18. Fastest pacing team, amateur trials, Prince Direct and Morning
Star, 2:06.
It will be observed that all of these records except a few were made in
races and not against time.
Whence came this wonderful family of horses? What is this pacing gait?
What mingling of blood lines have brought these horses of the plow, the
saddle and the wheel to the grandstand and the pinacle of fame?
This is the story I shall tell as a serial during the first twelve
issues of Trotwood’s Monthly.
The light-harness horse has come to be a type of its own. It is
distinctly an American type, as distinguished from the English running,
or thoroughbred horse, the German and French coach, the Russian Orloff
and horses of other nationalities. There is a wide gap, however,
between a race horse, whether runner or harness horse, and other
breeds, however pure, their blood lines. It is the difference of
intelligence, speed, endurance, of lung development, of steel bone. It
is the difference between genius and mediocracy--for speed is to the
horse what genius is to man.
Whence began this speed--in the English runner, in the American trotter
and pacer? Traced back, the sheiks of the desert might tell; they who
worshipped the midnight stars, or chased on steeds of fire the wild
antelope of the plains, before Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldees.”
Knowing the past now from the present, seeing it so clearly through
the glasses of twentieth century science, knowing the laws of the
“survival of the fittest,” that land and air and sand and sun make both
the physical man as well as the physical horse, we can easily guess
what centuries of wild gallops across the desert will do for the horse,
supplemented by that natural love of him in his master--that love which
brings care and kindness and the exercise of common sense in mating and
maternity.
As to the American horse, there are two distinct classes, based on
their respective gaits--the trotter and the pacer. In another chapter
these respective gaits are fully discussed, their difference shown,
their origin and the speed attained by each. This brief history will
deal only with the pacing gait, but so closely are these two great
gaits related, and so often do the blood lines of trotter and pacer
run in parallel columns that it is necessary for a clear explanation
of the subject to say a foreword about the trotter, that grand type of
beauty, speed and utility, so purely American and so superbly great
that the very mention of his name should excite a patriotic glow in the
bosom of every American who loves his country and her just fame.
The history of the trotting horse began with Messenger, a gray
thoroughbred foaled in 1780, and imported from England to America in
May, 1788. He was royally bred for his time, being by Mambrino, son
of Engineer, and through both sire and dam he traced to the famous
Godolphin Arabian. An old description of him says he was 15-3/4
hands high, with “a large, long head, rather short, straight neck,
with wind-pipe and nostrils nearly twice as large as ordinary; low
withers, shoulders somewhat upright, but deep and strong; powerful
loins and quarters; hocks and knees unusually large, and below them
limbs of medium size, but flat and clean and, whether at rest or in
motion, always in perfect position.” With this beginning, in 1822, a
Norfolk trotter called Bellfounder, who had trotted two miles in six
minutes, and had challenged all England to a trot, was imported. It
was his daughter in which the strains of Messenger met that produced
Hambletonian 10, the head of the trotting type in America, the first
great trotting sire of the world, and through him perpetuated by his
great sons, such as Geo. Wilkes, Electioneer, Dictator, and their
descendants. Through all these years the trotting record has gradually
been reduced, first by one great trotter and then another, beginning
with the first queen of the trotting turf, Lady Suffolk, and ending
with that superb little thing of fire and speed and sweetness, Lou
Dillon. Literally, in that century of progress millions of dollars
have been spent, not only by thousands of small breeders, but by such
financial magnates and great breeders as Vanderbilt, Sanford, Bonner,
Backman, Alexander, Forbes, Lawson and others, chiefly in New York, New
England, Kentucky and California.
The effect of all this was to create that splendid race of trotters now
known all over the world, and to produce a horse capable of trotting a
mile in two minutes or better.
But even before the advent of Messenger there had developed in the
eastern coast of the Colonies, chiefly in Delaware and Rhode Island, a
family of extremely fast pacers known as the Narragansetts, an account
of which will be seen a few chapters further on. These horses were
small, but game, docile, excellent under the saddle, and used almost
exclusively for travel in those early days of pioneer roads. Their
speed was marvelous, if the testimony of Rev. Dr. McSparrow, 1721, an
English minister who was stationed in the Colonies, may be accepted as
proof. This reverend gentleman, writing to a friend in England says
that he has seen them pace in races under saddle, going a mile in “a
little less than two and a good deal better than three minutes.”
However, for nearly two centuries the pacer never was thought of as
a factor in horse development, especially as a race horse until the
advent of the Hal family of Tennessee, in the early 70’s, with Little
Brown Jug and Mattie Hunter, although the great bloodlines and speed
of Pocahontas, James K. Polk and other noted pacers in the early ’40’s
ought to have foretold what great possibilities lay in the despised
pacing gait. As usual, the rejected stone found itself in the key of
the arch, and out of Tennessee, by what some might term chance, but in
fact the legitimate product of scientific breeding, of soil, of climate
and grass, out of an obscure family of saddle horses, bred with no idea
of racing and with never a thought of fame, but taken, like Coriolanus,
literally from the plow, this horse is found--the first to go a mile
in two minutes or better, and to do almost without price and without
effort what the millionaires of horsedom had spent fortunes to do in
vain.
This was first accomplished by Star Pointer, at Readville, Mass.,
September 2, 1897.
Such a family deserves to be perpetuated in history, however brief it
may be and unpretentiously written. And I beg the future as well as the
present historian not to criticise too closely its style, for in it,
as I go along, a hundred fancies will twine themselves with my facts.
There is so much about man and horse that is akin. There is so much of
human nature in both--there is such a chance for moralizing on their
life, their death, their fame, their fortune, their brief days’ strut
on the stage of time, their passing out--“and the rest is silence.”
And, speaking of fame in both man and horse, is it not all a lottery?
With men she is a sly and uncertain goddess, coming seldom to those who
court her, and often to others who care nothing for her, so, in the
rearing of race-horses the same uncertainty exists, and matron after
matron bred in purple lines may go on throwing quitters and lunkheads
year after year, while some obscure dam, whose breeding is barely
tolerable, but stamped by nature with a spirit of fire and a soul of
steel, sends out from some hithertofore obscure breeders’ farm a race
horse that sets a new mark for speed and a new fashion for blood lines.
In a decision, Judge Gaynor, of the Supreme Court of King’s County,
New York, in a case against the president of the Gravesend track,
where runners are raced, held that horse racing was not a lottery.
This may be true within the technical meaning of the term, lottery,
but if the honorable court had held that breeding race horses was not
a lottery, we have our doubt whether the decision would have met with
the unanimous consent of the breeders themselves. And, as we remarked
above, fame itself is not more uncertain.
There is so much similarity between man and horse that a student of
either will constantly find himself comparing the two. Almost every
quality possessed by man has its counterpart, though often in a less
degree, in man’s favorite animal, while now and then the master fails
to come up to the many excellencies of his beast. A good judge of
human nature is invariably a good judge of horses and horse nature. In
fact, so well understood is this rule that “horse sense” in man has
come to have a definite meaning of its own, and classes the human thus
favored with a common sense stronger than usual.
It is almost certain failure for erring man to struggle only to be
famous. She never yet came in all her splendor to the impetuous wooer.
Like Cleopatra, who secretly tired of the infatuated Anthony, who could
not fight at Actium for thoughts of her, and secretly died for love of
the young Caesar who heartily despised the character of the ancient
Langtry, so also with fame. “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,”
and perhaps knows if he allowed the fools who burn up their lives and
their midnight oil seeking to become famous, to become so, their heads
would burst with conceit or their own vanity would wreck them. But
on the other hand, He often showers on those who honestly fight for
right, regardless of consequences, who care more for principle than
for worldly honor, and more for truth than for glory, and who do their
whole duty regardless of consequences, the greatest fame and honor.
The strutting peacock has all he can carry in his gaudy plumage and
resplendent feathers. It would have been as much a sacrilege to have
added these decorations to either Ulysses S. Grant or Robert E. Lee, as
it would have been cruel to deprive John Pope and Robert Tombs of them.
And the gap between the pairs is the true distance between fame and
feathers.
The wild, reckless and dissipated young rake, who left Rome more to
be rid of his creditors than to fight the Gauls, never dreamed of the
glory in store for him as he threw the fire of his soul in his work and
blazed his way to fame both with a pen and sword--each so resplendently
bright that the student of to-day is lost in wonder and admiration
as he endeavors to decide on which Caesar’s greatest claim to renown
rests. “Here lies one whose name is written on water,” is the epitaph
which the poor, gentle, timid Keats begged to have carved on his tomb,
begged it as he lay dying from shafts of cruelty and malice. And yet,
his fame is as enduring as his art, and that is “a thing of beauty” and
“a joy forever.” “What have I done to be worthy of this great honor?”
asked Washington, when he heard he was elected the first president of
the Republic. Shakespeare was silent, morose, dissatisfied, as all true
artists are, with his own work, and judging from the epitaph, which it
is said he himself wrote, it appears he was fearful he might not have
even a place to rest his bones. And so, the world over. Simplicity is
greatness. Truth is fame. Honesty is glory. If you doubt it compare
Agricola and Cataline; Washington and Arnold; Paul and Iscariot;
Shakespeare and Sheridan.
In the same line of reasoning it is an hundred to one when a breeder,
pinning everything on a pedigree, an individuality, or some supposed
excellency, ever hits the mark. It is said that the same man once
owned Kittrell’s Tom Hal and Copperbottom. The latter he thought was
the better horse; the former was ignored. Time has shown, perhaps to
his loss, the owner’s error. An exchange recently published a story of
how a prospective buyer went to purchase one or two colts. The first
was Hambletonian 10, then, I think, a yearling; the second was a horse
called Abdallah. He regarded Abdallah the handsomest, the speediest,
the best. He spent a good deal of time in his examination, and as they
were priced the same, showing that even the owners had not discovered
any difference, he finally purchased the Abdallah colt, and, the writer
adds, “The first went to fame, the second to a double-tree.”
But some people think horse-breeding is not a lottery. Why, even
man-breeding is.
And so the Hal family, thinking not of fame, find it thrust upon them.
(To be Continued.)
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