The Kent Races: Peanuts, Lemonade, and Suspicion
While the crowds at the Kent track grew, the betting remained sluggish amid rumors of a fixed race.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The attendance at the Kent races yesterday showed a steady increase that gratified the members of the association, but the sports failed to come and bring their money, and so the betting hung fire almost altogether. The first race cost the Victoria sports, who covered General for all they had, quite a bit of money. Charges and counter insinuations of a 'job' filled the air the rest of the day, drowning the pleading cries of the auctioneer and putting an effective damper on betting. In some instances no pools were sold. Two or three book fiends brought their systems with them and worked them for a margin of a very few dollars, but the general public saved its money and bought peanuts and pink lemonade. There was an Indian pony race at the close of the day. The Duke, who is well known in the White River Valley and on the Puyallup reservation as the winner of something like $5,000 in purses and a pretty good short distance horse for a cayuse, ought to have been the favorite, but the people who knew woke up in time to run an iron-gray named Coolie to the front at odds of nearly three to one. Peanuts, the third horse, was left at the post. The result proved that the people on the inside knew what they were doing. Coolie had a bad start, and the Duke of Muckleshoot was in the act of running away when his rider charged him at the fence and jogged down the track, discarding every advantage that fortune threw in his way and losing by two lengths.
“Charges and counter insinuations of a 'job' filled the air the rest of the day, drowning the pleading cries of the auctioneer.”
Long before the suburban sprawl took over the Kent Valley, it was a hub for local racing circuits where 'cayuse' racing provided a gritty counterpoint to organized track events. The suspicions of a fixed race—a 'job'—remain a perennial theme in local sports history, echoing the recurring tension between public enthusiasm and the insular world of professional betting.
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