Steel Dust

The best-known detail of Steel Dust's career is a splinter. Writer Clay Coppedge says that before a planned 1855 race with Shiloh, the horse reared against the starting chute, broke a board and drove a splinter into his shoulder, and he later went blind. Steel Dust died in 1864 and was buried at Ten Mile Creek on Middleton Perry's farm. Shiloh outlived him and was buried on Bear Creek in Ellis County in 1874. Wayne Gard wrote a biography of the horse, and cowmen called his descendants Steeldusters, thinking them a separate breed.

What the plaque says

Steel Dust 19th century Texas frontier champion who became foundation sire for the most popular quarter horse strain of the 20th century. A Virginia type horse foaled by a Kentucky thoroughbred mare, Steel Dust was brought in 1844 as a colt to the Texas Republic by settlers Middleton Perry and Jones Greene. On Ten Mile Creek (near Lancaster, SE of Dallas) at the farm track of Thomas McKee Ellis, father-in-law of his owners, Steel Dust outran all challengers. He was about 16 hands high and so quick that his jockey coated his back with molasses in order to stay on. Steel Dust won a spectacular race in McKinney against local favorite Monmouth in 1855; soon afterward defeated Brown Dick, from Hopkins County. Later in 1855, going against Shiloh, a horse from Tennessee, Steel Dust was hurt at the starting gate. He soon went blind, never raced again, but survived at stud for years. The famed King Ranch in south Texas began to use breeding lines from Steel Dust and Shiloh in 1916, winning many honors at the State Fair of Texas. From this ranch has come stock for circuses, rodeos, and polo teams. The American Quarter Horse Association was formed in 1940. Quarter horses are now as much in demand for racing as for farm and ranch work. (1971)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fair Park — 0.2 mi
  The State Fair of Texas grounds since 1886, where the 1936 Texas Centennial Exposition left one of the country's greatest concentrations of Art Deco exposition buildings.
• African American Museum, Dallas — 0.4 mi
  Founded in 1974 at Bishop College, a free Fair Park museum holding the Sepia photograph archive, African art and A. Maceo Smith's papers, and the story of the Hall of Negro Life.
• Dallas Heritage Village at Old City Park — 1.7 mi
  Dallas's first city park, laid out around Browder's Spring in 1876, now a museum of historic buildings moved here from across North Texas, among them Millermore, a cotton planter's mansion.
• Dallas Museum of Art — 2.5 mi
  A city art museum that began as the Dallas Art Association in 1903, grew up in Fair Park, and has stood in the Arts District since 1984 under a forty-foot barrel vault.

More markers nearby

• WRR Radio — 0.2 mi
• Texas Women in the Civil War, A Tribute to — 0.3 mi
• State Fair of Texas — 0.5 mi
• Texas Centennial Exposition — 0.5 mi