was soon up, and the farm, too, and they repaired to the fair grounds
for the race. When they arrived they found that very “accommodating
fellow” getting Hoosier Boy ready for the race. A good-sized chunk of
lead adorned the toes of his front feet, but as Bob and his friends never
noticed it, and even if they had would never have minded it, since the
greatest of pacers often wear toe-weights, they only nudged each other
and prepared to soak it to poor Abe the harder.
As usual, Abe was drunk—or appeared so—and, much to the disgust of his
friends, staggered around trying to get up more bets on Hoosier Boy. Then
his friends begged, expostulated. They even threatened to take him home
forcefully and declare the race off because one of the parties was too
drunk to have justice done him. But Abe dodged them and claimed police
protection from the crowd who were backing Gray Dan and preparing to rob
him on a dead certainty.
Finally, they sent for Abe’s wife to come and save her husband’s
“lower eighty.” But the good lady only told them to attend to their
own business, and that Abe never was as drunk as he seemed, and while
they were gone Abe managed to borrow a thousand more by giving a bill
of sale, if he lost, on Hoosier Boy and twenty head of steers he had!
Then, to their disgust, he did more—he put up his homestead against
another thousand on the ground that he wanted to lose it, because his
mother-in-law always stayed there. As this was all in the world he
had—the eighty acres, the steers and the horse, and the homestead—and the
Gray Dan crowd could find no one else who would put up at any odds, they
called for the race and sat down to enjoy the fun.
The horses came out and scored for the race, and still the Gray Dan crowd
suspected nothing. It was dead easy. Hadn’t they seen Hoosier Boy do his
best, and paced in 2:24, and couldn’t Gray Dan pace in 2:16 or better?
“Po’r Abe,” said all of Abe’s friends, as they got behind fences and
posts to keep from seeing the robbery.
On the second score they got away—at least, Hoosier Boy did—so far away
from Gray Dan that he was at the half before the Gray Dan crowd saw that
he was not pacing at all, but trotting to beat the band.
He finished the mile in 2:13. They forgot to time Gray Dan, who was so
far behind.
Bob and his crowd fell off their perch in disgust and left their money
with the stake-holder. Abe still owns the lower eighty, and sundry
citizens of that locality have resolved that whenever they bet again how
fast a horse can go, they will stipulate whether it be trot or pace.
M. R. HIGBEE.
The Truth About Horseshoeing.
Editor Trotwood’s:
In a foot-note to my article in your February number, you said, “We will
gladly publish your ideas on horseshoeing,” thus letting the bars down,
knowing, perhaps, that I would be liable to wander in.
If I could turn backward in my career twenty or thirty years, I would
undertake the task with more confidence in my ability to furnish
something worthy of a place in your columns. I was young in the business
then. I had finished my apprenticeship, and felt sure that the few things
I did not know relative to the farrier’s art were not worth considering.
Since then, I have been a regular attendant in the great free school of
experience, taught by that merciless teacher, Necessity, and while I have
been fairly successful in trying to furnish unnatural protection to that
part of the horse which comes in contact with the earth, I am still in
need of the necessary amount of conceit that would enable me to pose as a
teacher.
I trust you will allow me to ramble around back and forth between the
horseshoer and the horse-owner (one as much to blame as the other when
the “family pet” goes lame), and I feel confident of being able to
benefit some one, or his poor old overfed horse.
To the uninitiated who read the average writer’s suggestions on
horseshoeing, it would appear that there is no other mechanical operation
so difficult as that of attaching a shield of metal to the hoof of a
horse. That is an erroneous opinion.
I was once told by an old English shoer that “the man who picked up a
horse’s foot that had never worn a shoe, gave it a brush or two with
a rasp and then nailed on a light piece of iron (an old, half-worn
shoe, perhaps) would do a better job of shoeing than nine-tenths of the
so-called fancy jobs.” I often think of my old English friend, who spent
five, perhaps seven years, as an apprentice trying to master the trade.
How different here in free America, and in these catch-as-catch-can
times. It is not a rare thing to find men who are proprietors of shoeing
shops, whose apprenticeship consisted of six months or a year’s service
as a helper, and the vast army of horses to be shod is owned and
controlled by people who are very much in a hurry, and who give little or
no attention to the care of horses’ feet.
So the “family pet,” as Trotwood has called him, goes lame. He is taken
to the shoeing shop in the belief that the shoer can relieve him. Now,
this shoer is a human being, flesh and blood like other men, and it is
extremely difficult for horseshoers to be strictly honest. (I speak from
experience.) The fact is, he wants to tell the owner that his horse is
too highly fed for the amount of exercise he is getting. He would like to
tell him that high calks and dry stalls are slowly, but surely, drawing
his hoofs together, causing a lateral pressure of the wall on the more
sensitive internal parts, and he thinks of many other things that point
to the duty of the care-taker. But I have found that, usually, that kind
of talk don’t suit my customers. It puts too much of the responsibility
on them, so the shoer begins at once to look wise. The horseshoer who
knows how to look wise is an artist, born to succeed. Placing his thumbs
in the armholes of his vest, he begins a tirade of abuse on the man who
last shod the horse, after this fashion: “Well, I should think he would
be lame. Any man that don’t know better than to put a pair of cook stoves
like those on a horse’s foot,” etc., etc. After he has removed the “cook
stoves” he proceeds to shoe the horse in his own unapproachable way
polishes the shoes, rasps the hoofs carefully and, perhaps, saturates the
bottoms with oil of tar. He pays the price demanded, takes the horse home
and, when his lameness grows worse instead of better, he comes to the
conclusion that he has been “buncoed.”
A few days ago a grocer’s horse with thick-walled hoofs was brought to
us, shod with heavy shoes and high calks, hoofs badly contracted, and
dead lame. I promised that if given my own way, I would cure him. We
shortened the hoofs, put on a pair of “tips”—just a little patch of
iron on each toe, letting the frog, or what remained of it, down on the
ground. In less than ten days the lameness ceased though he had been lame
for many months. In winter when it is necessary to shoe him with calks
again, he occasionally shows a little lameness, but when spring comes
we go back to the “tips” and the trouble vanishes. The owner of this
horse thinks we performed a miracle, but we did nothing of the kind,
we omitted the fancy rasping, the oil of tar, and the wise look in this
case, and just kept close to nature.
In the days of the old horse cars in the cities I have stood on the
boulder-covered streets of Chicago and watched the car horses, to see how
they were shod. Imagine my surprise when I found hundreds of them shod in
front, with shoes similar to those we used on the grocer’s horse.
When we mortals, who flatter ourselves that we are fashioned after
God’s own image, drift too far from nature’s prescribed course, we soon
discover the folly of our actions. If we don’t, the undertaker, for
a cash consideration backs up to the front door of our house with a
profusely tasseled hearse and starts us on our journey toward the head
waters of Salt river. Meanwhile, the horse goes on, pounding away on the
stony pikes, which, long ago, were substituted for the old bridle paths
and the turf-covered highways, so we resort to metal protection for the
hoof.
I have always looked upon horseshoeing, as practiced in many shops, as a
necessary evil, on a par with the taking into the human system of vile
physics and rank lotions, and when both owner and shoer are equally
ignorant or careless, what must the consequences be?
A number of years ago, a man came to me for advice as to how his family
horse should be shod. I ventured a suggestion and he brought the horse
in. This was early in September. We shod him all round, doing what we
called a first-class job. I advised that the shoes should be reset in
about six weeks. He went away seemingly much pleased, and his joy lasted
all winter.
On the 28th of March he came back with the shoes all on just as we left
them. A few things went through my mind which I thought best not to make
known to my customer. We reset the shoes and I never saw him afterwards.
That was about sixteen years ago, and I presume that when the shoes need
resetting again he will bring the horse to have us look after him.
Just one more: I once shod a banker’s horse all round, early in May. As
he took the horse from the shop he said his reason for having him shod
was on account of turning him out to pasture. Shades of Pegasus, think of
that! During the summer he sold the horse and in November he was brought
to us to be “sharpened up” for the winter. Imagine my surprise when I
discovered that not a shoe had been removed since we put them on early in
May.
I relate these two instances to show that there are difficulties in the
handling of horses’ feet over which the shoer has no control, and which
frequently put him in a frame of mind so that he concludes to abandon the
idea of painstaking, and resolves to be less particular about his work.
While roaming around in this broad, busy country of ours, I have
drifted into many shoeing shops, and have worked in not a few of them.
The greatest fault I find with my fellow craftsmen is their universal
tendency toward overdoing. In their zeal to excel the other fellow
they resort to “fads” and adopt unnecessary methods, many of which are
decidedly injurious to the horse, and you who have horses to be shod
should insist that you prefer a plain, careful job, minus the whittling,
polishing, rasping, etc., and the shoer, in these days of close
competition, will be only too glad to obey orders.
But how shall the owner know what is best for his horse? He is a butcher,
a baker or perhaps he is the time-honored “candlestick maker,” and
is as busy as any of us in this mad rush of to-day, from which there
seems to be no escape. So, really, I don’t believe he ever will give
much attention to his faithful horse’s feet, and between unscrupulous
horseshoers and third-grade veterinary surgeons, “poor old Dobbin” will
continue to be, as he has been in the past, the victim of his master’s
misplaced confidence. What does the average man know about the needs and
requirements of his own body? He has been called “a bundle of habits,”
and from what I can observe, he is about ready to draw a good salary as
the star performer in “a comedy of errors.” But in spite of stumbling
blocks, and millstones around our necks, out of the rank and file of
common men there comes occasionally, an Edison, a Horace Greeley, a
Mark Twain or one like your own Major Thomas, whose portrait adorns
the frontispiece of your March number. From the same source comes an
occasional good, honest, painstaking horseshoer, whose sole ambition is
not for the dollars he may lay up. He is one whom “goodness and mercy
will follow, all the days of his life”—one who knows the importance of
his calling and who realizes that a reputation for sobriety and honesty,
coupled with natural ability and acquired skill, will bring to him the
reward he is seeking.
I have written enough for this time, and what have I said in the above
preamble that will enlighten the reader who really is trying to post
himself on the care of the horse’s foot and the proper method of shoeing
it? He does not desire to become a student of anatomy, and I know from
experience that the advice of an humble knight of the anvil would not be
taken seriously by the majority of horse owners.
But I have in my library two small volumes on shoeing, and the care
of the hoof, which to me are worth their weight in gold. The first
is “Practical Horseshoeing,” by T. Fleming, President of the Central
Veterinary Surgeons’ Medical Society, Edinburgh, Scotland, published by
D. Appleton Co., New York. No honest man, who knows whereof he speaks,
can even criticise this work.
The other is “Pathological Horseshoeing,” by Joseph B. Coleman, V. S.,
which goes a little farther into diseases of the foot and their treatment.
Get these two little books, brother horse owner, and when the good horse
goes lame, bump your head against the side of his stall and think. They
will help you to see how far you are keeping from nature’s ways. Consider
that your horse is made of tissue and nerves, almost as delicate as your
own; that he is entirely at your mercy and unlike the “Devil Wagon,” he
cannot be patched up with files, monkey-wrenches and cement.
LA FORGE.
Pecatonica, Ill.
TROTWOOD’S MONTHLY
Devoted to Farm, Horse and Home.
TROTWOOD PUBLISHING CO., Nashville, Tenn.
Office 150 Fourth Ave., North.
JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE,
Editor-in-Chief.
E. E. SWEETLAND Business Manager.
GEO. E. McKENNON President.
JOHN W. FRY Vice-President.
EUGENE ANDERSON Treas.
WOOTEN MOORE Sec’y.
TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION: One Year, $1.00; Single Copy, 10 cents.
Advertising Rates on application.
NASHVILLE, TENN., MAY, 1906.
With Trotwood
Human Registration.
Mr. Thos. J. Moore, of Moore’s, S. C., writes: “Have you your family
genealogy? You seem to be up on horse pedigree. I’d like to have it, if
not too much trouble.”
Alas and alack! but that is the trouble with most of us. We pedigree our
horses and dogs, but we throw off terribly on our sons and daughters. Any
old pedigree seems good enough for them. In the language of the Bible,
“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?” What a Book it is!
“For I, the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of
the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of
them that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me
and keep my commandments.” There is authority for a pedigreed man. And
the Book itself—chapters are given to the pedigree of one man. The Bible
loves a good pedigree. It is a great registration Book of the Jews. Did
you ever see Moses’ pedigree tabulated—Moses, the greatest man in the
Bible except One? It tells a wonderful story. He was the most inbred man
that ever lived. And so was the mother of the Christ. These things will
do to study and think about.
As for me, I am constrained to say that the quiet study of the pedigree
of horses has taught me much. I have picked up a few of the great lessons
of cause and effect in studying the lower animal that should apply to
the higher one. That is the only way. Darwin reached the laws of his
evolution by beginning with the lowest form of life.
I hold it to be a crime for any human being to bring into the world an
offspring which he knows will be inferior to himself. He owes it to
posterity to breed up. The mother is what breeds up. The white man who
brands his unborn child a mongrel deserves death at the hands of the
rest of his race. Death, because, like the murderer, he is pulling down
society. The murderer takes what he cannot restore. But this man does
worse—he chains his own child for life to a dead body.
It is a crime because it is the duty of all to breed up—to produce
something by well chosen marriage better than themselves. It should be
a criminal offense—as it already is a moral one—to bring into the world
peoples with maimed heads, maimed souls and yellow bodies. The Greeks
were right—it is only through a pure breed that man may reach the stars.
The Bible is right—it always is: pedigree counts most.
What a pity all the world does not go into the horse business and study
the effects of heredity long enough to learn a little common sense about
the breeding of that highest of animals—man! What a pity they cannot get
off their little bicycles long enough to get the hump out of their backs
and the wheels out of their heads, and learn that like, in man or horse,
poet or donkey, produces like or the likeness of an ancestor! Will
people never learn that falling in love is often nothing in the world but
an accident, and often more fatal than falling down an elevator shaft?
Will they never stop to think that they haven’t any more right to afflict
their unborn children with the crotches, cranks, whims, crookedness and
conceit of their own souls than they have to murder them after they are
born? Ye gods, and is it from this that immortality is made?
Some day, for the benefit of humanity, I propose to open a Registration
Book. I want to do this because I want to see people take as much
interest in their own children as they do in their horses, and as much
interest in their own pedigree as they do in their dog’s. Many a man
“falls in love” with, and marries, a woman whose qualities, character and
pedigree, if wrapped up in a horse’s hide, he wouldn’t be caught trading
an old blind mule for; and many a woman, under the same silly pressure,
marries some vicious brute “to reform him,” who if turned into a buggy
horse, with half the meanness that he had inherited, she wouldn’t risk
her poodle dog behind.
And here is the way I would go to registering my people. In all
registration there must first be a foundation stock. I would let
truthfulness, honesty and work count as “foundation stock.” This would
change the present standard radically, and let into life a foundation of
good blood that at present is entirely neglected and not allowed to come
in at all unless it happens to come in under a dress suit. I would then
let accomplishments—the ability to do—from the ability to do poetry to
the ability to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before—count
as my classes, and it wouldn’t take me long to straighten out old
humanity and proceed to breed a race of people fit to live.
Here it is:
Trotwood’s Human Standard.
When white men and women meet the following requirements and
are duly registered, they shall be accepted as standard bred
and shall be permitted to marry:
1. Any white man who has earned and saved one thousand dollars,
provided he is honest, industrious and truthful, and is sound
in wind, limb, and mind.
2. Any white woman who can cook a square meal, make her
own clothes, keep a house clean and play on some musical
instrument, provided always that she is pure, lives under some
moral standard and will agree to raise her children under it.
3. Every man who is the father of a great man or woman.
4. Every woman who is the mother of a great man or woman.
5. Geniuses, however cranky.
6. The father and mother of a genius.
Non-Standard.
The following shall be non-standard, and neither they nor their
children shall be registered:
1. Old bachelors from choice.
2. Cranks.
3. Liars.
4. The impure.
5. Diseased persons and the children of consumptives, the
cancerous and the insane.
6. The children of impure married women.
7. Society people wherever found and their one child.
8. Married men who lead germans.
9. Women who eat onions, drink beer or whiskey, or chew gum.
10. The children of women who play cards for money or for
prizes. They keep up the supply of gamblers.
11. Evangelists who preach slang and dirty sermons from the
pulpit.
12. Dialect poets.
13. Praying lawyers.
14. Bank cashiers who run Sunday-schools.
15. Doctors who give much medicine and cut people open.
16. The last three ought really to be damned.
17. People who have reached middle age and still say: “I
taken,” “You hadn’t ought to,” “I seen him,” and “It is me.”
Given under the hand and seal, stamped and delivered by
TROTWOOD.
Old Wash’s Ma.
Editor Trotwood’s:
Your writings as they appeared in the Horse Review always appealed to me,
especially the “Old Wash” stories, and I remember some years ago that
some one was impertinent enough to ask the age of Old Wash. Of course,
that fellow wasn’t entitled to an answer, but as I have run across a
clipping of an old negro woman whom I am sure must be old Wash’s mother
(I hope you can verify it), I want him to look her up. The fact that he
felt young enough to marry (the unlucky thirteenth) it might interest him
to be able to tell his troubles to his ma.
Your magazine is a welcome monthly visitor, and may it always come up
to the standard you have planned for it is my earnest wish. Here is the
story:
Barnum, the great showman, hearing of an old negro woman down in
Tennessee who claimed to be 125 years old, called to see her with a view
to securing her for a side show. He found that the old woman was really
very ancient, and commenced to question to find out just how old she
really was. He said to her:
“Auntie, do you remember George Washington?”
“I reckon I duz, sah; I’se played wid him many a day.”
“Do you remember anything about the Revolutionary War?” asked Barnum.
“Well, I should say I duz,” replied the old lady. “I ’members when de
bullets wuz a flyin’ and a zoonin’ round here laik bumblebees, sah.”
“What do you remember about the fall of the Roman empire?” said Barnum.
The old woman was “stumped” for a moment, but, recovering herself,
replied:
“I wuz a mighty leetle gal den’ but I ’members hearin’ de ole folk say
dat dey heerd sumpin’ drap.”
E. J. FERGUSON.
Washington, Pa.
[Illustration: Photo by Julie Royster, Raleigh, N. C.]
Trotwood’s Travels
LITTLE JOURNEYS THROUGH THE SOUTH—FLORENCE ALABAMA.
It is fitting that the story of the journey to Florence, Ala., should
appear In the same issue with Jackson’s march into the Creek Nation;
for the story of this pretty little city on the Tennessee, between the
foothills of the mountains and the cotton plains beyond, is literally
thumb-marked with Old Hickory.
Andrew Jackson knew and understood what was good in woman, in man and
in land. In these he never erred. Never in his life did he tie on to
a quitter or touch a yellow streak. When he stamped the seal of his
friendship on a man or woman, or drove the steel of his compass[1] on
land he had decided to buy, they were already registered. And history, a
century later, will tell you they were not false.
When a man’s judgment, like his literature, stands the test of a century,
it is good for all time.
But before the white man was the Indian, and before the Indian, the Mound
Builders. The Mound Builders never were known to settle on poor land.
They found Florence before the Indian, before the white man, before the
hero of New Orleans.
It is beautiful to speculate about those people. Who they were and what
they were only their great, silent mound monuments tell, and they are as
dumb as the unreturning past.
The mound they built where the great creek meets the Tennessee is a
perfect and splendid specimen of their custom. Scholars say it was
built for religious worship—not to bury their dead within, and it is
one of a series in the valley of the Tennessee. What robed, mysterious
priest and peoples once worshiped around it? What censers of eternal fire
burned always on its summit? What white-robed maidens met a sacrificial
death on its summit overlooking the river? What warriors thronged around
it, chanting their battle songs and dipping their spear points in the
victims’ blood?
“Forever and forever flows the river,
Forever and forever rolls the plain—
Forever shall the pale stars ’round them quiver,
But never shall their past return again.
Hyperion dawns but light their frieze in vain,
And moons peer sadly through the columned way,
The midday glares on what doth yet remain
Of faded glory with a mocking play—
Thus passeth into shadow man’s imperial sway.”
[1] The following letter addressed to Gen. Dan Smith is preserved in
Nashville:
“October 29th, 1795.
“Sir: Captain John Hays and myself wish to have our land
divided; for which purpose to-morrow is appointed, wish to
get the favor of you to do the business, as we wish it done
accurate; therefore hope you will do us the favor to come to
my house this evening, so that we may take an early start
to-morrow. Will thank you to bring with you your compass and
chain. If you cannot come will thank you to favor me with the
loan of your compass and chain by the bearer. I am, sir with
the highest esteem, your most obedient servant,
[Signed] “Andrew Jackson.”
* * * * *