Greyhound Racing 2:
Coursing Becomes Racing
There were greyhounds in the United States at least as early as 1848, when a coursing contest, with antelopes as the quarry, was briefly mentioned in a book about Oregon and California.
Cavalry officers serving in the West often kept greyhounds because they could both catch game and help scouts by detecting movement at a distance. Among the greyhound fanciers was George Armstrong Custer, who coursed his pack of greyhounds the night before the fateful Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876.
Major James H. "Hound Dog" Kelly learned to breed and train greyhounds while he was Custer's orderly. In 1878, Kelly's team of four greyhounds set what was considered a record by running down six out of a dozen antelopes. That's generally considered the start of American coursing.
As farms spread through the Midwest and into the West after the Civil War, many greyhounds were imported from England to help protect crops from jackrabbits. Coursing meets, usually with two competing dogs chasing a live rabbit, became popular Sunday afternoon diversions. They were also sometimes staged, along with harness racing, at county fairs.
In 1905, Owen Patrick Smith was director of the chamber of commerce in Hot Springs, South Dakota. He was delegated to organize a coursing meet to attract visitors to the town. The meet was successful, but Smith felt that the sport was cruel. He began thinking about ways to make coursing a more humane sport with broader spectator appeal. Smith probably didn't know about the English "coursing by proxy" experiment of 1876, but he came up with the same basic idea: greyhounds chasing an artificial hare instead of a live one. He also improved on the idea by envisioning a race on an oval track rather than a straight course.
He brought his idea to George Sawyer, a wealthy greyhound owner who had many other interests, including a boxing arena in Oakland, California. Sawyer at first refused to give Smith any financial help. Like many greyhound owners of the time, he insisted that a greyhound wouldn't even chase a lure that didn't have a scent.
Nevertheless, Smith persevered. He organized the Intermountain Coursing Association and built a small circular track near Salt Lake City in 1907, where his artificial lure was introduced. It was a stuffed rabbit skin, pulled around the track behind a motorcycle. It worked, but Smith wasn't entirely happy with it.
Sawyer was impressed by the trial, though, and became Smith's financial backer. In 1910, Smith patented an "inanimate hare conveyor," basically an overhead arm that carried the artificial rabbit, trolley-like, along the track. Unfortunately, the device failed in its first test when water short-circuited the system.
It wasn't until 1919 that Smith had another major opportunity for a public demonstration of his idea for greyhound racing. In 1919, Sawyer and other businessmen financed construction of a track and grandstand at Emeryville, California, using the lumber from Sawyer's dismantled boxing arena. Smith had a new device, a motorized four-wheel cart that carried the lure on a rail around the 3/16-mile track. Attendance, though, was disappointing and several races were halted because the cart left its track.