In February 1956, a 28 year old riding instructor named Harry deLeyer showed up late to a horse auction in New Holland, Pennsylvania. The horses he had come to look at were already sold. As he was leaving, he noticed a battered gray horse being loaded onto a truck bound for the dog food factory. Something about the animal made him stop and pay $80 for it on the spot.

A Slow Horse for Beginners

deLeyer brought the horse home to his riding school on Long Island. His daughter named him Snowman. The horse was gentle, patient, and unremarkable to look at, an ex plow horse with a swayed back and no training. deLeyer used him as a lesson horse, putting nervous beginners on his back because he was calm enough not to spook.

Snowman did his job well enough that a neighbor asked to buy him, offering deLeyer more than he had paid. deLeyer agreed and sold the horse. It seemed like a good, uneventful deal.

The Horse Who Would Not Stay Sold

It was not. Within days, deLeyer kept finding Snowman back in his own pasture. The neighbor's fences were built more than five feet high, tall enough to stop most horses without a second thought. Snowman jumped them anyway, again and again, choosing to walk himself home rather than stay where he had been sent. Each time, deLeyer returned him. Each time, Snowman jumped out and came back.

Eventually the message was impossible to ignore. deLeyer bought Snowman back for good and started paying attention to what the horse had been trying to tell him the whole time: he could jump, and he wanted to.

From Auction Floor to Madison Square Garden

deLeyer began training the plow horse as a show jumper. Snowman's natural scope over a fence turned heads almost immediately, and by 1958, just two years after nearly ending up at the dog food factory, he was competing at the National Horse Show in Madison Square Garden.

Snowman won the United States Open Jumper Championship in 1958, and then did it again in 1959, taking the title in back to back years. He was also named Horse of the Year in 1958. Photographers loved him for another reason too: he was calm enough, and talented enough, to be photographed clearing jumps set directly over the backs of other standing horses, an image that turned up in Life magazine and made him one of the most recognizable horses in America.

Still Told Today

The story of the $80 horse who refused to stay away from home, and then would not stop winning, was later retold in Elizabeth Letts' bestselling book "The Eighty Dollar Champion" and the 2016 documentary "Harry & Snowman."

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