The 1947 Hearst Expedition

The 1947 Hearst Expedition I n

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For 97 years and soon to be four generations, one family has bred and raised Arabians at the historic Hearst Ranch along California’s central coast.

With an eye towards athleticism and an appreciation for gentle temperaments, the Arabians of San Simeon have been selected for their ability to do everything from work cattle to jumping — whether cross-country in the Monterey pine forests or in the showring. And although they have earned many national awards in those disciplines, they are most prized as trusted mounts for family and friends.

As William R. Hearst III says, “Our interest lies in breeding beautiful riding horses with eager, kind dispositions, who are able to safely carry their riders over the rugged terrain of the ranch.” In that way, these horses have instilled the passion for Arabians in the next generation.

William Randolph Hearst was 84 years old when he made his historic importation.

Front cover: Over the years, many such Hearst-bred champions have carried the blood of desertbred ancestors imported from Syria and Lebanon by William R. Hearst in 1947. Those 14 horses represent the last large-scale importation of Arabian horses from their original homeland to the United States.

Here is their story.

*Zamal, a 1944 desertbred stallion from Syria, was one of the 14 Arabians imported by William Randolph Hearst in 1947. He is pictured here being ridden by ranch manager Preston Dyer at Hearst’s San Simeon Ranch, California, pictured below in 1949.

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he storm that ravaged the North Atlantic in mid-November 1947 wasn’t actually a hurricane, but it sure felt like one. The nor’easter in the ocean off Cape Cod and Canada’s maritime provinces roiled the shipping lanes between Europe and the United States with hurricane-force winds of as much as 100 miles an hour. It wrecked freighters and fishing boats, flooded and damaged coastal ports, and delayed ocean liners and cargo ships from their scheduled arrivals. One experienced ship captain said it was the worst late-season storm he could remember.

Among the ships caught in the tempest was the S.S. Marine Flier, a freighter en route to New York from France. For two days, the 500-foot-long ship tossed on the ocean, rolling from side to side as winds and rain battered it and 60-foot waves washed over its deck. Deep in the Marine Flier’s hold, 14 prized Arabian horses were being knocked around in cramped, makeshift wooden shipping crates, as the storm swirled outside.

This was just the latest adventure involving the horses, the trophies of an Indiana Jones-like expedition that had stretched halfway around the world, through Europe and across the Middle East, with stops in Bedouin encampments and fabled cities, amid encounters with colorful desert cultures and international political intrigue.

Behind it all: William Randolph Hearst, the famed American newspaper magnate and horse lover.

Historic photos courtesy of the International Museum of the Horse, Kentucky Horse Park.

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reston Dyer Jr. was just 29 years old when he answered a tiny advertisement in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner for a “horse ranch superintendent.” Job requirements, according to the ad: “Must have former experience in breaking, training, and breeding horses.” In spite of his youth, Dyer had those qualifications — a native of Virginia’s horse country and a former U.S. Army cavalry soldier, he’d spent several years before and during World War II working as the personal horse manager for General George S. Patton and his family.

With a handwritten letter of application and a reference from Patton’s wife, Dyer won the job — which turned out to be managing the horses and stables at William Randolph Hearst’s legendary San Simeon ranch. Hearst was a longtime horse owner and breeder who, like other wealthy Americans such as cereal mogul W. K. Kellogg and the candy making Wrigley and Mars families, had focused his equine interests on Arabians.

The distinctive, high-stamina horses, powerful yet good-natured, had been favored for centuries by Arab sheikhs and warriors.

Hearst, who had begun acquiring Arabians in the 1930s, had dozens of the beautiful horses on his San Simeon ranch. But the Depression and World War II put imports of Arabians on hold, and Hearst and other breeders became concerned that fresh horses were needed to reinvigorate the U.S. Arabian bloodlines.

One night in the early spring of 1947, Dyer received a midnight phone call summoning him to an immediate meeting with the “Chief,” as Hearst was known to his employees. Dyer, a trim, intense-looking young man with combed-back dirty blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses, feared that the call meant bad news. He jumped out of bed and hurriedly drove the 15 miles or so from his home on the San Simeon ranch to the extravagant, sprawling main house, the legendary “castle” that sat atop a large hill overlooking the Pacific and tens of thousands of acres of Hearst-owned land. He met with Hearst in the giant Assembly Room, filled with artifacts and an enormous fireplace. As the two Hearst Castle, San Simeon, California.

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men sat down together at a small table, a butler served coffee and sweet cakes from a silver service.

The reason for Hearst’s summons was hardly bad news. The Chief first complimented Dyer on his job running the San Simeon stables, and then asked him what needed to be done to diversify and improve the bloodlines of the Arabians. Dyer told his boss that the Arabians in the United States were too interrelated, and that even the horses on storied breeding farms in England and Europe couldn’t really offer fresh blood. The best strategy, Dyer offhandedly suggested, might be to return to the source, the deserts and plains of the Middle East, in search of horses. That idea caught Hearst’s fancy. “Do you think you could get any in the desert?” he impulsively asked. Dyer, taken a bit off guard, replied, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know why not.”

That settled it. “Excellent idea,” Hearst declared, to Dyer’s surprise. On the spot, Hearst authorized the young horseman to mount an expedition to the Middle East in search of Arabians, according to an unpublished interview with the trainer, now in the archives of the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky. He told Dyer to call the Hearst corporate office in New York first thing in the morning to draw the extraordinary sum of $100,000 (more than $1 million in today’s dollars) to pay for the trip. “If you need any more money, let me know,” Hearst added. The two

men continued to talk well into the night, with Hearst regaling Dyer with stories about Homer Davenport, the flamboyant Hearst newspapers cartoonist who was one of the first major breeders of Arabians in the United States and one of the first to import horses directly from the Middle East. It was nearly dawn when Dyer drove back down the hill from the castle to wake his wife and tell her all about his remarkable meeting with the Chief.

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yer immediately began planning his trip, traveling first to New Mexico to seek advice from Carl Raswan, a leading Arabian connoisseur and breeder who had extensive contacts in the Middle East. Raswan offered to introduce him to Fawaz al Shaalan, a Bedouin prince whom Raswan considered a “blood brother.”

Fawaz was soon to come to the United States for meetings at the nascent United Nations, and when he arrived, he and Dyer immediately hit it off. The two men took a driving tour of California together, with stops in Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Francisco, and of course, a few days at San Simeon. At the end of April, Fawaz left to go to the United Nations meeting

Above: Dyer inspects yearlings at the RAS in Egypt.

Left: Fawaz al Shaalan, head of the Ruwalla branch of the Anazah Bedouin.

Below inset: John Williamson, the expedition photographer, was the grandson of Arabian breeder W. K. Kellogg.

in New York, but he soon called Dyer to invite him to come east. “We were having a lot of fun together,” Dyer later recalled, “and he was lonesome.”

The Hearst-sponsored quest for Arabians was on: In July 1947, Dyer and Fawaz traveled to London to visit Arabian breeders there, and then went on to Paris. Before leaving the United States, Dyer had ordered two Buick convertibles, one red, one green, for Fawaz. One was shipped to Fawaz’s compound in the Syrian desert; the other went to Paris, and the two men drove it through France, to the French Riviera and Monte Carlo, and then down to Rome. They were two young guys on a European road trip, stopping all along the way to look at farms and breeding facilities, checking out horses that might fulfill Hearst’s objective. “I had found no stock in England equal to ours at San Simeon, and none in France and Italy,” Dyer told an interviewer for Hearst’s Examiner newspapers a year later. “I was deeply discouraged.”

As Dyer had predicted to Hearst, they needed to go to the desert to find the best Arabians. So they shipped the Buick to Egypt and traveled there to look at horses. In early August, Dyer was joined in Cairo by two more members of his expedition: Dr. Fred Pulling, the San Simeon veterinarian, and John Williamson, a Los Angeles-based photographer who shot hundreds of evocative photos and even Technicolor® home movies of the trip. Coincidentally, Williamson was the grandson of Hearst’s friend and fellow Arabian breeder, W. K. Kellogg.

For a month, the three Hearst men lived it up in Egypt, staying at the grand Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, taking camel rides and playing golf at the picturesque Mena House Hotel course at the foot of the Great Pyramid. They took time to look for promising Arabians, as well, frequenting racetracks, taking a weekend trip to Alexandria to evaluate the horses there, and visiting the expansive Royal Agricultural Society compound to learn about Egyptian equine practices. There, the men looked at hundreds of horses in Egypt, but did not find what they were looking for.

Dyer planned to range broadly across the Middle East in search of horses, with an ambitious itinerary that included Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. But world politics intervened. At the end of August, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) recommended that Palestine be divided in two to create the Jewish state of Israel.

The plan infuriated many Arabs. Prince Faisal of Saudi Arabia, the Saudi foreign minister, called an urgent meeting in Cairo of members of the Arab League. The topic: how to mount opposition to the Palestinian plan at the mid-September meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. One of the delegates invited to the Cairo meeting was Fawaz. In addition to being a Bedouin prince, Fawaz had close ties to the Saudi royal family — his sister Nawf was one of King Abdulaziz ibn Saud’s wives.

Conveniently, the meeting was to be held at Shepheard’s Hotel. Dyer and Fawaz waited on the hotel terrace to greet each delegate as he arrived, and Dyer used the conversations to ask about the best places to find horses. With advice gleaned from the

Left: Prince Fawaz and his son, left, and Preston Dyer, right, in Damascus.

Below: Inspecting horses at the RAS in Egypt.

Prince Faisal at the meeting of the Arab League in front of the Shepheards Hotel in Cairo.

Arab leaders, Dyer revamped his itinerary to narrow the focus of his search to Syria and Lebanon. When the Arab League conference ended, Dyer, Pulling, and Williamson left Cairo with Fawaz to fly to Syria.

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awaz was greeted in Damascus like a returning hero. It had been nearly a year since the globe-trotting Bedouin prince had been to his Ruwalla tribe’s encampment in Adra, 10 miles northeast of Damascus. Tribesmen swarmed the Damascus airport to await his arrival. The crowds were so thick on the runway that the plane had to circle three times before sufficient space could be cleared to allow it to land, and the pilot had to quickly cut the engines to avoid injuring anyone in the crowd pressing against the plane. As soon as Fawaz came out of the airplane door, he was grabbed by the Ruwalla tribesmen, joyously lifted onto their shoulders and transported back to camp. The three Americans, left behind at the airport, were somewhat bewildered. After a couple of hours, Fawaz’ brother returned to the airport and took them to a hotel outside Damascus, and they settled in to begin looking for horses in Syria.

A couple of days after they arrived in Damascus, Fawaz sent the two Buicks to pick up Dyer’s party. A few miles into the desert, they were met by a team of horsemen and escorted to a luncheon feast and celebration unlike anything they had ever experienced. Under enormous tents, wide platters were heaped with rice and roasted lamb and mutton and placed on low tables. The 300 guests sat cross-legged on Persian rugs around the platters and scooped the food up with their hands. Dyer and his men quickly learned to make balls of the rice to pop into their mouths, and to eat the meat off the bone. After their short post-meal nap, sweet hot tea was served.

And then came the entertainment. Ruwalla tribesmen put on an exhibition of fighting skills — to the rhythmic beat of large drums, lines of warriors approached each other with sabers drawn and then drew back, circling each other over and over, for nearly two hours. Dancing girls moved provocatively through the crowd. Falconers displayed their birds. A group of acrobats and contortionists performed balancing, 4 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

Top: Dyer in the Ruwalla camp in Adra.

Middle right: Luncheon feast and celebration at the Ruwalla camp in honor of the return of their Bedouin prince Fawaz.

knife, and magic tricks. A few hours later, at dinner at the home of a neighboring sheikh, the banquet was repeated, until the Americans thought they could eat no more. The trip’s photographer, Williamson, took dozens of photos, providing a unique and vivid record of nomadic desert life.

Then they got down to business.

Over the next couple of days, Dyer’s team looked at hundreds of horses from the Ruwallah tribe and around Damascus, presented to them by proud tribesmen.

But once again, they found none worth bringing back to the United States. The tribal horses showed signs of poor feeding and overuse; even the healthiest horses lacked the distinctive large head shape and other features favored by Arabian aficionados in the United States. The tribe’s most prized royal steeds, treated more carefully than the everyday horses, also were deemed inadequate by the Americans. Dyer had been on the road

for nearly three months, extravagantly spending Hearst’s money, and he still didn’t have any horses to show for it.

Dyer, Pulling, and Williamson decided to say farewell to Fawaz and drive on to Beirut.

Horses prepare for a race in Beirut.

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Dyer, Henri Pharoun, and his son at a Beirut racetrack.

eirut in 1947 was very different from the city that has been devastated in recent years by civil war and terrorism. Indeed, mid-century Beirut was justifiably known as the Paris of the Middle East, a beautiful seaside city with wide boulevards, verdant parks lined with palm trees, classic architecture, expensive hotels and resorts, and swanky nightclubs and restaurants. One of the architects of this cosmopolitan era in Beirut was Lebanon’s foreign minister, Henri Pharoun, who owned the nation’s largest bank and even had a hand in designing the Lebanese flag. Dyer, with his knack for hobnobbing with famous, powerful men, quickly made Pharoun’s acquaintance and enlisted him in the search for Arabians.

Dyer later called Pharoun “definitely the best-informed man on Arab horse breeding that we met.” Pharoun owned hundreds of horses — at one time he was the world’s largest single owner of Arabians — and was president of the group that managed Beirut’s renowned Hippodrome du Parc de Beyrouth, the venue for popular Sunday races featuring purebred Arabians exclusively. Dyer rented stable space in downtown Beirut and set out looking for horses.

Along with Pulling and Williamson, occasionally accompanied by Pharoun, Dyer traveled deep into the Lebanese countryside and into neighboring Syria, visiting tribesmen to inspect and negotiate for promising Arabians. They found that the 5 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

Top and bottom: Dyer at a stable in Beirut.

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Arabians in Lebanon, usually only one or two generations removed from the desert, were of very high quality. Over the course of a busy couple of weeks, Dyer’s group journeyed by plane, by automobile, on horseback, and on foot north to Tripoli, Homs, Aleppo, and the Plain of Akkar, and east into the Beqaa Valley and along the Euphrates River. They met with members of many tribes — nomads who had been raising and riding Arabians for centuries. When they visited the desert camps, hundreds of tribesmen would gallop in with their horses, looking to make a deal with the American.

Dyer quickly learned how to do business with the Bedouins. “Buying from a Bedouin isn’t easy,” he later told a group in California. “He is very religious and bound to any statement he makes. We had to learn that he could not

Left and below right: Beirut racetrack.

Inspecting a horse at a Beirut stable.

bargain, as once having stated the value of his horse, he could never change it without becoming, in the eyes of any other Bedouins, a liar.” By one account, Dyer even made a remarkable solo journey to acquire a particular horse. During a visit to one breeder, he spotted an especially attractive mare and negotiated with the owner to buy her. Worried that the seller might have second thoughts, Dyer mounted the horse and quickly rode it 85 miles back to Beirut, stopping only to sleep at night on the ground in a sleeping bag with the mare tied safely nearby.

In all, Dyer purchased 13 horses in his short stay in Lebanon. It’s not clear how many horses were acquired directly from tribesmen; records indicate that all of the purchases came through Pharoun, who may have acted as an agent in dealings with the tribes. Several of the horses came from Pharoun’s own stock; one was purchased the day before it won an important race at Hippodrome track, attesting to its value. In some cases, Dyer paid cash for the horses. For others, he said later, he bartered Cadillacs, Buicks, or Jeeps. At the end of Dyer’s stay in Beirut, in early October, Pharoun gave him a 14th horse, a fine stallion named Arkane, as a gift for Hearst.

Dyer had found what Hearst had sent him to the Middle East to acquire: a collection of fine Arabians, six stallions and eight mares, ranging in age from two years to 12. They would fortify the Hearst herd at San Simeon and could be bred with American horses to refresh the U.S. Arabian bloodlines. Now he just needed to get them back to California.

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yer and Hearst had initially boasted of plans to fly the horses back to the United States on a chartered plane. But the actual voyage was more conventional — and difficult — than that. Complications arose from the start: shortly after Dyer and his men had left Cairo, cholera broke out there, eventually killing more than 10,000 people. The outbreak severely restricted travel, with United States officials banning direct passage from the Middle East. And in any event, finding transport for 14 horses was not easy. “The homeward trip was a long, tedious affair that required a lot of wheedling and coaxing,” Dyer said later. “Ship captains refused to take our horses aboard because they didn’t want their ships messed up.”

Working the Beirut waterfront, Dyer finally booked passage to Marseilles, France, aboard a small Romanian passenger ship, the Transylvania. The horses would have to stay on deck, and Dyer’s group had special crates built to hold them. The wooden crates, just three feet wide and eight feet long, barely gave the Arabians room to move.

Feed bins attached to the crates held hay for the horses. Williamson’s photos of the voyage show the horses crowded on the Transylvania’s foredeck amid piles of hay and straw. Veterinarian Pulling lamented that the feed wasn’t of very high quality, and also later wrote, “These boxes were constructed in Beirut of the best material available, which was none too good as we later experienced.” But at least the weather was pleasant for the weeklong trip to Marseille. After arriving there, the horses stayed at a small, drafty stable near the docks in the French port for a couple of weeks, munching on poor quality hay, before giant cranes lifted their crates into the cargo hold of the S.S. Marine Flier, a former World War II freighter bound from Marseilles for New York.

The slow 20-day trip across the Atlantic was mostly uneventful — until the Marine Flier encountered the nor’easter near the end of the voyage. The last tropical hurricane of the season had petered out in the North Atlantic a few weeks before, but this was almost as bad, with hurricane-force winds gusting up to 100 miles an hour.

Off the coast of Newfoundland, a 400-foot British freighter, the Langleecrag, was dashed against rocks and broke up; two of its crew members died. A 110-foot fishing

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Scenes of Marseilles.

Below left and right: The 14 horses on the deck of the ship to Marseille. Dyer’s group had special crates built to hold the horses for their journey.

Bottom left: The stable in Marseille where the horses stayed for several weeks waiting for their next ship to the U.S.

trawler, the Uncle John, foundered and sank off the Massachusetts coast. On land, the towns of Cape Cod were battered, trees were uprooted, streets were covered with debris and broken glass, and two hangars collapsed at the Martha’s Vineyard airport.

Heading for New York, the Marine Flier sailed straight into the nor’easter. The sturdy steel ship, just over two years old, was tossed about as waves crashed over its deck. In an account published a few months later, Pulling wrote that the ship rolled 35 degrees to port and starboard every three minutes as it plowed through the high seas and powerful winds.

The storm lasted two days, and Pulling kept close watch on the horses in their wooden crates in the hold. As the ship rolled, the horses fell and repeatedly had to be helped up — at one point, five horses were knocked down at once. Some of the crates splintered. As Pulling attended to the horses, the indefatigable Williamson was shooting photos of the storm, capturing dramatic pictures of waves as tall as the bow of the boat splashing across the deck.

Finally, three days behind schedule, on November 17, the Marine Flier docked in New York. Amazingly, the 14 Arabians were largely uninjured except for minor scrapes.

The horses passed through Customs and were certified for importation into the U.S., in care of Sunical Land & Livestock, the Hearst subsidiary that oversaw San Simeon.

After resting in New York for five days, the Arabians were loaded onto a Pennsylvania Railroad train to California. This trip, by way of Chicago and Omaha, also proved challenging: The heater in the baggage car carrying the horses malfunctioned, subjecting them to sub-freezing temperatures for much of the four-day trip. Again, they endured. The 14 Arabians finally were unloaded from the train in San Luis Obispo for the last leg of their journey, a 50-mile truck ride up California’s Highway 1 to San Simeon. Over the 1947 Thanksgiving weekend, the horses arrived at the Spanish-style stables of the Hearst ranch and were turned loose in San Simeon’s lush pastures.

In all Dyer & Co. had traveled 25,000 miles over six months, through several countries, by plane, boat, car, horseback, and on foot. They considered 3,000 possible horses before deciding on the 14 Arabians they brought back. A few descendants still remain on the Hearst ranch as part of the Hearst family’s San Simeon Arabians breeding operation.

Top left: The storm from the deck of the S.S. Marine Flier, a former World War II freighter, enroute to the U.S. Top right: The horses in the cargo hold of the Marine Flier.

Bottom right: Dyer unloads one of the horses from the train in San Luis Obispo, California, ready for the last 50 mile leg of the journey in a van to San Simeon.

Ironically, however, William Randolph Hearst never saw the Arabians he paid so much to bring to the United States. In his 80s and in failing health, Hearst had left San Simeon for the last time in May 1947, shortly after his midnight meeting to dispatch Dyer on the expedition to the Middle East.

Hearst and his longtime mistress, Marion Davies, moved to Los Angeles, where he could receive better medical care. The legendary press baron lived until 1951, but he never returned to his castle by the sea — or to the noble Arabian steeds that Dyer brought back from his Middle Eastern adventure.

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The Horses of the Hearst Importation b y

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Hama Halba Beqaa Beirut Rayak

The map above depicts some of the sites in Lebanon and Syria visited by Preston Dyer and party in their 1947 search for Arabian horses.

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he six stallions and eight mares William Randolph Hearst Sr. imported from Lebanon in 1947 for his San Simeon Stud, in Pico Creek, California, are an important pillar of American Arabian horse breeding.

They are also significant in that they collectively represent the last large-scale importation of Arabian horses from their original homeland to the West, at a time when cars and trucks were on the verge of supplanting horses as the Bedouins’ preferred means of transportation and source of prestige.

The general circumstances of the expedition which Preston Dyer, San Simeon’s stud manager, Fred Pulling, the stud’s veterinarian, and John Williamson, the trip’s photographer, undertook to buy the horses are well-known, mostly from an article about a trip that ran in Hearst’s newspaper, the San Francisco Examiner, on May 16, 1948. Since then, new information has regularly surfaced about the trip itself and the circumstances behind the acquisition of the horses. Some of it came from an interview of Preston Dyer by Arabian horse historian Carol Mulder in 1980. Bill Cooke, the Director of the International Museum of the Horse in Lexington, Kentucky, did an interview with Dyer’s nephew in 2012 and provided some additional background. Thanks to their efforts’ and others, we now know more about the Hearst importation as a whole than ever before.

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Top right and above: *Zamal, a 1944 desertbred stallion, pictured with Preston Dyer riding at the Hearst San Simeon Ranch.

The 1944 stallion *Ghamil, pictured top at the Beirut stable, and bottom at San Simeon Ranch.

Yet unlike other travelers, who kept diaries, exchanged correspondence, or wrote books about their adventures, Dyer and his colleagues did not leave written accounts of their trip. Consequently, relatively little is known about the ancestry, breeder, and place of origin of some of the horses beyond the information in the importation documents issued by the Beirut racetrack. Were the horses acquired in Lebanon, as Fred Pulling wrote in the August 1948 issue of the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association? Or were most obtained directly from the Bedouin tribes of the nearby Syrian Desert, as Preston Dyer’s account of the trip suggests in the San Francisco Examiner article?

How many of them were racehorses in Beirut at the time of their purchase? What role did wealthy horse owner Henri Pharoun — who was, in more than one way — W. R. Hearst’s Middle Eastern alter ego, play in facilitating the acquisition and export of the horses? Reconciling the information in the importation documents of the Hearst imports with first-hand accounts from veteran Lebanese horse breeders, the Lebanese Arabian Horse Studbooks and surviving records from the Beirut Jockey Club provides the answers to these questions, and others.

It appears that the fourteen horses came from at least three different areas: the plain of Akkar in northern Lebanon, the valley of the Beqaa in eastern Lebanon, and the steppes of Syria, specifically the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers known as the “Djezireh” (the Upper Mesopotamia of Antiquity). All three were Arabian prime horse breeding areas in the 1940s, and the some of the best and most authentic Arabian horses were bred there, at the hands of wealthy aristocratic urban and rural landowners, and powerful Bedouin tribesmen.

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The stallion *Snounou, pictured in his win photo after a race in Lebanon, below, and at San Simeon Ranch, right.

The plain of Akkar is a fertile agricultural area, stretching eastwards from the Mediterranean Sea north of the Lebanese port of Tripoli all the way, and extending into Syria around the city of Tall Kalakh. As of the 1940s, this area was providing an increasing number of Arabian horses for the Beirut racetrack. Over the next three decades, its horses would constitute the nucleus of the national Lebanese Arabian horse breeding program. At the time of Preston Dyer’s expedition, wealth, power, and Arabian horses in Akkar were concentrated in the hands of different branches of the landowning family of the al-Miri’bi. They owned precious, authentic Arabian horses from old strains like Kuhaylan Tamri, Kuhaylan al-Kharas, Kuhaylan al-Dunays, and Ma’naqi Sbayli. The Lebanese government traditionally maintained at least one, and 12 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

sometimes two, breeding stallions at stud in Halba, the center of the province of Akkar. In the 1940s, these stallions were Ghazwane and Kouhailane, known as “al-A’ma,” ‘the blind.’ These were two closely related stallions from the same strain of Kuhaylan al-Kharas, both former racehorses previously owned by Henri Pharoun, and sons of the famed Krush Halba. The Turkish Government had purchased this Kuhaylan Krush in Halba in 1933 in old age, and turned him into a foundation stallion for its own Arabian horse breeding program.

Three imported Hearst mares can be directly traced to Akkar and the area around it. They are *Kouhailane, *Nouwayra and *Najwa. *Kouhailane, also known as “Bint Kouhailane” was a grey 1943 “Kohaila Tamri” by “Kouhailane” out of a “Kouhaila Tamrie.”

She was owned by Henri Pharoun, who apparently drove the Americans to Akkar — a two hour drive from Beirut by car — to see her. That she was still located in Akkar at the age of four, and did not have a name of her own, but was rather known by her sire’s name (the daughter of Kouhailane), indicates that she had not

The stallion *Arkane in Beirut, top, and at San Simeon Ranch, bottom. *arkane was later given by W. R. Hearst to the President of Mexico.

been raced before. Pharoun, despite being Lebanon’s wealthiest man at the time, and the owner of the largest racing stable in Beirut and perhaps the world, did not operate his own breeding farm, but used a more cost-effective business model: he engaged in partnerships with small breeders over choice broodmares, picked the stallions they were to be bred to, and bought their offspring. His partners kept the mares and paid all expenses. *Kouhailane may well have been the outcome of one of these partnership arrangements. Her sire appears to have been the stallion of same name that stood at stud in Halba, and her dam a Kuhaylah Tamriyah from one of the Miri’bi studs farms — no other breeders bred this rare strain in Akkar. The strain originally hailed from the ‘Anazah Bedouins, one or two generations further back.

Unfortunately, the importation documents for the two other Akkar mares yield much less information: Unlike *Kouhailane, *Nouwayra, a six-year-old grey, by Ghazwane out of Chahrazade, and *Najwa, another three-year-old grey,

by Ghazwane out of Maazouza, have no strain attached to them. One account has Preston Dyer riding off a prized mare he had just acquired over a distance of 85 miles all the way back to Beirut. That’s

exactly the distance between Beirut and the Syrian town of Tal Kalakh, a major Arabian horse breeding center directly to the North of Akkar. That mare may have been *Najwa, or more probably *Nouwayra. What gives away the two mares’ Akkar or Tal Kalakh origin is their link to Ghazwane, the famous racehorse that stood at stud in Halba, Akkar and was used all the way to Tal Kalakh and even beyond. The majority of purebred horses in Volume 1 of the Lebanese Arabian Horse Studbook trace to Ghazwane in one way or another. He was the foundation stallion of the emerging Lebanese national Arabian horse breeding program, and the fastest racehorse of his era.

The valley of the Beqaa in eastern Lebanon was the second major horse breeding area of Lebanon. Unlike in Akkar, Arabian horses in the Beqaa, were mostly bred on a small scale by merchant families of the towns of Zahle and Baalbeck with commercial ties to Damascus and the Syrian Desert. The sheep trading Hindi family of Rayak — my family’s partners in horses for three generations — owned a famous and racy strain of Sa’dan Tuqan; the Mutran family of Baalbeck owned a branch of the Sheykhan strain (originally Ubayyan).

The Braidi family of Zahle owned horses from the Shuwayman Sabbah strain (the strain of *Mounwer and *Bourhane). The Khamis family of Rayak in the Beqaa (“Bekaa” is the French spelling), while not merchants, had taken to breeding and selling Arabian horses for racing purposes. Pharoun was reportedly very fond of their Sheykhan strain, which was the strain of the Hearst import *Layya, and seemed to have maintained some sort of longstanding arrangement with the Khamis family, where he had preferential access to colts from this strain. In his later years, Pharoun complained to my father, who was after a mare from this strain, that the Khamis family would not let go of 13 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

The stallion *Mounwer at San Simeon Ranch, top, and in the washrack in Beirut, bottom left.

The stallion *Bourhane in Beirut.

their Sheykhan mares. Khamis-bred horses from the Sheykhan strain won races at the Beirut racetrack well into the 1990s, and I recall seeing two of their stallions — a black and a chestnut at the Beirut tracks.

Here in the Baqaa, the Lebanese government kept a stallion or two for breeding at its facility in Eblah, three miles from Rayak, which it had taken over from the French after independence. In the 1940s, these government stallions were Sergent Major, and another “Koheilan.” Sergent Major, a Hadban Enzahi was a former racehorse from Pharoun’s stables, sired by a Kuhaylan al-Dunays named Padishah, also owned and raced by Pharoun. The second stallion, alternatively known as a “Kuhaylan of the French,” “Kuhaylan of the Government” was an older Kuhaylan al-Kharas stallion who was there from the time of the French, before 1943. He was also referred to as “Kuhaylan al-Mufattah” — Kuhaylan of the open eyes — to distinguish him from his blind namesake in Akkar.

The valley of the Beqaa, and more specifically the town of Rayak in this valley, was the place of origin of six other Hearst imports: the stallions *Bourhane, *Mounwer and *Zamal, and the mares *Lebnanieh, *Layya and *Mansourah. The importation documents of five of them (all the above except *Zamal) show them as having been 14 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

bred by “Khamis, Rayak,” or “Khamis, Bekaa.” It appears that Dyer and his companions visited George Khamis’ stud farm, which was about an hour by car from the expedition’s operating base in Beirut. Some of the five horses bred by Khamis, especially the younger ones like *Mansourah may well have been bought there, while others like *Bourhane and *Zamal would have been acquired directly at the Beirut racetrack. Of the six Beqaa Valley horses, two were offspring of the government’s Sergent Major (*Lebnanieh and *Zamal), and, according to their breeder George Khamis, at least four of them (*Lebnanieh, *Layya, *Mansourah, and *Bourhane) traced to a “Khailan” stallion a generation or two farther back in the pedigree. This would have been the “Kuhaylan of the Government.” All six Beqaa horses had many ancestors in common, despite being from three different strains (three Ma’naqi, two Shueyman, and one Sheykhan).

In his later years, Georges Khamis moved to the United States and provided Dick Skinner (then trainer and manager at the Hearst’s Pico Creek stables), with detailed background information about the five Hearst imports horses he bred, including pedigrees going back several generations. The handwritten information is in the Hearst scrapbook at the International Museum of the Horse.

Part of this information is reproduced in an article by Michael Bowling in the Fall 1988 issue CMK Record, and the reader is referred to it for more information and analysis. It is very consistent with firsthand information on the Arabian horse breeding programs in the Beqaa valley, including my family’s.

The information on *Mounwer is the most detailed of that reproduced by Michael Bowling and is representative of the background of the rest of the Khamis horses. *Mounwer’s pedigree by Khamis indicates that *Mounwer was sired by Kayane, a grey Hamdani Simri who stood

at private stud in Rayak. Kayane was by Ghazal, a grey Hadban Enzahi closely related to Sergent Major, and yet another of Pharoun’s race winners. The name of *Mounwer’s dam, the chestnut Bint El Berdowny, is a reference to the Berdowny, a creek that flows from the Lebanon mountains through the town of Zahle. It suggests an association with the Braidi family of this town, who owned a good strain of Shuwayman Sabbah, *Mounwer’s strain. According to Khamis, Bint El Berdowny was sired by a black Ma’anaqi Sbayli; and her dam, the chestnut Subayha and was sired by a grey desertbred Ma’anaqi Sbayli, which “the French Army brought to Lebanon from the Saudi Arabian desert” in 1919.

The five remaining Hearst imports are *Snounou, *Ghamil, *Arkane, *Rajwa and *Bint Rajwa. Four of them came from the Syrian “Djezireh,” while the fifth, *Bint Rajwa (b. 1945) was born in Lebanon out of *Rajwa. *Bint Rajwa was sired by the famed Lebanese racehorse Karawane (nicknamed “the Great”), a Ma’naqi Sbayli son

Top: The mare *Layya with Preston Dyer at San Simeon.

Bottom left: The mare *Kouhailane in Tripoli.

Bottom right: The mare *Najwa in San Simeon.

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The mare *Lebnanieh in the Biqaa Valley in eastern Labanon.

of Ghazwane from Akkar whom Pharoun (who else?) had owned and raced. The term “Djezireh” specifically designated the area of the Syrian steppe between the Tigris and Euphrates, but at the Beirut racetrack, a “Djezireh horse” was synonymous with “Syrian desert-bred” in general. This was the realm of the horse-breeding Bedouin, the homeland of the Arabian horse, where Lady Anne Blunt, Homer Davenport, and others obtained their desert bred stock.

Henri Pharoun, who appears to have been the original owner of at least three of the five, was no stranger to the Djezireh. For decades, he toured it with his car and his driver in the spring of each year, to restock his racing stables with colts (and some fillies) from the strains and breeding programs he fancied. Year in and year out he acquired an average of thirty to fourty Djezireh horses, and his arrival to the black tent camps and guesthouses of the Sheikhs was much anticipated. Here too, he had his favorite strains, among them the Kuhaylan Da’jani of Ahmad al-Taha, and the Saqlawi Jadran of Drey’i al-Hadb. He also had his preferred stallions — among them “the horse of ‘Ebbo,’” a Saglawi Jadran from the Tai Bedouins — and would ask for specific breedings to be made, and would commit to buying the offspring the next year. He took no one from Beirut on these trips, and was cautious not to reveal the source of his purchases, for fear of competition from others. For this reason, his driver was particularly coveted by trainers and merchants. Pharoun took Preston Dyer and his companions along with him on these desert trips. The following was from the San Francisco Examiner interview with Dyer: “With Pharoun, Dyer and his assistants made repeated trips into the sweltering desert — by airplane, automobile, horse and afoot. Operating out of Beyrout, Dyer visited numerous Arab camps. By the hundreds, the tribesmen would race into the camps on their spirited steeds, anxious to sell. ‘Some of the horses came from Homs, near Aleppo, some from the Shammar Tribe, some from the Sharrar Tribe,’ said Dyer. ‘We traversed Palmyra and paused at Hama, the center of the Arabian horse-breeding country. We called on other tribes reputed to have good horses 16 ▪ HEARST/DYER EXPEDITION ▪ WORLD

— the Cumayr Tribe ruled by Sheikh Ibid Smayr, the Saba Tribe, ruled by Sheikhs Murshid and Misrid. Along the Euphrates, we inspected the horses of Sheikh Ibn Muhayd’s Fidan tribe of the Deyr Ez-Zor.’” This account is a useful description of the places visited, but does not say whether the four “Djezireh” horses were obtained during these trips. We know that *Arkane, *Ghamil and *Snounou were already racing in Beirut, so they could not have been bought then. We also know that *Rajwa’s filly Bint *Rajwa was born in 1945 (so bred in 1944), sired by a Lebanese stallion from Akkar, and so neither could have been in the desert during Dyer and Pharoun’s trip.

This makes it quite possible that no horses were actually purchased during Dyer’s trips to the Syrian steppe, but that the four desert-bred Syrian horses were all obtained from Lebanon, as Fred Pulling clearly indicates in his article, and more specifically from Pharoun’s stables. They could have been purchased

by Pharoun from Syria at an earlier time, quite possibly from the places Dyer

mentioned in his interview — the city of Homs, the Shammar Bedouins, the “Sharrar” (Sharrarat is a better spelling).

It is possible that the group expressed the desire to see horses in the desert among the Bedouin tribes, but that they were not pleased with their condition and that they preferred Pharoun’s better fed horses, and those from the fertile plains of Akkar and the Beqaa.

There is no record of where each of the four “Djezireh” horses came from, so one is left to speculate about their origins using clues from the horses’ strains. Of the four Djezireh horses, *Snounou is the easiest to trace. His importation certificate gives his dam as “Maanakieh” (a different hand scratched out “Maanakieh” and wrote in “Sikliwya Jedran”) and his sire as Al-Khdeili. The latter is a reference to the Kuhaylan Khdili strain, which the ‘Anazah Bedouin in general and the Fad’aan in particular owned and specialized in.

What would increase the likelihood that *Snounou came from the ‘Anazah is Dyer’s mention that they visited the horses of Ibn Muhayd, the Sheikh of the Fad’aan, along the Euphrates, and three other ‘Anazah Sheikhs, Ibn Mirshid (that would have been Rakan Ibn Mirshid) and Ibn Misrab (that would have been Salih Ibn Misrab) of the Sba’ah, and Ibn Smeyr of the Wuld ‘Ali. *Ghamil (sire Siclawi, dam Maanakieh Sbeyli) is a puzzle because of how common these two strains were with most of the tribes Dyer mentions. The two others, *Arkane and *Rajwa (and consequently *Bint Rajwa too) are from the mysterious strain of Saqlawi (“Siclawi”) “Ejrefi,” femine “Ejrafie.” This is a strain I have never come across, and if it weren’t for its repetition thrice in the importation documents, I would have assumed it was just misspelt. In any case, it suggests that Pharoun appreciated the strain enough to acquire two of its representatives, including a female he bred from.

Top left: The mare *Mansourah in Beirut.

Top right: The mare *Bint Rajwa at San Simeon.

Bottom right: The mare *Nouwayra at San Simeon.

The central figure of Henri Pharoun looms large in the story of the Hearst importation, yet there is no account of how he and Preston Dyer came to meet. One serious possibility that has not been examined before is that the two first met in Cairo in August 1947, at the minister-level meeting of the Arab League in the Shepheard Hotel, a few weeks before meeting again in Beirut. Pharoun, then Lebanon’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, represented Lebanon at the meeting. Their prior acquaintance at this high level diplomatic event, where Dyer was introduced by Prince Fawaz al-Shaalan, would explain the interest Pharoun took in Dyer’s horse-buying venture. This interest manifested itself in Pharoun’s readiness to take Dyer and his companions on distant trips to see Bedouin and other horses and horse breeders, the advice he gave them on which horses to buy, and the logistical support he supplied. Indeed, Williamson’s photos of the Hearst imports at the Beirut racetrack feature Pharoun’s very recognizable stables, which he seems to have put at the team’s disposal. Similarly, all the horses’ importation documents show Pharoun as original owner, but that may have just been him allowing the use of his name and political influence to facilitate the export process.

More probably, it could have been an indication that the Hearst horses that came from Syria, such as the four Djezireh horses, may not have had official Syrian exportation documents, and needed to be registered in the name of a Lebanese before they could be exported from Lebanon. Ironically, the extent of Pharoun’s involvement makes the question of how many of the fourteen horses he originally owned very difficult to answer. It is not a question of prime importance for understanding the horses’ breeding and origins, given that Pharoun was not a breeder, but only an intermediary owner in these horses’ incredible trajectory between the steppes and plains of the Middle East and the seashores of the Far West.

The 1994 stallion Zamal Khan (Khemosabi x Amazon Of Pico by Amara Baha), who traces to both imports *Mounwer and *Zamal, at San Simeon Arabians.

Bill Flemion, Manager P.O. Box 96 路 San Simeon 路 California 93452 805.927.4522 facebook.com/sansimeonarabians

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