JOHN H. WALLACE.

THE
HORSE OF AMERICA
in his
Derivation, History, and Development.

TRACING HIS ANCESTORS, BY THE AID OF MUCH NEWLY DISCOVERED DATA,
THROUGH ALL THE AGES FROM THE FIRST DAWNINGS
OF HISTORY TO THE PRESENT DAY.

INCLUDING THE HORSES OF THE COLONIAL PERIOD, HITHERTO UNEXPLORED,
GIVING THEIR HISTORY, SIZE, GAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS
IN EACH OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES.

SHOWING HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED, TOGETHER WITH A HISTORY
OF THE PUBLICATIONS THROUGH WHICH THE BREED
OF TROTTERS WAS ESTABLISHED.

With Maps and Illustrations.

BY
JOHN H. WALLACE,
Founder of “Wallace’s American Trotting Register,” “Wallace’s Monthly,”
“Wallace’s Year Book,” etc.

NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR.
1897.

Entered according to act of Congress, by
JOHN H. WALLACE,
in the year 1897, at Washington, D. C.

PREFACE.

The study of the Horse, from the first glimmerings of history, sacred and profane, and tracing him from his original home through his migrations until all the peoples of the globe had received their initial supply, may not be a new idea, but it is certainly a new undertaking. Horse Books without number have been written, mostly in the century just closing, but in the history of the horse they are all alike—merely reproductions of what had been printed before. So far as my knowledge goes, therefore, this volume is the first attempt, in any language, to determine the original habitat of the horse and to trace him, historically, in his distribution.

The facts presented touching the introduction of the horse into Egypt, and two thousand years later into Arabia, as well as the plebeian blood from which the English race horse has derived his great speed, will be a shock to the nerves of the romanticists of the old world as well as the new. Taking the facts of history and well-known experiences together, my readers can determine for themselves whether the claims for the superiority of Arabian blood is not pure fiction. For my own part I cannot recognize any blood in all horsedom as “royal blood” except that which is found in the veins of the horse that “has gone out and done it,” either himself or in his progeny.

In our own country there has always remained a blank in horse history that nobody has attempted to supply. This blank embraced a century of racing of which we of the present generation have been entirely ignorant. Believing that a correct knowledge of the horse of the Colonial period, in his size, gait, qualities and capacities was absolutely essential to an intelligent comprehension of the phenomena presented on our trotting and running courses of the present day, I have not hesitated to bestow on this new feature of the work great labor and research. In this I have felt a special satisfaction in the fact that while the field is old in dates, this is the first time it has ever been traversed and considered.

In the chapters which follow, many historical questions are treated at such length as their relative importance seems to demand, embracing the different families that have contributed to the building up of the breed of trotters; and the question of how the trotting horse is bred is carefully considered in the light of all past experiences and brought down to the close of 1896. These chapters will not surprise the old readers of the Wallace’s Monthly, for they will here meet with many thoughts that will not be new to them, but they will find them more fully elaborated, in more orderly form, and brought down to the latest experiences.

It is not the purpose of this book to furnish statistical tables covering the great mass of trotting experiences, nor to consider the mysteries of the trainer’s art that have been so ably discussed by experienced and skillful men. But the real and only purpose is to place upon record the results of years devoted to historical research, at home and abroad; to dispel the illusions and humbugs that have clustered about the horse for many centuries; and to consider with some minuteness, which of necessity cannot be impersonal, the great industrial revolution that has been wrought in horse-breeding, and all growing out of a little unpretentious treatise written twenty-five years ago, which contained nothing more striking than a little bit of science and a little bit of sense intelligently commingled. The battle between the principles of this treatise and selfish prejudices and mental sterility, was long and bitter, but the truth prevailed, and in the production of the Driving Horse the teachings of that little paper have placed our country first among all the nations of the earth.

JOHN H. WALLACE.

New York: 40 West 93d Street.

September 1, 1897

CONTENTS.

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Note.—Nine of the above engravings have been reproduced, by permission, from the Portfolio issued by The Horse Review.

THE HORSE OF AMERICA.

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

General View of the Field Traversed.

In undertaking to fulfill a promise made years ago, to write a history of the American Trotting Horse and his ancestors, I am met with the inquiry: What were his ancestors and whence did they come? To say that the American Trotter, the phenomenal horse of this century, is descended from a certain horse imported from England in 1788, does not fully meet the requirements of the truth, for there are other and very distinctive elements embodied in his inheritance that are not indebted to that particular imported horse. In searching for these undefined elements, I have found myself in the fields of antiquity, reaching out step by step, further and further, until the utmost boundaries of all history, sacred and profane, were clearly in view. There I found a field that was especially attractive because it was a new field, and the relations of the peoples of the earliest ages to their horses had never been investigated nor discussed. Having no engagements nor necessities to hurry me, the careful exploration of this hitherto unknown territory has afforded me very great enjoyment.

As the result of these investigations, the breadth and scope of this volume will be greatly widened, touching upon the originals of most of the lighter types of horses, and many of the idols of the imagination will be demolished. The objective point is the history of the Trotting Horse, but before reaching that point we must consider the beginnings of, practically, nearly all the varieties of horses in the world. The assistance that I may be able to gain from modern writers will be very limited, and restricted Haicus, the great grandson of Japheth, became the ruler of his people. Descending from him, in the direct male line, there were five or six long reigns before the dynasty was overthrown by the Assyrians. They were largely an agricultural people, and the ancient historians have told us they were famous for the great numbers and fine quality of the horses they produced. The market for their horses, the prophet Ezekiel tells us, was in the great commercial city of Tyre, whence they were carried “in the ships of Tarshish” by the Phœnician merchants to all portions of the known world. Having here reached back to the Noachic period and country, with all that this implies, I will leave the problem, with the more extended consideration that will be given it in the chapter on the general distribution of horses in all parts of the commercial world.

Horsemen of average intelligence and writers on the horse, oftentimes much below average intelligence in horse matters, all seem to unite on the Arabian horse as their fetish, when in fact they know nothing about him. The songs of the poets and the stories of the novelists have taken the place, in the minds of the people of all nations, of solid history and sober experience. When a story writer wishes to depict an athletic and daring hero, he never fails to mount him upon an “Arab steed,” when some blood-curdling adventures are to be disclosed. When Admiral Rous, the great racing authority in England, announced some years ago, that the English race horse was purely descended from the horses of Arabia Deserta, without one drop of plebeian blood, all England believed him, and this rash and groundless dictum has served all writers as conclusive evidence ever since. Now, it is not probable that more than two or at most three per cent. of the blood of the English race horse as he stands to-day is Arabian blood. The greatness and value of the Arabian horse is purely mythical. He has been tested hundreds of times, both on the course and in the stud, and in every single instance he has proved a failure. This is what all history and experience teach. There are but few horses bred in Arabia and there are, comparatively, but few there now. From the time of their first introduction into Yemen—Arabia Felix—up to the time of Mohammed, about two hundred and seventy years, they were still very scarce. Mohammed was not a horseman nor a horse breeder, nor is it known that he ever mounted a horse but once, and then he had but two in his army. When he made his first pilgrimage to Mecca he rode a camel; and when he went the second time in triumph, mounted on a camel, he made the requisite number of circuits round the holy place, then dismounted and broke the idols that had been set up there. Then came the triumphant shout of his followers; “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.” Since then, this cry has rung over a thousand battlefields, and as I write it is still heard in the homes of the slaughtered Armenians. From a great, warlike, and conquering people, the followers of Mohammed have degenerated into an aggregation of robbers and murderers of defenseless Christians. Since the days of Mohammed, horses no doubt have increased in numbers, but all modern travelers express their surprise at the small numbers they see. The horse is an expensive luxury in Arabia, and none but the rich can afford to keep him. He fills no economic place in the domestic life of the Arab, for he is never used for any purpose except display and robbery. Nobody is able to own a horse but the sheiks and a few wealthy men. Nobody would think of mounting a horse for a journey, be it long or short. The camel fills the place of the horse, the cow and a flock of sheep, all in one, and surely the Arabs are right in saying, “Job’s beast is a monument of God’s mercy.” It is very evident that nearly all the horses said to have been brought from Arabia never saw Arabia. As an illustration of the uncertainty of what a man is getting when he thinks he is buying an Arabian, in the Orient, I will give, in some detail the experiences of Mr. Wilfrid S. Blunt, a wealthy Englishman who had an ambition to regenerate the English race horse by bringing in fresh infusions of Arabian blood. He went to Arabia to buy the best, but he didn’t go into Arabia to find it. He skirted along through the border land where agriculture and civilization prevailed, while away off to the south the wild tribes roamed over the desert, and to the north, not far away, was the land of abundance that had been famous for more than three thousand years for the great numbers and excellence of the horses bred there. Here on the banks of the Euphrates Mr. Blunt found the town of Deyr, and he soon discovered it was a famous horse market. The inhabitants were the only people he met with who seemed to understand and appreciate the value of pedigrees, and there were no horses in the town but “thoroughbreds.” Here Mr. Blunt made nearly all his purchases which amounted to eighteen mares and two stallions “at reasonable prices.” As will be seen in the extracts from his book, he was strikingly solicitous that the friends at home should have no doubt about the quality of the stock he purchased being all “thoroughbred.” No doubt he realized the awkwardness of the location as not the right one in which to secure “thoroughbred” Arabians and hence the vigorous indorsement of the honesty of the “slick and experienced” dealers as honest men and true descendants of the Bedouins of the desert. In this “he doth protest too much” and thus suggests that while the pedigrees came from the tribes of the desert to the South, it might be possible that the horses came from the farmers who bred them to the North. However this may have been, the whole enterprise turned out to be a flat failure, and after a number of years spent in begging for popular support, the whole collection was dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, not realizing a tithing of the cost.

While it is not necessary that I should express any opinion as to whether Mr. Blunt was deceived in the breeding of the animals which he brought home, I will make brief allusion to an American experience which is more fully considered elsewhere. Some forty or more years ago Mr. A. Keene Richards, a breeder of race horses in Kentucky, became impressed with the idea that the way to improve the race horse of America was to introduce direct infusions of the blood of Arabia. He did not hesitate, but he started to Arabia and brought home some horses and mares and put them to breeding. The pure bloods could not run at all and the half-breeds were too slow to make the semblance of a contest with Kentucky-bred colts. He concluded that he had been cheated by the rascally Arabs in the blood they put upon him. He then determined to go back and get the right blood, and as a counselor he took with him the famous horse painter, Troye, who was thoroughly up on anatomy and structure. They went into the very heart of Arabia and spent many weeks among the different tribes of the desert. They had greatly the advantage of Mr. Blunt or any other amateur, for they were experienced horsemen and knew just what they were doing. When they were ready to start home they believed they had found and secured the very best horses that Arabia had produced. When the produce of this second importation were old enough to run it was found that they were no better than the first lot, and thus all the bright dreams of enthusiasm were dissipated. Thus was demonstrated for the thousandth time that the blood of even the best and purest Arabian horse is a detriment and hindrance rather than a benefit to the modern race horse. Mr. Richards, with all his practical knowledge and experience, was no more successful than the amateur, Mr. Blunt. The blood which Mr. Richards brought home was, no doubt, purer and more fashionable, as estimated in the desert, than that brought home by Mr. Blunt, but when tested by modern advancement it was no better.

A careful study of the chapter on the English Race Horse will present to the minds of all my intelligent readers the consideration of several points to which they will be slow in yielding assent. These points run up squarely against the preconceived opinions and prejudices of two centuries, and these preconceived opinions and prejudices are well-nigh universal. The first point upon which the public intelligence has gone wrong is in the general belief that horse-racing had its origin in the seventeenth century, when Charles II. was restored to his throne. The truth is we have accounts of racing by contemporaneous historians in the twelfth century, and indeed, we might say from the time of the Romans in Britain. To go back four centuries, however, is far enough to answer our present purpose. After selecting, breeding, and racing four hundred years we must conclude that the English had some pretty good race horses. This is fully verified by the writers at the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign as well as at the beginning of Charles II.’s. They had native English horses that were able to beat all the imported exotics, including the Arabian owned by King James. We must, therefore, conclude that the race horse was not created by Charles II., but that racing was simply revived by him, after the restrictions of Cromwell’s time, and that the old English blood was the basis of that revival. The importations of so many exotics in his reign were simply so many reinforcements of the old English racing blood.

The next point to which exception will be taken is the conclusion reached as to the character and influence of the exotics that were introduced in the reign of Charles II. These exotics have been designated in a general way, by the phrase “foundation stock,” which has been introduced more out of deference to the popular understanding than to its legitimate and true meaning. For the real “foundation stock” we must look away back in the centuries, long before Charles was born. The analysis of the data furnished by Mr. Weatherby as “foundation stock” clearly shows that the Turks predominated in numbers, but, possibly, the Barbs in influence. The Arabian element, in both numbers and influence, seems to be practically nil, and this is the “gist of my offending.” The one great horse—Godolphin Arabian—exerted a greater and more lasting influence upon the English race horse than any other of his century and probably than all the others of his century, and his blood is wholly unknown. Fortunately, a few years ago I was able to unearth his portrait and prove it a true portrait, and in that picture we must look for his lineage. He was a horse of great substance and strength on short legs, with no resemblance whatever to a race horse. About fifty years after his death Mr. Stubbs, the artist, who prided himself upon representing the character of a horse rather than his shape, came across this picture, from which he made an “ideal” copy of what he thought the horse should have been, which is a veritable monstrosity. These two pictures will appear together in their proper places, where they can be leisurely studied, and the honest and the dishonest compared.

The American race horse is the lineal descendent of the English race horse, and like his ancestor he is very largely dependent upon the “native blood” for his existence as a breed. The first English race horse was imported into Virginia about 1750, and he there met a class of saddle mares that had been selected, bred, trained, and raced at all distances up to four-mile heats, for nearly a hundred years. These mares were the real maternal foundation stock upon which the American race horse was established, as a breed. The phrase “native blood” is here used as applying to the animals and their descendants, that were brought over from England at and soon after the plantation of the American colonies. Up to the time of the Revolution there were but few racing mares brought over—as many as you could count on your fingers—but they must have been marvelously prolific, for thirty or forty filly foals each would hardly have accommodated all the animals with pedigrees tracing to them. Quite a number of our greatest race horses and sires of forty or fifty years ago traced to some one of these mares through links that were wholly fictitious. Indeed, from the period of the Revolution, and even before that, down to our own time, the pernicious and dishonest habit of adding fictitious crosses beyond the second or third dam became the rule in the old American families, and an animal with a strictly honest pedigree was the exception. In spreading abroad these dishonest fictions as true pedigrees, the press—perhaps not venally, but ignorantly—was made the active agent. Whenever a rogue could get a pedigree into print, however absurd, nothing could prevent its spread as the truth. The early sporting and breeding press was not in the hands of men remarkable for conscience and still less remarkable for knowledge. But the worst of all was the “professional pedigree maker” who knew so many things that he never knew, and stopped at nothing. In all this dirty work of manufacturing pedigrees there is a very striking resemblance between the awkward efforts of the early English and the early American pedigree maker. This whole topic of the ignorance of the press and the dishonesty of the pedigree makers will be considered fully in its proper place. Fortunately, although still far from perfect, the methods and care in the preservation of the true lineage of the race horse in our own day have been greatly improved. The many efforts to improve the American race horse by introducing fresh infusions of Saracenic blood will receive due attention, especially as they have nearly all been made within the newspaper period, and their uniform and complete failure will not be new to American horsemen.

When we reach the horses of the colonial period, we are in a field that never has been explored and cannot be expected to yield a very rich harvest. Here and there I have been able to pick up a detached paragraph from some contemporaneous writer, and occasionally a record, or an advertisement, from which, in most cases, I have been able to construct a fair and truthful outline and description of the horses of the different colonies, down to the Revolutionary war. The collection of the material has required great patience and great labor, but it has not been an irksome task, for many things have been brought to light of great interest to the student of horse history. The knowledge of the colonial horse in his character and action, that may be gathered from the chapters devoted to his description and history, I flatter myself, will not only be interesting as something new, but will throw a strong light on the lineage of the two-minute trotter and pacer.

The colonists of Virginia were subjected for a number of years to great suffering, privation, and want. They were badly selected and many of them were improvident and never trained to habits of industry and thrift. There were quite too many “penniless gentlemen’s sons” among them, who had been sent out with the hope that the change might improve their habits and their morals. They were too proud to work, and when they were driven to it by necessity they didn’t know how. After suffering untold hardships for a succession of years, those that survived learned to adapt themselves to their environment and to make their own way in the world. Their first supply of domestic animals were all consumed as food, embracing horses, cattle, swine, and goats, and everything had thus been consumed except one venerable female swine, as reported by a board of examiners. Their second supply of horses, cattle, swine, and goats was more carefully guarded, and from them in greater part came the countless denizens of the barnyard.

There were several shipments of horses at different times, by the proprietors in London, down till about 1620 and possibly later, but they do not seem to have increased very rapidly, for in 1646 all the horses in the colony were estimated at about two hundred of both sexes. This estimate was probably too low, for ten years after this the exportation of mares was forbidden by legislative enactment, and eleven years later this restriction was removed, and both sexes could then be exported. From this legislation and from writers who visited the colony we learn that horses were very plenty, and they are described as of excellent quality, hardy and strong, but under size. It was the custom in Virginia, and indeed in all the other colonies at that period and for long afterward, to brand their young horses and turn them out to hustle for their own living. They increased with wonderful rapidity and great numbers became as wild and as wary of the habitation and sight of man as the deer of the forest. About the close of the seventeenth century the chasing and capture of wild horses in Virginia became a legitimate and not always an unprofitable sport, for an animal caught without a brand became the unquestioned property of his captor. It is a noteworthy fact that off the coast of Virginia the island of Chincoteague has been occupied for probably two hundred years by large bands of wild horses. They are still there, and not till within the last few decades have there been any efforts made to domesticate some selections from them. They are of all colors, but quite uniform in size, not averaging much over thirteen hands, with clean limbs, and many of them are pacers. There is only one way to account for them in that location, and that is, that they were originally a band of Virginia wild horses that wandered or was chased out onto this sandy peninsula, and while there some great storm set the mysterious ocean currents at work and cut off their retreat by converting a peninsula into an island, and there they have lived and multiplied ever since.

The colonial horses of Virginia were of all colors and all very small in size, as we would class them in our day. An examination of a great many advertisements of “Strayed,” “Taken up,” etc., of the period of about 1750, clearly establishes the fact that at that time the average height was a small fraction over thirteen hands and one inch. More were described as just thirteen hands than any other size, and they were nearly all between thirteen and fourteen. From this same advertising source I was able to glean conclusive evidence as to their habits of action, and found that just two-thirds of them were natural pacers and one-third natural trotters. Thus for more than a hundred years they had retained the peculiarities of their English ancestors in the reign of James I., in color, size, and gait. This in no way differs from the description of the Chincoteague Island ponies of to-day. As early as 1686 a law was enacted that all stallions less than thirteen and a half hands high found running at large should be forfeited; but this, like Henry VIII.’s laws in the same direction, had failed to increase the average size of the horses. From the indomitable passion for horse-racing which prevailed universally among the colonists, we may safely conclude that some animals were carefully selected and coupled with a view to the speed of the progeny, both at the gallop and at the pace, but the great mass were allowed to roam at large, and under such conditions no variety or tribe of horses has ever improved in size, or indeed in any other quality.

The early horses of the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, afterward New York, were brought from Utrecht in Holland. As we would look at them to-day, they were small, but they were larger and better, and brought higher prices than the English horses of the Eastern colonies or than the Swedish on the West. It was conceded, however, that for the saddle they were not so good as the New England horses, and hence it may be inferred that they were not pacers. It is very evident, however, that the two breeds were soon mixed, as the saddle was then the universal means of travel, whether for long or short distances. During the time of the Revolutionary war a large accumulation of data bearing on the size and action of the horses of that period goes to show that the average size had then increased to fourteen hands and one inch, and in gait fifteen both paced and trotted, nine trotted only, and seven paced only. It is not pretended that these data represent the horses of the early colonial period, but only of the period above indicated. Strains of larger breeds had been introduced, but the little New England pacer had made his mark on the habits of action.

In 1665, the next year after the Dutch had surrendered the country to the English, Governor Nicolls established a race-course on Hempstead Plains and offered prizes for the fleetest runners, and his successors kept up annual meetings on that course for many years. This was the first official and regularly organized race-course that we have any trace of in this country. These meetings seem to have been well supported from the very first by both town and country, and as the people were then practically all Dutch, it is a fair inference that the horses engaged in the races were Dutch horses. This was before the English race horse had reached the character of a breed, and a hundred years before the first of that breed was imported into New York. From this beginning many tracks were constructed or improvised in and about the city, upon which racing at all forms and at all gaits has been carried on to the present day. When honestly conducted the sport has always been favorably received by reputable people; but at successive periods it has degenerated into a mere carnival of gambling that placed it under a ban.

The horses of the New England colonies fill a very important place in the horse history of the country. This is especially true of a remarkable tribe of swift pacers, produced in Rhode Island and known throughout the whole country as the “Narragansett Pacers.” To the description of these a special chapter will be devoted. The first horses imported into New England reached Boston harbor in 1629 and were sent direct from England by the proprietary company in London. The same year a small consignment reached Salem. The next year about sixty head were shipped to the plantation, but many of them were lost on the voyage. In 1635 two Dutch ships landed at Salem with twenty-seven mares and three stallions, and were sold there at remunerative prices. Other shipments followed, no doubt, that have not been noted. In 1640 the colonists seem to have been supplied with all the horses they needed, for that year they shipped a cargo of eighty head to the Barbadoes. From these importations into Boston and Salem, all the New England colonists received their supplies. The field specially gleaned to determine the size and gaits of the Massachusetts horses covered the years 1756-59, from which it appears that the average height was then fourteen hands and one inch; and as to gait, just three-fourths were pacers and one-fourth trotters. In comparing this average size with the Virginians of the same period we find that the Massachusetts horses were about one hand higher, which would indicate the influence of the early Dutch blood. Besides this we must make some allowance for a possible different habit of estimating size.

When the plantation was made at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1636, the planters brought their horses and other domestic animals with them. In 1653 the General Court, at New Haven, made provision for keeping public saddle horses for hire, and all horses had to be branded. After passing over a period of more than a hundred and twenty years we find that in 1776 the average size of the Connecticut horse was thirteen hands and three inches, thus ranging below the other New England colonies. At that period it is found that the ratio of pacers and trotters was as fifteen pacers, or trotters and pacers, to four that trotted only. The very interesting experience of two English travelers, mounted on Connecticut pacers, in 1769, and their enthusiasm about their superlative qualities, will be found in its place.

The colony of Rhode Island was planted in 1636 by Roger Williams and his followers, and eleven years later they obtained their charter. Their supply of horses came wholly from the colony of Massachusetts, and in a short time the new plantation became greatly distinguished for the superiority and speed of its pacers. From the official report of the colony for 1690, we learn that horses constituted their leading item of exports, and that they were shipping horses to all the colonies of the seaboard. At that early day the fame of the Narragansett pacer extended through all the English colonies, and probably also through the French plantations on the St. Lawrence. All trade with Canada was strictly prohibited, but in the then condition of the borders how could such regulation be enforced, if a Frenchman, with a bale of peltry, wanted to exchange it for a Narragansett? Freed from the Puritan restrictions of New England, of that day, the Rhode Islanders developed the speed of their pacers by racing them, and thus the best and fastest of all New England were collected there. In 1768 the average height of the Narragansetts was fourteen hands and one inch, which shows them to have been about three and a quarter inches higher than the Virginia horses of the same period. They were not all pacers, for out of thirty-five there were eight that did not pace, and some others that both trotted and paced. A full account of these famous pacers will be found in the chapter on the Colonial Horse History of New England, and that on The American Pacer and his Relations to the American Trotter.

William Penn did not visit his princely gift from Charles II. until 1682, and it was then under the government of the Duke of York. In giving a description of things as he found them he remarks: “The horses are not very handsome, but good,” and this is all he says of them. Knowing that Pennsylvania, in the early part of this century, produced larger and heavier horses, than any other portion of the country, it was a great surprise to me to find the undoubted proof that a hundred years earlier she had produced the smallest and the lightest horses of any of the colonies. In the first half of the last century the average size of the horses of Eastern Pennsylvania was thirteen hands one and a quarter inches, and they were remarkably uniform in size. This was one-quarter inch below the average of the Virginians. Of the twenty-eight animals examined as to gait, twenty-four of them were natural pacers, three both paced and trotted, and a single one trotted only. Finding these two facts of uniformity of size and uniformity of gait together, we are prepared for another fact that follows, viz., in Philadelphia the pacers were more popular and fashionable than in any other city, so far as we can learn, and they were selected with great care and bred for their speed, and that speed was highly tested on the race-course. They were breeding for speed without much regard to size, and hence the uniformity.

It has not been discovered that the colonists of New Jersey made any direct importations of horses from England. Their original supplies were obtained from New York on the one side and Pennsylvania on the other. From these sources, therefore, we can form a correct estimate of the size and gaits of the Jersey horses, without going into particular investigation. The only object, then, in referring to this colony is to prove that before 1748 all kinds of racing had become so common in the colony as to be a nuisance. Consequently the legislative authority passed an act in 1748 for the suppression of “Running, Pacing and Trotting Races.” This was in strict harmony with the well-known condition of things in Philadelphia and vicinity very early in the century. If there had been no pacing races there would have been no legislation suppressing them.

The horses of the colony of Maryland would necessarily partake of the characteristics of Virginia and Pennsylvania, from which she probably received her supply. There seems to be no evidence of direct importation. This colony was really the first, in point of time, to legislate for the suppression of pacing races. In 1747, one year before New Jersey, an act was passed forbidding pacing races in certain locations at certain times, and the avowed object was the protection of the Friends in holding their yearly meetings. Here, then, we have historic evidence that the three colonies of Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Virginia had frequent pacing races, and legislative evidence that Maryland and New Jersey had quite too many pacing races, early in the last century. It follows, then, that the other colonies indulged their sporting fancies in pacing races also.

The colonies of North and South Carolina obtained their supply of horses from Virginia, and they possessed the same characteristics as the parent stock. The first permanent settlement in North Carolina was in 1653, but before this it had become the refuge of Quakers and others fleeing from the proscriptions that prevailed in Virginia against all who did not conform to the English church. South Carolina received her charter in 1663, at a time when horses were beginning to run wild in Virginia. In 1747 thirty horses were advertised in which the size was given, and the average is within a small fraction of thirteen and a half hands high, and in this number two were given as fifteen hands, which was a very large horse for that day. The gait is given in only twelve cases—ten of which were pacers, one paced and trotted, and one trotted only.

The chapter on the “Early Horse History of Canada” is very brief. It was not till the year 1665 that the first horses were brought over from France, and as they came from ancient Picardy, right across the Channel from England, it is reasonable to assume that they partook of the same characteristics as the English horses, and that many of them were pacers. Another theory of the origin of the Canadian pacer is the probability of clandestine trading with the New Englanders. Among the many impossible stories about the breeding of Old Tippoo, the greatest sire of Canada, the truth seems to come to the surface at last, and there can be no reasonable doubt that he was got by “Scape Goat.” However much or little dependence can be placed upon many of the claims of fast pacing stallions coming from Canada, it must be conceded that some of these claims seem to be well founded, and that the pacing element has been greatly strengthened by blood from the other side of the border.

The most striking fact in the history of the pacing habit of action is its great antiquity. The average Englishman of to-day and the average American of twenty years ago have been united in insisting with the greatest vehemence that the pace is not a natural but an acquired gait, resulting from some injury or malformation. One of the great leaders on that side of the discussion called it “structural incongruity” arising from the breeding of the “thoroughbred” horse on the “slab-sided” mares of the West and South, and thought the idea was unanswerable, but never cited any instances to prove it. Now, the truth is, the earliest unquestioned evidence we have that horses paced is that furnished by the chisel of Phidias when he sculptured the horses on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, and that is two thousand three hundred and thirty-three years old. From the period when the sons of Japheth turned their attention to horse-breeding on the fruitful plains and valleys in the regions of the mountains of Ararat down to this culmination of Greek art, I have not been able to find any contemporaneous evidence of the existence of the lateral habit of action; but as we know it existed more than two thousand years ago, we are justified in concluding that among the original bands of horses, in their original habitat, pacers as well as trotters abounded. From the erection of the Parthenon in Athens, the occupation of Britain by the Romans, and through all the centuries down to the plantation of the colonies in this country, we have mountains of indisputable evidence of the antiquity of the pacer. In its place this topic will be quite fully discussed.

The relation which the pacer bears to the American Trotting Horse has for twenty-five years been a topic of much senseless discussion. In the historical sketch which served as an introduction to the first volume of the “American Trotting Register,” the attention of the breeding public was first called to this question, in a form that was somewhat tentative, and much less didactic than my judgment suggested, but it served as an introduction to the study of the question which it foreshadowed. From this initial paragraph grew the discussion that has been going on ever since, much of which has been the merest jargon. The essential oneness of the trot and the pace has been clearly demonstrated by thousands of experiences. The trotting inheritance that produces the fast trotter also produces the fast pacer; and the pacing inheritance that produces the fast pacer also produces the fast trotter. The trotting-bred John R. Gentry, with his pacing record of a mile in two minutes and one-half a second, is but a single instance of very many of the same character. The fastest harness racers in the world are the pacers, and it seems to make no difference whether the inheritance of speed comes from the trotter or the pacer. The subject of the pacer in his diversified historical relations to the American trotter will be found in different portions of this work, and all tending to show the significant fact that he is again rapidly attaining the position of honor among the equine race which he maintained for so many centuries in the far-distant past.

Early in this century the American Saddle Horse, the real saddle horse of all time, past and present, began to vanish from sight. Improved roads and wheeled vehicles superseded him, in great measure, long before the days of railroads. For business and travel he was the sole dependence of our forefathers for two hundred years, and in point of health it is a great misfortune that he has gone so completely out of use. The horse that cannot take the “saddle gaits” and carry his rider without discomfort or fatigue is not a saddle horse. Springing up and down at every revolution of the horse is not riding for pleasure, but to avoid punishment and a torpid liver. In the chapter devoted to his description, origin, and breeding, it will be clearly shown that he is indebted to his pacing ancestry of the past centuries for his saddle gaits. As the mere matter of great speed cuts no figure in the qualifications of a saddle horse there is a wide field here for the production of style and beauty in the breeder’s art. The aims of a goodly number of intelligent breeders are now moving in this direction, and with the foundations so well laid as they now are, we can look forward to a grand superstructure. As the breeder of speed at the trot goes to the horse that can do it himself, and as the breeder of speed at the gallop goes to the horse that can beat all the others, so the breeder of the saddler will go to the handsomest and best of all his tribe, and when we reach the horse that is perfect in symmetry, style, quality, and disposition, he will be a saddle horse and no questions will be asked about what particular combinations of blood he may possess. He will be strictly eclectic, with the one exception of the inheritance of gait, and he will be the result of wise choosing in his size and structure, and of skillful handling in his disposition and manners.

The Wild Horse of the plains and pampas of North and South America was at one time an object of great interest and curiosity with all our people. No schoolboy of sixty or seventy years ago knew any lesson in his geography so well as the one which pictured and described the millions of wild horses that roamed over the Western plains. In the field of imagination and exaggerated fiction he was a fairly good second to the Arabian—both arrant humbugs, at least so far as their merits have been tested. In the past, the question has sometimes been asked, tentatively, whether the horse may not have been indigenous on this continent? The paleontologists have undertaken to answer this question in the affirmative and have produced the bones of what they call the horse to prove it. This “horse” is scant fifteen inches high and he has three, four or five toes on each foot. These toes resemble “claws” more than anything else. They tell us these little animals flourished over two millions of years before man was placed on the earth, and that they are now found imbedded in the solid rock, say two hundred feet below the general surface. The outline drawing of horses on works supposed to have been erected by a prehistoric and lost race, and also the linguistic question as to whether any of the oldest Indian tribes had any word representing the horse, will be fully considered, with that presented by the paleontologists, in the chapter devoted to the Wild Horse. Too much prominence has been given to the horses of Cortez in his conquest of Mexico, as the progenitors of the American wild horse. He had very few horses in his command, and it is very doubtful whether any of them escaped the slaughter of battle and found a home in the wilderness. The horses in the army of the unfortunate Ferdinand De Soto, that were abandoned on the confines of Texas, after his death, became the progenitors of all the wild horses of North America.

The remarkable pre-eminence to which Messenger attained as the founder of a great race of trotters, in his own right and by his own power, and more especially as he was the only English-imported running horse that ever showed any tendency whatever in that direction, the study of Messenger’s lineage becomes a question of very great interest and value to all students of trotting history. His sire, Mambrino, was a great race horse, and was distinguished above all others of his generation, or indeed of any other generation, before or since, as the progenitor of a tribe of coach horses of great excellence and value. In addition to this, the evidence seems to be conclusive that he had a natural and undeveloped trotting step that far surpassed that of all other running horses of his day. His sire, Engineer, was notoriously short on the side of his dam, and his grandsire, Sampson, was a half-breed of great size and bone, and ran some winning races, in the best of company, for that day.

The history of Messenger himself is still clouded in mystery, and the blood he inherited from his dam remains hopelessly unknown. The identity of his importer and owner has never been established, which of itself throws a suspicion upon the pedigree that is said to have come with him. He ran several races at Newmarket, England, and proved himself a second or third-rate race horse. The racing records there show that he was by Mambrino, and that is all that is known about his inheritance. He left a few tolerably good race horses, for their time, but he filled the country with the best road and driving horses that the horsemen of this country had ever known. A chapter each to Messenger’s ancestors and to himself will be found in their proper places in this volume. The twenty years of Messenger’s life and service in this country fell in a period of indifference to all kinds of racing except running. The English race horse was then the popular idol, and it is not known that any of his sons or daughters were ever trained to trot. Neither can it now be certainly determined that any of them were disposed to pace, but if we may judge of the habits of action of his immediate progeny by what we know of succeeding generations, we can hardly doubt that there were pacers among them. As the custom then was, and as it so remained for at least half a century later, all pacers were hidden away from public sight, as they were supposed to furnish evidence of ignoble breeding.

The chapter on “The Sons of Messenger” will be long, but it will be of exceeding interest. They constitute the connecting link that brings together the peculiar trotting instincts of the sire and develops them in their own progeny. Several of them were not only trained to run, but did run successfully. It is not known that any of his sons was ever trained to trot, but it is known from contemporaneous evidence that several of them were fast natural trotters, notably Bishop’s Hambletonian, Bush Messenger, Winthrop Messenger, Mambrino, etc., all of which will be considered in their proper place. When we reach the second remove from Messenger we begin to enter into the full fruition of all the promises, and in considering such animals as Abdallah, Almack, Mambrino Paymaster, Harris’ Hambletonian, etc., we begin to feel that we are well within the trotting latitudes, for this remove began to found families and tribes that attracted the attention of all intelligent breeders.

In the next remove from Messenger we strike the most famous of all trotting progenitors in Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. At one time there was an active and determined difference of opinion among breeders as to which of three horses, Hambletonian, Ethan Allen, or Mambrino Chief, would in the end prove to be the most successful sire. This controversy may not be remembered by the younger of the present generation of horsemen, but it was bitter and uncompromising, and it presents a lesson so important that it may be here referred to. The adherents of Ethan Allen argued that as he was handsomer, that his gait was the very perfection of trotting action, and that he was incomparably faster than either of the other two, he must of necessity prove the most successful in begetting trotters. The adherents of Mambrino Chief used the same argument, with the exception of beauty and style, and dwelt strongly on the fact that he was a faster horse than Hambletonian, and would consequently get faster offspring. Both these arguments were good, so far as they went, but they lacked completeness and hence were not sound. Neither Ethan Allen nor Mambrino Chief had a dam, and so far as we know the inheritance of both was restricted to the male side of the house. Development of speed is a valuable and real qualification in any sire, but all experience goes to show that it is only a help to an inheritance. Hambletonian was not much developed, but it is conceded on all hands that he could show a 2:40 gait at any time and that his action was very perfect. He was got by a grandson of Messenger, whose dam, Amazonia, was one of the fastest mares of her generation, whatever her blood may have been. Abdallah got more and faster trotters than any other grandson of Messenger, and his daughters were very famous as the producers of trotters. Hambletonian’s dam, the Kent Mare, was by imported Bellfounder, a horse that got no trotters practically, but this mare was the fastest four-year-old of her time, and that because she was out of a very fast mare, One Eye, that was a double granddaughter of Messenger. That is, One Eye was by Hambletonian, the son of Messenger, and out of Silvertail, a daughter of Messenger. This double Messenger mare was unknown to the trotting turf, but she was well known throughout Orange County as a remarkably fast trotter. Hence Hambletonian not only possessed more Messenger blood than any horse of his generation, but that blood came to him through developed trotters, and he had a right to surpass all competitors, especially the two that were, at one time, the most prominent.

Several of the sons of Hambletonian, as shown by the tabular statistics which will be introduced, became greater than their sire, not only in getting trotters from their own loins, but in transmitting the trotting instinct to their descendants. The growth and spread of this family is far and away beyond any precedent that can be cited in any age or country, and is simply marvelous. It is said that fully ninety per cent. of the fast trotters now on the turf have more or less of the blood of Hambletonian in their veins, and I think it is a safe conclusion to say that no intelligent breeder in all the country is trying to produce trotters without it. All the other tribes are dropping out of sight, and at the present ratio of rise and fall it will be but a few years till every trotter on the turf will be credited in some degree to the one really great progenitor, Hambletonian. The other tribes will not be blotted out nor will their merits be lost, but absorbed into the mightier tribe.

Such families as the Bashaws, the Clays, the Black Hawks, the Mambrino Chiefs, the Pilots, the American Stars, the Blue Bulls, etc., will be fully considered through several chapters, according to their strength and merit. As these families have not been able to hold their own in the rush to the front, and as they seem to be falling further to the rear in the number and quality of their performers each succeeding year, we may as well begin to designate them as “the minor families.” Their inheritance was feeble and unsatisfactory, and more or less sporadic, and we never had any right to expect a brilliant and permanent success from such beginnings.

As the investigation of disputed, spurious and fraudulent pedigrees was a prime necessity in order to reach safe and honest grounds upon which to build up a breed of trotters, much of my time through all my editorial life was devoted to this kind of investigation. From the first page of the first volume of the “Register” I was deeply impressed with the importance of having all pedigrees absolutely correct, and this impression grew into a vital conviction that without this a breed of trotters never could be established. I soon found that I had accepted from some breeders of the very highest respectability a goodly number of pedigrees that were thoroughly rotten in their extensions. This taught me that I must study the moral fiber of breeders critically, as well as their pedigrees, and that from the highest to the lowest. Some men are honest from principle and because it is right to be honest, while others are honest because “honesty is the best policy.” Some men are dishonest because of ignorance, others because they were born cheats, but the most dangerous of all rogues is the man who will utter a false pedigree and then prove it by trained witnesses who, for half a dollar, can remember whatever is necessary and forget whatever might be against their employer’s interest. By this kind of evidence a man can prove anything. Not very long ago a man proved that a certain mare came out of a certain other mare, and when that was shown to be impossible he turned round and proved (?) that she was out of another mare, and there was just as much truth in the one as the other, and not a single word of truth in either. So long as there are men in the world there will be rogues among them, but the intelligence of the public in breeding matters has so greatly advanced that many an honest man would begin to doubt his own sanity if he were even to think of breeding in lines that he was once ready to fight for as the only right and successful way to breed. The brainless advocacy of “more running blood in the trotter,” was substantially the basis of the whole brood of dishonest pedigrees, against which it became my duty to wage war; but to-day no intelligent man in all the land can be found to advocate any such balderdash unless it be in the foolish support of thoughtless opinions previously expressed.

The subject of “How the Trotting Horse is Bred,” is a most interesting one because it is entirely new in animal economy and is distinctively American. The initial thought that opened the door to the practical and scientific consideration of the subject was the happy conception, in the spring of 1872, of the little phrase, “Trotting Instinct.” Following this with the definition of the word “instinct” as being “the sum of inherited habits,” the term expressed in two words and the definition of it in five words, put the whole subject in a form that was easily comprehensible and flashed upon the mind as thoroughly practical. This little phrase, with its definition, when once comprehended, is a very complete epitome of all that has been taught and all that has been learned of the art of breeding the trotter. It not only embraces, but requires, the trotting inheritance as the only starting point, which must be strengthened and the instinct intensified by the development of the speed of succeeding generations. It stood some years at the parting of the ways between intelligence and ignorance, between enlightened judgment and stupid prejudice, between honesty and dishonesty, but now it is accepted, in practice, as the universal law from one end of the land to the other. Thus, we have not only added millions to the wealth of the country, but without any outside assistance or instruction we have produced a horse that by way of pre-eminence, throughout the world, is justly entitled to be designated, “The Horse of America.”

CHAPTER II.
ORIGINAL HABITAT OF THE HORSE.

No indications that the horse was originally wild—The steppes of High Asia and Arabia not tenable as his original home—Color not sufficient evidence —Impossibility of horses existing in Arabia in a wild state—No horses in Arabia until 356 A.D.—Large forces of Armenian, Median, and Cappadocian cavalry employed more than one thousand seven hundred years B.C.—A breed of white race horses—Special adaptability of the Armenian country to the horse—Armenia a horse-exporting country before the Prophet Ezekiel—Devotion of the Armenian people to agricultural and pastoral pursuits through a period of four thousand years—All the evidences point to ancient Armenia as the center from which the horse was distributed.

In undertaking to consider and determine what particular portion of the earth was the original habitat of the horse, we must not forget that we are in a field that antedates all history, both sacred and profane. When we have gone back to the very first dawnings of historical records we are still far short of the period in which initial light can be reached. In profane history, with more or less safety, we can get back to a point about seventeen hundred years before the Christian era; and in sacred history about two hundred years less. At both of these dates the horses referred to were not in a feral state, but were the companions and servants of man.

There have been two separate theories advanced which demand some attention, because of the eminence and learning of the men who have advanced them. The first is that the original habitat of the horse was on the steppes of High Asia, east and north of the Caspian and the Black Sea. The only argument I have ever seen advanced in support of this theory is based upon the great number of wild horses that are found in that part of the world, and that so many of them are of a dun color. From the frequency of the recurrence of the dun color another theory has sprung up to the effect that the original color of the horse was dun, and hence it is argued that when the dun color appears in our own day it must be taken as evidence that the original color of the horse was dun. This reasoning is very far from being conclusive, for there are dun horses and dun tribes in all breeds, just as there are greys, and the color is just as liable to be transmitted as any other color. In the last century there were many dun horses in England, and at least one of that color was advertised very widely as “the Dun Arabian,” probably a foreign horse, but it is hardly possible that he was an Arabian. It was then the custom of the country to call all foreign horses “Arabians,” no difference from what part of the world they came. It has been stated on what seemed to be good authority that a dun horse once won the Derby, but whether the color may result from line breeding or from atavistic tendencies, the argument advanced does not seem to have any weight in it for the purpose intended.

Transcriber’s Note: the map can be clicked for a larger version.

ARMENIA, CAPPADOCIA, NORTHERN SYRIA ETC.

ABOUT 1200 B.C.

Another argument in favor of the wild and unknown regions east and north of the Caspian as the habitat of the horse has been urged with much more power and effect. It has been accepted and reiterated by so many learned men, one after another, that I doubted the wisdom of attempting to overthrow it, until I found the spot in which it was fatally weak. This view of the question seems to rest upon the fact that the successive hosts of Barbarians that overran Europe in the early centuries of the Christian era brought their horses, as well as their flocks and herds, with them, and it is assumed that these horses were the first brought into Europe. This involves a total misconception of dates; not of a few years merely, but of many centuries. All of Europe, including Britain, and all of Northern Africa, were abundantly supplied with horses, probably a thousand years before the first destructive wave of Barbarians touched Europe. Linguistic and ethnological facts clearly prove that those people came from Asia, and possibly from a part of Asia where there were horses running wild, but that does not prove that they came from the original habitat of the horse. With no dates, either definite or approximate, to support this theory, and with no specific portion of the earth fixed upon as the general locality from which they came, it resolves itself into a mere speculation with nothing to support it, except the fact that different writers have been copying it from one another, without throwing any additional light upon it, for a number of generations.

The most remarkable and at the same time the most untenable of all the claims that have been urged about the horse is that he was indigenous in Arabia. We can tolerate any number of foolish claims set up to show that the Arabian horse is superior to all others, for such assertions can be tested and disproved, as they have been a thousand times, but the claim that Arabia was the original habitat of the horse is so utterly preposterous, and yet so widely advocated by writers and others who know nothing about it, that we must consider it with some brief deliberation. When the maimed and crippled horses of De Soto were turned loose and abandoned on the plains of Texas, they had all around them the means of an abundant and healthy subsistence, and they multiplied and grew into an innumerable host that made the earth tremble when they moved in great masses. Under the same favorable conditions of water and pasture, the same results followed on the pampas of South America. Upon the early settlement of Virginia, as well probably as in some of the other colonies, and within two hundred years, many of the horses of the colonists strayed away, became wild and remained so, propagating and increasing for generations, and until the growing numbers of their former masters captured or exterminated them. The varied herbage of the forest and its grassy swales, and streams of pure water everywhere, made Virginia a paradise for the horse in his feral state.

Buffon, the French naturalist of a hundred and fifty years ago, notices the theory of the wild horses of Arabia, but he is careful not to commit himself nor indorse it in any form. In Vol. I., p. 237, he says: “According to Mannol, the Arabian horses are descended from the wild horses in the deserts of Arabia, of which, in ancient times, large studs were formed,” etc. In going further, to find where Mannol got his information, it appears that somebody, with an unpronounceable name that I have forgotten, told him so. Major Upton, a very intelligent but very credulous modern writer on what he saw and learned in the desert, says he never heard of this story of wild horses in Arabia, and pronounces it a “fallacy.” When we consider that Arabia never was conquered and the reason why, although Rome, at the very culmination of her power, followed by Assyria and Egypt, all failed of their purpose without meeting an enemy in battle, we must accept the fact that nature had interposed a barrier that military power could not surmount. The barrenness and aridity of the desert has always protected the Arabs against the most powerful armies of the mightiest nations. Now, to maintain that wild horses could not only live, but flourish and increase, in a country where there was not enough edible herbage on a thousand acres to keep a grasshopper alive, and not a running stream of water within five hundred miles, requires a measure of mental sterility that can be found nowhere but among a few of the writers on the Arabian horse. Of all the curiosities in which the literature of the Arabian horse abounds and in the multitudinous efforts to give him the primacy among horses, there seems to be nothing quite so absurd as this story about his being indigenous to the desert. Animals in a wild state are never found except in countries and districts where the conditions surrounding provide them with food and water. How long would a band of strong, healthy horses live if turned loose to seek their own subsistence in the desert of Arabia? Of all the countries on the face of the globe there is no one where the horse is so completely dependent upon, the care and support of his master as Arabia.

Fortunately, we are not left for data to unwritten traditions two thousand years old, nor to the fervid imaginations of a race of cutthroats and thieves of the very lowest order of civilization, but we can turn, with full confidence, to authentic contemporaneous history, from which we can settle this question, at once and for all time. Strabo, the great Greek geographer and philosopher, flourished in the reign of Augustus, at the very beginning of the Christian era. He describes Arabia just as we know it to-day, for all countries have changed in their boundaries and government except Arabia. He describes the people as chiefly nomadic, and as breeders of camels. The most remarkable thing in this description is the fact, found in his great work, Vol. III., p. 190, that they had no horses at that time. The exact language used in this statement will be found in the next chapter of this work. The question now arises, If there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era, when and how did they become possessed of them? Fortunately, again, written history supplies the answer to this question. In my next chapter will be found, quoted at some length, the circumstances bearing on this question. In brief, the facts are as follows: Philostorgius, a distinguished Greek theologian, wrote an ecclesiastical history in the fifth century which is no longer extant. Photius, at one time Patriarch of Constantinople, in the ninth century wrote an epitome of the work by Philostorgius and to this epitome we are indebted for the facts we here relate. Constantius, at the time of which Philostorgius wrote, was on the throne of the Eastern empire, and was exceedingly zealous in spreading and strengthening the Christian religion. He learned that the prince of Arabia Felix (that part of Arabia which we will designate by its modern name Yemen) was strongly disposed to come out with his people and embrace Christianity. Constantius thereupon determined to encourage both prince and people in the movement they were contemplating, and he sent them a grand embassy with many valuable presents, the most noted of which were two hundred “well-bred Cappadocian horses.” The embassy was completely successful, and Theopholis, who had been made a bishop and placed at the head of it, remained there several years. This was in the year 356 of the Christian era, and is the first intimation we have in all history of horses in Arabia. These are the facts, so far as any facts are known, upon the consideration of which I am not able to assent to the claim that either High Asia or Arabia was the original habitat of the horse.

I have been surprised at the number of coincidences that seem to point to ancient Armenia as the first habitation of the horse. This country at one time was a very powerful kingdom, extending from the mountains of Caucasus on the north to Media or Assyria on the south, and from the Caspian Sea on the east to the Euphrates on the west, and at one time even to the Mediterranean. It was intersected by several ranges of mountains and not only gave rise to the Euphrates and the Tigris, but to a number of smaller rivers. It was well watered everywhere, and produced in great abundance all varieties of herbage, cereals, and fruits. It was originally called Ararat by the Hebrews, probably after a range of mountains about central to the territory embraced, and because Noah’s Ark rested somewhere “on the mountains of Ararat.” It is also called Togarmah in Scripture, after Torgom, son of Gomer, who was the son of Japheth, the son of Noah. Japheth seems to have been the oldest son of Noah, and he chose this fruitful region as the future home of his descendants. The Rev. Michael Chamich, a native Armenian, went back into the old Armenian records, translated the language as originally used, and wrote a history of the country from its first settlement; and this history has been Englished by Johannes Adval, another native Armenian, and published in Calcutta in 1827. This work seems to be worthy of credence, and it clearly establishes the lineal descent of the governing family back to Japheth, the son of Noah. The order of succession as the head of the tribe continues through several generations unbroken, from father to son. Gomer, the son of Japheth, was succeeded by his son Togarmah, then followed Haicus, Armenac, Aramais, Amassia, Gelam, Harma, Aram, Arah, who was slain in battle, his son Cardus (at twelve years old), Anushaven, who died without issue and was succeeded by Paret, who reigned fifty years and during his reign the patriarch Joseph died in Egypt, B.C. 1635. These princes all had long reigns. Haicus was the first of the line to assume the title of king, and he was greatly distinguished for extending the boundaries of his kingdom. Gelam extended his borders to the Caspian. Aram was fifty-eight years on the throne, during which time he had a war with the Medes, and also with the Cappadocians, in both of which he had a large force of cavalry in the field. This was about seventeen hundred years before the Christian era, and is the first mention of cavalry that I have found in history, either sacred or profane. In both these wars his cavalry was met by the cavalry of the enemy, equal to or greater than his in numbers. How long before this troops may have been mounted on horses it is impossible to say, but from the numbers so used at that period of the world by the neighboring nations and tribes, as the Medes, the Cappadocians, etc., it is fair to conclude that the horse had then been an important factor in all military movements for many generations. When we consider two opposing armies, each provided with divisions of five thousand cavalry, the period being about B.C. 1700, with no dates beyond that are known as relating to the horse, we are shut up to our own reasoning as to the number of centuries that may have been required to produce these great numbers. It must have been at least one century, or it may have been three or four, and this would carry us back to the head of the house of Japheth.

If we accept Egyptian chronology, which still lacks much of being reliable, one of the Pharaohs, named Thutmosis I., invaded Syria, passing up through Palestine till he reached the latitude of Aleppo, and then turned eastward and crossed the Euphrates. His campaign was successful; he fought many battles and returned laden with spoils, especially horses and chariots of war. This was before the Israelites reached the promised land, and before Joshua’s battle with the “Northern kings,” in which they had “horsemen and chariots very many,” and which is the earliest Scriptural instance in which horses were employed in battle.

The territory embracing the ancient countries of Eastern Asia Minor, bounded on the north by the Black Sea and the Caucasian mountains, on the south by the thirty-seventh degree of north latitude, and extending to the Caspian Sea, has always been remarkable for the variety, value, and abundance of its agricultural products. Many of the very early historians have noted the fact that each one of the countries embraced in this territory was distinguished for the excellence and numbers of horses produced, and they appear in about the following order, namely, Armenia, Cappadocia, Cilicia, Media. The last-named country embraced what is now the northern part of Persia, and as between the “Medes” and the “Persians” there is no little confusion in the public mind, as sometimes one was on top and sometimes the other. Then, to add to the confusion, the Assyrians came in, occupying the same country and the same capitals. For our present purposes it is not necessary to enter into the consideration of these successive dynasties. The Medes were comparatively newcomers, and as they were a great military people their prominence in horse history resulted more from the spoils of war and the tribute in horses that they collected from their neighbors than from their own production. Kitto says that in the time of the Persian empire the plain of Nissæum was celebrated for its horses and horse races. This plain was near the city of Nissæa, around which were fine pasture lands, producing excellent clover. The horses were “entirely white” (probably grey) and of extraordinary height and beauty, as well as speed. They constituted part of the luxury of the great, and a tribute in kind was paid from them to the monarch, who, like all Eastern sovereigns, used to delight in equestrian display. Some idea of the opulence of the country may be had when it is known that, independently of imposts rendered in money, Media (then the undermost dog), paid a yearly tribute of not less than three thousand horses, four thousand mules, and nearly one hundred thousand sheep. The races, once celebrated through the world, seem to exist no more.

When Darius the Mede had extended his empire over the whole of Western Asia and Egypt, he exacted heavy tribute in horses from all subjugated provinces. This was about 520 B.C., and antedated the racing referred to above. In all parts of his extended empire he built roads and established lines of couriers, mounted on fleet horses, that there might be no delay in receiving at his capital and sending out again intelligence of what was transpiring in any part of his dominions. For this service the best and fleetest horses were required, and the only guide we have to determine how these horses were selected we find in the fact that the tribute collected from the little kingdom of Cilicia, formerly a part of Cappadocia, was, in addition to a stated sum of money, one white horse for every day in the year. It is possible that these white Cilician horses may have been the progenitors of the white (grey) race horses spoken of in Media.

In describing the general fruitfulness of Cappadocia, Strabo says: “Cappadocia was also rich in herds and flocks, but more particularly celebrated for its breed of horses.” Strabo speaks of this as a leading characteristic of the country and doubtless it had held pre-eminence in this respect for generations before he wrote. Three hundred and fifty-six years later, when Constantius was selecting his presents of horses for the prince and people of Yemen, in Arabia, he knew just where to look, in all his dominions, for the best of their kind, and selected two hundred “well-bred” ones for Arabia. Sir R. Wilson, in discussing the quality of the Russian cavalry horses about 1810, had evidently heard of this Cappadocian origin of the Arabian horse, but, unfortunately, he got all the parties badly mixed in his reference. He makes Constantine instead of Constantius the donor of three hundred Cappadocian horses, instead of two hundred, and they are given to one of the African princes, instead of to an Arabian prince. The African traveler, Bruce, found some excellent horses in Nubia, Africa, and from their high quality and unusually large size he seems to have jumped to the conclusion that these were the descendants of the three hundred from Constantine.

After glancing over all the different countries in this great zone as defined above, and extending from the Bosphorus to the Caspian Sea, one cannot fail to be impressed with its special adaptation to the production and sustenance of all varieties of domestic animals, in their greatest perfection. Here the country seems to have been made for the horse, and the horse for the country. Here was a country suited to his nativity, and here we find records of his existence centuries earlier than in any other country. The wild ass flourished in this country, but I have not been able to find any evidence or indication that the horse was not always the companion and servant of man. Wherever he is found in a feral state reasons that are amply satisfactory are never wanting to account for that state. Ancient historians have specially noted each of the principal countries embraced in this zone for the superiority and numbers of its horses, but no one has made any allusion to wild horses, nor suggested that there may have been a time when their ancestors were wild.

Now, as we have designated a long and wide region of Western Asia, embracing a number of different nationalities and governments, as the probable original habitat of the horse, can we go further and designate the particular nationality or government in which was his original home and from which he was distributed to adjoining nations or peoples? In answer to this question, we cannot present any dates of record earlier than about 1700 B.C., and this date will apply as well to Media and Cappadocia as to Armenia. We must, therefore, consider it in the light of other facts and circumstances, not dependent upon specific dates. In the first place, and taking the Mosaic account of the deluge as the starting point, “the ark rested on the mountains of Ararat.” This is the original name of a country, intersected by a mountain range, and that range took its name from the country in which it was found. “Mount Ararat” was simply a very high peak in that range. The distinction should be observed here between “the mountains of Ararat” and “Mount Ararat.” In the second place, it is clearly established by all history that near the base of this mountain range Japheth and his descendants had their homes. His son Gomer was highly distinguished in his day, and his grandson, Togarmah, son of Gomer, became a powerful chief. To such prominence did he rise in the affairs of his age that for centuries after his day his country was called “Togarmah.” Hence we have the three names, Ararat, Togarmah and Armenia applied in sacred and profane history to the same country that we are now considering.

During the continuance of the dynasty of King Haic or Haicus, the son of Togarmah, the Armenians became a very prosperous and powerful people. They did not seem to be an aggressive or warlike people, although their boundaries were greatly extended, but a thrifty agricultural and industrious people. Breeding and marketing horses seem to have been their leading employments. In the twenty-seventh chapter of the Prophet Ezekiel he gives a catalogue of the different peoples trading with the great Phœnician merchants and the products of their countries, in which they traded. This catalogue was written five hundred and fifty-eight years before the Christian era, and is very remarkable for its extent and completeness. It not only shows what the Phœnicians carried away to the West, in their “Ships of Tarshish,” but also what they brought back for distribution among their customers in Western Asia. I will quote, from the revised version, two or three of the classes of articles enumerated, embracing both import and export trade. Of foreign imports he says: “Tarshish” (Spain and beyond) “was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded for thy wares.” Of articles for export he says: “They of the house of Togarmah traded for thy wares with horses and war-horses and mules.” “Togarmah” here means “Armenia,” and this is the only instance in which horses are mentioned in the catalogue. I will give another quotation, not because it is conclusive in itself, but because it is confirmatory of Strabo’s statement that there were no horses in Arabia in his day. He says: “Arabia and all the princes of Kedar, they were the merchants of thy hand; in lambs, and rams, and goats, in these were they thy merchants.” Other products from more southern portions of Arabia are enumerated, but no horses. This is the initial step toward the general distribution of horses, by the Phœnician merchants, which will be developed in the next chapter.

In speaking of Media (Vol. II., p. 265), Strabo says: “The country is peculiarly adapted, as well as Armenia, to the breeding of horses.” Of one district not far from the Caspian he remarks: “Here, it is said, fifty thousand mares were pastured in the time of the Persians, and were the king’s stud. The Nessæan horses, the best and the largest in the king’s province, were of this breed, according to some writers, but according to others they were from Armenia.” Again he says: “Cappadocia paid to the Persians, yearly, in addition to a tribute in silver, one thousand five hundred horses, two thousand mules, and fifty thousand sheep, and the Medes contributed nearly double this amount.”

Of Armenia he says, p. 271: “The country is so well adapted, being nothing inferior in this respect to Media, for breeding horses that the race of Nessæan horses, which the king of Persia used, is found here also; the satrap of Armenia used to send annually to the king of Persia twenty thousand young horses.”

The Nessæan horses, so famous for their speed, were the “thoroughbreds” of their day, and there can hardly be a doubt they originated in Armenia, and, just like our own “thoroughbreds,” they were essentially the result of careful selection through a series of generations, and of breeding only from animals possessing the desired qualifications in the highest degree. In the earlier days of racing in Media, it appears that white was the fashionable color, but I am disposed to think that grey, growing white with age, was the color intended to be expressed by the writers of that period. The “albino” color is abnormal and supposed to indicate tenderness and lack of stamina.

There is one fact, in considering this question, to which I have probably not given sufficient prominence and weight. So far as the records go, the three countries of Armenia, Cappadocia, and Media are synchronous in having mounted troops in their armies seventeen hundred years before the Christian era. We must, therefore, consider the conditions of these countries antecedent to the period of 1700 B.C. Of Cappadocia we know absolutely nothing historically until it was conquered by Cyrus, king of Persia, about 588 B.C. Of Media the earliest knowledge we have of a historical character does not go back further than about 842 B.C. It should be observed that I here speak of “historical” knowledge and not of uncertain traditions of many centuries earlier. Both of these nations with their distinctive nationalities have, long since, been wiped off the surface of the earth.

When we reach Armenia, we reach a people with a most remarkable history, extending back for more than four thousand years. This history, although not wholly free from criticism or doubt, seems to be honestly written and worthy of a liberal measure of confidence. That the children of Japheth should have settled at the foot of the mountains of Ararat strikes every one as a very natural event, but that their descendants should still be there, through all the triumphs and oppressions of four thousand years, is one of the most stupendous facts in the history of the world. From the very first we know of them they seem to have been an agricultural people, strongly attached to their native soil. When they ruled over the land from the Caspian to the Mediterranean, they built no great cities, but adhered steadfastly to the rural pursuits of their fathers, and this, probably, was the chief cause of their weakness. Their wealth and sources of wealth were chiefly in their horses, and these they sold to the merchants of Sidon and Tyre, who carried them to all the nations of Europe and Africa, commencing with Egypt, and supplying all wants as far as Spain and Morocco, and beyond, probably, as far as Britain. The Phœnician merchants were the first to open commercial transactions with Europe and Africa, and they were in control of the commerce of the world long before King Solomon entered into commercial partnership with Hiram, king of Tyre. Armenia had horses to sell long before they had horses in Egypt, and Phœnicia had ships and enterprise to carry them there. There is a fitting of interests here that seems to point to Armenia as the great original source of supply, and as the original habitat of the horse.

CHAPTER III.
EARLY DISTRIBUTION OF HORSES.

First evidences of horses in Egypt about 1700 B.C.—Supported by Egyptian records and history—The Patriarch Job had no horses—Solomon’s great cavalry force organized—Arabia as described by Strabo at the beginning of our era—No horses then in Arabia—Constantius sends two hundred Cappadocian horses into Arabia A.D. 356—Arabia the last country to be supplied with horses—The ancient Phœnician merchants and their colonies —Hannibal’s cavalry forces in the Punic Wars—Distant ramifications of Phœnician trade and colonization—Commerce reached as far as Britain and the Baltic—Probable source of Britain’s earliest horses.

Having considered the different theories or opinions as to the original habitat of the horse and the means and facilities by which distribution to the different portions of the earth may have been effected, I have omitted land migration, which will be self-evident to all as an important factor in the problem. It is now in order, therefore, to consider such dates and facts as are pertinent and may be gleaned from history, sacred and profane.

Transcriber’s Note: the map can be clicked for a larger version.

PHŒNICIAN COLONIES

ABOUT 1200 B.C.

When Abraham, with Sarah his wife, visited Egypt about 1920 B.C., the Pharaoh for her sake bestowed upon him many gifts: “Sheep and oxen and he asses and men servants and maid servants and she asses and camels.” Among these great gifts there were no horses, evidently because Egypt had no horses at that time. There is no mention nor reference to horses in Egypt till Joseph became prime minister two hundred years later, when there were a few horses, and they were traded or sold to Joseph by their owners in exchange for food, not in droves, but as individuals. These scriptural facts in the experiences of Abraham and Joseph seem to be circumstantially sustained by the discoveries of those learned Egyptologists who, in late years and with the spade in their hands, have resurrected so much of history that had been buried for thousands of years. It was during the reign of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings, that Abraham and Joseph were in Egypt, and in order to approximate the time when horses were first introduced, we must glance at a few facts in connection with what is known of the Hyksos. Some have claimed they were from Chaldea, some from Northern Syria and Asia Minor, and some again from Phœnicia, and it is one of the strangest things in history that a great nation should be overthrown and held in subjection for over five hundred years and nobody know who did it. Then again, it is equally incomprehensible that any nation should have subdued Egypt and held it in bondage so long and yet never have claimed the honor of having done so. Still another mystery remains that never has been solved, and that is, what became of the Shepherds and their followers when they were driven out? At the period of the conquest the governing class was rent by factions and under a weak and tyrannical king. The Delta and the Valley of the Nile were crowded with slaves, many of them of Asiatic origin. The elevated plains and mountain sides were covered with fierce and intractable nomads, all of Asiatic origin, tending their flocks. Some brave and skillful shepherd organized the shepherds and the slaves and at their head swept down upon the government with a power that was so mighty as to be irresistible. Manetho, the great Egyptian historian of more than two thousand years ago, thus describes the event: “Under this king, then, I know not wherefore, the god caused to blow upon us a baleful wind, and in the face of all probability bands from the East, people of ignoble race, came upon us unawares, attacked the country and subdued it easily and without fighting.” In remarking upon this same event Professor Maspero, who stands at the very head of the Egyptologists, says: “It is possible that they (the shepherds) owed this rapid victory to the presence in their armies of a factor hitherto unknown to the Africans—the war chariot—and before the horse and his driver the Egyptians gave way in a body.” In view of the direct declaration of Manetho that the question of the succession was settled “without fighting,” the mere suggestion of an unsustained “possibility” from Maspero that the result may have been determined by the war chariots cannot be accepted. All the authorities agree that the horse was introduced into Egypt at some period during the rule of the Shepherd Kings, but there is absolutely no evidence that this was at the beginning or anywhere near the beginning of that rule.

No records or delineations of the horse have been found in any of the temples or tombs of Egypt prior to the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, which was probably about the year 1570 B.C. and contemporaneous with the birth of Moses. If the Shepherd Kings left behind them any records or delineations of the horse it would be quite natural for the true kingly line to destroy and erase every vestige of whatever would revive a memory to them so bitter and hateful. But the absence of all traces of horses under the seventeenth dynasty of the Shepherds does not prove that there was none, for we have direct proof in Joseph’s case that they were there one hundred and fifty-six years, and in Jacob’s burial one hundred and nineteen years before the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty.

The question as to the time when they procured their horses having now been approximately settled, the inquiry naturally follows as to where they came from? In answering this question there seems to be no hesitation or doubt. They came from Northern Syria, which embraces not only the northeastern coast of the Mediterranean, including Phœnicia, but the countries north and east of it trading there, which means the great horse-breeding countries of Armenia and Cappadocia. Being largely engaged in the Egyptian trade for many centuries, it is probable the Phœnician merchants were the principal agents in supplying them. In speaking of the horse in Egypt, Prof. Maspero says: “The horse when once introduced into Egypt soon became fairly adapted to its environment. It retained both its height and size, keeping the convex forehead—which gave the head a slightly curved profile—the slender neck, the narrow hind-quarters, the lean and sinewy legs and the long, flowing tail which had characterized it in its native country. The climate, however, was enervating, and constant care had to be taken, by the introduction of new blood from Syria, to prevent the breed from deteriorating. The Pharaohs kept studs of horses in the principal cities of the Nile valley, and the great feudal lords, following their example, vied with each other in the possession of numerous breeding stables.”

There are some facts here that are worthy of special emphasis: (1) There were no horses in Egypt till the period of the Shepherd Kings, i. e., about the time of Joseph. (2) All Egyptologists down to the present day agree that the supply of Egyptian horses was procured from Northern Syria. (3) The Egyptians and the Arabians were adjoining nations in constant, friendly intercourse, exchanging the products of their respective countries, and yet there is no shadow of an intimation that the Arabians had then ever owned a horse. It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, not only from what is written, but from what is implied, that the Arabians at about the period of 1600 B.C. had no horses. Northern Syria, as the source of Egyptian supply, points directly to Armenia, adjoining on the east, as the original source. When Strabo wrote at the beginning of the Christian era that there were no horses in Arabia at that time, he would still have been within the bounds of the truth if he had said there had been none there for more the sixteen hundred years before his day. All these considerations confirm the history that has come down to us from Philostorgius.

As early as the dynasties of the Shepherd Kings and while the Israelites were still in Egyptian bondage, the Phœnician merchants had accumulated great wealth and great power and were literally the masters of the seas. The Phœnicians were a commercial and maritime people and the Egyptians were, in fact, dependent upon them for all their foreign supplies. These conditions leave hardly a doubt that Egypt’s first supply of horses came through the Phœnicians. But upon the establishment of the eighteenth dynasty under the old Thebans, the spirit of war and conquest revived, and under Thutmosis I. and Thutmosis III., notably, numerous and successful campaigns were made against Northern Syria and then extending eastward across the Euphrates into the borders of Armenia and Assyria. And from the number of horses and chariots captured in battle and collected as tribute, the careful student cannot avoid the conclusion that this kind of spoil was the chief incentive to the various campaigns. “Besides the usual species,” Maspero informs us, “powerful stallions were imported from Northern Syria, which were known by the Semitic name of Abiri, the strong.” This is the first mention in history of an improved type of horse noted for his strength.

Whatever may have been the precise period in which the Patriarch Job lived, he was the author of the grandest panegyric on the war-horse that ever was written. Yet it seems strange that he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred she asses, but did not own a horse. To draw his picture of the war-horse he must have seen him in action, on the field, and it is not improbable in his younger days he witnessed, or possibly participated in, some great battle between the Babylonians and the Persians, north of the latitude and country in which he lived. It is now generally conceded, I think, among learned men that the “land of Uz” was in the southeastern portion of Arabia Deserta, bordering on the Persian Gulf, where the horse is a useless luxury. Job was a very rich man, he certainly did not lack in admiration of the horse, and if he had thought that horses would add to his comfort and enjoyment he could easily have obtained them from the great herds in the north. But the camel is the great beast of service and utility in Arabia; it was so in Job’s time, it is so to-day, and it always will be so because it is suited to the environment.

When Joshua was subduing the tribes of Canaan, B.C. 1450, he found that the Phœnicians had several well-fortified cities and did not attack them, but he encountered a combination of “Northern Kings” with a vast army and “with horses and chariots very many.” His victory was complete, and he houghed their horses and burned their chariots with fire.

Jabin, called the King of Canaan, in the time of the Judges, had his kingdom on the northern border of Palestine and east of Phœnicia, at the southern extension of Mount Lebanon. Sisera, one of the greatest commanders of the time, B.C. 1285, commanded his army and he had nine hundred chariots of iron, but the victory of the Israelites was complete.

In the year B.C. 1056, David pursued some of the tribes of Western Arabia that had made a raid on Southern Palestine and carried away many captives and much spoil. He overtook them with his own followers and subdued them, and none escaped except four hundred young men who fled on camels. He recovered all the captives and brought back all the flocks and herds, but there were no horses among them. About the same time, historians inform us, the tribes of Eastern Arabia were paying their tribute to the Assyrians in camels and asses, while the northern countries were paying theirs in horses and money.

The Queen of Sheba visited King Solomon B.C. 992, to learn of his wisdom and “to prove him with hard questions.” Her kingdom was in that part of southeastern Arabia now called Yemen, bordering on the Red Sea. Her journey was a very long one and she “came with a very great train of camels that bare spices and very much gold and precious stones.” It will be observed that there were no horses in this “very great train.” It will be observed further, from the incidents above related, that whenever the Israelites met their neighbors north of them, whether in peace or war, they met horses with them; and whenever they met their neighbors south of them, they were mounted only on camels.

When the dominions of Solomon had become vastly extended, embracing numbers of tributary kingdoms, as well as nomadic tribes, and when his ships had gathered in untold riches from all parts of the world, he found it prudent to reorganize his army for the defense of his kingdom and his wealth, and on a scale commensurate with the dangers that might arise from a combination of the jealous and envious neighbors with whom he was surrounded. Among the northern kingdoms of that day it had been often demonstrated in battle that the effective force of an army must be estimated by its strength in horsemen and chariots of war. Solomon, therefore, bought horses and chariots from Egypt, and horses from all lands that had them for sale. It is probable that the superiority of the Egyptian chariots was the special reason for buying them in that country, as he paid six hundred shekels of silver for the chariots and one hundred and fifty for the horses to bring them home. The reorganized army consisted of one thousand four hundred chariots and twelve thousand horsemen, and they were quartered in the different large cities in his dominions. In the interval of seven hundred and twenty-eight years that had elapsed since Joseph was Prime Minister, and horses introduced in Egypt, they had greatly multiplied. When Solomon died and his kingdom was divided into two hostile camps, Hiram, King of Tyre, his lifelong friend and associate, became virtually his successor to the trade of the world.

The great Greek geographer, Strabo, traveled and wrote in the reign of Augustus, and died A.D. 24. For descriptions of all countries of that period and their industries and productions, he has been quoted for eighteen hundred years as the best if not the only authority. Writing as he did, at the very initial point of the Christian era, he gives us a landmark that fixes itself in the mind. He gives a brief, but quite satisfactory, description of Arabia, in which he notes the general topography and boundaries as they are understood to-day; and then he enters, somewhat, into the climate, productions of the soil, character and industries of the people, etc. Of one part of the country he speaks of the inhabitants as breeders of camels, and of another, that is more productive, he remarks: “The general fertility of the country is very great; among other products there is in particular an abundant supply of honey. Except horses, there are numerous herds of animals, asses and swine, birds also of every kind, except geese and the gallinaceous tribes.”

Here we have from the very highest authority the pivotal fact that there were no horses in Arabia at the commencement of the Christian era. This does not rest upon argument, nor is it a deduction from some condition of things that might have existed; but it is a distinct declaration of what Strabo saw with his own eyes and wrote down when he saw it. It must, therefore, stand as an undisputed fact, until some reputable authority is brought forward to contradict it. This description from Strabo applies to that rich portion of Arabia, bordering on the Red Sea along its full length. With the fact established, circumstantially and historically, that there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era, it now remains to consider how and when they were first introduced in that country.

Philostorgius, a distinguished Greek theologian, born A.D. 425, as related in the preceding chapter, wrote an ecclesiastical history, which is no longer extant, but fortunately Photius, at one time patriarch of the Eastern church, born A.D. 853, prepared an epitome of it. This epitome of Philostorgius comes down to A.D. 425, and is to be found in the Lenox Library of this city, bound up in the same volume with Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History. I will here quote literally from this epitome so much as is pertinent to the question before us. Constantius was then on the throne of the Eastern Empire, and labored for the promotion of the Christian religion.

“Constantius sent ambassadors to those who were formerly called Sabæans, but are now known as Homeritæ, a tribe descended from Abraham, by Keturah. As to the territory which they inhabit, it is called by the Greeks Magna Arabia and Arabia Felix, and extends to the most distant part of the ocean. Its metropolis is Saba, the city from which the Queen of Sheba went forth to see Solomon.... Constantius, accordingly, sent ambassadors to them to come over to the Christian religion.... Constantius, wishing to array the embassy with peculiar splendor, put on board their ships two hundred well-bred horses from Cappadocia, and sent them, with many other gifts.... The embassy turned out successfully, for the prince of the nation, by sincere conviction, came over to the true religion.”

Other facts might be quoted from this epitome, showing that Theopholis was made a bishop and placed at the head of this embassy and that he remained in Arabia Felix several years, prosecuting his work successfully. It might also be quoted to show that the people of the cities of Yemen (Arabia Felix) were, at that day, well advanced in civilization and refinement, and that wealth and luxury abounded on all sides. Their lands, from the sea to the desert, were wonderfully productive, and their people lived in the cities and on their farms, but few leading a nomadic life. In later generations this part of the country, which is in Arabia Felix, has been called Yemen, and I believe it is universally conceded among the Arab tribes and by writers who have studied the subject that the best horses come from Yemen.

Taking the administration of Joseph as indicating the time when the first horses were introduced into Egypt, about B.C. 1720, and the actual date when Constantius sent the first into Arabia, A.D. 356, we find that Egypt led Arabia by two thousand and seventy-six years. And yet numbers of men have written great pretentious books on the horse, in which they tell us that the Egyptians got their horses from the Arabians; while others equally pretentious and voluminous tell us the Arabians got their horses from the Egyptians; and neither class probably ever gave the labor of an honest hour to settle this question. The one is over two thousand years out of the way, and still they know just as much about it as the other knows. They are both equally ignorant and equally dishonest, for they simply copied, as their own, what somebody had said before them.

It is conceded on all hands and by all men who have gone beneath the mere surface, that the literature of the ages furnishes no evidence that there were horses in Arabia before the fourth or fifth century of our era. General Tweedie, by far the ablest writer on the Arabian horse that we have examined, concedes the pertinency and force of the absence of all literary evidence, until the fifth century is reached, and as a reply he says: “The several Roman invasions of Arabia, in the reigns of Augustus, Trajan, and Severus, must have left foreign horses behind them.” This is, in fact, conceding the accuracy of Strabo’s representations and that there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. The truth of the historical allusion is that the Romans never overran nor conquered Arabia. They could skirmish around the border and capture a few towns or cities, but the death-dealing desert was too much for them. Trajan at last made it a Roman province by his proclamation, and not by his sword, and for the excellent reason that “the game was not worth the candle.” What a strange fact it is that Arabia, instead of the first, should have been the last country in all the old world to be supplied with horses!

It is very difficult to comprehend or even imagine the changes that may be wrought in a thousand years by a strong, enterprising, and aggressive people, colonized in a rich country occupied by semi-barbarians and savages. This was the condition in Northern Africa, when the Phœnician colonies were planted there, a thousand years before the Christian era. The colony at Utica in Algeria was planted about eleven hundred years before the Christian era, which was contemporaneous with the reign of Saul as king of Israel. The colony of Carthage, that afterward contested with Rome for universal dominion, was planted in the same country, about two hundred years later, and was contemporaneous with Jehu. The whole southern shore of the Mediterranean was dotted with Phœnician colonies, from Egypt westward.

The oldest of the Phœnician colonies so far from home was probably Gades, now called Cadiz, on the Atlantic coast of Spain and outside of the Pillars of Hercules. This colony was planted about fifteen hundred years B.C. and was contemporaneous with Moses and the forty years’ journeying of the Israelites in the wilderness. The more recent scholarship seems to have developed the fact that still north of Gades and extending from the mouth of the Guadelete to that of the Guadiana, there was a very large and flourishing colony planted by the Phœnicians, possessing within itself many of the requisites and functions of statehood, and that this was the ancient “Tarshish” of scripture. This plantation became a secondary Tyre, and the “ships of Tarshish” not only made their voyages back and forth through the length of the Mediterranean, but extended them northward, up the European coast and to Britain, and southward along the African coast for a great distance, establishing trading posts wherever the products of a country promised profitable exchange.

The planting of colonies in that age, even for the one ostensible purpose of trade, involved more than the mere erection of a “trading post” at some selected harbor. A strong and well-equipped and well-trained military force had to be employed to protect and defend them. The Phœnicians were great traders, and at the same time they were excellent fighters. Their numerous colonies on both shores of the Mediterranean required a strong military force that was made up very largely of slaves and the nomadic tribes of the country, but always commanded by prominent and influential Phœnicians. It is impossible to tell what the very early experiences of the colonists may have been with regard to horses; nor do we know whether they found horses already there when they arrived at their new plantations. My belief is, however, that they were not only the first to carry horses to Egypt, but they were the first to carry them to the western extremities of the Mediterranean. It will be remembered that the early trade of the Armenians with the Phœnician merchants was not only in horses, but in horsemen, and it is probable that these “horsemen” were slaves, expert and skillful in managing the horse. It has been said by historians that certain classes of their ships were ornamented with a carved horse’s head, at the prow; and it has been inferred that the ships so designated were specially constructed and fitted up for the safe carrying of horses. It is true that in the course of the centuries horses may have found their way from Egypt westward to Algeria, and by crossing the Bosphorus they might have found their way from Asia Minor to Spain, but it is also true that from small beginnings at the plantation of the colonies there was ample time for them to increase to almost countless herds before the period when the colonists became a mighty military power in the earth.

Historians tell us that the military establishment of the city of Carthage alone, when on a peace footing, consisted of three hundred elephants, four thousand horses and forty thousand foot soldiers. When Hannibal started out to fight Rome, in the second Punic war, say B.C. 218, he had with him eighty thousand footmen and twelve thousand horsemen; and he left thirty-two thousand soldiers at home to guard his Spanish and his African dominions. With a proportional division of the home troops, he then had about seventeen thousand mounted men in his army. These were not war levies, but hardened and trained soldiers, and it is, therefore, not remarkable that he held nearly the whole of Spain in subjection, and practically all of Northwestern Africa. Polybius, the soldier historian, tells us that “his Numidian cavalry formed the strongest part of his army, and to their quick evolutions, their sudden retreat, and their rapid return to the charge, may be attributed the success of Hannibal in his great victories.” At an earlier period, we learn that in the organization of the Phœnician armies the numerous nomadic tribes were placed on their flanks, and wheeled about on unsaddled horses guided by a bridle of rushes.

At a very remote period there were two tribes in the interior of Spain, the Celtæ and Iberi, that were greatly distinguished for their love of independence and their bravery in defending it. The antiquarians have failed to give us any information as to what they were or whence they came. They were contemporaneous with some of the early colonies of the Phœnicians. Their tactics in battle seemed to have been to break the enemy’s ranks by a charge as cavalry, and to then dismount and fight on foot. They united as one people and called themselves Celtiberi. Where they got their horses, or whether they had them before the Phœnicians arrived, are questions that cannot be answered.

The Visigoths, or western Goths, overran Northern Italy, settled in Southern France and eventually passed over into Spain, where they established a dynasty that lasted over two centuries and until it was overthrown by the Saracens, A.D. 711. Roderick, the king of the Visigoths, went out to battle with the Saracens, arrayed in his most showy apparel, and mounted on his splendid chariot, made of ivory and set with precious stones. As the battle progressed he saw what he had good reason to believe was treachery on the part of one wing of his army and he alighted from his chariot, mounted his horse called Orelia and rode away while his soldiers were being butchered. He was the last of the Gothic dynasty. There had been a battle between the navies of the Saracens and the Goths, A.D. 680, fifty-one years earlier, in which the fleet of the Saracens had been entirely destroyed, and at that time the Saracens occupied the whole of the southern shore of the Mediterranean. The word “Moors,” as often used to designate the people of Northern Africa, is not well chosen, for it really belongs to but one of many different tribes of different names. The term “Saracen” anciently meant only an Arab born, but since the middle ages it has come to mean any and all adherents to the Mohammedan religion, in the usage of Christian people, and is particularly apposite when speaking of a number of tribes engaged in a common cause.

The people of Northern Africa were not negroes as we understand the word, but a mixture of different races. When the Phœnicians settled among them they were nomadic barbarians, possessing a country of great riches without knowing it. Under the tuition of their new masters they made great advances in many of the arts of peace and in all the arts of war. The Phœnician blood was liberally commingled with that of the natives. The blood carried the brains, and hence the beautiful structures that came from their hands and heads. No purely bred nomad ever could have conceived or constructed the Alhambra. The Phœnicians were refined and educated idolaters, as refinement and education were understood in their day, while the native people were literally barbarians.

The then recent and rapid spread of Mohammedanism among all the people of Northern Africa is, on its surface, one of the most remarkable facts in history. As a religion it served to unite, under the banner of the Crescent, all who accepted it, and guaranteed to all who fell in its defense immediate admission to paradise. All who did not accept it were enemies and only fit to perish by the sword of the Saracen. The founder of this religion died A.D. 632, and seventy-nine years afterward his followers, in Northern Africa alone, won their great victory over the Gothic dynasty of Spain. When once on Spanish soil they appeared to take root there and held possession of a large part of Spain for nearly nine hundred years.

Now that I have traversed the field of Spain and Northern Africa, from the first dawnings of history down to the beginning of the seventeenth century, in order to gather in all that history reveals touching the introduction and propagation of the horse in those regions, we are ready to summarize the facts that we have gleaned. At the periods of six hundred (when Carthage became independent of the mother country), four hundred, and two hundred years before the Christian era, there is undoubted evidence, over and over again, that Spain and Northern Africa were abundantly supplied with horses. Then, how is it possible that the hordes of Barbarians from Asia could have supplied these countries with horses, when they did not arrive there until several centuries after the supply is established to have existed? Take, if you please, the shortest of the periods suggested above, when Hannibal’s cavalry almost annihilated a great Roman army, two hundred and sixteen years before the Christian era. This was five hundred and seventy-two years before Arabia had any horses; and how can “the blind leaders of the blind” supply Hannibal’s cavalry with Arabian blood? When the people of Northern Africa, west of Egypt, fought their way into Spain it is not known that there was a single Arabian soldier nor a single Arabian horse in the whole army. They were all called Arabians, however, and that pretense has existed ever since.

The Phœnicians were the most remarkable people of all the early ages and indeed of any age. They belonged to the Aramaic or Semitic race; they settled in Canaan long before the days of Abraham and attained their greatest prosperity in the days of Solomon, when his fleets and those of his friend Hiram, King of Tyre, controlled and monopolized the commerce of the world. More than five hundred years before this alliance, however, they had established commercial relations with all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and their ships were trading in the ports of every country from Egypt to the Pillars of Hercules and far beyond. There seems to be no doubt that they carried tin from Britain and amber from the Baltic, and, of course, they had to bring something to exchange for what they carried away. What did they bring? As amber did not enter into the necessary arts it is not probable the trade was very large, but tin was required by many nations in their everyday life, especially the Egyptians, who had no foreign commerce and were thus dependent upon the Phœnician merchants. We may conclude, therefore, that the trade in tin was large, and as there was no Phœnician colony in extreme southwestern Britain, the foreign traders would bring just what the Britons most needed. If they were already in possession of horses they would not need that kind of exchange, but if they were not in possession of horses, that would be just the kind of exchange they would want, and probably this was the source from which they obtained their supply. The question, however, of how or when our British ancestors obtained their first supply of horses has never been positively answered. That they had them in great abundance at the beginning of the Christian era is fully established by the experience of the Romans when they captured Britain. From their great numbers and the skill displayed in their management in battle, it cannot be doubted that they were there for many generations before the Roman armies came in contact with them. Many theories have been advanced as to how the horse may have reached Britain, but no one of them rests on so reasonable a basis of probability as that of the Phœnician traders. If from this source, which I am strongly disposed to believe was the true source, it must have been during the maritime supremacy of the Phœnicians and their colonies, and this would place the date several centuries before the Christian era. If we were able to reconstruct the original line of the migration of the early English horses, we would, probably, first find them in “the land of Togarmah” starting to market at Tyre, where they were exchanged for supplies needed in Armenia. There they were put on board one of the great “ships of Tarshish,” and when they next touched the land it was at one of the ports at the southwestern portion of England, where they were exchanged for tin and other products of the mines.

In addition to the argument furnished by this known course of trade between nations and peoples, in prehistoric times, we have an additional one in the natural perpetuation of racial qualities, extending through many centuries. In reply to some questions submitted to a friend of mine who was born in Western Persia, educated in this country, and then returned to the land of his nativity, I have replies to my questions bearing date of July, 1896. He is located at Oroomiah, not far from the modern line between Persia and Turkey, and in what may be considered the very center of ancient Armenia. He is not skilled in horse lore, but he uses horses a great deal and is a very intelligent observer. He says that the Persian horses have been greatly overrated and that the country is full of very ordinary horses. He says that they are all colors, with bays probably predominating. There is a great variety of mixed greys, shading into white, and a few that are dappled. Then there are chestnuts, sorrels, “mouse-color” (duns), and not many blacks. They are small, as a rule, and a harness of small size from this country has to be cut down for them. From this I infer that they are generally under fourteen hands. On the whole the horses are nicely shaped, have slender, clean limbs, small ears, and carry the head and tail well up. As a rule they are great stumblers. With regard to gaits he says that stress is laid on a rapid walk—a half walk and half trot. In this country we would call it the “running walk” that may be kept up for days in succession. In speaking of the pace, my correspondent says: “There are some horses trained to pace, while some pick it up naturally, that is, are born pacers. The greater number are natural pacers. Now and then one will find a rapid pacer, but commonly the pace is a five or six miles an hour gait. There are some that single-foot naturally, and from birth.”

He then says horses are not bred with any care. They are turned loose in herds and the breeding is such as would naturally occur.

It will be observed that my Persian friend speaks of the different colors “of grey, shading into white,” which suggests a possible descent from the famous breed of white Nissæan horses kept by the great Darius and other Medo-Persian monarchs for racing purposes. But the striking feature in this description of the horses of Persia, or more properly, of ancient Armenia, of this day, is the fact that they are of the same size and color and habits of action as the horses of Britain when first visited by the Romans, as well as when they were more minutely described twelve hundred years later, and as they were at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and as they still were at the middle of the eighteenth century. As evidence on these points reference is made to the chapters on horses of the colonial period that will follow in their place. In ancient Armenia, as with all pastoral people of the early ages, horses were turned out to run in herds and literally left to Mr. Darwin’s law of “natural selection and the survival of the fittest.” So it was in Britain to a great extent, until the eighteenth century, and so it was in the American colonies until fifty years later; hence the same types and characteristics prevailed and were perpetuated in all these countries.

It is sad to contemplate the present debased and semi-barbarous condition of the descendants of a great people who for centuries stood first among all the nations of the earth in commercial enterprise, in learning, and in the arts. The banishment of the Saracens from Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century of our era was in fact the banishment of the descendants of the Phœnicians who first colonized Spain. The architectural structures which they left behind them, and which for their marvelous beauty have challenged the admiration of the world, were not the work of nomads and barbarians. They were the flashes of the old Phœnician taste and genius as exemplified by the descendants of the men whom Hiram sent to construct and decorate the buildings of Solomon. The Alhambra and some other structures in Spain are all that we have to remind us of the genius, and grandeur of Phœnicia. Whatever may have been the character and attainments of the descendants of the colonists at the time, the change from idolatry to Islamism was a bad one. Wherever, throughout the world, the teachings of the “Prophet” have been accepted, whole nations have become intolerant, murderous and brutalized, and the modern Phœnicians are no exception. They have now lost their identity in the follies and crimes of Islamism and we can have no sympathy for them.

CHAPTER IV.
THE ARABIAN HORSE.

The Arabian, the horse of romance—The horse naturally foreign to Arabia— Superiority of the camel for all Arabian needs—Scarcity of horses in Arabia in Mohammed’s time—Various preposterous traditions of Arab horsemanship—The Prophet’s mythical mares—Mohammed not in any sense a horseman—Early English Arabians—the Markham Arabian—The alleged Royal Mares—The Darley Arabian—The Godolphin Arabian—The Prince of Wales’ Arabian race horses—Mr. Blunt’s pilgrimage to the Euphrates—His purchases of so-called Arabians—Deyr as a great horse market where everything is thoroughbred—Failure of Mr. Blunt’s experiments—Various Arabian horses brought to America—Horses sent to our Presidents—Disastrous experiments of A. Keene Richards—Tendency of Arab romancing from Ben Hur.

Admiration always leads to exaggeration. This is true in most of the relations of life, but in our admiration of the horse it becomes greatly intensified, so greatly indeed that in magnifying his excellent qualities we find ourselves telling downright falsehoods about him before we know it. This “amiable weakness,” as we might call it, is true of our everyday life and our everyday horses; but when we come to the horse that is the universal ideal of perfection, everybody seems to lay aside all the restraints of truth in extolling the superiority of his qualities. The “Arabian horse” is the ideal horse of all the world. He is the “gold standard” in all horsedom, with the one important distinction that the one is real and the other is mythical. Not one so-called horseman in a million ever saw a genuine Arabian horse, nor any of the descendants of one; and in all the discussions of the past three hundred and fifty years it has never been shown in a single instance that a horse from Arabia, with an authenticated pedigree and tracing as such, has ever been of any value, either as a race horse or as a progenitor of race horses. The superior qualities of “the Arabian horse,” like the superior qualities of “The Arabian Nights,” are purely works of the imagination. There is just as much truth in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor and Aladdin’s Lamp as there is in most of the literature relating to the Arabian horse.

I am fully satisfied that these views of the Arabian horse will not meet with a ready acceptance by the vast majority of the horsemen of this or any other country, but my reasons for presenting them will become apparent as the discussion progresses. They smash too many idols and dispel too many chimeras of the brain to be readily accepted. It takes the average man a long time to get clear of the prejudices in which he was born, and the first question that will be asked by the doubter is, “Why could not Arabia have supported a race of indigenous wild horses, as well as any other country?” Because the horse, wild or tame, has never learned to dig a well forty feet deep, nor to draw water after it is dug. Neither has he learned to lay up a store in time of plenty against a time of famine. The horse could not live in Arabia without the care of man. And, second, “Why were all the civilized and semi-civilized nations west of Asia supplied with horses a thousand years before Arabia, when so near the original habitat of the horse?” It is the first law of our nature to supply ourselves with what we need. The camel always has been a necessity to the Arab, not only to carry him and his burdens, but to furnish nourishment and sustenance to him and his family. The camel is adapted to the country and the country to the camel, and no other created animal can fill that place. He is, literally, “the ship of the desert.” The horse in Arabia is a luxury that can be indulged in only by the rich; hence his ownership is practically restricted to the chiefs of tribes. He is never used except for display and war. Palgrave, in speaking specially of the Nejd tribe, says: “A horse is by no means an article of everyday possession, or of ordinary or working use. No genuine Arab would ever dream of mounting his horse for a mere peaceful journey, whether for a short or a long distance.”

When we consider the immeasurable superiority of the camel to the horse in meeting the wants and necessities of the Arab, we will not be surprised at the immense herds of the former and the small numbers of the latter that are bred and reared in that country. A camel can go four days without water, and under stress, it is said, a good one can cover the distance of two hundred miles in twenty-four hours. The camel and the country are suited to each other, while the horse is an exotic, and has no part in any industrial interest except raiding and robbery. My attention was first called to this unexpected smallness in the numbers of Arabian horses in the seventh century, two hundred and sixty years after the introduction of the original stock from Cappadocia. The flight of Mohammed from his enemies in Mecca to Medina took place A.D. 622. There, setting up as a Prophet, and as holding communications with Heaven, he soon gathered around him a number who believed in his divine inspiration. Understanding the habits and instincts of his followers, he soon found he must give them something to do. He called them about him, mounted a camel, and at their head he was successful in plundering two or three caravans, which greatly enraged his old enemies at Mecca. Whether the anger of his enemies was kindled anew because some of the plunder belonged in Mecca, or whether he merely deprived the Meccans of the opportunity of doing the plundering themselves, the historian fails to make clear. Whichever may have been the underlying reason, it led to war. In the first campaign of the Meccans and in the first battle fought, they far outnumbered the followers of the Prophet. There were some camels in Mohammed’s train, but no horses. He did not lead the battle himself, but remained in his tent and promised his followers that all who fell in battle would be forthwith admitted into Paradise. They believed the promise, as millions and millions have believed it since; it inspired them with a recklessness of life, and they were completely victorious. The result of this victory was the capture of one hundred and fifteen camels and fourteen horses, besides the entire camp of the enemy. In the battle of the next year (A.D. 625) between the same parties, the forces were much increased on both sides. Sir William Muir, the historian, informs us that Mohammed had but two horses in his army, one of which he mounted himself and took command of his forces. This battle was not decisive. In subsequent raids he captured many enemies and traded his female captives for horses with the surrounding tribes, so far as he was able to obtain them. The next year he had an army of three thousand men and thirty-six horses, while the enemy had an army of three thousand men, of whom two hundred were cavalry, but there was no fighting. The fame of Mohammed as a successful and relentless pillager and destroyer had now spread far and wide, and as a means of escape the chiefs of the larger portion of the tribes of Arabia hastened to tender their allegiance and obey his commands. From this forward, therefore, we must consider Mohammed as the representative of the whole of Arabia, in both its religious and military power. The next year his old enemies, the citizens of Mecca, surrendered the sacred city to him without a blow, and thus Islamism became a mighty power in the world.

It is evident from many sources other than the history of Mohammed that horses have always been a very sparse production in Arabia. Burckhardt, the famous traveler in the East, journeyed very extensively in Arabia about 1814, and he gives the result of his observations on this point of numbers as follows: “In all the journey from Mecca to Medina, between the mountains and the sea, a distance of at least two hundred and sixty miles, I do not believe that two hundred horses could be found, and the same proportion of numbers may be remarked all along the Red Sea.” This is in strict conformity with the observations of other writers, the reasons for which have already been given.

Time out of mind, everybody has heard of the insuperable difficulty of prevailing upon an Arab to part with his genuine, high-caste mare for either love or money. He will expatiate, as the story goes, upon “the beauty and graces of his mare as the light of his household and the joy and playmate of his children, and above all as she is royally bred he cannot, as a good Moslem, disobey the injunctions of the Prophet not to sell such mares, but to keep them forever that their descendants may enrich the children of the faithful to all generations.” If you ask him more particularly about her lines of descent, he will give you fifty or a hundred generations and land you safely on the name of the particular one of the five mares of the Prophet from which she is descended. To illustrate the sham of all this Major Upton’s experience, in purchasing horses in Arabia for the East India service, may be cited. It is evident the major understands his dealers and they understand him. He says: “In the desert we never heard of Mohammed’s mares, nor was his name ever mentioned in any way as connected with the Arabian horse.” He says there is no restriction nor difficulty in buying as many mares as you want, in any part of Arabia. This disposes of the tricky pretenses of the Arab horse dealer when he is negotiating a sale to a man without Arabian experience.

Some modern writers make mention of a tradition that still prevails among some tribes as to the origin of the Arabian horse, and it is to the effect that their best horses came originally from Yemen. This tradition is met with in Arabia Deserta, a long way from Arabia Felix, of which Yemen is a portion. While this tradition is of no possible value as evidence, it is suggestive of what might be unearthed in that strange country. The people were not nomadic, but agricultural and commercial, and the cities were rich. The people were well advanced in the arts and comforts of civilized life, and in their cities they had many beautiful temples and palaces. Such a people would of necessity produce learned men who would leave records of their national history behind them, and especially that of such an event as the conversion of the whole people to Christianity. Possibly the researches of scholarly men may yet bring to light more of the facts connected with the embassy from the Emperor Constantius and the introduction of the Cappadocian horses into Yemen, as related in the preceding chapters.

There are many other traditions, so called, that are burnished up and brought out whenever the crafty dealer finds he has a Richards from America, or a Blunt from England, with his mind already made up that all the best horses of the world have come from Arabia. To such a customer, with his mind already at high tension in search for the longest pedigree and the purest blood, the dealer casts his hook in something like the form following:

“When King Solomon had completed the temple he turned his attention to supplying his army with horses and chariots. He searched every nation that had horses for sale and would have none but the very best that the world could produce. He spent much of his time in admiring his beautiful horses, and one day he was so thoroughly absorbed that the hour of prayer passed without his observing it. He felt that this neglect to pray at the proper time was a great sin, and that his horses had led him into it. He did not hesitate longer, but he at once ordered all his horses to be turned loose to the public. Some of my ancestors succeeded in securing six of these mares, and from these six mares all the good horses of Arabia are descended.”

Other dealers are a little more modest in their claims for the antiquity of the pedigrees of their horses, and generously knock off about sixteen hundred years, being content to trace to the mares of the Prophet instead of the mares of Solomon. This still leaves them with a pedigree only about twelve hundred years long, which beats our modern romancers in making stud books. In order to test and select the mares that were worthy of becoming the dams of the best horses, as the story goes, the Prophet shut up a herd of mares, in plain sight of water, and kept them there till they were almost famished with thirst; and then at a signal they were all released at once, and when rushing headlong to the water the trumpet sounds, and notwithstanding their sufferings they turn and align themselves up in military order. In this test of obedience and discipline, it is said, only five of the mares obeyed the signal (some say only three) and thus the mares that obeyed, notwithstanding their sufferings, became justly entitled to the distinctive and honored name of “The Prophet’s Mares.” Another story is told of the particular markings which, in the Prophet’s estimation, indicated the best horses. By one authority he always selected a black horse with a white “forehead,” and some white mark or marks on his upper lip. Another authority says he always chose a bay horse with a bald face and four white legs, and so we might go on till we had embraced every color and every combination of marks, and we would then find that each “authority” had a horse to sell corresponding with the Prophet’s preferences. Now the fact is that Mohammed was neither a horseman nor a horse breeder, and the whole tenor of history goes to show that he neither knew nor cared very much about horses. In his first pilgrimage to Mecca, after the battles referred to above, the privilege for which was secured by negotiation, a hundred horsemen, it is said, were started and kept one day’s journey in advance of the main body of pilgrims. The great numbers following Mohammed on this pilgrimage admonished his old enemies of Mecca of the futility of attempting to resist his power longer, and they fled from the city during the continuance of the ceremonies. A year or two later he summoned all the tribes of Northern and Eastern Arabia to follow him again to Mecca, and they had too lively a sense of their own safety to disobey. Due time was given for preparation, the rendezvous was at Medina, and a vast host from all Northern and Western Arabia congregated there for a purpose that might be to fight, or it might be to pray. Mohammed mounted his camel and the word was passed, “On to Mecca.” As against such a multitude the Meccans saw that resistance was hopeless, and the city was surrendered without either side striking a blow. Arrayed in great splendor and mounted on his camel, the Prophet made the requisite number of circuits round the holy place and then entered and ordered all the idols that had been set up there to be destroyed, and his followers then shouted, “Allah is Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet!” Thus he became master of all Arabia—and woe to the Christian or the Jew who stood in his way. Two years afterward he died, and there is nothing in his life or history to indicate that he ever owned a horse or that he ever mounted one, except on a single occasion. In the ten short years of his public life he had something more important on hand than to determine how to breed horses.

In studying the Arabian horse in the light of what he has done and what he has failed to do, we are indebted to English writers for little snatches of experiences extending back for a period of about two hundred and fifty years. The earliest English writer who has had anything to say about the Arabian horse was the Duke of Newcastle, who seems to have known a great deal about the various types and breeds of horses of his day. During the period of the Commonwealth it appears he devoted his time, in the Netherlands, to training horses in the manege of that day. From his experience in this employment he became an expert in the form, structure, and docility of the different kinds of horses that he handled. When Charles II. was brought back and placed upon the throne, the duke also came to his own, and being a personal friend of the king he became his counselor and adviser in all matters relating to the improvement of the horses of the realm. In 1667 the duke published his famous book upon the horse, in which he speaks right out on any and every question that he touches. There can be no doubt that he knew more about horses and horse history than any man of his day. In speaking of the Arabian horse he says: “I never saw but one of these horses, which Mr. John Markham, a merchant, brought over, and said he was a right Arabian. He was a bay, but a little horse, and no rarity for shape, for I have seen many English horses far finer. Mr. Markham sold him to King James for five hundred pounds, and being trained up for a course (race), when he came to run every horse beat him.”

It is generally held that this Markham Arabian was the first of that breed ever brought to England, and this seems to be established by the fact that historians antedating his arrival make no mention of any Arabian horse before this one, and those following always speak of this horse as the first. In speaking of the powers of endurance of the Arabian horse, the duke says: “They talk they will ride fourscore miles in a day and never draw the bridle. When I was young I could have bought a nag for ten pounds that would have done as much very easily.” The duke’s masterful knowledge of the subject, as well as his special official relations to the king, gave him control of whatever was done or attempted in the direction of improving the racing stock of England. Tradition informs us that “King Charles II. sent abroad the master of the horse to procure a number of foreign horses and mares for breeding, and the mares brought over by him (as also many of their produce) have since been called Royal Mares.” It is very doubtful whether any such importation was ever made. The question has been discussed, from time to time and even recently, but nobody has ever yet discovered who was “Master of the Horse,” to what country he was sent or what the character of the mares he brought home, or where he got them. The fair presumption is that these “Royal Mares” were myths and that they were created merely for the purpose of putting a finish on certain very uncertain pedigrees, just as a trotting-horse man would finish a pedigree that he knew nothing about by saying, “out of a thoroughbred mare.” As a matter of course it has always been assumed that these “Royal Mares” were of distinctively pure Arabian blood. But, if we admit that such an importation was really made, we must consider that it was made under the direction and control of the Duke of Newcastle, the king’s mentor in all horse affairs, and this is sufficient proof that there was no Arabian blood about the “Royal Mares.” As the size of the English race horse and especially his weight of bone commenced to increase soon after this time, it strikes me as probable that this was the wise and guiding motive of the duke in making his selections of the “Royal Mares.”

When we come down a little nearer to our own times and step across the border from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, we are still in the realm of traditions, and many of them very preposterous. The deceptions practiced in nomenclature were so common as to be well-nigh universal. Everybody who owned a foreign horse must have “Arabian” attached to his name. To illustrate this evil and the misleading effects flowing from it, I will give two instances of the most famous horses in all English history. The Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian stand pre-eminent and before all others as progenitors of the English race horse. The former of these two was purchased at Aleppo, in Asia Minor, and brought to England in 1711, by Mr. Darley of Yorkshire who secured him through a brother in trade in that region. He was the sire of Flying Childers and many others, and his blood carried from generation to generation. Aleppo is in Northern Syria and far distant from Arabia. At one time it was embraced in Armenia Minor, the original home of the horse, and adjoined Cappadocia and Cilicia, all famous for the excellence of their horse stock more than two thousand years before there was a single horse in Arabia. Upon the restoration of the ancient Theban line of Pharaohs in Egypt, at the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, no time was lost by Thutmosis I. in leading a great army into Northern Syria for no other purpose that is apparent except to replenish and reinvigorate the horse stock of Egypt, from the region of Aleppo and further east, for this is the region from which they had secured their original stock. His successors pursued the same course, year after year, and the number of horses and chariots captured in battle, as well as the number of mares sent as tribute by the frightened people, were duly recorded in the annals of their achievements. If the Darley Arabian, so called, bore any relationship whatever to the Arabian horse, it can only be established by tracing him back to some one of the animals in Cappadocia that the Emperor Constantius sent to Arabia in the year A.D. 356. A writer of the seventeenth century, Dr. Alexander Bursell, in speaking of Aleppo, says: “Formerly this part of the country was famous for fine horses; and though many good ones are still bred here, it may be said they are much degenerated.” This is the observation of an intelligent man, written and published in 1756, about forty years after Mr. Darley’s horse was brought from there.

The other illustration is that of Godolphin Arabian. As a progenitor of race horses this was the greatest horse of his century, or indeed of any other century in the history of the English race horse. He died in 1753, and absolutely nothing is known of his origin or his early history. The story is generally accepted, and I suppose is true, that he was bought out of a cart in Paris, as an act of humanity, by a Mr. Coke, taken to London, presented to Mr. Williams, the keeper of a coffee-house, and passed from him to Lord Godolphin, who kept him till he died. The story that he was presented to Louis XV. by the Bey of Tunis in 1731 has never been verified in any manner, and breaks down on the vital point of date. Some intelligent Englishmen insist that he must have been an Arabian, while others insist that he must have been a Barb, while no man knows whether he was either one or the other. With the most prominent horses of the nation and of their century thus used to mislead the public mind as to their lineage, what are we to expect from the great ruck of the obscure and less prominent? But, as a more elaborate and methodical discussion of this topic will be found in the chapter on the English and American Race Horse, we will now turn our attention to the actual experiences with the Arabians in recent times.

When we come down to the present century we get into the era of newspapers that really begun to give the news, and thus educate their readers, not very authentically, but circumstantially, in what was passing in the world in every department of knowledge and enterprise. Under these wide sources of information, a few authentic experiences will serve to illustrate the true status of the Arabian horse and his influence, or lack of influence, on English and American horses. More than twenty years ago the Prince of Wales made a royal progress through Her Majesty’s dominions in the East. The enthusiasm was unbounded and he was loaded down with many valuable presents, among them several elegant, high-caste Arabian horses. It appears that some of these horses had already won reputation and money on the turf, and were considered the very best that could be found in the East. On their arrival they were greatly admired and praised, especially by the sporting friends of the prince, who seemed to have no doubt, nor did they conceal their opinions, that they could beat any horses in all England. This was a conclusion that a great many racing men, with longer memories, could not accept, and after a good deal of diplomacy a match was finally concluded between the prince’s best horse and an old horse that was third or fourth-class, in his prime, but was unsound and liable to break down any time he was extended. The prince was popular, had many supporters, and much money was pending. The old horse was patched up as well as possible, the day came, the race was started, and the old cripple was so much faster than the Arab that his managers had the hardest work in the world to prevent him from running clear away and disgracing the prince. This account of the race I had from one of the most eminent and successful trainers that England has produced. He witnessed the race and knew all the facts concerning it. Notwithstanding the popularity of the prince and the universal feeling of loyalty toward him, it was a long time before his Arabs ceased to be a laughing-stock among horsemen.

Some sixteen or eighteen years ago, an English gentleman of wealth and intelligence—Mr. Wilfrid S. Blunt—got it into his head that the way to improve the English race horse was to secure fresh infusions of pure Arabian blood. He was industrious in propagating his fad, in an amateurish way, through the columns of the English newspapers, evincing great zeal and a great lack of knowledge of the hundreds of experiments in the same direction and in the history of his own country that had proved disastrous. But he had a will of his own and a bank account that enabled him to carry out his views to their own realization. In the autumn of 1877 he made up a pleasant family party, consisting of his wife, Lady Anne, and two of her lady friends and started for Arabia, with the full determination to find the best and to buy nothing that was not of the purest and best lineage that could be found in all that country. Fortunately, Lady Anne carefully noted down everything that transpired in their journeyings and after the return wrote a very pleasant and readable book, understood to have been edited by her husband in some of its features. The title of the book—“The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates”—did not strike me pleasantly, for I never knew that any of the numerous Bedouin tribes were to be found on the Euphrates. But my purpose is not to criticise either the book or its title, but to follow the party over its itinerary and discover just where Mr. Blunt found the blood he was looking for, and upon what evidence he accepted it as “the best blood.” With this view I will carefully give his own language, so far as it applies to the point in view.

His first purchase was at Aleppo, where he got a mare he named Hagar, as he says, “for a very moderate sum.” “She was of the Kehilan-Ajuz breed.” “When purchased she was in very poor condition, having just gone through the severe training of a campaign.” “She was bred by the Gommussa, the most able of the horse-breeding tribes, had passed from them to the Roala, and had now been captured and ridden some two hundred miles, in hot haste, for sale to Aleppo.” “We never met anything in our travels that could compete with her over a distance, and she has often run down foxes and even hares, without assistance, carrying thirteen stone on her back.” This was the first experience of the English “tenderfoot” among Syrian horsethieves. According to his own showing, he bought her from the fellow who had stolen her and had ridden her two hundred miles to escape, and he accepted what the thief told about the breeding of the mare as true. The thief knew just what Mr. Blunt wanted and he shaped the pedigree and tracing to suit the purchaser. Mr. Blunt had no knowledge of this mare’s breeding, nor where she came from; still, her blood was to become one of the great influences in renovating the English race horse. This incident is of no importance, in itself, except as it illustrates the universal conditions under which amateurs buy horses in the Orient.

Upon leaving Aleppo, the party traveled eastward till they struck the Euphrates and then down the right bank of that river. The first town of any importance was Deyr, on the river, and just across was ancient Mesopotamia. They were still in the border land between the productive north and the desert south, with the Syrian desert between them and the Arabian desert. All this region is occupied with a mixture of races, employed in varied pursuits, with but a feeble trace of tribal authority, as all are under the direct government of the Sultan of Turkey.

“Deyr is well-known,” Mr. Blunt says, “as a horse market, and is, perhaps, the only town north of the Jebel Shammar where the inhabitants have any general knowledge of the blood and breeding of the beasts they possess. The townsmen, indeed, are but a single step removed from the Bedouins, their undoubted ancestors. They usually purchase their colts as yearlings either from the Gomussa, or some of the Sabaa tribes, and having broken them thoroughly, sell them at three years old to the Aleppo merchants. They occasionally, too, have mares left with them, in partnership, by the Anazah, and from these they breed according to the strictest desert rules. It is, therefore, for a stranger, by far the best market for thoroughbreds in Asia, and you may get some of the best blood at Deyr that can be found anywhere, besides having a guarantee of its authenticity, impossible, under ordinary circumstances, to get at Damascus or Aleppo. There are, I may say, no horses at Deyr but thoroughbreds.”

He made some purchases at Deyr and then they pursued their journey down the river, and at the most convenient point he crossed over to Bagdad, on the Tigris. Here he inspected the stud of the Turkish pasha, but the prices were high and he seemed to lack confidence in the purity of their breeding. Whatever the cause, he made no purchases, and soon started on his journey up the Tigris. Upon reaching Sherghat on the Tigris, he turned westward, and crossing ancient Mesopotamia, he was again at Deyr, where he seems to have made more purchases, and then started, in a southwesterly direction, with eighteen mares and two stallions for Damascus and the coast. This closed the search of Arabia for Arabian horses of the highest caste and purest blood, without really being in Arabia, and this is all that can be said of “The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates”—without having seen a real Bedouin.

No doubt Mr. Blunt thinks he is right in his high appreciation of the town of Deyr as a horse market; that it is “the best market for thoroughbreds in Asia;” and that “there are no horses in Deyr but thoroughbreds,” or he would not have bought his horses there. Dealing in horses seems to be the principal business of the people, they are all well informed on the best and purest strains of blood, according to Mr. Blunt, and all their own horses are thoroughbred. Truly an ideal market, an ideal people, and ideal horses, just suited to the needs of enthusiastic amateurs like Mr. Blunt. This remarkable horse town is located on the border between the rich grain fields and luxuriant meadows on the north, and the comparatively barren deserts of the south. On the north the country has been famous for thousands of years for the great numbers and excellence of the horses produced, and they are still produced of excellent form and quality, and are sold at very low prices. On the south is the land of the camel, and but few horses and those few held at high prices, and the simple term “Arabian horse” always brings them purchasers. Here, then, we find that Deyr is the very paradise of horse traders—a tribe, wherever we find them on the face of the earth, distinguished for elasticity of conscience. The north furnishes the horses and the south furnishes the pedigrees, and no wonder the Deyrites had nothing but “thoroughbreds” when Mr. Blunt came along. In the line of their business and from their southern neighbors, they had picked up enough “Arabian horse talk” to satisfy all inexperienced buyers that they knew all about the value of the different strains of Arabian blood, and could supply them from their own studs, at very reasonable prices. And thus Mr. Blunt brought home to England eighteen “Arabian” mares and two stallions, without any satisfactory evidence that they ever had seen Arabia. In this enthusiastic venture, resulting in utter failure, there is one alleviating fact that Mr. Blunt can call to mind, and that is that his horses were just as good for the purpose of improving the English race horse as any others that have been brought from the Orient in the past hundred years. Whatever their blood, whether genuine or counterfeit Arabians, they have all alike been failures, and all alike good for nothing.

Early in the history of our own government it became not an unusual thing for the Sultan of Turkey, the Emperor of Morocco, or some other potentate of the Saracenic races, to present to the President two horses, and as they were presents from royalty to what they esteemed royalty, they were necessarily of the highest caste and of the greatest value of any horses in all their dominions. It is probable that Mr. Jefferson was the first president to receive these royal gifts, and under the requirements of the constitution and without any disrespect to the donor, he ordered them to be sold to the highest bidder, and turned the money into the treasury. Several of the presidents received these presents of horses, and without knowing the fact, I will presume disposed of them the same way. In the case of President Lincoln, Mr. Seward seemed to be more highly favored and the sultan sent the horses to him. Through the State Agricultural Society, Mr. Seward presented his royal presents to the State of New York. My recollection is not very distinct, but my impression is that Mr. Van Buren had disposed of his in the same way. When General Grant received his, he was not in public office and hence they became his personal property. A number of the first of these importations, together with some others that were brought from Arabia, individually and by private persons, were, in the early part of the century, carried into the South, which was then the “race-horse region,” but the breeders there very soon discovered that in breeding from them they were taking a backward instead of a forward step. Their progeny could neither run nor trot, and as they were too small for the ordinary uses of the farmer and planter, they were almost unanimously rejected, with nothing left but the ignorant “fad” that was embodied in the name “Arabian.”

The most notable example of the folly of attempting to regenerate the American race horse by the introduction of the “blood of the desert” is furnished in the sad experience of the late A. Keene Richards, of Kentucky. He inherited a large estate, and when he came into possession he proved himself an intelligent and successful breeder, and ran the colts of his own breeding, with a full share of winnings. He was not a spendthrift nor a gambler, but he was not content with mediocrity in sharing triumphs with his neighbors, for he was ambitious to beat, them all. He soon had his head full of such horses as the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian, and he argued if that blood founded the English race horse, he would go to Arabia and get it, and it could not fail to regenerate the American race horse. He did not stop to inquire whether either of his great ideals might have had a drop of Arabian blood in his veins, but he started for Arabia at once. He brought home a few stallions and felt sure he was on the eve of the greatest triumph of his life. When the half-Arab produce of his strong and elegantly bred race mares were old enough to run the jockey club allowed the half-breeds seven pounds the advantage in weight and they were beaten. The club then allowed them fourteen pounds and they were again beaten; and finally the allowance was raised to twenty-one pounds, and they were still in the rear rank. Under these humiliating defeats a careful man would have hesitated before he went further, but he at once jumped to the conclusion that his defeat was not in the fact that Arab blood could not run fast enough to win, but in the fact, as he supposed, that the rascally Arabs had sold him blood that was not Arab blood. In a short time he was off for Arabia again, taking with him as companion and adviser the distinguished animal painter, Troye, who had a long and successful experience as a delineator of race horses and knew all about the anatomy of the horse. They spent several months among the different tribes, and in order to get “inside of the ring,” as it were, they ate with the Arabs, slept with the Arabs, and worshiped with the Arabs, as Mr. Richards told me himself. They came home full of the highest expectations, bringing several mares as well as stallions with them, and fully assured that every one was of the highest caste and the best form for racing that could be found on all the plains of the desert. After the foals of this importation were old enough to start in the stakes, they were given the same advantages in weight as before, and they proved no better than the first lot. Poor Mr. Richards was crushed in spirits, not only by the vanishing of his air castles, but by the importunacy of his creditors. In his heroic, but misguided, efforts to improve the American race horse by infusions of pure Arabian blood, he involved his once handsome estate, and he died hopelessly insolvent. He had bred a number of pure Arabs of several generations, but the abundant feed and luxuriant blue grass of Kentucky did not increase their size, for when they came under the auctioneer’s hammer they were but little “tackeys,” and they brought only the price of little “tackeys.”

The number of horses brought to this country, whether as gifts to statesmen or as private ventures, and called “Arabians,” is not very large, and it is safe to say that not one in ten of them ever saw Arabia. They came from Turkey or some of the Barbary States. But in the case of Mr. Richards there can be no doubt that he made his selections in Arabia itself. Those selections having been made personally and with care and skill, we are bound to accept them as genuine Arabians. When we find, therefore, that having been tested they are no better than the horses brought from Turkey or from Africa, we must conclude that the whole scheme is mere moonshine, and that Arabian blood as a means of improvement has failed to develop the value that enthusiasts and dreamers have claimed for it since “time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” Practical and thinking men always judge of the value of a breed of horses from what the representatives of that breed can do or what they fail to do. The emotional and unpractical are always looking for an ideal horse, and the poets and story writers are always furnishing them one. Where a horse figures in a story he is uniformly endowed with an almost supernatural intelligence and sense. To finish up the ideal horse, he always traces back to the “Courser of the Desert.” If his triumph is in a flight of speed, he distances all competitors because he is a pure Arabian. The story of “Ben Hur,” written by General Lew Wallace, furnishes a fitting illustration of this tendency of the public mind. The story of the chariot race at Antioch is a masterpiece of most exciting ingenuity, and one of the finest specimens of word painting in the English language. The irascible old sheik is quite overdrawn, but the judgment and skill of Ben Hur cannot be surpassed. As a matter of course, the team of black Arabians was bound to win. Every bright schoolboy in the country has read the story, and he has joined in the triumph of the black Arabians. The wide interest in the chariot race seemed to demand its pictorial delineation, and soon the public was gratified with a large and elegant etching, which hangs before me as I write. The only trouble about this excellent work of the imagination and the team of black Arabians is that there were no horses in Arabia till about three hundred and fifty years after the date of this supposed scene. We must let the poets sing and the novelists work out their plots, but it is well to pay some attention to the facts and experiences of history.

GODOLPHIN ARABIAN.

A true portrait taken from life by D. Murrier, painter to H. R. H. the Duke of Cumberland.

GODOLPHIN ARABIAN.

A distorted copy by Mr. Stubbs who never saw the horse, and changed to express the idea of fleetness.

CHAPTER V.
THE ENGLISH RACE HORSE.

The real origin of the English race horse in confusion—Full list of the “foundation stock” as given by Mr. Weatherby one hundred years ago—The list complete and embraces all of any note—Admiral Rous’ extravaganza—Godolphin Arabian’s origin wholly unknown—His history—Successful search for his true portrait—Stubbs’ picture a caricature—The true portrait alone supplies all that is known of his origin and blood.

The English Race Horse is the great central figure of all the horse literature of the past two hundred years. Much has been claimed for him and much has been written about him, in a haphazard way, by people who know but little of the subject. A few men of independent and real thought have written on this subject, but they have devoted their attention to the comparing of family with family or individual with individual. Of the books that have been written by brainless people on the English horse there is no end, and they are generally mere repetitions, without giving credit, of what somebody has said before. Among all the books that have been written on this subject I have never yet found one that even pretended to make a serious attempt at discovering the real origin of the English Race Horse. They all seem to agree with Admiral Rous that he is purely descended from the Arabian horse, and without one drop of the blood of the indigenous English horse. The average writer for the two past centuries has been content with just this much knowledge, and he wants nothing more. Occasionally it is modestly suggested in some magazine article that this exclusively Arabian origin may not be true, and I am glad to note that these suggestions are becoming more frequent of late years. It has been claimed that the pure Arabian origin of the race horse “is as solid as a pyramid,” all of which may be accepted—but, unfortunately for the claimant, the “pyramid” is standing on its apex, and when the facts breathe upon it, as gently as a zephyr, it will topple over. The most convenient and the most authoritative collection of facts relating to the earliest exotic horses that were brought in is to be found in the English Stud Book itself, and as but few of my readers have access to this work, I will copy that portion of it entire, as it appears in the first volume, and the edition of 1803. In the edition of 1808 the list was reprinted with four additional animals and some verbal changes, which, when important, will be noted.

“ARABIANS, BARBS AND TURKS.”

1. The Helmsley Turk was an old Duke of Buckingham’s and got Bustler, etc.

2. Place’s White Turk was the property of Mr. Place, studmaster to Oliver Cromwell, when Protector, and was the sire of Wormwood Commoner, and the great grandams of Windham, Grey Ramsden and Cartouch.

3. Royal Mares: King Charles the Second sent abroad the master of the horse, to procure a number of foreign horses and mares for breeding, and the mares brought over by him (as also many of their produce) have since been called Royal Mares.

4. Dodsworth, though foaled in England, was a natural Barb. His dam, a Barb mare, was imported in the time of Charles the Second, and was called a Royal Mare. She was sold by the studmaster, after the king’s death, for forty guineas, at twenty years old, when in foal (by the Helmsley Turk) with Vixen, dam of the Old Child Mare.

5. The Stradling or Lister Turk was brought into England by the Duke of Berwick, from the siege of Buda, in the reign of James the Second. He got Snake, the D. of Kingston’s Brisk and Piping Peg, Coneyskins, the dam of Hip, and the grandam of Bolton Sweepstakes.

6. The Byerly Turk was Captain Byerly’s charger in Ireland, in King William’s wars (1869, etc.). He did not cover many bred mares, but was the sire of D. of Kingston’s Sprite, who was thought nearly as good as Leedes; the D. of Rutland’s Black Hearty and Archer, and the D. of Devonshire’s Basto, Ld. Bristol’s Grasshopper, and Ld. Godolphin’s Byerly Gelding, all in good forms: Halloway’s Jigg, a middling horse; and Knightley’s Mare, in a very good form.

7. Greyhound. The cover of this foal was in Barbary, after which both his sire and dam were purchased, and brought into England by Mr. Marshall. He was got by King William’s White Barb Chillaby, out of Slugey, a natural Barb Mare. Greyhound got the D. of Wharton’s Othello, said to have beat Chanter easily in a trial, giving him a stone, but who, falling lame, ran only one match in public, against a bad horse; he also got Panton’s Whitefoot, a very good horse; Osmyn, a very fleet horse and in good form for his size; the D. of Wharton’s Rake, a middling horse; Ld. Halifax’s Sampson, Goliah and Favorite, pretty good 12-stone Plate horses; Desdemona, and other good mares, and several ordinary Plate horses, who ran in the North where he was a common stallion and covered many of the best mares.

8. The D’Arcy White Turk was the sire of Old Hautboy, Grey Royal, Cannon, etc.

9. The D’Arcy Yellow Turk was the sire of Spanker, Brimmer, and the great-great-grandam of Cartouch.

10. The Marshall or Selaby Turk was the property of Mr. Marshall’s brother, studmaster to King William, Queen Anne, and King George the first. He got the Curwen Old Spot, the dam of Windham, the dam of Derby Ticklepitcher, and great-grandam of Bolton Sloven and Fearnought.

11. Curwen’s Bay Barb was a present to Louis the Fourteenth from Muley Ishmael, King of Morocco, and was brought into England by Mr. Curwen, who being in France when Count Byram and Count Thoulouse (two natural sons of Louis the Fourteenth) were, the former, master of the horse, and the latter an admiral, he procured of them two Barb horses, both of which proved excellent stallions, and were well known by the names of the Curwen Bay Barb and the Thoulouse Barb. Curwen’s Bay Barb got Mixbury and Tantivy, both very excellent formed Galloways. The first of them was only thirteen hands two inches high, and yet there were not more than two horses of his time that could beat him at light weights. Brocklesby, Little George, Yellow Jack, Bay Jack, Monkey, Dangerfield, Hip, Peacock, and Flatface, the first two in good forms, the rest middling; two Mixburys, full brothers to the first Mixbury, middling Galloways; Long Meg, Brocklesby Betty, and Creeping Molly, extraordinarily high-formed mares; Whiteneck, Mistake, Sparkler, and Lightfoot, very good mares, and several middling Galloways, who ran for Plates in the North. He got two full sisters to Mixbury, one of which bred Partner, Little Scar, Soreheels and the dam of Crab; the other was the dam of Quiet, Silver Eye and Hazard. He did not cover many mares except Mr. Curwen’s and Mr. Pelham’s.

12. The Thoulouse Barb became afterward the property of Sir J. Parsons and was the sire of Bagpiper, Blacklegs, Mr. Panton’s Molly, and the dam of Cinnamon.

13. Darley’s Arabian was brought over by a brother of Mr. Darley, of Yorkshire, who, being an agent in merchandise abroad, became member of a hunting club, by which means he acquired interest to procure this horse. He was the sire of Childers, and also got Almanzor, a very good horse; a white-legged horse of the D. of Somerset’s, full brother to Almanzor, and thought to be as good, but meeting with an accident, he never ran in public; Cupid and Brisk, good horses; Dædalus, a very swift horse; Dart, Shipjack, Maica and Aleppo, good Plate horses, though out of bad mares; Ld. Lonsdale’s Mare in very good form, and Ld. Tracy’s Mare in a good one for Plates. He covered very few mares except Mr. Darley’s, who had very few well-bred mares besides Almanzor’s Dam.

14. Sir J. William’s Turk (more commonly called the Honeywood Arabian) got Mr. Honeywood’s two True Blues; the elder of them was the best Plate horse in England, for four or five years; the younger was in very high form and got the Rumford Gelding, and Ld. Onslow’s Grey Horse, middling horses out of road mares. It is not known that this Turk covered any bred mares except the dam of the two True Blues.

15. The Belgrade Turk was taken at the siege of Belgrade, by Gen. Merci, and sent by him to the Prince de Craon, from whom he was a present to the Prince of Lorraine. He was afterward purchased by Sir Marmaduke Wyvill, and died in his possession about 1740.

16. Croft’s Bay Barb was got by Chillaby, out of the Moonah Barb Mare.

17. The Godolphin Arabian was imported by Mr. Coke, at whose death he became (together with Cade, Regulus, etc., then young) the property of Ld. Godolphin. His first employment was that of a teaser to Hobgoblin, who, refusing to cover Roxana, she was put to the Arabian, and from that cover produced Lath, the first of his get. He was also sire of Cade, Regulus, Blank, etc., and what is considered very remarkable, as well as a strong proof of his excellence as a stallion, there is not a superior horse now on the turf without a cross of the Godolphin Arabian, neither has there been for several years past. He was a brown bay, with no white, except on the off heel behind, and about fifteen hands high (a picture of him is in the library at Gog Magog, Cambridgeshire). It is not known to what particular race of the Arab breed, indeed it has been asserted that he was a Barb. He died at Gog Magog in 1753, in or about the 29th year of his age. The story of his playfellow, the black cat, must not be omitted here, especially as an erroneous account has got abroad, copied from the first introduction to the present work. Instead of his grieving for the loss of the cat she survived him, though but for a short time; she sat upon him after he was dead in the building erected for him, and followed him to the place where he was buried under a gateway near the running stable; sat upon him there till he was buried, then went away, and never was seen again, till found dead in the hayloft.

18. The Cullen Arabian was brought over by Mr. Nosco and was sire of Mr. Warren’s Camillus, Ld. Orford’s Matron, Mr. Gorges’ Sour Face, the dam of Regulator, etc., etc.

19. The Coomb Arabian (sometimes called the Pigot Arabian and sometimes the Bolingbroke Grey Arabian) was the sire of Methodist, the dam of Crop, etc., etc.

20. The Compton Barb, more commonly called the Sedley Arabian, was sire of Coquette, Greyling, etc.

(Additions in 1808 Edition.)

21. King James the First bought an Arabian of Mr. Markham, a merchant, for 500gs., said (but with little probability) to have been the first of the breed ever seen in England. The Duke of Newcastle says, in his treatise on Horsemanship, that he had seen the above Arabian, and describes him as a small bay horse, and not of very excellent shape.

23. Bloody Buttocks; nothing further can be traced from the papers of the late Mr. Crofts than that he was a grey Arabian, with a red mark on his hip, from whence he derived his name.

23. The Vernon Arabian was a small chestnut horse. He covered at Highflyer Hall, and was the sire of Alert, etc. Alert had good speed for a short distance.

24 & 25. The Wellesley Grey, and Chestnut Arabians (so called) were brought from the East, but evidently not Arabians. The former was a horse of good shape, with the size and substance of an English hunter.

This list of twenty-seven different animals, which for the sake of convenience I have numbered, was presented to the public more than a hundred years ago by Mr. Weatherby, the highest of all English authorities, as the foundation stock from which the English race horse was propagated. The uniform omission of dates of importations, etc., discloses the fact that the compiler had no accurate knowledge of the animals or their history, and that he was dependent largely upon very uncertain traditions for his information. It must not be understood that the animals in this list were contemporaneous, or that the list embraces all the foreign animals that were brought in, but only those that were recognized as of value in founding the breed.

To understand just what we have to consider, I will place here, in juxtaposition to the above list, the remark of Admiral Rous, at one time the great race-horse authority of England, which expresses the popular opinion as to the origin of the race horse, that is practically universally held in all lands. The admiral says: “The British race horse is a pure Eastern exotic whose pedigree may be traced two thousand years, the true son of Arabia Deserta, without a drop of English blood.” To reach the approximate truth on the issue here made, and to puncture this extravaganza is the work now before us.

Numbers 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15, were Turks, and to these we may add Mr. Darley’s horse, known as the Darley Arabian, number 13, for he was brought from Aleppo in Turkey, far removed from Arabia, and famous for the great numbers and excellence of its horses many centuries before Arabia had any horses. To carry horses, for sale, from the deserts of Arabia, where they are scarce, to the region of Aleppo, where they are very plenty, and of the highest quality, would be simply “carrying coals to Newcastle.” We may therefore safely conclude that the ten horses here enumerated were Turks.

Numbers 4, 7, 11, 12, 16, 20 were Barbs, as they are named in the list. It is a surprise to me that these six horses should be designated as “Barbs,” for it has been the usage of many generations to call these horses “Arabians.” As late as 1819 the Dey of Algiers sent several Algerine horses as a present to the Prince Regent of England, and they were always spoken of as “Arabians.”

Numbers 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 are all unsatisfactory as to their origin. Number 17—Lord Godolphin’s horse—is wholly unknown as to his blood elements, and further on his history will be considered. Number 18 “was brought over,” but from whence nobody knows. Number 19 is in the same condition, and not one of his different owners has been able to tell us anything about his origin. Number 21 was, possibly, an Arabian, but the Duke of Newcastle, who knew the horse well, seems to have doubted his genuineness on account of his inferiority. However this may have been, he preceded other importations so many years that it is not known that he ever sired a colt, and as a progenitor we may as well strike him out. Number 22 seems to be in darkness, and all efforts to find his origin having failed he may as well be classed as unknown. Number 23 is furnished with no evidence that he was entitled to be classed as an Arabian. Numbers 24 and 25 were confessedly not genuine.

This reduces the analysis to its lowest form and shows that in the original foundation stock, including Mr. Darley’s horse (13), there were ten Turks and six Barbs that can be accepted with reasonable certainty. This leaves eight so-called “Arabians,” from which we must eliminate numbers 17, 21, 24, 25, leaving numbers 18, 19, 22, 23, without any evidence whatever that they were Arabians except in name. From these four rather obscure animals, therefore, according to the Rous dictum, the English race horse must have derived every drop of his blood; and yet there is not a scintilla of evidence either direct or inferential that any one of them, or the ancestors of any one of them, ever saw Arabia. From the custom of calling every horse from abroad an “Arabian,” that has prevailed in England for more than two hundred years, it is fair to conclude that there was no Arabian blood in the foundation stock. It was the blood of the Turks and the Barbs, commingled with that of the native blood that had been bred to race for centuries, that furnished the foundation of the modern English and American race horse.

Blood in the race horse is an imperative necessity, but it must be blood that has been carefully selected from winners, and raced for generations, or it is of no value as an element of speed. If the English race horse had been a strictly pure exotic from Arabia Deserta, as Admiral Rous maintained, he would have been of no value either as a race horse or the progenitor of race horses, without many generations of careful selection and development of speed.

The Godolphin Arabian was altogether the greatest horse of his century. He flourished during most of the reign of King George II., but the horsemen of the world, even Englishmen themselves, know far more about him than they do about the reign of that monarch. Still, nobody knows anything of his birthplace, his origin or his blood. He was to the English race horse what Rysdyk’s Hambletonian has been to the American trotter. Neither of them was ever in a race, but each of them stood immeasurably superior to all others of his day as a progenitor of speed, at his own gait. From the latter we had reason to expect speed because we knew he inherited speed, but from the former we had no reason to expect anything, for we knew nothing of what he inherited until he proved his inheritance by what he transmitted to his progeny. Some of the principal semi-tragic incidents, so far as known in the early life of Godolphin Arabian, were seized upon by the great novelist Eugene Sue, and out of them grew a “horse novel” from his gifted pen. The horse was foaled about 1724, was brought to England from France about 1730, and died at Magog Hills, 1753. There seems to be a substantial agreement among those who had the best opportunities to know that the horse was employed on the streets of Paris as a common drudge in a cart and driven by a brutal master. A Mr. Coke, who is represented to have been a Quaker, was in Paris on business and he happened to witness the brutality of the ruffian who was this horse’s master in trying to make him draw a load of wood up a steep acclivity on to a new bridge, which the horse after repeated trials and clubbings was unable to accomplish. To relieve the poor brute from his sufferings, Mr. Coke’s feelings of humanity asserted themselves, and he stepped forward and bought the horse on the spot and had him released from the cart. Mr. Coke, it is said, brought the horse to London and presented him to Mr. Williams, the proprietor of a famous coffee-house, and Mr. Williams presented him to Earl Godolphin.

In September, 1829, Mr. John S. Skinner commenced the publication of the first horse magazine that ever appeared in this country, and in the first number there appeared a steel engraving purporting to be executed by the famous Stubbs and to represent the great horse, Godolphin Arabian. Not many years afterward I came into possession of a copy of this publication from the beginning, and the sight of this picture always impressed me as the most ludicrous abortion of the likeness of a horse that could be conceived of. The neck was absolutely longer than the body, the legs were about strong enough for a sheep, and all over it lacked strength of both muscle and bone to a most absurd extent. When this picture appeared in London, some years before, it was laughed at by all artists as well as by all men who knew anything about the shape of a horse, as a monstrosity, and it was received in the same spirit on this side of the water; but it bore the name of a great artist and that was sufficient to secure the approbation of the unthinking and the unknowing. The only key to the origin of the horse, the only pedigree that can be given, must be found written in his own structure of bone and muscle and brain. A true delineation, therefore, of his form and shape became a matter of the highest moment, not merely to satisfy the curiosity of the curious, but as a study of the true sources of his wonderful prepotency.

Sixty-five years ago a correspondent of Mr. Skinner’s magazine, referred to above, and a descendant of Mr. Samuel Galloway of Maryland, spoke of an oil painting of Godolphin Arabian that had hung in the hall at Tulip Hill from the days of his childhood as still hanging there, and said that it was wholly unlike the Stubbs engraving. Mr. Galloway was one of Maryland’s land barons, an enthusiastic horse breeder, and a successful horse racer. He was educated at Cambridge, I think; and if so, no doubt he saw Godolphin Arabian many times before he died, for he was within four or five miles of him, and his sporting instincts could not fail to take him to see so great a horse when so near at hand. As he was a young man of great wealth and great ambitions, it is quite probable he was on terms of friendly acquaintance, if not intimacy, with Lord Godolphin, and thus secured the oil painting from that distinguished friend himself. This theory is strengthened by the fact that the picture still bears the coat of arms of Lord Godolphin.

To reach and secure this picture, or at least a faithful copy of it, became an object of continuous effort that was never intermitted for more than twenty years. At last, in the spring of 1877, one of the correspondents of Wallace’s Monthly, Prof. M. C. Ellzey, of Blacksburg, Virginia, wrote me that the picture was then the property of Dr. J. H. Murray (whose wife was a lineal descendant of Mr. Galloway) of Cedar Park, adjoining Tulip Hill, West River, Maryland, and that he would have the picture sent to me. In a few days it arrived, and when my eyes rested upon it, it was like the feast of a lifetime; for there was all that could ever be known of the greatest horse of his century. The painting was in a state of excellent preservation and the coat of arms of Lord Godolphin was plainly traceable. The horse is shown from his right side, in his rough, paddock condition, with his right hind foot a little advanced, and his head low and without any animation or excitement. The standpoint of the artist is a little forward of the shoulders, and he must have been a tall man or the horse must have been a low horse, or perhaps both, for he sees over the horse and portrays the fine spring of muscle over the loin, on the opposite side of the vertebra. From the position of the artist the drawing is slightly foreshortened, and this, together with the advance of his right hind foot, intensifies the droop of the rump, to some degree, in the outline. From the proportions, as shown in the painting, I would conclude he was below fourteen and a half hands high rather than above it. His head is striking and unusually large for an animal of his size, with remarkable width between the eyes, and without a star to lighten it up. His ear is not fine, and it droops backward as he stands, as if half-asleep. His mane is sparse and in disorder. His throat-latch is very good, and the windpipe large and well developed. The neck is of a fair length for a horse of his blocky formation, and there is nothing unusual about it except its great depth at the collar place. The slope of the shoulder is very marked and shows his ability to carry his head in the air when he wished to do so, but the shoulder itself is coarse and angular to an unusual degree. His withers rise very abruptly and there is great perpendicular depth through the carcass at this point. His back is remarkably short and the spread and arch of his loins is simply magnificent. But the point of superlative excellence is in the remarkable development of power in his quarters. His limbs, instead of being “spider legs,” are unusually strong for an animal of his size; indeed, they might be considered coarse for any horse that was pretended to be a race horse. His tail is of the usual weight and somewhat wavy. With the addition that there is a little white at the coronet of the right hind foot, and not forgetting his friend and companion the cat, I have made a somewhat detailed description of what is represented in the painting. Several artists examined the picture, and they pronounced it the work of an artist of ability and experience. The signature “D. M. pinxt” was carefully examined, but no one was able to throw any light upon the name represented by the initial letters “D. M.”

While this painting contained within itself evidence of its great value as a likeness of its subject, it lacked confirmation as “true to the life;” and nothing could supply this lack but to find a portrait of the same horse, painted by another artist, and then if the two agreed, the proof would be fully satisfying to the understanding. A little over a hundred years ago Lord Francis Godolphin Osborne, Duke of Leeds, and heir to Lord Godolphin, wrote Sir Charles Bunbury, a great race-horse man, that he had a painting of Godolphin Arabian, by Wootton, at Gog Magog Hills. Over sixty years ago an American gentleman wrote to Mr. Skinner’s magazine that he had seen a painting of Godolphin Arabian hanging in Houghton Hall, Norfolk. In 1878 my physician told me I must quit work for awhile, and that I had better visit the great Exposition at Paris that year. I was anxious to see the Fair, but I was a great deal more anxious to see those two paintings of Godolphin Arabian, if they were still in existence. Gog Magog Hills is a quaint old place, and the origin and meaning of its name is lost in a very remote antiquity. As it has not been the residence of its owners for more than a hundred years, it is much neglected. The people in charge were very obliging, and I was immediately admitted to the view of Wootton’s painting of Godolphin Arabian. The first glance was a complete vindication of the truthfulness of the Maryland painting as a true likeness in every important feature of the outline and proportions. The canvas is about four and a half by four feet, inclosed in a massive frame. After studying it and comparing it, point by point for more than an hour, with a copy of the Maryland painting, it became evident they were not painted by the same hand, although the horse had the same position in both pictures, with the exception that the right hind foot was thrown backward in the Wootton painting instead of forward, and thus gave a less abrupt droop of the rump. The head was precisely the same shape, but in the large painting the articulations were less distinct and expressive.

After a little peregrination through Norfolk, studying the “Norfolk Trotter” as then called, but since called “Hackney,” on his “native heath,” I reached Houghton Hall, in Norfolk. This grand old place was built over a hundred and sixty years ago by the famous Sir Robert Walpole, and at that time it was considered the most splendid structure, as a gentleman’s country seat, in all England. For many years it has been the property of the Marquis of Cholmondeley, but is not often occupied as a residence. Here too, I was lucky, for upon my entrance to the picture gallery, about the first object upon which my eye rested was the painting of the Godolphin Arabian, and the first impression was that there must be “spooks” around, for that seemed certainly the Maryland picture I was looking at. I had it taken down and removed to a good light, and there the whole mystery was removed. It is difficult to compare two peas. All you can say about them is that they were just alike, and that is all I can say about the Galloway picture in Maryland and the Houghton Hall picture in England. The paintings were the same size, and the pigments used were of precisely the same shades of color and quality. The colors were peculiar in the fact that the artist had used no varnish nor oil that would leave a shiny appearance. The Houghton Hall picture had a black, glossy margin all around it of about five inches in width on which the names of the most noted of his progeny were inscribed in gold letters, and at the bottom was this inscription: “The original picture taken at The Hills, by D. Murrier, painter to H. R. H. the Duke of Cumberland.” This explained the modest signature attached to the Maryland picture, which was a replica of the original. “The Hills” is the local designation of “Gog Magog Hills.” The word “original” not only implies that the picture was made from life, but that one or more replicas were made at the same time.

Here, then, in this picture, we have all that we know or probably ever will know of the origin and pedigree of this horse. It does not tell us what he was, but it does tell us in the most clear and unmistakable language what he was not. There is no feature nor element in his make-up that does not say that he was neither an Arabian nor a Barb. He was a stout, strong-boned, heavily muscled, short-legged horse. In his form and shape he was very far removed from an ideal progenitor of race horses, but he was that progenitor all the same. About forty years after his death Mr. Stubbs, who never saw the horse, brought out a painting of him which all artists laughed at as the picture of an impossible horse. This picture, however, was engraved on steel and became the standard representation of Godolphin Arabian, in England, till this day. Both these pictures are here given, and a comparison of many points makes it evident that Stubbs copied from the original of Murrier or from the painting by Wootton, which was probably also a copy of Murrier, and he followed his copy just as closely as he could while converting a big-boned, stout saddle horse into a long-necked, spindle-shanked race horse. By actual measurement the neck is longer than the body, but it is not necessary to point out the Stubbs absurdities, as they are apparent to every eye. It was simply an awkward and dishonest attempt to express in his form and shape such a pedigree as a great racing sire should have had. In these two pictures we have the real and the imaginary—the honest and the dishonest.

The search for this picture and then for its verification was a labor of many years. I never expected to find the horse’s origin, but the discovery of his likeness seemed to be in the bounds of a possibility that was finally realized. Murrier’s picture, as a mere work of art, is of no mean value. It contains within itself undoubted evidence that it is a true picture of a horse, and it is shown circumstantially that this horse was the great “unknown and untraced founder” of the English race horse, with nothing of the race horse in his appearance.

The name of this horse has been a misnomer ever since the day he fell into the hands of Lord Godolphin, and it has misled a multitude of men to their financial hurt. Of late years the more intelligent class of writers, instead of calling him an “Arabian” call him a “Barb,” but there is just as much propriety in using one name as the other, and not a scintilla of authority for using either. Whatever may have been his origin, his marvelous structural combination of propelling power supplied what was wanting in the English stock of his day, and gave him success. Since then thousands of Arabians and Barbs have been tried and all of them have failed.

CHAPTER VI.
THE ENGLISH RACE HORSE (Continued).

England supplied with horses before the Christian era—Bred for different purposes—Markham on the speed of early native horses—Duke of Newcastle on Arabians—His choice of blood to propagate—Size of early English horses—Difficulties about pedigrees in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Early accumulations very trashy—The Galloways and Irish Hobbies—Discrepancies in size—The old saddle stock—The pacers wiped out—Partial revision of the English Stud Book.

Britain was fully supplied with horses when first invaded by the Romans, but as there is no history beyond that period we are only groping in the dark when we attempt to discover when or whence this supply was procured. The most reasonable theory is that the first supply came from the Phœnician merchants, when they were trading for tin in the southwestern part of Britain. If this theory be correct, the trading between the Phœnicians and the Britons could hardly have been later than the fourth century before the Christian era, and it is more probable that it was several centuries earlier. This topic, however, has been considered in a preceding chapter. Another theory is that when the tides of migration struck the Atlantic, in the higher latitudes, there was a natural deflection toward the warmer countries of the south, the people carrying their horses with them. But from the primitive condition of the arts and of maritime affairs among the Norsemen of that very early period, and from the insular position of Britain, it seems to me that to reach it with horses, the most probable source of supply was from that great nation whose “ships of Tarshish” had been trading to all lands more than a thousand years before the Christian era. But, laying all theories aside, there are some facts and dates that we know, and the particular one to which I wish here to call attention is the historical record that when the Romans first visited Britain they found an abundant supply of horses; and this was about four hundred years before Arabia received her supply from the Emperor Constantius.

From the time of the Romans in Britain, horse-racing has been a popular and favorite amusement of our ancestors, and from that time horses have been bred for special purposes. The “Great Horse,” as he was called, was bred for war, parade, and show, and was large enough and strong enough to carry a knight in armor. The smaller horses were bred for the race or the chase, others for the saddle on account of their easy, gliding motion, and the comfort of the rider, while others, again, were stout of back and limb and able to carry burdens. In regard to the speed of the horses bred for that purpose, Mr. Gervase Markham, the second Englishman who undertook to write a book on the horse, has given us some very interesting and valuable information. He brought out his work in the latter part of the sixteenth century, and it passed through several “enlarged and improved” editions. In the edition of 1606 he says:

“For swiftness what nation has brought forth the horse which excelled the English? When the best Barbaries that ever were in their prime, I saw them overcome by a black Hobbie, of Salisbury, and yet that black Hobbie was overcome by a horse called Valentine, which Valentine neither in hunting nor running was ever equalled, yet was a plain English horse, both by syre and dam.”

From this we must conclude that some horses from the Barbary States had been brought over previous to 1606, which doubtless antedated the arrival of King James’ Arabian. This is the horse known as the Markham Arabian, and is in the above list of foundation stallions. In speaking of the Arabian horses as a breed, the Duke of Newcastle remarks as follows upon this particular representative of that breed:

“I never saw but one of these horses, which Mr. John Markham, a merchant, brought over and said he was a right Arabian. He was a bay, but a little horse, and no rarity for shape, for I have seen many English horses far finer. Mr. Markham sold him to King James for five hundred pounds, and being trained up for a course (race), when he came to run every horse beat him.”

The duke then goes on to speak of the staying qualities of the Arabians:

“They talk they will ride fourscore miles in a day and never draw the bridle. When I was young I could have bought a nag for ten pounds that would have done as much very easily.”

These remarks are repeated here because they are specially pertinent in this connection.

It will be conceded by every one who has any knowledge of the horse history of this period that the Duke of Newcastle was the best-informed man of his generation on all subjects connected with the history and breeding of the horse. His preference for blood was in the following order: The Barb, the Turk, the Spaniard, the Neapolitan, and the handsomest of the English stock. It will be observed that in this classification the Arabian has no place.

From these illustrations, to which other similar ones might be added, it seems to be evident that the native English stock did not lack speed so much as they lacked quality, finish, and beauty. Perhaps size should be included in this enumeration. They had been bred and trained to run for centuries, and they were as stout and fleet as the exotics, but they lacked the qualifications of beauty and style. The foreigners possessed what the natives lacked, and more than all they furnished both the climatic and the blood outcross that were needed to re-invigorate the native character. It was the custom of the people in the seventeenth century to let their horses of both sexes roam at will through forests and glades, and in this way the average size had been reduced and the law of Henry VIII. (prohibiting the running at large of stallions under a certain size) had become a nullity. At the time of the restoration of Charles II. (1660) the average size of the traveling stock of England was very small—perhaps not over thirteen hands high—and then commenced the serious work of increasing the size and improving the speed of the light horse stock, under the direction and influence of the Duke of Newcastle. The introduction of the new blood would give vigor to the stock, but as that blood was the blood of Turks and Barbs, probably but little if any larger than the native stock, the mystery still remains unsolved. In about one hundred years from that time the average size of the race horse had been brought up from less than fourteen to about fifteen hands. This increase of size cannot be accounted for on any other grounds than the introduction of the blood of some larger breed. We cannot conceive of this being the blood of the old Flanders stock that had been brought over centuries before; hence I am strongly of the opinion that the duke knew just what he was doing when he brought in a lot of stallions and mares (the latter called the “Royal Mares”) without telling anybody what they were or where they came from. This view is strengthened by the fact that none of the descendants of these mares, for several generations, ever made a mark upon the turf. If we reject this theory of the “Royal Mares,” we are then forced to the conclusion that the increase of size came chiefly from the large cold-blooded mares of the native stock. The fleet running families of the natives were small, and the imported Turks and Barbs were but little if any larger; hence, if we accept the evidence of our own senses and study the great variations in height, we cannot reject the conclusion that these variations had their origin in the size of the original elements entering into the formation of the breed.

What was the extent of the influence of the speed of the old English race horse upon the new race horse that sprang up in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? This is a question that has not been very much discussed, but every intelligent and thinking man has given it more or less thought. Britain was not rapid in the progress of civilization and refinement, but through all the centuries of her history she had her race horses and she ran them. There can be no doubt that many of these native horses could outrun and outlast the best of the exotics that were brought in. None of those exotics, so far as we know, could run and win. Their value, then, was measured, not by what they could do themselves, but by what their progeny could do; and that progeny, at the foundation, carried half the blood of the old tribes. There were no racing calendars in the seventeenth century and none till the second decade of the eighteenth, and during all that time the blood of every man’s horse would, naturally, be fashionable blood. When the racing calendars were established they were a partial check upon untruthful representations, but this check only extended to the sire of the animal, and was then not always trustworthy. This left the whole maternal side open to all kinds of misrepresentation, and as the Anglo-Saxon race is fond of liberty, every man exercised the liberty of making his pedigrees to suit himself. Thus, through advertisements, sale papers, etc., great multitudes of fictitious pedigrees, all shaped on fashionable lines, gained currency and were propagated from owner to owner, from generation to generation. On this point I speak from the personal knowledge of a long lifetime in connection with such affairs in our own country, and I take it for granted that our English ancestors were no better and no worse than we are ourselves. This was the condition of things in England for about one hundred and fifty years, and when Mr. Weatherby was at work on the Stud Book he was overflowed with a flood of those bald-headed fictions, concocted by generations long past, and nobody could disprove them. In this way a large portion of the accumulated rubbish of past generations found its way into the English Stud Book and there it stands to-day, serving only to misguide the seeker after truth.

The earliest records of English racing commence with the year 1709, and at Newmarket 1716. There have been several racing calendars published at different times, but probably the best and most convenient for office use is the Racing Register published by Bailey Bros., commencing with the first and now filling several large volumes. In the early days very few of the winners even had any pedigree, but after the lapse of about fifty years we find it the rule to insert the sire of all winners, although there were still some exceptions. Under this usage it became possible in the course of time to establish the leading facts on the paternal side, and thus the work of the stud-book compiler was greatly facilitated. Those racing calendars, although intended merely to serve the convenience of men who bet their money, caring nothing for blood, served the more permanent and valuable purpose of fixing the paternal lines in the genealogy of the English race horse.

In 1786 Mr. William Pick, of York, England, published “A Careful Collection of all the Pedigrees it was then Possible to Obtain,” thus antedating Mr. Weatherby’s “Introduction” by five years. In 1785 Mr. Pick had commenced the publication of a racing calendar called “The Sportsman and Breeder’s Vade Mecum,” which was continued a good many years. These little annual volumes were well received, and they were the forerunners of Pick’s Turf Register, the first volume of which was brought out in 1703. This was the same year that the first volume of Weatherby’s Stud Book appeared, and there was a sharp rivalry between the two authors, not merely as two men, but as representing two divisions of the country. Mr. Pick was a Yorkshire man and Mr. Weatherby was a Londoner. Yorkshire claimed to be the “race-horse region” of England, and the Southrons were ready to fight rather than concede that claim. This rivalry survived two or three generations of racing men, and it is a question whether it has yet subsided. In the north Pick was the authority and in the south, Weatherby.

These two men worked on different plans, and each had its advantages. Pick limited his labors to the great animals of the past, and took them up in chronological order, giving a brief sketch of the history and performances of each. This plan required space, and when he had completed his first volume of five hundred and twenty-eight pages he had only reached the close of 1763. The second volume, bringing the work down to the close of 1772, made its appearance in 1805. Mr. Pick did not live to continue the work, and it fell into the hands of Mr. R. Johnson, who brought out the third volume in 1822, which continued the chronological order to the close of 1782. After the lapse of forty-five years, namely 1867, the fourth volume appeared under Mr. Johnson’s name, bringing the work to the close of 1792, and I am not aware that the work has been continued. These four volumes contained much that cannot be found elsewhere, and are very valuable.

When we come to study these assemblages of impossible things put together and called pedigrees, we begin to realize the absolute rottenness of the alleged pedigrees of that whole early period. Take, for instance, the case of the horse called the Bald Galloway. He bore this name because he had a bald face, and was of the Galloway breed. This Galloway breed took its name from the old Province of Galloway, in the southwestern part of Scotland. They were small, active horses and were famous for many generations as a breed of pacers. It has been said that the last pacers in Great Britain were found in Galloway. This horse, Bald Galloway, was foaled some time about 1708 and was famous as a fast race horse till he trained off at five years old. I think there is no doubt about his being a genuine Galloway, and if so how could he have a pedigree all of foreign blood and ending in a “Royal Mare?” This Galloway horse was the sire of the famous Roxana, that produced Lath and his full brother Cade, that made the early reputation of the great Godolphin Arabian. I will ask my readers to refer to the Curwen Bay Barb, No. 11, near the commencement of this chapter. This was one of the very best of all the Barbs imported, and his origin and history are given with unusual fullness, as well as an enumeration of the best of his get. In examining this enumeration it will be seen that a good number of his best foals were out of Galloway mares and are called “Galloways.” Brocklesby Betty was one of the great mares of her day, and the Stud Book says that “as a runner, she was thought to be the superior of any horse or mare of her time.” She was foaled 1711, was got by Curwen Bay Barb and out of Mr. Leedes’ Hobby Mare. She was a brood mare before she was trained, and her performances were soon after the establishment of the Racing Calendars, which show her great superiority. The “Hobbies” were a breed of Irish pacing horses that had been noted for more than a hundred years, on both sides of the Irish channel, as saddle horses, hunters, and runners. The theory that these “Irish Hobbies” were descended from the horses on board one of the ships of the Spanish Armada, that was wrecked on the Irish coast, is purely fanciful, for they were known as a breed long before the Spanish Armada was projected. The Hobbies were larger and better formed, as a rule, than the Galloways, and more highly esteemed. These illustrations of the influence and power of indigenous blood in the formation of the breed, known throughout the world as the English race horse might be extended indefinitely, but let these suffice. With the “Galloways” and the “Hobbies,” well known to our ancestors two hundred years ago as established breeds or tribes of horses, we cannot avoid the conclusion that they were very prodigal of fancy and very economical of truth when they attempted to clothe Bald Galloway, Leedes’ Hobby, etc., in foreign pedigrees to make them fashionable. Aside from the matters of evidence here introduced going to show the composite material entering into the constitution, structure and instincts of the race horse as he is today, there is another that plays a very prominent part in the combination. When we see a race horse fourteen hands high, and another of equally pure blood standing beside him seventeen hands high, we naturally wonder, and ask, Why this difference in size? The Turk, the Barb, the Hobby, the Galloway, and indeed all the old English racing stock, were very small, scarcely averaging fourteen hands. After we have made every allowance for a salubrious climate and a generous and unstinted dietary we must concede a gradual increase of growth, but these things fail to account for a difference of twelve inches in the height of two horses bred in the same lines for untold generations. The conclusion seems to be inevitable that there were big horses as well as little ones in the original combination of ancestors. From these diverse sources of his inheritance, it becomes plain to the mind of every one that the English race horse is thoroughly composite in the blood he inherits, and it is beyond the powers of analysis to determine whether one element did more than another in making him the fastest running horse in the world.

While it might be forcibly, if not conclusively, argued that the native English horse had in him all the elements necessary to the development of a breed of race horses as great as the breed of our own day, there is one fact ever present to the senses which goes to show that the influence of exotic blood was very wide and very powerful in controlling the action of the race horse. The popular and prevailing pacing action of the Hobbies, the Galloways, and other hunting, racing and saddle tribes was completely wiped out more than a hundred years ago. Any attempt to account for this revolution in the gait of the English horse as a fancy of fashion, or on the introduction of wheeled vehicles, fails to satisfy the understanding. In the first half of the seventeenth century pacers were popular, common, and abounded everywhere. In the second half of the eighteenth century not one could be found in all Britain, “from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s House.” Of all the facts that are known and established in the history of the English horse, the wiping out of the pacer is the most striking and significant. This exterminating process was not limited to the families that were intended for hunting or racing purposes, but extended to all types and breeds of English horses. The little English pacers that had been the favorites of kings and princes and nobles for so many centuries were submerged in the streams of Saracenic blood that flowed in upon them, and their only legitimate descendants left upon the face of the earth found homes in the American colonies. Their blood is one of the principal elements in the foundation of the English race horse, but the “lateral action” in his progeny was esteemed a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of the stallion, and it was sought to be covered up with something more fashionable in name. The old saddle horses of England were not all pacers, although that habit of action was very general among them, and in some families it was more uniform and confirmed than in others, and my authority for this conclusion will be found in the detailed account of the horses brought from England to the American colonies early in the seventeenth century. It is evident that from the day the blood of the Saracenic horse was brought in contact with that of the indigenous saddle horse, they were antagonistic, if in nothing more, certainly in the habit of action. The one never moved in the lateral action and the other very generally adopted that form of progression because it was his inheritance. What might have been the result if left to the laws of “natural selection,” it would be impossible to decide; but with the dictates of profit to the master, the mandates of fashion, and above all the accepted teachings of the Duke of Newcastle, the little pacer had no “friends at court,” and all he could do was to get out of the way, with his lateral action. In our own country and under the observation of everybody the pacer shows great tenacity to his long-inherited habit of action, and although buried in non-pacing blood, as supposed, for two or three generations, the pace is liable to appear again, at any time. So it was, doubtless in English experiences, but as the revolution was not retarded by the development of pacing speed, in one hundred years from the restoration, in 1660, there was no longer a pacer on British soil.

When the first Mr. Weatherby assumed the task of making and keeping a registry of English race horses, he seems to have had only a very faint conception of the magnitude of the undertaking. The first volume of his “General Stud Book” was published in 1803, and when it appeared it was found to contain so many things that were not true that the necessary work of revision and excision reduced its contents fearfully. In these eliminations he started in with a free hand, as is shown by comparison with later editions, but soon found that his book was disappearing very rapidly, and not much of it would be left, if he did not stay his hand. At this point he seems to have adopted some new rule, unfortunately, either of evidence or of date, probably the latter, for his work discloses the fact that he declined all responsibility for pedigrees as they came to him, of an earlier period than about 1780. Beyond that date nearly all the crude and impossible things of fiction were allowed to remain and are thus propagated as true, down to our own day. There was one rule, however, adopted very early in the management of this compilation that saved it from degeneracy, and that was the difficulty of getting into it. In all its history, from the beginning, it has been a kind of “close corporation,” and the animals in the volume of the last year are almost uniformly descended from the animals to be found in the first volume. The application of this rule, no doubt, worked an injustice in very many cases, but it made the English race horse a BREED, pre-eminent above all other horses for his unequaled speed as a running horse. This general rule restricting admissions to the descendants of such as had places in preceding volumes seems to have been followed and maintained with a good share of rigidity, by the different generations of the Weatherby family, in whose hands the compilation still remains. Whatever may have been the ratio of fables and forgeries in the first volume, they were there compacted and neither the Weatherbys nor the breeders have been much annoyed with them since. The plan of the Stud Book itself is very unsatisfactory to the careful student, for the reason that it admits of no details of breeder, owner, etc., that are of vital importance in tracing and identifying an unknown or disputed pedigree. While the plan is very desirable and effective in placing the produce of mares underneath the dams, it is very defective in relation to breeders, and subsequent owners. Unless the identity of the animal can be traced and established by the records, the pedigree is always doubtful. But notwithstanding the unsatisfactory plan of its construction, it has been honestly compiled, and we may safely accept its contents, back as far as the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Mr. Weatherby began his work; but when we reach the period of the eighteenth century, facts, fables and frauds are so inextricably mixed that whatever we accept must be cum grano salis. Beyond that period Mr. Weatherby furnishes nothing but the wildest fancies and traditions shaped up by those contributing them with a view to lengthen a pedigree and a price accordingly. All that we can ever know of the horses of that period we must gather from the little snatches dropped by contemporaneous historians.

In establishing his “General Stud Book,” Mr. Weatherby’s work may be compared to the building of an embankment around a great field which contained all the race horses of the realm. They were of all colors, all markings and all sizes, except the monster cart horse and the diminutive Shetland. They had all raced or possessed blood that had raced, and they all had pedigrees of various lengths and various degrees of reliability. They all walked and trotted and galloped, and there was not a pacer among them, for the last pacer had disappeared from England probably fifty years before this. The antagonism of the Saracenic horse had triumphed, and that antagonism was bred in the blood and bone of every animal in the field. They were placed there to be inter-bred and to produce race horses. Every one of the thousand owners was anxious to produce a great winner, and he was left to the exercise of his own fancy and judgment as to what cross would be most likely to prove successful, and to vindicate his superior intelligence. With, all experimenting outside of the breed practically barred, the instincts of the breed ripened and intensified until its representatives are able to beat the fleetest in the world at the gallop, but they could neither walk fast nor trot fast. It is doubtful whether any person in the world has ever seen a true-bred race horse that could trot a mile in four minutes. At this gait they show no aptness nor speed whatever. By breeding to fit the modern methods of racing, the speed of the race horse has been greatly increased, for short distances, but his stamina and endurance no longer command admiration as in former generations.

In the latter half of the last century there were a good many excellent trotters in England, but the further we get away from the blood of the old English pacer, the fewer the trotters we find, until at last there are none at all. It seems to be true of all countries that where there are no pacers there are no trotters. It was not the purpose nor wish of the English people to banish the trotter, but when the pacer was banished the trotter soon followed him.

CHAPTER VII.
THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE.

Antiquity of American racing—First race course at Hempstead Plain, 1665— Racing in Virginia, 1677—Conditions of early races—Early so-called Arabian importations—The marvelous tradition of Lindsay’s “Arabian”— English race horses first imported about 1750—The old colonial stock as a basis—First American turf literature—Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, 1829—Cadwallader R. Colden’s Sporting Magazine short-lived but valuable—The original Spirit of the Times—Porter’s Spirit of the Times—Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, 1859—Edgar’s Stud Book —Wallace’s Stud Book—Bruce’s Stud Book—Their history, methods, and value—Summing up results, showing that success has followed breeding to individuals and families that could run and not to individuals and families that could not run, whatever their blood.

Horses were kept for running, and horse racing was a common amusement in some of the American Colonies for about a hundred years before the first English race horses were imported. This embraces a century of horse history that, hitherto, has been practically unexplored and unknown. For the details of what I have been able to glean of this neglected and unknown century my readers are referred to the chapters on the different colonies. The first racing in this country of which we have any historical knowledge was organized by Governor Nicolls. In 1664 the Dutch surrendered the province of New Netherlands to the English, and the next autumn, 1665, the new race course at Hempstead Plains was inaugurated by the new governor of the colony. This course was named Newmarket, after the famous English course, and Governor Nicolls’ successors continued to offer purses on this course for many years, and after a time there were two regular meetings held there, spring and autumn. Owing to the distance of this course from the city, other courses, near at hand, were soon constructed and racing of all kinds and at all gaits held high carnival. The principal prizes were called “Subscription Purses,” the distance almost invariably two miles, and the weight carried ten stone. The horses that ran were known as “Dutch horses,” and were descended from the original stock brought from Utrecht, in Holland. They were larger than the English horses, and brought better prices, although the latter were esteemed more highly for their saddle gaits. I think the Dutch horses, originally, had no natural pacers among them, but for the pleasures and uses of the saddle they were inter-bred with the English horses and the mixed blood soon produced many pacers. It is probable also that this mixture increased the speed of the whole tribe. Thus racing continued with but few interruptions and without any known changes in the rules or conditions governing performances, except that after fifty years or more the weight to be carried was reduced from ten stone to eight stone. In the year 1751, which was eighty-six years after Governor Nicolls had established the Newmarket course on Long Island, we find the following significant condition inserted in the terms of entrance to the races, for the first time: “Free to any horse, mare, or gelding bred in America.” The simple meaning of this new condition was to “head off” the scheme of some “sharp” fellows who were, probably, then on the ocean with two or three English race horses, with which they expected to “gobble up” whatever stakes or purses came within their reach.

The first record we have of racing in Virginia is to be found in the court records of Henrico County, in the year 1677—twelve years after the establishment of racing in New York. For fuller particulars of this, the reader is referred to the chapter on that colony. The Virginians were a horse-racing people from the start, and it is impossible to tell how long before racing first commenced, but probably just as soon as any two neighbors met, each owning a horse, a few hundred pounds of tobacco were put up the next day, to make it interesting, in determining which was the faster. This racing feeling was not confined to neighbors nor to neighborhoods, but it pervaded the whole colony, and the people of every county had their annual and semi-annual meetings, which everybody attended. Their methods of handicapping will strike the present generation as somewhat peculiar. In their advertisements of the meetings, such language as the following was very common: “Sized horses to carry one hundred and forty pounds and Galloways to be allowed weight for inches.” From this we learn that the tribe of little Scotch pacers were still to the fore on this side of the water and that they were just as fleet as the larger horses, provided the weight was graduated to their inches. There was one feature in these race meetings that will be a surprise to many of my readers, as it was to myself, and that is the fact that at most of these meetings there was one four-mile race. Smaller prizes were run for by horses classed as to size, and it may be noted that there was one class “not exceeding thirteen hands.” At these meetings the distance never seems to have been less than one mile, while on the southern border of the colony and in North Carolina, quarter racing was very popular and very common from the earliest dates, and it was kept up through the greater part of the eighteenth century. For a fuller account of the racing of those early days the reader is referred to the chapter on Virginia.

In this old English, Irish and Scottish blood, full of the pacing element, which we may now call “native” blood, we have the real foundation upon which the English race horse was bred and from which has come the approximate if not the complete equal of the highest type of the English horse, in both speed and stamina. The English and the American race horse came from the same source and possess the same blood, with this trifling distinction—the native mares in England were bred to horses of exotic, Saracenic origin, while the native mares of America were bred to the descendants of that native-exotic combination. Hence, with the original maternal ancestry of the same blood, the combined and improved English descendant of that blood became the paternal ancestor of the American race horse. We must not forget that this “paternal ancestor” had been the result of crossing and recrossing, selecting, breeding and developing for nearly a hundred years, and that he was, therefore, a far better horse and far more prepotent as a sire than the produce of the first cross made under the direction of the Duke of Newcastle. We must not ignore the fact that while there were many stallions brought over in the early days there were also a few mares, but they were so few in number that their influence was hardly appreciable in the new breed to be established. Saracenic blood was touched very sparingly in the colonial days, as even the names of not more than three or four have been preserved in history. The only one of that period fully identified was named Bashaw and was kept on Long Island about the year 1768. Like all the others, he was called an Arabian, but according to the showing of his advertisement he was bred by the Emperor of Morocco, and was not an Arabian. Of the later period and coming down to about 1860 there are twenty-five or thirty that have been called “Arabians.” Near the head of the list stands one called “Arab Barb” or “Black Arabian Barb.” He was claimed to be an imported Barb from Algiers, and was seventeen hands high, “and coarse in proportion.” Many other so-called “importers” were equally absurd and dishonest in their claims, but there horses all passed as genuine “Arabians.” Out of the whole number called “Arabians” not more than five or six seem to have had a shadow of right to the name, and these exceptions were practically restricted to the animals imported by Mr. A. Keene Richards, of Kentucky. That each and all of these exceptions were irredeemable failures is a fact well known to all intelligent horsemen. This motley crew of “Arabian” importations came from all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, except Arabia, were all called “Arabians,” and they were all flat disappointments both as race horses and as producers of race horses.

Out of this list of thirty-five or forty so-called Arabian horses, there is one that requires special mention, not only because a correction may be made in his history, but because I have frequently spoken of him as the only Arabian that had left any mark upon the horse stock of the country. Lindsay’s Arabian, as he was called, was a grey horse and represented to be over fifteen hands high. The story is that he was a Barb and had been presented to the commander of a British man-of-war, when a colt, by the ruler of one of the Barbary States, as an expression of gratitude to the captain for having saved the life of his son. The captain sailed away for a South American port, and while lying there he took his present ashore to let him have a little exercise. The colt was given the free range of a lumber-yard, as the story goes, and in his playfulness a pile of lumber fell upon him and broke three of his legs. The British officer was greatly grieved at his loss and proposed to put the colt out of misery by knocking him on the head. There happened to be an American trading vessel in port and the skipper “allowed if he had that critter on his vessel he could save him.” The officer at once gave him to the skipper and told him his history. Yankee ingenuity and thrift soon got him aboard the trader and he was swung up and his legs properly bandaged. The surgical treatment was good, the bones knit, and in due time the vessel arrived at New London, and the colt was taken to the vicinity of Hartford. Just where this story originated it is not possible now to say, nor do I know that it ever had currency in Connecticut, but it was certainly rehearsed and probably believed in Maryland. He was owned by Colonel Wyllis of Hartford, and was advertised in 1770 under the single name of Ranger, and described as “a fine English stallion of the Barbary breed, bred in England.” From this it would appear that nothing was then known of his romantic history. As a part of his Maryland history it was said that General Washington’s attention had been attracted to a body of Connecticut cavalry by the excellence of their horses, and at his instance Captain Lindsay bought Ranger, because he was the sire of many of those horses, and took him to Maryland, where he was ever afterward known as “Lindsay’s Arabian.” The story of the indorsement of Washington made an excellent stallion card, and it is not necessary that we should inquire into it too closely, for the dates might raise a question. The horse passed from Colonel Wyllis to James Howard, of Windham, and was advertised by him as “The Imported Arabian Horse called The Ranger to stand at his stable the season of 1778.” Hence we must conclude that he was not taken to the South before the season of 1779, or possibly later. Then, as now, to catch the popular fancy, North and South, the horse is no longer an “English stallion of the Barbary breed” but an “Imported Arabian Horse.” His cross was well esteemed in his day, and it has held its place in the estimation of all the experienced horsemen as a good cross in an old pedigree. We now see that he was bred in England, that he was got by a Barb horse or the son of a Barb horse, and that it is not probable there was a single drop of Arabian blood in his veins. This little sketch will serve to illustrate the methods, general and particular, that were invariably used to place a fictitious value upon the so-called imported “Arabians.” In no other department of human knowledge has there been such a universal and persistent habit of misrepresenting the truth of history as in matters relating to the horse. It seems to have been, and still is, a kind of psychical contagion that has been generating dishonesty and a habit of lying in the minds of the great body of horsemen for the past two hundred and fifty years. If a horse is brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, he is at once called an “Arabian.” This is worse than a misnomer, for it is an essential untruth, and its universal use does not redeem it from its essence of deception and fraud. It must be conceded, however, that this deception may have sprung from bad teaching and ignorance rather than from a depraved moral sense, for many people, as well as the poets and the novelists, may have concluded that as the nations named above got their religion from Arabia, so they got their horse stock from the same country, and thus the horses brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, are descendants of the Arabian horse and thus entitled to the name “Arabian.” This seems to be the only theory upon which this universal misrepresentation can be palliated. Let us repeat a sentence or two here, to show what history reveals on this point. Strabo says there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. Philostorgius says that in the year 356, two hundred “well-bred” Cappadocian horses were sent as a present to the prince of Yemen, by the Emperor Constantius. These were the first horses in Arabia. In the days of Mohammed horses were exceedingly scarce in Arabia, and they have remained so to the present time. The horse is an expensive exotic in Arabia, as he is never used for any domestic purpose, nor for any other purpose except robbery or display. For all domestic and commercial uses the camel is far better. All the countries named above were abundantly supplied with horses, at least eight hundred or a thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia. The Moslems got their religion from Arabia, but not their horses. This topic is more fully discussed in the chapter on the Arabian horse.

The importation of English race horses to this side of the water commenced about the year 1750, and that being the middle of the last century it is easy to remember the date when the line was drawn between the old and the new elements appearing on the race course. The following six animals were brought over within a year or two of that date—Monkey, Traveller, Dabster, Childers, Badger, and Janus. A few others might be named, but some at least are mythical. Of those here named, Traveller was the great horse. Janus became the progenitor of a tribe of very fast quarter horses, and although he did not found that tribe, which had been in existence for a hundred years on the border line between Virginia and North Carolina, he doubtless improved it. Monkey was twenty-two years old when he came and did not live long. The whole number imported into all the colonies before the war of the Revolution counts up to about fifty, and some of these are practically unknown, and a few of them were wholly fictitious. Maryland, I think, was first in the field of importations, and then followed Virginia, New York, and North Carolina. Possibly the very earliest importations were made in South Carolina, but there is not much evidence that those importations were utilized to any extent for racing purposes, and hence we know but little of the doings of that colony till a later date. There were not more than about twenty mares of English race-horse blood imported, in the quarter of a century preceding the Revolution, into all the colonies. As many of these animals of both sexes were stolen or destroyed during the war, we can approximate with some degree of certainty the great reduction in this producing force by the time the war ended and importations again commenced.

Now, we have before us the old colonial running stock that had been tested in many a battle and found able to cover the distance of two to four miles, and we have also the new running stock that had never been asked to go any further, but we have no actual, authentic and reliable knowledge of the comparative speed of the two classes. There were no stop watches nor records of time kept in those days. This much only we know, that prizes were offered for “half-breds” for a few years, but when it was found that some of the half-breds could run just as fast and as far as some of the whole-breds, this class of prizes was withdrawn. Then commenced the manufacture of fraudulent pedigrees, for, it was argued, “How could an American horse beat an English horse unless he had English blood and plenty of it?” Hence, when a horse won that fact was taken as proof that he was full bred, and no time was lost in investing him with a first-class, pure-bred pedigree. This was a little onerous on the few imported mares that were known and named, as in the case of imported Mary Gray, for she had to produce eleven filly foals by imported Jolly Roger in order to accommodate her numerous progeny, as alleged, and how many more claims were made of the same pedigree it would be very difficult to estimate. When it began to appear a little awkward to require Mary Gray to have, on paper, more than eleven filly foals by Jolly Roger, it was soon, discovered that it was less perplexing and at the same time less liable to be “cornered” by saying “dam an imported English mare.” No doubt there was a great deal of sharp practice, to say nothing of cheating and lying, about horse matters in Colonial times, but those little venialities were only the blossoms indicating the mature fruits of deceptions and frauds that were to follow when pedigrees would be considered an element of value in the running horse, and when every man would have the power, in fact, to make and print his pedigrees to suit himself. This brings us to a very brief consideration of what has been done in the direction of correcting the frauds of the past and preventing them in the future.

The period of fable and of falsehood in the genealogy of the American race horse seems to have commenced not long after the first importations of English race horses. In the first generations from the imported English horse and the native mare, it was rather difficult for a man to fix up a pedigree for his half-bred colt that would show him to be full bred, but after forty, fifty, or sixty years had elapsed the events became misty, and then every man exercised the right to make his own pedigrees to suit his own fancy. This seems to have been the condition of things for many years, and while there were a few honest men who would stick to the truth, the great majority either made their pedigrees to suit themselves or employed some “expert” to make them for them. The confusion which ensued was most perplexing, and the slipshod manner in which editors and writers on the horse did their work was most discouraging. Whatever was found in print on a crossroads blacksmith shop door was taken as authentic, because it was in print.

In 1829 Mr. John S. Skinner, of Baltimore, Maryland, commenced the publication of a monthly magazine, entitled “The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine,” and as it really “filled a long-felt want,” it received a very encouraging support. As its name indicated its field, it at once became the authority on sporting events and the receptacle of a great amount of valuable correspondence on the horses of the day, as well as the earlier race horses. Mr. Skinner was industrious in collecting material for his magazine, but unfortunately he published whatever was sent to him relating to the horse, and just as it was sent. If a communication was well written, no difference how many errors of fact it might contain, it never seemed to occur to Mr. Skinner to use his blue pencil. Pedigrees were sent in, amounting to many thousands, during his ownership, with fictitious and untruthful remote extensions, and published without any possibility of tracing the different crosses to a known or responsible source or name. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime to “fix up” the pedigrees of stallions to suit the public demand and the fees sought by their owners, send them to Mr. Skinner, and have them duly spread before the public in all their dishonest finery. The early volumes are very rich in the accumulations of pedigrees, such as they are, and hence very valuable. The magazine received less and less attention from its proprietor each succeeding year and finally it was transferred to the Spirit of the Times, of New York, and died after an existence of some fifteen years.

Mr. Cadwallader R. Colden, of New York, commenced the publication of another sporting magazine, that was of very great merit, and did much to correct some of the errors that abounded in Mr. Skinner’s publication. In the controversies which naturally sprang up he had greatly the advantage of his adversary, for he knew horse history and Mr. Skinner did not. Mr. Colden was a man of marked ability, and over the signature of “An Old Turfman” he made himself famous as a writer. He hated a fraud and wherever he saw one he did not hesitate to hit it. His publication was a large and expensive one, racing was then under the periodical interdict of public opinion, and after about two or three years, and greatly to the loss and misfortune of the truths of horse history, the publication was discontinued. The weekly press had no representative in the field of “horse literature and sporting subjects” until early in the thirties, when the Spirit of the Times was founded by William T. Porter. The conception of a weekly paper devoted to all kinds of sports, such as hunting, fishing, racing, gaming, etc., was not only new in this country, but it was brilliant. Mr. Porter was not only a gentleman in his appearance and manners, but he had fine social qualities and was a writer of ability and polish. Such a personage would naturally gather about him friends and correspondents that were congenial, and very soon The Spirit of the Times became noted as the organ of a great body of educated men who loved sport and enjoyed wit. It was the only publication of its kind on the continent, and it soon obtained a very wide circulation. Mr. Porter knew very little of horses, either theoretically or practically, but he was a ready adapter and wrote some fine descriptions of famous racing contests. His habits were sportive rather than industrious, hence he left nothing behind him of value to his friends or to the world except the mere fact that he was the founder of the first sporting paper in this country. In course of time the paper with all its belongings became the property of John Richards, the former pressman, and Mr. Porter had to look for a living wherever he could find it. Mr. George Wilkes then took him under his wing, and started a new sporting paper called Porter’s Spirit of the Times. The use of this name carried with it the support of a good many friends, but as he was not able to write anything, practically, for the new paper, from its very commencement in September, 1856, it failed to yield any support to Mr. Porter, and not much to Mr. Wilkes and his partners. Litigation arose and Mr. Wilkes finally withdrew from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, and started Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times in September, 1859. We then had three sporting papers all claiming to be the original and only legitimate Spirit of the Times. Among their readers they were distinguished as the Old Spirit, Porter’s Spirit, and Wilkes’ Spirit. The circulation of the Old Spirit was largely in the Southern States, and the war destroyed it, in 1861. Porter’s Spirit having but little money and still less brains, died about the same time. This left Mr. Wilkes in open possession of the field, and his remarkably trenchant articles on the conduct of the war gave Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times a very wide circulation, even among those who cared nothing for sporting matters. At the same time he was fortunate in securing the services of Mr. Charles J. Foster, an able writer on horse subjects, and a very industrious and capable man in managing and discussing affairs connected with the horse. Some years later, Mr. Wilkes dropped his own name from the title of his paper, and not long afterward he added twenty-five or thirty years to its age by changing the numbers so as to cover the period of the original Spirit of the Times founded by William T. Porter. The old sporting publications, one and all, maintained the view, so far as they ever had any view to maintain, that all that was of any value in the American horse, for whatever purpose, had come down to us from the Arabian through the English race horse. Their value, therefore, consists wholly in the naked statistics which they contain.

The first attempt made in this country, in the direction of publishing a stud book of American race horses, was the product of Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, an eccentric and apparently not well-balanced Irishman, who was a resident of North Carolina. This book, which purported to be a “first” volume, was very remarkable in many respects, two or three of which I will enumerate. The prevailing absence of dates and all means by which the truth or falsity of a pedigree could be determined; the astounding number of crosses given, even to the immediate descendants of imported sires; the multitude of animals never heard of before nor since, with pedigrees extended a dozen crosses; the absence of many animals that everybody had heard of. This book had been in print about thirty years before I ever saw it, and the first impression it made on my mind was that the author was “clean daft.” At the same time, through all his work there was a “method in his madness,” going to show the care he had taken to exclude or suppress any little fact that might lead to detection and exposure. As an illustration of his methods I will take the following pedigree, at random, as given by him and copied, literally, by Mr. Bruce, following the particular form of the latter:

CENTAUR, b. h. foaled 1767, bred by ——; owned in Virginia, got by imported Stirling (Evans’) (foaled 1762).

1st dam by imp. Aristotle (imported 1764).

2d dam by imp. Dotterel.

3d dam by imp. David (imported 1763).

4th dam by imp. Ranter (imported 1762).

5th dam by imp. Othello (imported 1755).

6th dam by imp. Childers (imported 1761).

7th dam an imported, thoroughbred mare.

Now, what do we know about this pedigree that has been indorsed and published, just as here stated, by two stud-book makers? They do not pretend to know by whom he was bred, nor do they know in what part of Virginia he was owned, but they assume to know perfectly well each cross in his pedigree and that his seventh dam was an imported, thoroughbred mare. The dates of importations in parentheses in the foregoing have been placed there by myself for the sake of the exhibit. The horse Dotterel, the original of that name and by the same reputed sire, never left England, and it is probable this Dotterel is mythical. Now, let us analyze this pedigree by the aid of the searchlight of dates. Ranter, imported 1762, might have had a filly to his credit in 1763. This filly at two years old might have been bred to David and produced a filly in 1766. This filly at two years old might have been bred to Dotterel and produced a filly in 1769. This filly at two years old might have been bred to Aristotle and produced a filly in 1772. This filly, at two years old, might have bred to Evans’ Stirling (or Starling), and produced the colt Centaur in 1775—but he was foaled in 1767. Not once in a million times would this succession of possibilities occur, but if they did occur in this case the pedigree of Centaur still remains absolutely impossible, for four generations of horses cannot be crowded into five years. This exhibit fairly illustrates the character of Mr. Edgar’s work, and being right on the border line between the “native” race horse and the modern “thoroughbred” we see just how they compressed the breeding of eight generations into the space of fifteen or sixteen years. If we were to compare the English with the American methods of manufacturing pedigrees, it would be hard to determine which was the more shamefully dishonest. Mr. Edgar was fiercely dissatisfied with the indifference of horsemen to his enterprise, and with the lack of support which they rendered him. He went forward with his second volume and professed to have completed it, but announced that it should never be put in type until the horsemen of the country should assist and support him. In the event of their failing to do so he threatened to sink his manuscript twenty feet deep in the center of the Dismal Swamp, where no mortal would ever find it. The second volume never appeared, and it is to be hoped he carried out his threat.

For the second attempt at compiling a stud book of American Race Horses I must, myself, plead guilty. Some time in the “fifties” I came into possession of a number of volumes of the “old” Spirit of the Times, Skinner’s American Turf Register, three or four volumes of the “English Stud Book” and a large number of volumes of the English Sporting Magazine. As I was then dabbling slightly around the edges of “horse literature,” I found this little nucleus of a library very convenient, but very unsatisfactory in answering questions that came to me, and which an official position seemed to require that I should be able to answer. When asked for the pedigrees of other domestic animals I could take down the Herd Books of the different leading breeds and give precise information, but when asked about the pedigree of a horse, unless he was greatly distinguished as a racer, days of solid labor might be expended on the one question and then not discover the information sought. It was, perhaps, ten years after this time before I ever saw or heard of the misbegotten and foolish compilation of pedigrees made by Edgar. For some years this labor of compilation was prosecuted at odd hours, for my own personal use and satisfaction, and without the remotest purpose of ever publishing a stud book. As I plodded my way along, finding what I supposed to be a fact here and another there, and often conflicting, I found myself invariably accepting what was longest as a pedigree, as this feature seemed to be evidence not only of completeness, but of truthfulness at the same time. As my gleanings grew in volume my interest in what I was doing became more absorbing and intense, and when I had completed the search of every page and paragraph of my published sources of information, up to the close of the year 1839, I found I had enough matter for a large volume. About this time I came into possession of a copy of “Edgar’s Stud Book”—and I was greatly perplexed to know what to do with it. The copyright was dead and it contained a good many unimportant and utterly unknown things that I had not met with in all my gleanings. Under these circumstances and considering the fact that it abounded in the crudest uncertainties, to call them by no harsher name, I concluded to use his work in all cases where I did not have a pedigree from other sources, to cut off all imaginary extensions and to insert his name, in every case, as the source of information and responsibility. The work then went to press and the first volume of “Wallace’s American Stud Book” made its appearance in 1871. The time and labor expended on the first volume made me quite familiar with the leading performers of the several generations embraced therein, and the work on the second volume went forward with more ease and rapidity, and in 1871 I had completed the gleaning of all publications relating to the race horse, up to the close of 1870.

This second volume, being about the size of the first, was completed and put in due form for the compositor, but never was published. The reason why it was never published may not be without interest to the student of horse genealogy, and I will, in a few words, state that reason. Side by side with the progress of the second volume of the runners, I was carrying forward a careful investigation of the lineage of the early trotters and their progenitors. As there were no trotting records giving pedigrees, I was compelled to go back to the breeders as the only source of reliable information. When I obtained this from intelligent and reputable people I accepted the information and stood by it as the truth; and when I came to compare it with the representations of pedigree made in advertisements of some stallion scion of the family, the truth began to dawn upon me that advertisements, whether in newspapers or on crossroads blacksmith-shop doors, with scarcely an exception, were made up of statements that were utterly false and fictitious. They were made up for the single purpose of securing patronage, and generally traced in different directions to famous and well-known horses. The fictitious extensions of stallion advertisements have served as the basis for the fictitious extensions of families and tribes. When I came to compare the extensions of trotting pedigrees with running pedigrees, I could not discover that the one was any more or less reliable than the other. They rested on precisely the same basis of stallion pedigrees, and no difference whether they appeared in Mr. Skinner’s Turf Register or in a big poster, there was no censorship, and they were both in type—and whatever was in type was generally supposed to be worthy of belief. In one respect the pedigrees of running horses are more reliable than the early advertisements of trotting horses, particularly with those that raced, for they were required to give the sire and dam when they were entered in races, and a failure to comply with this rule was penalized. The sires, therefore, are generally right, but unfortunately the rule did not require the dam to be named and definitely specified, hence any one of a dozen unnamed mares by a given horse could be represented in after years as the dam of that particular horse. Here commenced the trouble in the unnamed and untraced mares that never have been nor ever can be identified. On a careful and sorrowful review of my work of many years I found that I had been working on a wrong basis from the start. Instead of discovering and arranging a great many valuable truths, as I supposed, I had devoted years to perpetuating thousands and thousands of fictions in these unknown, unnamed, and unidentified dams. This is the reason the second volume of “Wallace’s American Stud Book” never was published. The only benefit I ever derived from the work was in its educational aspects. The work made me familiar with the early running-horse history of this country and of England, and taught me what so many horsemen should learn—that a truth is always better than a lie. The more carefully and thoroughly I went into the origin, lineage and history of what we may call the modern race horse, the more evident it became to my mind that the great mass of the running horses of our own generation are carrying, in their pedigrees, the frauds and fictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to say nothing of the innumerable deceptions and tricks of our own century. To accept and propagate these untruths is simply to, in a manner, indorse them, and an attempt to eliminate them would invoke the clamors of a continent. Hence, more than twenty years ago, I washed my hands of all responsibility for the pedigrees of English race horses, and turned my attention to establishing the lineage of the American trotter, on sure foundations, and building him up into a breed.

The third attempt at compiling the pedigrees of running-bred horses was made by Mr. Sanders D. Bruce, of New York, and as it followed Edgar and Wallace, it was made up chiefly of what he found in these works. The conscienceless fictions of Edgar were accepted without hesitation or remorse, and the central aim seemed to be to make every pedigree as long as possible, whether true or false. No fictitious stallion advertisement was ever too absurd to serve as a basis for the pedigrees of all his kindred. Mr. Bruce accepted everything and rejected nothing, and it is not probable he ever investigated a pedigree in his life. His rule of action seems to have been to please his customers, and to scrupulously avoid all public discussions of pedigrees. This was the politic course to pursue, for any attempt to defend the monstrosities it contained would have wiped it out of existence very quickly. Bruce’s Stud Book seems to have been supported by a few individuals, from the beginning, as a kind of eleemosynary institution, and it is not likely it will ever rise above that condition.

The substantial correctness of the generations extending back for a period of sixty or eighty years, and in some cases even a little further, is a very valuable contribution to our store of knowledge in this department of industry, but, unfortunately, the generations beyond those that may be classed as recent very largely rest upon foundations that are fictitious and fraudulent.

These fictions and frauds are so general and common in the remote extensions on the female side of the pedigree that when we find a string of ten or perhaps twenty dams and not one of them named, known or identified until we strike the twenty-first, and she described as “thoroughbred, imported mare,” we know that this is the work of the professional “pedigree maker,” and not more than once in a hundred times will we be mistaken. This is alike true of both English and American pedigrees of race horses. The modern crosses are comparatively honest, but the remote extensions, through the maternal lines, in both countries are chiefly the products of a venal imagination.

There are some foundation truths in the history and development of the English and American race horse—for they are both one in blood—to which I must briefly advert before dismissing this topic. In announcing the conclusions which I have reached, I am fully conscious that I will come in contact with preconceived opinions that have been very prevalent, if not universal, for at least two centuries.

1. There were race horses in England that had been racing and breeding for centuries before the first Saracenic horse was brought there, and it was not an uncommon thing for the native to beat the exotic, when he first arrived. There had been racing in America, by what we will call the native stock—but they were all English and Dutch—for about one hundred years before the first English race horse reached this country.

2. These horses had been selected with care and bred for centuries with more or less intelligence, with the single purpose of increasing their speed. During those centuries there were not so many writers on biology, heredity, etc., as we have now, but the old aphorism, “Like begets like”—a complete epitome of all science on this subject—was just as well known and as universally believed a thousand years ago as it is to-day. We may, therefore, safely conclude that at the close of the sixteenth century there were many native English horses, descended from lines and tribes that had been selected, raced and bred for generations, that were fully the equals of the best of the exotics, that were brought in about that time.

3. The native stock of England at the close of the sixteenth century, was the stock from which the American colonies received their first supplies, except the few brought from Utrecht, in Holland, to the Dutch Colonists in New York. When brought across the Atlantic, especially in Virginia, no time was lost in continuing their development as race horses, which was carried forward for nearly one hundred years before the first English race horse was imported for their improvement. Their regular racing was at all distances, up to four miles.

4. On this basis of the native English blood, common to both countries, the breed of English and American race horses was built up. The foreign elements brought into England were chiefly from the Barbary States and from Turkey. This exotic blood certainly had a very marked effect upon the horse stock of Britain, but it cannot be said, with certainty, that it increased the speed of the race horse. All the experiences of the past hundred years with these foreign strains have gone to show that instead of increasing the speed they have retarded it.

5. The list of the foundation stock of the English race horse as given by Mr. Weatherby, in the first volume of the English Stud Book, and reproduced in the preceding chapter, is worthy of very careful study, especially by those who seem to think that the English race horse is descended, without admixture, from the Arabian horse. The striking feature of that list is the overwhelming preponderance of other blood than the Arabian, even if we accept all that is called Arabian as genuine. Mr. Darley’s horse, called an Arabian, and Lord Godolphin’s horse, called an Arabian, count for more than all the others put together, in the make-up of the English race horse. Mr. Darley’s horse came from a region remote from Arabia and where a thousand good horses are bred for one in Arabia, and should be called a Turk. Lord Godolphin’s horse—“the great unknown”—will ever remain unknown. He seems to have been traced to France, and, after studying his portraiture, it is probable he was a French horse.

6. Taking this list of foundation stock and viewing it from the standpoint of the greatest lenity and liberality that a sound and careful judgment can accord, we find that the inheritance of Arabian blood in the veins of the English race horse, if there was any such inheritance at all, was strictly infinitesimal. This historical fact in the foundation of the race horse, showing the inutility of Arabian blood, whether genuine or spurious, has been fully confirmed in great multitudes of trials, in both nations, during the past hundred years. In no case has it been a benefit, but always a detriment.

7. The race horse has been bred through centuries for the single purpose of speed. Through all his generations he has been the product of the brains, judgment and skill of his successive masters. Parents were selected that could go out and win the prizes from their fellows. The next generation was not only the product of running parents, but parents that were from running families. Thus grew up the pedigree of the race horse under the direction of thought and judgment. Pedigrees are practical things and full of winners, and in no sense made more valuable by having some supposed “Arabian” cross away back ten generations, that never ran in his life.

CHAPTER VIII.
COLONIAL HORSE HISTORY—VIRGINIA.

Hardships of the colonists—First importations of horses—Racing prevalent in the seventeenth century—Exportation and then importations prohibited—Organized horse racing commenced 1677 and became very general—In 1704 there were many wild horses in Virginia and they were hunted as game—The Chincoteague ponies accounted for—Jones on life in Virginia, 1720—Fast early pacers, Galloways and Irish Hobbies—English race horses imported—Moreton’s Traveler probably the first—Quarter racing prevailed on the Carolina border—Average size and habits of action clearly established—The native pacer thrown in the shade by the imported runner—An Englishman’s prejudices.

The colony of Virginia, settled at Jamestown, May 13, 1607, was subjected to a succession of dissensions, privations and disasters extending through a number of years. The elements of which this first plantation was composed were heterogeneous, and many of them wholly unsuited to battle with the hardships and privations of the wilderness. A very large proportion of the adventurers were mere idlers at home, descended from good but impecunious families, and had never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Too proud to labor even if they had known how, hunger and rags soon made them the most unhappy and discontented of mortals. The governmental affairs of the colony fell into confusion, like the people forming it, and we have no official record of what was done for a number of years. All that is known today of what transpired in the early years of the colony has been gleaned from the personal correspondence of actors in the many strifes that came so near destroying them all. These letters are, generally, so strongly imbued with partisan feeling that there seems to be no room left to tell us anything about the industrial growth of the colony, either in planting or breeding. The excerpts, therefore, relating to the early horses of Virginia which I have been able to gather from a great many sources, will fall far short of being complete, but I think they will serve as a basis upon which to form an intelligent estimate of the Virginia horses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and as to the nineteenth, the newspapers will furnish everything what is needed.

It is evident that the fleet of three vessels which took out to Virginia the first adventurers took also some horses and mares with them; for the governor and council, who went out the next year, in reporting the condition of the colonists to the home company, under date of July 7, 1610, use this language:

“Our people, together with the Indians, had, the last winter, destroyed and killed up all our hogs, inasmuch as of five or six hundred, as it is supposed, there was not above one sow that we can hear of left alive, not a hen or a chick in the fort, and our horses and mares they had eaten with the first.”

From a letter written by M. Gabriel Archer, who arrived in Virginia August 31, 1609, we gather the following facts:

“From Woolwich, the fifteenth day of May, 1609, seven sail weighed anchor and came to Plymouth the twentieth day, where George Somers, with two small vessels, consorted with us. There we took into The Blessing, being the ship wherein I went, six mares and two horses, and the fleet layed in some necessaries belonging to the action; in which business we spent time till the 2d of June, and then set sail to sea, but crossed by South West winds, we put into Falmouth, and there stayed until the 8th of June, then gate out.”

Now, as The Blessing was probably about the average size of the rest of the fleet, I think it is reasonable to conclude that each of the other vessels took some horses also. In a report of a voyage to Virginia, dated November 13, 1611, we find the following statement: “They have brought to this colony one hundred cows, two hundred pigs, one hundred goats, and seventeen horses and mares.” In 1614 the Virginians made a raid on Port Royal, in what was then called New France, and carried off to Virginia, among other captures, a number of horses, mares and colts. A second raid in the same quarter seems to have resulted in carrying off wheat, horses, clothing, working tools, etc.

Mr. Harmor, writing in 1614, in his “True Discourse on the Present State of Virginia,” says: “The colony is already furnished with two hundred neat cattle, infinite hogs in herds all over the woods, some mares, horses and colts, poultry, great store, etc.”

In 1894, in the Public Records Office in London, I found that the Virginia Company had sent out four mares, February, 1619, on The Falcon. And further, I found a kind of summary of what the company had done in the past toward populating and supplying the colonists with live stock. It is stated that they had sent twelve ships, taking out one thousand two hundred and sixty-one persons, making the total number in Virginia at that date about two thousand four hundred. The exportations include five hundred cattle, with some horses and goats, and an infinite number of swine. In 1620 the company ordered twenty mares to be sent over, at a cost, delivered, of fifteen pounds each. From the price of horses in England at that day, I would infer that somebody was making money out of the colonists.

In a little work published in London, 1646, entitled “A Perfect Description of Virginia,” the author says that “There are in Virginia, of an excellent raise (race), about two hundred horses and mares.” It is evident that this statement is a mere estimate, and I am disposed to think it a very wild estimate from what follows in a very few years. It is true that horses do not propagate and increase as fast as any other variety of domestic animals, but under the circumstances every effort would be made to increase the stock, and from what follows, I think my criticism will be sustained.

In the legislation of the colony we find no mention of horses, till the year 1657, when the exportation of mares was prohibited. Eleven years after this (1668) this restriction was removed and the exportation of both mares and horses permitted. The very next year, 1669, the importation of more horses was prohibited by legislative enactment. From this it would seem that there were already too many horses in the colony, or possibly some horse breeder had begun to realize that there were better horses in some of the other colonies that were finding a market in Virginia, and they thus sought “protection” for their own stock.

This prohibition could not have been aimed at the mother country, for the prices obtained would not justify the cost and risk of a sea voyage. We must, therefore, conclude that it was intended to shut out the New England colonies, which were already shipping horses to all the settlements on the seaboard, as well as to some of the West India Islands. In this we see at what an early date commenced the interchange of commodities among the colonies. As early as 1647 the Dutch authorities at New Amsterdam authorized Isaac Allerton to sell twenty or twenty-five horses to Virginia.