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Folk wisdom has it that equestrian statues contain a code whereby the rider's fate can be determined by noting how many hooves the horse has raised. The most common theory has it that if one hoof is raised, the rider was wounded in battle (possibly dying of those wounds later but not necessarily so); two raised hooves, death in battle; all four hooves on the ground, the rider survived all battles unharmed. However, even the most cursory look at the statues around other sites, such as Washington, D.C., quickly disproves that the hoof code holds sway in general. Washington is home to more equestrian statues than any other city in the nation, and it's significant that perhaps only 10 out of 30 or more follow the convention. Here's a quick look-see at various equestrian statues in Washington and how they fit or don't fit this theory. First, some statues that follow the rule: And now some that don't: An additional rumored statue code is prevalent in Virginia's Monument Avenue in Richmond. The Civil War statues honoring Gens. Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis are pointed in distinct directions, according to local lore -- the statues of those who died in the war face north, while the statues of those who survived the war face south. Upon examination, we find local lore initially appears to have something going for it, but appearances are deceiving. The equestrian statues of Lee, facing south, and Jackson, facing north, do fit the formula, and the horse of Stuart, who was mortally wounded at Yellow Tavern in 1864, faces north. But the heads of Stuart, Davis, and Matthew Fontaine Maury face east. To the best of anyone's knowledge, the position and pose of the statue do not signify anything, said Frances Pollard, a curator at the Virginia Historical Society. Those who should known better continue to pass along this piece of folklore as fact, as evidenced by this July 2001 question and response in Marilyn vos Savant's Ask Marilyn column: Hmm ... a vocational tradition that those who practice the trade are either complete unaware of, or choose to ignore when they do know of it. Given that the alleged statuary code consists of three poses (no hooves raised, one hoof raised, and two hooves raised), the odds that a rider's manner of death would correspond to his horse's pose through plain chance are one in three, which is the proportion we find when surveying the equestrian statues in our nation's capital — that is, only about ten out of thirty statues in Washington, D.C., follow the traditional pattern. (Please don't write to tell us that the odds of a given person's manner of death matching the correct statuary code are one in nine, not one in three. The latter is correct.) The connection between statuary horses hooves' and the manner of deaths of their riders is not tradition, but — like the well-known but mundane list of coincidences between the Lincoln and Kennedy assassinations — an attempt to create an interesting piece of information (in this case, something akin to a secret code) by finding patterns in randomness through the expedient of simply ignoring or explaining away all the cases that don't fit the pattern. This type of statuary lore is neither new nor unique to equestrian statuary, as a similar tradition (i.e., fallacy) was attributed well over a century ago, in the same fashion, to sculptors who had created effigies of knights several hundred years earlier: Once again, proof that folklore never dies — it simply gets updated in time and place to keep it relevant to modern audiences.
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