by rain and snow. Halim takes this like an old soldier. He is a fine war horse—I never owned a better one.”

In March 1916, after Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and his men raided the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, President Woodrow Wilson ordered that a “punitive expedition,” headed by Brigadier General John “Black Jack” Pershing, ride into Mexico to capture Villa. The 11-month expedition, which was ultimately unsuccessful, was later chronicled by Tompkins in a 1934 book called Chasing Villa: The Last Campaign of the U.S. Cavalry. (Tompkins, who rode with Pershing in pursuit of Villa, was mounted on a partbred Arabian named Kingfisher.) 

The foreword to Tompkins’s Chasing Villa was penned by Major General James Harbord (b. 1866, d. 1947), who, as a member of the First Cavalry, rode *Halim in Mexico as part of the punitive expedition. In the book, he wrote that Tompkins “has probably forgotten that 20 years ago last summer [i.e., 1914]…he sent me…‘Halim.’” The horse was finally registered with the Arabian Horse Club of America in 1918, with Harbord as his owner. A 1920 article in the Cavalry Journal noted that Harbord was still riding him.

 Harbord retired from the military in 1922. He then became president of the recently created Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a position he held until 1930. During Harbord’s tenure, RCA diversified dramatically, founding the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and becoming a partner in the movie studio known as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., which made many films in various genres, including Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life, Bringing Up Baby, Cimarron, Swing Time, Pride of the Yankees, and King Kong, to name a few. 

Also in 1922, Harbord lent *Halim to the U.S. Army Remount for breeding purposes. The stallion stood at the Front Royal Quartermaster Remount Depot, in Virginia, in 1924 and 1925. By 1927, the Arabian studbook listed *Halim as being in the ownership of the Remount. 

*Halim died sometime between 1927 and 1930.  While owned by  Borden, he sired two fillies, Narina and Primrose. In 1918, when Borden decided to stop breeding Arabians in favor of Guernsey cattle, fellow Arabian breeder/promoter W. R. Brown purchased the majority of his horses, including *Halim’s daughters. Although each mare produced one registered foal apiece, those foals did not breed on. 

Borden would have been stunned to hear that *Halim was “generally regarded as the world’s most perfectly balanced horse,” according to the New Yorker. In 1915—a few years after he had sold *Halim—Borden observed to Lady Anne Blunt, “Halim was a disappointment, though he made good in the [military] service. He never had the finish that my educated eye demands in an Arab.” Carol Mulder, who assessed *Halim from some photographs, believed that *Halim did have some good points, such as his “pleasing head,” “fine, expressive eyes,” a neck of “good length,” and good shoulders. 

The last word about *Halim, however, should go to the man who knew him best. Major General Harbord, who rode him in search of Pancho Villa, called this stallion “the most beautiful and lovely thoroughbred Arab horse that ever brought delight to the heart of a cavalryman.” 

Photo of *Halim at age 4. Rider unknown. In Imported Foundation Stock
of North American Arabian Horses, Volume II (revised edition),
by Carol Woodbridge Mulder.