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Vagrant
Vagrant began life as the son of a cast-off stallion and a mare of no great reputation. His sire, Virgil, was noted as a colt of great beauty and speed, but did not stay past a mile and was not overly sound. Although he won six of eight races as a three-year-old, he was not the equal of either the great filly Ruthless (the winner of the inaugural Belmont Stakes) or the good colt Monday, and after he broke down at the end of his three-year-old season, he was away from the races for three years. An attempt was made to make a hurdler of him when he came back to the races at age six, but he did not shine in this metier, and at seven he was broken to harness and used as a buggy-horse. 1872 found Virgil at the farm of owner Milton Sanford, who found himself with something of a dilemma that spring. All of his other stallions were sons of Lexington, but a fair number of his mares were daughters of that horse, and he needed to get them bred. Accordingly, Virgil was pressed into service for Mr. Sanford’s Lexington mares, along with one or two other mares considered to be of no particular merit. After the breeding season was over, Virgil was given to Mr. B. G. Bruce, who apparently had no particular use for the horse and by the fall of 1874 was advertising him for sale for three hundred dollars with no takers. But in 1875 Vagrant appeared, along with the good colts Virginius and Vigil, and a chastened Sanford hastened to repurchase their sire, who later sired one of the all-time greats in Hindoo. (Sanford later set a price of $60,000 on Virgil, who remained in Sanford’s possession until his death.) As it happened, Vagrant was not out of one of Mr. Sanford’s Lexington mares; his dam was Lazy, by *Scythian. But Sanford had no cause to regret his decision to let Lazy go to Virgil rather than another stallion, for Vagrant proved a brilliant juvenile while racing for Dan Swigert. The only youngster rated in the same street with Pierre Lorillard’s star gelding Parole, Vagrant won five of six starts while racing primarily in Kentucky, his only loss being to the good colt Creedmoor. Although Vagrant was a gelding, his juvenile form was so highly rated that he sold for $20,000 -- a good price for any young horse at the time, let alone one with no breeding potential -- to William Astor. Astor kept him in Kentucky, and Vagrant rewarded him by winning the Phoenix Stakes and the Kentucky Derby. He then ran second to Creedmoor in the Clark Stakes. Taken to Philadelphia for the Centennial Exposition, he won the Exposition Stakes there but was injured afterwards in training and did not start again until his five-year-old season. Still, he had shown enough in his abbreviated sophomore campaign for some authorities to rank him as the co-champion three-year-old male of 1876 with Vigil (also a son of Virgil). Unfortunately, Vagrant never recaptured his old form when he returned to racing in 1878, and the remainder of his racing career was undistinguished. He finally left racing having won twenty of eighty-eight starts, with twelve seconds and twelve thirds. © 2005 by Avalyn Hunter |
