The Oh, Hello everyone.

welcome back to 1001 Heroes, Legends, Histories and Mysteries Podcast. This is your host John

Hagadorn and I've got a great story about a man who is a legend in his own time.

One of the best horse trainers of all time, Tom Bass. If his life story isn't a movie, it should be. They say

that white men can't dance and black men can't ride horses. That's bullwacky on both counts. This is a story of a

preed slave who became one of the most popular and respected horse trainers of the late 19th

and early 20th centuries. In the days before cars fully replaced the horse and wagon.

Those were days when owning a prize horse meant something.

Tom Bass at the height of his career trained horses for men like Buffalo Bill Cody,

Will Rogers, and President Theodore Roosevelt and William McKinley, just to name a few.

And people would travel from all around the world to see his horses in shows.

Tom Bass was to horses, what Jack Johnson was to boxing and Harriet Tubman was to civil

rights. His training and methods of working with horses changed the way

horses were treated not just here in the US but all around the world and that type

of training and those methods are at the core of movies and books like the Horse Whisper.

Tom Bass was born a slave on the Hayden Plantation in Boone County, Missouri on January 5, 1859.

His mother, Cornelia Gray, was a slave.

His father, William Hayden Bass, was the son of wealthy plantation owner Eli Bass. Eli Bass owned and trained a great number of horses and young Tom Bass watched and learned fast.

In fact, as Tom once said, he was no bigger than a horsefly when he began to spend time with the horses getting to know them

As a toddler he had no fear of them

He would walk under the bigger horses without having to stoop and by age four he was riding them. At age six he was jumping fences. At

age seven he was given a bulky old mule called Mr. Potts by his Grandpa Presley

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