My Neighbor, the Olympian: Major-General Jonathan Burton, an Equestrian Legend

By Tobi Lopez Taylor

This essay is part of the ongoing Arizona Horse History Project series, which also includes posts on Penny Chenery and Secretariat, Hank the Cowdog, Man O’ War’s son By Hisself, Frank Brophy,  Doc Pardee, and another essay about General Burton.  

About two months ago, a woman and a man came walking up my driveway on a Saturday morning. I had two horses turned out in the arena. Often, people drop by to watch the horses romp or to ask whether I board horses (I don’t), or inquire if I know where they can buy a pony for their child (ditto) or a quarter horse for their husband (also ditto). I have sport horses, equines bred to event, do dressage, or jump—and that kind of thing is rare on my side of Tucson, where the majority of riders I know either rope or trail ride.

But back to the couple. The woman said they lived nearby and stopped because they’d seen dressage letters in my arena. She inquired about whether I rode dressage (yes), and did I have a trainer (yes), and then she said, “My father, here, is a horse trainer. His name is Jack Burton.”

I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not Major-General Jonathan Burton, are you?”

The man nodded, and his eyes lit up.

“It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

General Burton is a legend in the horse world: a member of the 1956 Olympic three-day event team, past president of various equestrian federations, international judge, and author. Not long after I’d begun to take dressage lessons, in the 1980s, a friend had given me Burton’s book How to Ride a Winning Dressage Test. And Burton is still judging: I recalled that he’d given a wonderful score to a Trakehner colt named Horatio SF, bred by my friend Heather Buttrum Jantzen, in an in-hand class at a show in California a couple of years earlier.

At left: General Burton show jumping in 1949; at right, taking a fall on the Olympic cross-country course in Stockholm, 1956 (he remounted and finished the course). 

Burton, who is closer to ninety than he is to eighty, rides his bike several days a week. Ever since our first meeting, he’s dropped by a number of times to pet whichever horse of ours is turned out near the road, usually Rosie, my Arabian mare. He doesn’t say much but seems quite glad to simply be around horses on a somewhat regular basis.

The General unintentionally made my day on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. My husband and I were in the arena with Immaginn, my two-year-old Anglo-Arabian gelding, whose nickname, like the General’s, is Jack. This gelding is a product of our small breeding program, and he is by far the best one. I find very little to fault in him, but I'm well aware of that scourge of horse breeding, “barn blindness.” As it happened, General was passing by on his daily bike ride. When he got to our driveway, he pulled in and stopped. “Who is THAT?” he exclaimed, as Jack trotted around. “He’s magnificent!”

My husband looked at me and rolled his eyes, knowing he’d never hear the end of that remark.

“Can I quote you on that?” I asked.

“Sure!” The General watched Jack walk, trot, canter, and play for about fifteen minutes. I asked him if he thought he saw a particular discipline—dressage, jumping?—in his future. “The sky’s the limit with that one,” he replied, and then he pedaled on home. I have been smiling ever since, and am now calling Jack (the gelding, not the General) “Mr. Magnificent.”

General Burton and Immaginn: Jack and Jack.

Interestingly, what the General didn’t know was that he himself had seen the sire of this gelding. Jack’s dad is a stallion named Innkeeper, one of the last remaining sons of the famous Secretariat, and the only one licensed for warmblood breeding. Innkeeper’s owner, Ursula Ferrier, and I are friends. A while back, she wrote, “Hilltop Farm asked if we could bring [Innkeeper] to a breed judges’ seminar with the head of the Swedish National Stud at their farm. He was a big hit...and Major General Jonathon Burton thought he was the only ‘real’ stallion there.” Imagine—or rather, Immaginn—that!

Lucky Baldwin and the Cure for Boredom: Horses

 Recently, while proofreading Playing Cards of the Apaches: A Study in Cultural Adaptation, by Virginia and Harold Wayland, and Alan Ferg, I was struck by this passage, a quotation from playing-card scholar Sylvia Mann: “I happen to collect playing-cards as my way into history.” 

Intrigued, I consulted Mann’s book, All Cards on the Table, in which she writes that “a true collector, whatever the object of his particular interest, be it children’s comics or gold snuff boxes, touches a live element of history....I have acquired, through application and countless reference works and the talents of other collectors, some knowledge about a lot of subjects hitherto outside my interests.” 

In the case of Playing Cards of the Apaches, my own “way into history”—horses—has come in handy. In the book, the provenance of each pack of cards is traced in minute detail, whether the pack belonged to a captured Apache girl, or a U.S. Army soldier, or even Vincent Price.

When I proofread the pages devoted to a pack owned by Elias J. Baldwin, he was mentioned simply as the donor of a pack of cards—and not, as I knew from my crazy patchwork way of assimilating history through horses, as “Lucky” Baldwin, who constructed the first iteration of the racetrack now known as Santa Anita Park, where Seabiscuit won the Big ‘Cap in 1940. 

Lucky was also the father of Anita Baldwin, whose Arabian stallion, *Ibn Mahruss, sired El Jafil, purchased as a herd sire by General Levi Manning, former mayor of Tucson, where I live. Hearing this, the junior author (Ferg) kindly agreed to add some further biographical information about Baldwin. 

Anita Baldwin and *Ibn Mahruss, bred by the Crabbet Arabian Stud 

of Lady Anne and Wilfrid Blunt.

Given Baldwin's interest in gambling, it’s not a surprise that he owned a pack of Apache cards; aside from their use in gambling, he may also have appreciated them for their depictions of caballos, ridden by jaunty caballeros. 

I don’t consider myself a collector of horses (though some of my friends might disagree), but, like Mann, my interest in equines has led me to learn about (and what is perhaps more frightening, to retain knowledge of) subjects that seem, at first glance, to have no connection to horses, including: genealogy (horse and human); textiles; W. K. Kellogg; the King Ranch; Jostens class rings; General Patton; Bromo-Seltzer; the Rolling Stones’ Charlie Watts; singer John Davidson; the Battle of the Little Big Horn; Catalina Island; the Polish language; Calumet baking soda; the paintings of Degas, Munnings, and Stubbs; Theosophy; and the architecture of Richard Neutra, Philip Webb, and Walter Gropius.

 As Dorothy Parker noted, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”