The day came in 1886 when Interpose lay down in her stall inside of the red round barn at Doncaste Ranch and bore her colt. She began licking him, the equine way to learn each other’s scent and sounds. The colt’s coat gleamed like copper, but chestnut was the true color.
Noah Armstrong learned of the exciting news while in Spokane Falls, Washington Territory, where he attended to his mining interests there. His choice for a name, “Spokane,” translated to the poetic “Children of the Sun” of the Spokane Tribe. One day cowboy Joseph Redfern gently placed a saddle on Spokane’s back. “Didn’t have too much trouble, broke him without spur, and with a pancake [racing-type] saddle,” Redfern said. That was well and good, but the young racehorse could be lazy. “He’d run like all get out when he had to, but sometimes he had to be forced.” Spokane’s disposition was somewhere between affectionately shoving his nose into the “bosom” of those he liked and taking a nip at a stranger’s arm, but he was not mean.
On a warm day in March 1888, Noah selected the Thoroughbreds he wanted to represent his racing stable, the Montana Stable. Spokane and nine stablemates were walked from Doncaster Ranch twenty-eight miles south and entrained at the Dillon depot.
Spokane made his debut as a racehorse at the Washington Park track in Chicago on July 5, 1888. Stepping onto the brown oval for the Hyde Park Stakes, open to two-year-olds only, he paraded with four competitors to the starting post. The starter’s flag twirled. Spokane broke slow, and he broke last, and nor did his position improve despite his jockey, whipping him the entire distance of six furlongs (one furlong equals an eighth of a mile).
Spokane made his second start on September 25 at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, and earned ninth. At the Latonia track at Covington, Kentucky, on October 2 for the Maiden Stakes, Spokane’s performance over a wet, muddy racetrack was “remarkable,” according to the Cincinnati Enquirer. “He got off absolutely last in a field of fourteen, and by wonderfully good running passed one after another, and won as he pleased. He did not get to the front until in the last furlong, then he went up on Sportsman, took the lead, and left all the others as though they were tied up.”
On October 11, Spokane finished sixth in a Latonia race. A heavy racetrack and an increase in the weight carried likely underwrote the loss. While 118 pounds of impost was not excessive for a healthy two-year-old colt to manage, it was substantially heavier than the feathery 100 pounds he had shouldered in the Maiden Stakes. Racetrack handicappers, in the past as well as today, allocate the weight, or impost, a racehorse must carry in a race. Impost includes the weight of the jockey, tack, and lead slabs inserted into the saddle to make the required weight, say, 118 pounds. Weight is adjusted according to age, and fillies receive an allowance from colts. Weight carried is also based on past performances; superior performers are penalized for the victories they garner by having to carry higher weight in future races. Theoretically, if weight were perfectly distributed across the board to greater and lesser performers, all races would end in dead heats.
Spokane’s two-year-old campaign closed on October 23, 1888, at rain-soaked West Side Park in Nashville. Showing complete disregard for the unpleasant conditions, he picked off six rivals. A $300 purse capped off a moderately successful season of five starts and two wins. Noah returned to Montana, but Spokane remained in the East, resting and overwintering in temperate Memphis.