Eliza Carpenter

Eliza Carpenter was a race horse owner and jockey, born into slavery in Virginia around 1851 and sold as a child to owners in Kentucky and then Missouri. After emancipation she returned to Madisonville, Kentucky, where she learned the business of buying, training and riding racehorses, and later moved to Kansas and then Ponca City, Oklahoma. For more than thirty years she owned and raced Thoroughbreds and other horses on country circuits, winning many races and a considerable amount of money, and when dissatisfied with the way a race was going she sometimes rode her own horses. She is described as the only African-American horse racer in early Oklahoma and one of the few African-American stable owners in the American West. She also took part in the 1893 Cherokee Outlet land rush and won a 1920 recreation of it in a buggy. She died on 16 December 1924.