All the lights went out, except for the spotlight trained on the top of the platform. There, Powderface stood, seemingly unperturbed by the crowd below or the bathing suit-clad woman on his back, his coat glowing white against the darkness. For a moment, the horse paused and shifted his weight from hoof to hoof. Forty feet below was a pool of water, just 12 feet deep. The audience was rapt, the only sound coming from the waves crashing against the sides of Steel Pier, Atlantic City’s boardwalk that extends 1,000 feet off the New Jersey coast.
“I did not have the sense that he was afraid at all,” remembers Cynthia Branigan, author of The Last Diving Horse in America, who was among the spectators that day in August 1964. The future author and animal rights activist was 11 years old at the time. “It seemed to me that he was just taking it in, enjoying his moment in the spotlight.”
Suddenly, Powderface cantered off the edge. Both horse and rider seemed to hang in the air for an instant, then plummeted, and disappeared into the water with barely a ripple. The crowd erupted into furious cheers as Powderface surfaced and the woman slid from his back. As an attendant rushed to towel off his dripping flanks, the horse seemed to exude the casual arrogance of a star athlete.
“The whole thing lasted, I guess, 30 seconds, maybe 20 seconds, but that moment is seared into my consciousness,” Branigan says. “The lights went on and the crowd dispersed. And I started to cry a little bit. Not weeping and wailing, but tears rolled down my cheek. I was deeply affected by something, and I didn’t even know what. It was over, but really, it wasn’t over for me.”
As bizarre, even cruel, as it might seem today, horse-diving was a prime traveling attraction that found a steady home in Atlantic City. From the moment the first horses dove for crowds at the Steel Pier in 1928, the act was a sensation. For 50 years, horses and riders took the plunge there anywhere from two to six times a day, despite the obvious safety risks.
Broken bones and minor injuries were a regular occurrence for the riders—sometimes the injuries were more severe. (History doesn’t record any particular injuries to the horses.) Oscar Smith, a 19-year-old who took his first and last dive in San Antonio, Texas, in 1907, died when he hit the water. Sonora Webster Carver, who was later the subject of the 1991 film Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken, lost her sight when her retina detached on impact in 1931. She continued to dive, blind, for another 11 years.