'Bar C' Coup Reverses the Oregon Trail

The stable name traces to a ranch they once owned in the Oregon outback: “Bar C” was how they branded their cattle. But while Neal and Pam Christopherson are proud of their home state, and have achieved a great deal there, even they couldn't make horses pay in those gulch-carved scrublands, under those huge empty skies.

“Telocaset, Union, Oregon,” Neal says. “Snows an inch, drifts 10 feet. Cold country.”

But horses are tough, no?

“Well, they are,” replies Neal. “But we lost a heck of a nice Quarter Horse colt that climbed up on the snow drift, across the water trough, and drowned because the ice broke. That's why we moved to Hermiston on the Columbia River. Probably the mildest weather you can have in Oregon is right there.”

But all those experiences, across nearly half a century, add up to something that wouldn't be quite as special, nor as solid, if you could leave out the difficult days. The Christophersons have been raising or training horses for 48 years. Long enough, perhaps, to have developed some kind of X-ray vision when they saw Forever For Now (War Front) at the Keeneland November Sale two years ago. They could see straight into that mare's swaying belly, right?

“No,” says Neal with a grin, miming the opening of a catalogue. “It just said 'Uncle Mo' down there.”

That predilection, after all, was why they were there in the first place.

Six years previously, at the equivalent auction, the Christophersons had bought an El Prado (Ire) mare named Fresia for $35,000. She, too, was carrying an Uncle Mo colt, who they sold as a yearling for $60,000.

“When we took him down there to the sale at Pomona, they were all talking about something on his X-rays, a sesamoid I think,” Neal recalls. “But Eddie Woods bought the horse, took him to Florida, broke and trained him down there, and then brought him back to Barretts for the 2-year-old sale. And he sold him for $600,000! So right then and there, we knew we had something if we could just stay in the Uncle Mo business.”

That colt was raced as Galilean by West Point Thoroughbreds and his six stakes wins–which have now launched him on a stud career in New York–made his dam a suddenly lucrative proposition. Sure enough, having been returned to Uncle Mo on a foal-share, Fresia produced a filly that sold for $700,000 to Courtlandt Farm at the September Sale of 2021.

It was with their share of the proceeds that the Christophersons promptly spent $210,000 on Forever For Now that November. And, once again, a foal acquired in utero has raised the stakes. Because the mare delivered such a knockout son that he even broke new ground for horsemen as seasoned as the Penn brothers.

Their one-horse Book I consignment, so expertly handled that the colt was as mannerly and inquisitive after 300 shows as on his first, made nearly every shortlist. In the end M.V. Magnier had to go to $1.35 million to tap back into a family that his Coolmore team had helped to make one of the best in the book, Forever For Now's third dam being a full sister to Galileo (Ire) himself.

Okay, so maybe that kind of page doesn't really require X-ray vision.

“No, you just grab the dice and you roll,” Neal says. “See what happens. Because 99.9 percent of this game is luck.”

But you have to believe that you can put yourself in a position to be lucky. And the Christophersons' Bar C Racing Stable has been doing that for a long time now, albeit mostly in shallower waters.

“When we first met, we were down there at Corvallis,” Neal recalls. “That's where Oregon State University is. And I had a stallion and a mare, Quarter Horses, that I was actually using to rodeo. Pam and I ran into each other down at the bar. She'd just bought a mare off the track, to barrel race. So we both started with Quarter Horses.”

Since then, the Christophersons have excelled with Thoroughbreds on the West Coast scene in many different guises: as breeders, owners, vendors, and for 30 years as trainers. They stood a local phenomenon in Harbor the Gold, 14-time champion sire in Oregon; having bred or co-bred 11 champions over the state line, they were recently inducted into the Washington Hall of Fame; and they've topped a Barretts sale with a $600,000 Cal-bred.

Sadly, after decades of accomplishment, they feel disenchanted with the direction of their home circuit. Having for a long time upgraded the Pacific gene pool with Kentucky mares, they've gone up another level even as horseracing in Washington has been reduced to 55 days at a single track. The mares, as a result, are increasingly staying right where they are in the Bluegrass. Recently, the Christophersons have even toyed with prospecting for a farm of their own there.

“They've closed nearly all the tracks where we are,” Neal laments. “They closed Portland Meadows. They closed Playfair. Yakima. Now it's Golden Gate. The horse business in our neck of the woods is going downhill. These youngsters don't like to mess with horses, that's the only thing I can see. It's unfortunate. Like to see it keep going. We used to have five different racetracks just in Washington. But we took six head to the Seattle sale this summer, and only made $35,000.”

Of course, this kind of situation only tends to spiral downward: a struggling region tends to end up disillusioning precisely those whose experience, resources and skills it can least afford to lose–skills, it can now be seen, of uncommon transferability. Because the Christophersons have managed to hang in there, even against a growing headwind.

“This mare came into the ring at Pomona a couple of years ago and nobody's bidding,” Neal recalls. “So I opened the page, and I'm thinking, 'What's the matter with this?' So I raised my hand once, just for the hell of it, got her for $1,000. She was in foal to Stanford, who was just beginning there in California, so on our way home we went over to the ranch, dropped her off, said, 'Foal her out and breed her back!' When all that was done, we went back and got her, took her back to Oregon, had a foal. Brought the foal back a year later to the yearling sale at Pomona–and sold her for $100,000. Out of my $1,000 mare. But, again, all luck. She had good breeding, everything was good.”

So the Christophersons have been doing their best. They still have five stallions–even a young son of the inevitable Uncle Mo–and a score of broodmares.

“The Uncle Mo is a good-looking fella, but we'll see,” Neal says with a shrug. “In this business it always takes three years to find out if you've got anything. A lot of people ask us, 'Why do you do this? It takes so damned long!' But if that was how we started, every year now we've got horses going someplace or another.”

Increasingly, however, “someplace” means Kentucky. In fairness, this is hardly some overnight reaction to their September coup.

“No, what happened was that we were buying and selling in the Pacific Northwest and getting nowhere,” Neal explains. “We knew Gary Chervenell in Washington, and he's always been telling us, 'If you want the good stuff, go to Kentucky. That's where they're made.' So we made our first trip over with him 20 years ago, and really that's what has made us–the fact that we just got lucky buying some fairly well bred mares.”

One of the introductions Chervenell made was to Bo Davis, then broodmare manager at Overbrook. And when that farm's Seeking The Gold half-brother to GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile winner Boston Harbor blew a knee, Davis wouldn't stop pestering them about him. “You guys really need to stand this horse,” he urged them. “I know him, I've been with him ever since he was born.”

“We had a darn good horse at that time, name of Tiffany Ice,” Neal recalls. “But he was 22, and Bo kept saying he wasn't going to last forever. And finally, one day when he called us on our way down to Portland Meadows, back when those bag phones had just come out, the first mobiles, we said 'Oh, just send him out.'”

“When he got off that van, after shipping all the way from New York, he didn't look very good at all,” Pam says.

“We looked at each other and said, 'What in the hell do we do now?'” says Neal, shaking his head.

“We got him fattened up, and I think he bred seven mares his first year,” Pam said. “But his first foal was Noosa Beach. He won the [GII] Longacres Mile, and was horse of the Emerald Downs meet four years in a row. Out of the first mare he ever bred.”

“And you know why we bred him?” Neal says. “Because the old horse, Tiffany Ice, if ever a mare looked like she's going to kick him, do anything bad, he would just turn away and go back in his stall. And this mare, she was pretty testy. So what we did, we brought the new guy up. Had no idea what he was going to do. He'd never tried to breed anything. And he was a wild man. Boy, she didn't kick no way when Harbor the Gold got ahold of her! And that was the first baby. Won over $500,000.”

“And Harbor the Gold went on to have 72 stakes horses at Emerald Downs,” Pam marvels. “The next closest to him had 27. And every year his babies made $1 million in racing.”

As it happens, Harbor the Gold died the same year that the Christophersons sold Galilean's sister, and played up the winnings on Forever For Now. As so often in this business, as one door closed, so another one opened.

“We were going back and forth at Hill 'n' Dale when they sold Fresia's filly,” Pam recalls. “And they had this cute little War Front mare there, in foal to Uncle Mo, and I just kept looking at her. She was young, and pretty nice. Kinda looked like Miss Piggy! A big broad thing with a white blaze down her face. They said she'd had a beautiful Justify filly, I don't know where she might have shown up meanwhile, but this was going to be her second foal. Anyway when we sold the filly so well, we thought, 'Well, let's get this mare.' And all we ever wanted from the colt she was carrying was to try to make back the $210,000 she cost.”

The Christophersons are clear that one of the reasons the colt so wildly exceeded those hopes is the diligence and hands-on attention of the Penn family: brothers John and Frank, plus John's son and daughter-in-law, Alex and Kendra. Certainly you couldn't hope to see a more obliging horse, loosely on the shank, after the number of shows he made in September. But that reflected the companionship established at home–over many a mile, and many a month–with Kendra, who was also tending him at Keeneland.

“She's a good hand, by golly,” Pam says. “She's walking them, ponying them, she knows everything about them. And that horse, he knew what he was supposed to do. They're sure good people, and they did a great job.”

“We really believe in them,” stresses Neal. “You can get lost in some of those big 'factories'. This horse came out and walked the same way, every single person that came to see him, didn't get pissy once. He's a smart horse. They'll go a long way with him, as long as they keep him sound.”

Forever For Now, who has a Caravaggio weanling and is in foal to Mystic Guide, is obviously slated to return to Uncle Mo next.

“We're pretty well Uncle Mo'd out,” says Neal wryly. “Own a share in Mo Forza, that's now standing in California. His first crop was on the ground this spring. We'll see what happens. But a lot was riding on September. A few hundred bucks a day, it starts getting 'old' after a while! Now we've got enough that we can leave them here. But we're just into it, and have been forever. Like I said, we've got something coming through every year now. And the real breeding program's going well, no matter what. We've got a couple of the best kids in the country.”

Their daughter is a nurse, and has managed to resist the lure of horses, but their son now has a few acres of his own, and is also boarding mares with the Penns. The Christopherson momentum, after all these years, remains ever forward. At the November Sale, a young mare in foal to War Front caught this observer's eye in the back ring: she was by an unjustly neglected sire, but out of a half-sister to Scat Daddy. It was going to be instructive to learn which person was smart enough to buy her. Sure enough, when the next sheet went up on the wall, there it was: sold to Bar C Racing, $160,000. And history tells us to keep an eye on that War Front foal!

So by no means was this amazing coup in September necessarily the climax of a story already 48 years in the telling. Its authors remain full of passion for the next chapter.

“Because here we are, 73 years old, looking at picking up stock and barrel and going to Kentucky,” says Neal with a chuckle. “Now, isn't that crazy?”