The trail is as cold as Fairbanks in February. A century since Black Gold won the Kentucky Derby, the fate of his owner's trophy remains shrouded in mystery, the truth buried beneath conflicting accounts, faulty conclusions, curious gaps, and secrets taken to the grave.

The family of winning owner Rosa Hoots believes the gold trophy is currently residing at the Kentucky Derby Museum, which is just a short walk from the winner's circle where it was presented 100 years ago. The museum has hired former curator Jay Ferguson to assess the authenticity of a 14-karat gold cup descendants of Hoots believe to be the one presented to her at Churchill Downs on Derby Day 1924, and subsequently stolen.

Though the museum has taken extraordinary and expensive pains to identify the trophy in question, Ferguson has been unable to connect enough dots to make a determination and laments, "the leads are getting pretty thin."

Subscribe now!

Worth at least $80,000 based on its gold content alone, the mystery trophy could be considerably more valuable as a historical artifact. Leland's auction house sold Spend a Buck's 1985 Derby trophy for $187,521 in 2015 and Strike the Gold's 1991 Derby trophy for $165,479 in an auction that closed March 16. Since the 1924 trophy was the first of the modern Derby owner's trophies, celebrating the 50th edition of the race — "the Holy Grail of horse racing" according to Hoots' great granddaughter, Theresa Collins — it could command a higher price.

Yet despite a 2016 investigation that the Smithsonian Channel's "Sports Detectives" series presented as conclusive proof the trophy is Black Gold's, and Collins' exhaustive efforts to confirm those findings, the museum's own research has proved inconclusive.

If Black Gold's name was ever engraved on the trophy, it was removed prior to its acquisition by a Churchill Downs executive. A 1952 column by Louisville Courier-Journal sports editor Earl Ruby recounts an item in the New Orleans Daily States quoting an unnamed dealer who was selling a Derby trophy as saying, "a family of famous horse breeders who won a dozen or so of these cups had their name and presentation lines removed from this one before selling it to me."

Ruby surmised (incorrectly) the trophy may have belonged to Samuel Riddle, owner of 1937 Triple Crown winner War Admiral, but though Riddle remained Ruby's main suspect, other aspects of his story had changed when he revisited the subject in 1966.  

Ruby wrote that the Daily Racing Form's Don Fair had discovered the trophy in a New Orleans "hock shop" more than 20 years earlier, which would have pushed its presence there at least as far back as the mid-1940s. According to Ruby's later report, Fair alerted Churchill Downs executive vice president Stanley Hugenberg to the trophy's existence and the track executive paid $1,200 to take it off the market. Hugenberg would go on to serve in a leadership position at the museum.

Ruby's changing narrative was later contradicted by former Derby Museum curator Mary Ann Cooper, who told the Kentucky Department of Public Information, circa 1974, that the mystery trophy was acquired in a sale of a bankrupt estate.

More than three decades later, Ferguson received an e-mail recounting a conversation with Cooper in which she is quoted saying the mystery trophy had come from the collection of track publicist George "Brownie" Leach. Since Ruby, Cooper, and Leach are all deceased, it is likely too late to reconcile the various versions of the trophy's acquisition.

Black Gold won the 1924 Kentucky Derby. (BloodHorse Library)

"It seems like whenever I find information, I can find counter-information," Ferguson said. "The story kind of changes from year to year, even when you're talking to the same person. What's frustrating to me is the lack of the primary resource. A lot of this information I'm dealing with is second-hand or secondary resources."

Herein lies a common problem curators confront: provenance. Many artifacts lack a clear chain-of-custody to help substantiate their historical significance. Rachel Warner, director of collections for the York (Pa.) County History Center, described the dilemma in weighing what to do about what may or may not be a lock of George Washington's hair in the museum's collection.

"As truthtellers and keepers of history, what should we do?" Warner wrote. "While we can't claim to have a piece of America's first president, we do have several options and duties as an institution that holds items in the public trust.

"First of all, we can continue to properly house the object—making sure the conditions are stable and we do everything possible to slow deterioration. Second, we can continue to keep accurate records, which detail everything we do know about the piece, any research that has been done, and any changes that may occur over the years. Even though we cannot be 100% sure (the hair) is authentic, we will still treat it as if it is, with the hope that new information may become available."

Ferguson hopes to find further clues about the mystery trophy in a search of Churchill's financial records from the period, provided they still exist. Yet even if he were to find a receipt that shows how the trophy was acquired, tracking its path back to the winner's circle may be virtually impossible at this point.

Collins says the 1924 Derby trophy was among numerous items taken from Hoots' home in Tulsa, Okla., while the family was attending races in Dallas during the 1930s. Though Hoots was not immune to Depression-era financial pressures, Collins said no insurance claim was made on the lost valuables. Nor did the family report the theft to police for more than 65 years, until Collins' late father, Richard Freeman, filed a citizen crime report with Tulsa police March 25, 2001. (That report says the crime took place between 1930 and 1933; Collins later amended the timeline to 1934 or 1935).

"Upon our return from the racing meeting," Freeman wrote, "I just remember walking into the house and finding that the house had been rummaged through. Drawers had been left open where articles had been taken. We discovered that the racing trophies, photos and silks had all been stolen along with the sterling sets my grandmother owned."

Though period photographs show subtle design differences between the mystery trophy and the two others from that era that have not been located—those from 1929 and 1936—the process of elimination has its limits. It does not account for prototypes or duplicate Derby trophies that have been made as recently as 1970 without Churchill's authorization.

Black Gold as a 2-year-old in 1923. (BloodHorse Library)

Insisting "there is no doubt" the trophy is Black Gold's and determined to prod the museum to concede the point prior to the 150th Derby, Collins sent a detailed nine-page investigative report last week to Chris Goodlett, the museum's senior director of curatorial and educational affairs. But after reviewing the document, Goodlett's stance remained skeptical. In an interview with BloodHorse, he declined to speculate on whether the mystery trophy was Black Gold's or even probably Black Gold's.

"Our position is we're still looking at all avenues," Goodlett said. "We're not closing any of those doors. And we haven't established provenance, so we can't make an attribution."

Consequently, the mystery trophy has been consigned to the museum's storage facility, out of sight if not out of mind. Goodlett declined to allow BloodHorse to inspect the trophy and the museum has refused to release photographs of it "to maintain the integrity" of its ongoing investigation. Susanne Blackinton-Juaire, whose company has made Derby trophies since 1975, said she was not at liberty to share photographs in her possession of the mystery trophy because they belong to the museum.

The interests of transparency may have come into conflict here with the museum staff's chagrin over a mistake that has complicated the authentication process. Believing the trophy had been won by War Admiral, management had the trophy mistakenly engraved with the 1937 Derby winner's name prior to the museum's grand opening in 1985. War Admiral's actual owner's trophy resurfaced in 2004 and it was later donated to the museum by the R.D. and Joan Dale Hubbard Foundation. It currently is on display.

Blackinton-Juaire said the War Admiral engraving made it more difficult to tell if the trophy had carried an earlier inscription. Undaunted by that obstacle, Goodlett took the trophy to San Francisco's Cultural Heritage Imaging in September 2016 for tech-savvy further study.

Through a technique called reflectance transformation imaging, which translates photographs taken with various light angles into a digital representation that enhances surface detail (and cost the museum $1,440), Goodlett sought to unveil the trophy's hidden secrets.

The mystery trophy, however, remained mysterious.

"Chris found some interesting tool marks related to wear on the piece,'' said Carla Schroer, Cultural Heritage Imaging's founder and director. "But in terms of bringing back any inscription, as I recall there just wasn't evidence of that that we could see."

Kevin Barrows, the former FBI agent whose "Sports Detectives" probe had aired four months before Goodlett's trip, was then and is now satisfied he had successfully closed the case without engraved evidence.

"Based on everything we did, and I did there, to me I think they'd be more than correct in calling it Black Gold's trophy at this point," Barrows said. "With respect to (the Derby Museum), I'm sure that they're gun-shy about this because of the prior error that was made, the whole War Admiral rebranding. So, I'm sure they're obviously concerned, and they want some, in their minds, more definitive evidence."

Comparing the mystery trophy to photographs of the other Derby trophies still unaccounted for—Clyde Van Dusen's in 1929 and Bold Venture's in 1936—Barrows seized on a difference in the horseshoe on the 1929 trophy and in ornamental features on the 1936 trophy to distinguish them from a grainy winner's circle image of the 1924 trophy. After verifying the mystery trophy's gold content with a Massachusetts metallurgist, he took the trophy to Blackinton-Juaire's New England Copperworks for further examination.

Click image to purchase shirt.

The markings on its base were consistent with those stamped on other Derby trophies by the original manufacturer, Redlich & Co. When the cup was placed on a steel "chuck" used to shape trophies, Blackinton-Juaire said, "it fit like Cinderella's slipper."

"It was perfect," she said. "There is no doubt that the mystery trophy is an authentic Derby trophy. You can tell by the way it's made and the placement of everything. But here's the thing: What if it got stolen in manufacturing?…What if it got stolen as an inside job at the manufacturer before it got engraved?

"A lot of signs point that it is (Black Gold's trophy), but there are too many other possibilities. It's not beyond a reasonable doubt. If it was based on a percentage, I would say, 'Yes, it's theirs.' But you can't say for 100% certain."

For more than a year, Collins has pressed the Derby Museum to validate the mystery trophy in time for the 100th anniversary of Black Gold's Run for the Roses. She said her family members have purchased 18 tickets to the May 4 Derby while hoping for some formal acknowledgement.

Rosa Hoots remains the only member of the Osage tribe to own a Derby winner, a victory that took place near the height of the "Reign of Terror" depicted in the film "Killers of the Flower Moon." Black Gold, of course, is a colloquialism for oil, whose discovery on Osage land would enrich the tribe but led to many of its members being murdered over rights to the royalties.

"It is necessary to honor Rosa's memory and Black Gold's accomplishment," Collins wrote in closing her nine-page report. "Not only for Rosa's family, but also to give the Osage Indian Nation a place to acknowledge the pride they experienced, now and for future generations."

Collins said her family will not seek the return of the mystery trophy if it were to be confirmed as Black Gold's—her father donated a replica the family had made to the museum prior to his death—and maintains that her efforts are about legacy rather than loot. Her hope is attention paid to the story will help unearth new information that ends her impasse with the Kentucky Derby Museum.

"I think there's probably a lot of fear behind all this," said Leonard Lusky, who has helped Collins market Black Gold and previously served on the museum's board. "I wish I could have gotten in front of the Derby Museum and said, 'Guys, you're about telling the Derby story. This is a fabulous Derby story from its beginning.' I would have hoped that the very least they could have done was say, 'This (trophy) may be it.' They don't have to say, 'This is it.'  If the point for them is to promote the Derby, this story does it in spades.

"I think the best we're ever going to get is a lot of great circumstantial evidence, but that's enough to tell the story."

-- Tim Sullivan