Saratoga Springs: Health, History, Horses

Saratoga Springs wears three words like a motto: Health, History, Horses. Each one earned.

The Mohawk had known these springs for generations before the first European arrived in seventeen seventy-one. The waters here are among the only naturally carbonated mineral springs east of the Rocky Mountains, and they bubble up from limestone bedrock carrying iron, calcium, and a sulfurous bite that eighteenth-century physicians swore could cure almost anything. By the early eighteen hundreds grand hotels rose around the springs, and by the Gilded Age, Saratoga was the resort where railroad barons, politicians, and diamond merchants came to take the waters and show off their fortunes.

The history runs even deeper. About fifteen miles to the southeast, the two Battles of Saratoga, fought in September and October of seventeen seventy-seven, became the turning point of the American Revolution. General John Burgoyne's British army, marching south from Canada, was first checked and then encircled. His surrender on October seventeenth, seventeen seventy-seven convinced France to enter the war on the American side. Without Saratoga, there may have been no republic.

But what draws the crowds every August is the horses. In eighteen sixty-three, just weeks after the bloodshed at Gettysburg, gambler and bare-knuckle boxing champion John Morrissey organized the first race meet here. The Saratoga Race Course, now one of the oldest thoroughbred tracks in America, quickly became the place where champions are made or undone. Racing historians call it the Graveyard of Champions. Man o' War, who won twenty of twenty-one races in his life, lost his only race right here in nineteen nineteen, beaten by a horse named Upset. Secretariat, the nineteen seventy-three Triple Crown winner, lost the Whitney Stakes here to a sixty-six-to-one longshot named Onion. American Pharoah, the most recent Triple Crown winner, fell to Keen Ice before fifty thousand witnesses in twenty fifteen.

The Travers Stakes, run here since eighteen sixty-four, is the oldest Grade One stakes race in the country. Saratoga does not coddle greatness. It tests it.