The race horse has come, by common consent to represent all that is
graceful and grand in the animal kingdom. The culmination of perfected
strength and speed, courage and intelligence, he stands, nevertheless,
the model of patience, gentleness and forbearance. How wonderful it
seems that in this dumb creature, whose mental gifts, compared to
man’s, are as a clay bed to a bank of violets, yet has he reached,
through the misty channels of mere instinct, a physical perfection and
often a moral excellence which his maker and molder may never attain!
He is amiable in spite of force and desperate races, and often blows
and cruelty; he is gentle, notwithstanding a training tending to make
him a whirlwind of wrath and a tornado of tempests; he is honest in
spite of the dishonesty of those around him and docile and contented
despite the fact that there slumbers within him like sleeping bolts in
a flying cloud the spirit of madness gathered from the nerve granaries
of a long line of unnumbered ancestors.
A regiment with his courage would ride over the guns of a Balaklava;
a state with his honesty would need no criminal laws; give scholars
his patience, and the stars would be their playthings; imbued with
his power of endurance, the weakest nation would tunnel mountains as
a child a sand hill, build cities as a dreamer builds castles, and
shoulder the world with a laugh. To one who sees him as he is, and
loves him for his intrinsic greatness, he is all this and more. Man’s
honest servant, dumb exemplar, truest helper, best friend.
In his master’s hour of recreation, he is the joyful spirit that whirls
him, at the swish of a whip, along the dizzy course where the whistling
winds sing their warning. In his hours of stern reality, when fortunes
hang on his hoof beats and fame stands balanced on the wire that ends
the home-stretch, he is the embodiment of power and dignity, the
champion of might and the god of victory. And finally, in his gentler
moods, he is the faithful servant of the stubble and the plow, the
gentle guardian of the family turn-out, who hauls the laughing children
along the by-ways amid the sweet grasses, where the sunshine and the
zephyrs play. Out from the past, the dim, bloody, shifting past, came
this noble animal, the horse, side by side with man, fighting with
him the battles of progress, bearing with him the burdens of the
centuries. Down the long, hard road, through flint or mire, through
swamp or sand, wherever there has been a footprint, there also will be
seen a hoof-print. They have been one and inseparable, the aim and the
object, the means and the end. And if the time shall ever come, as some
boastingly declare, when the one shall breed away from the other, the
puny relic of a once perfect manhood will not live long enough to trace
the record of it on the tablet of time.
The greatest distinct family of horses that has ever lived is the
Hal family of pacers, a distinctively Tennessee product, originating
in that peculiar geological formation known as the Middle Basin--the
bluegrass region of Tennessee. To understand the greatness of this
family of horses--now known throughout the world, wherever speed and
endurance has a name--it is only necessary to publish the following
table of world-records held by them. These records have all been won
in the last quarter of a century, the remarkable fact being that
before that time these horses lived only for the plow, the saddle
or the wheel, and that nearly all of them are sons and daughters or
descendants of one horse--a roan, known locally as Gibson’s Tom Hal,
from the fact that Capt. Thomas Gibson, a gentleman of the old school,
then living on his estate in Maury County, Tenn., and now the efficient
secretary of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway Library,
first reclaimed him from obscurity and brought him to the county where
his greatness was recognized.
These world records, the choicest in the harness world, are held
to-day, August, 1905, by the descendants of the old roan pacer:
1. First horse to go a mile in harness in 2 minutes, Star Pointer,
1:59-1/4.