The horse with manure-stained legs

California Chrome generated a lot of interest in professional horse racing last weekend — it’s been 36 years since the last Triple Crown winner, after all — but had to go home without the honor.The was wrangling before the Belmont Stakes over Chrome’s nosepiece. Small matter, really, considering the old days.It hardly needs to be said, racing and horse trading a century and a quarter ago were susceptible to shady doings. Take the case of the bay gelding named Manhattan, who appeared in several trotting events in Falls Village in the 1880s.Manhattan was a grandson of Rysdyk’s Hambletonian or RH, for short, founding sire of the Standardbred horse. The senior horse was known as Sugarloaf until fame overtook him, and he acquired the fancier moniker.Manhattan, too, was known by another name. But for less than licit reasons. He had a record of 2.331/2 — I’m ignorant of what that figure means. According to a story in Wallace’s Monthly for April 1885, “A trotting horse has a name given him when he is entered in his first race on a track of the National Trotting Association, and that name is recorded on the books of the association and cannot be changed without due notice and the payment of a fee of fifty dollars.”Manhattan’s first public race was in August 1873 in Buffalo. Manhattan wasn’t seen on the turf again until September 1880, when he raced in Amenia, N.Y., and Poughkeepsie and in Falls Village. He lost in Falls Village. He was on the track again two years later. This time he won, with a time of 2:36. His handler, E. Harrison, paired Manhattan with the horse Harry Mills in double-team races, and they often prevailed.u u uOne day a visiting horseman examined Harrison’s horse, particularly its hind legs, “and was told by Harrison that they had been discolored by standing in manure.” Oh, really?Harrison said he had acquired the horse because of its close resemblance to an old-time horse called Albright, which had two white hind feet. “It was thought better to color these feet and have them match the other horse’s exactly. He had his name changed to Albright, that being considered the brightest name for him,” Harrison said.Albright with the colored legs was presented as “a green trotter just out of a milk wagon.” But the horse already had a racing record at Newark and other tracks. When word got out the horse’s legs had been colored, no one was interested in buying him. The horse was really Manhattan. He was a ringer.Harrison apparently offered the horse for sale as a green horse, never intending to sell it. He really wanted to race it as a green horse and go for a big purse.Harrison always denied he had switched horses.A.W. Cowan of Jersey City, N.J., owned Manhattan at the last. The horse was 17 when he died in 1885 in a runaway accident.The writer, an associate editor of this newspaper, relied on several old newspaper articles for this column.