Messenger’s coming, and long before his get and their get appeared on
the road. But the matches were neighborhood affairs and attracted only
local attention. There was absolutely no effort at organization and the
construction of trotting tracks until many years later. What racing
there was was in the hands and under the control of gentlemen; how much
interest they took in these trotting and pacing matches I do not know.
But not much I fancy, for caste in America was stronger and more
separating than it is now, when, if we put the “mighty rich” in a class
by themselves there is very little at all. It was not until between 1820
and 1830 that horses were trotted on tracks, and then there was little,
if any, of this mile heat business to see really how fast a horse could
go for a short distance. What the people of that elder day seemed to be
most interested in was how far a horse could trot at a good rate of
speed. I will not tire my readers with a recital of the fictions of the
contests on the roads of Long Island and Harlem, but begin with the race
of Lady Kate under the saddle against time. Her task was to go fifteen
miles in an hour. This she did and easily. Nor does it seem much of a
task when we consider that a few years later Andrew Jackson was doing
mile after mile in much less than three minutes. This horse, by the way,
was so superior to the trotters of the time that his owner could make
few matches with him. His speed and endurance frightened the others off,
and there was little, if any, rivalry. We find it recorded, however,
that Paul Pry, in 1833, beat time in an effort to go sixteen miles to
the hour, and Hiram Woodruff, then a boy, expressed the opinion that
this horse could then have gone twenty miles in the hour. This same old
driver tells of a horse which he thought was one of the most superior he
ever knew, Top Gallant, by Messenger. This fellow, in his twenty-second
year, went four four-mile heats in time very fast for that day. A little
later appeared Dutchman, who, in a race of three-mile heats against
Rattler, went the distance in 7.45½, 7.50, 8.02 and 8.24, Dutchman won
the first and fourth heat, Rattler won the second heat, while the third
was a dead heat. Here we see the first heat was trotted at the rate of
2.35, which was surely very fast going, considering the distance, the
vehicles used and the shoeing. But such journeys are now considered too
far.
Lady Suffolk, an inbred Messenger, was spoken of for a while as the
Queen of Trotters, and she was a remarkably good one both in breeding
and in performance. She was sired by Engineer II, by Engineer, a son of
imported Messenger; her dam was by Don Quixote, son of Messenger. So it
will be seen that she was closely inbred to Messenger and had as much of
the Thoroughbred blood as any trotting horse of remarkable performance.
She was a gray, and was foaled in 1833 on Long Island. She began
trotting when she was five years old, and had a remarkably successful
career. She trotted 138 races, winning eighty-eight times and receiving
forfeit three times. When she was twelve years old, at Beacon Course,
Hoboken, she trotted the second heat of a five-heat race in 2.29½, which
was the first time 2.30 had been passed, and was, of course, the record.
In 1849 she made a saddle record of 2.26. She was bred to Black Hawk in
Vermont, but the colt was prematurely born, and she left no descendants.
Although this record was reduced in 1849 to 2.28 by Pelham, a converted
pacer, another second was knocked off in 1853 by Highland Maid, also a
converted pacer, there was nothing in the way of trotters to take the
great place of Lady Suffolk until Flora Temple, the queen of them all,
came along about 1850, and proceeded to beat all that attempted to rival
her for speed and courage.
When I was a boy, Flora Temple was considered almost as great as
Lexington. In Kentucky at that time, her wonderful performances, her
speed and her courage were considered all the more remarkable from the
fact that no one knew how she was bred, and inferred that she had no
breeding that was good. This was not a fair inference. Her appearance,
her gameness, her fighting qualities, together with her nervousness, all
indicated that she was a high-bred animal. To say what that breeding was
is another matter. So a pedigree was fixed up for her. On the plate
published by Currier and Ives when she was at the very zenith of her
fame, her pedigree was set down as follows: “Sired by one-eyed Kentucky
Hunter, by Kentucky Hunter; dam Madam Temple by a spotted Arabian
horse.” I have no doubt that this pedigree is as arrant nonsense as was
ever put in print, and was simply made up to put on the advertisements
of the races in which she was entered. I doubt, even, whether there was
any serious effort to trace her pedigree when she was a filly, for it
was not until she was five years old that she attracted the attention of
a horseman and he bought her for $175, and sold her quickly for $350.
Previous to that she had been used in a livery stable, though I recall a
tradition that she had been used in a milk cart.
Colonel Battell, who spares no pains when he goes after a pedigree,
investigated that of Flora Temple, and says it is as follows: “Foaled
May, 1845; bred by Samuel Welch, Sangerfield, New York; got by Loomis’s
Bogus, son of Lame Bogus, by Ellis’s Bogus, son of imported Tom Bogus;
dam Madam Temple, about 850 pounds, bay, foaled 1840, bred by Elijah
Peck, Waterville, New York, sold when four months old to William
Johnson, of whom she was purchased, 1843, by Samuel Welch, got by a
spotted stallion (owned by Horace Terry, who brought him from Long
Island or Dutchess County, New York) said to be by a full-blooded
Arabian stallion kept on Long Island; second dam described by John I.
Peck, son of Elijah Peck, as bay with black points, bob tail, low set
and heavy, very smart and would weigh from 1050 to 1175 pounds, foaled
about 1834, purchased by Mr. Peck of a Mr. Randall, Paris, New York.
Sold when weaning with her dam to Archie Hughes, Sangerfield, who sold
her for $13 to Nathan Tracy of Hamilton, New York, who kept her two and
one-half years, and sold to William H. Condon, Smyrna, New York, who
sold to Kelley & Richardson, livery-stable keepers, Richardson, New
York. Mr. Richardson took her with a drove of cattle to Washington
Hollow, New York, and sold her for $175 to Jno. Vielee, who took her to
New York and sold her to George E. Perrin, for $550, who sold her
September, 1850, to G. A. Vogel, for $600. A correspondent of the
_Spirit of the Times_, writing from Waterville, Oneida County, New York,
February, 1860, says: “Madam Temple, the dam of Flora, was foaled the
property of Elijah Peck, Waterville, Oneida County, New York, in the
spring of 1840: her dam was a small but fleet bay mare. Madam Temple was
sired by a spotted Arabian stallion brought from Dutchess County, and
owned by Horace Terry. Mr. Peck disposed of Madam Temple when four
months old for a mere trifle to William Johnson of the same place....
Terry’s spotted Arabian was a remarkably strong, restless, fast-trotting
horse, said to have been sired by a full-blooded Arabian stallion on
Long Island. He was a great favorite in this section, and his stock for
general use possesses probably more excellent qualities than that of any
other horse known in this vicinity. They were uniformly strong, with
rare speed and bottom. The general high reputation in which his stock
was held may be judged from the fact that George W. Crowningshield, of
Boston, owned a pacing gray mare of his get, so fast and enduring that
he sold her for $1500. That was considered very high in those days.
Madam Temple has always been regarded as a remarkable roadster. Mr.
Hughes sold her in 1846 to G. B. Cleveland, Waterville, who soon parted
with her to N. W. Moss of the same place, but now of Osage, Iowa. By him
she was kept as a horse of all work for several years, from whom she was
purchased by James M. Tower in the spring of 1854, and he subsequently
sold to H. L. Barker, of Clinton, Oneida County, New York, in January,
1855, who now owns her. Flora was her first colt. Her second a horse
colt, was foaled in the spring of 1855, and was bought by J. W. Taylor,
of East Bloomfield, for R. A. Alexander, of Woodford County, for $500.
This colt was sired by H. L. Barker’s Edwin Forrest (a Kentucky colt),
now owned by S. Downing, Lexington, Kentucky.”
So we can take our choice of pedigrees. If Flora Temple had been born a
few years later the Hambletonian advocates would surely have claimed
her. It has always been a wonder to me that they did not, after all,
assert that she was of collateral blood. When her new owner brought this
most remarkable mare to New York, he had not the most remote idea that
he held one of the wonders of the world. He believed that she was a
pretty good pony, and could strike a good clip on the road. She was only
14.2 hands high and had a mere stump of a tail. Besides, she was
nervous, and before she “found herself” had a rather choppy action. When
she had learned the trick, however, her action was smooth and
clock-like, and she glided along with almost unapproachable grace.
Moreover, when she broke she lost scarcely nothing, as she did not have
to be pulled back almost to a standstill, but caught her trotting stride
from what was very like a run.
There are other books in which the record of Flora Temple can be found
in all of its proud and brilliant details. She beat everything of her
day, beginning with the Waite Pony on the Bloomingdale road in 1850,
until Ethan Allen, Princess, George M. Patchen and all the good ones had
to take her dust. She was not used under the saddle, but always to sulky
or wagon. Hiram Woodruff, her first real trainer, says she was a great
weight puller and was not in the least bothered by a 350 pound wagon,
but went along with it as merrily as though she were in a racing sulky.
Her first defeat was in 1853 by Black Douglas, a son of Henry Clay; but
a few months later she had her revenge and beat the Clay stallion with
apparent ease. In 1856 she took the trotting record away from Highland
Maid by covering a mile in 2.24½. The record remained with her for
eleven years; she reduced it in 1859 to 2.19¾, and so she was the first
to trot better than 2.20, as Lady Suffolk was the first to go below
2.30. In 1859 the little bay stump-tail mare was at the very zenith of
her fame, though Hiram Woodruff was of opinion that the next year she
might have surpassed this. The next year the Civil War broke out and
she, not being in good form, was retired to the breeding farm of
Aristides Welch, near Philadelphia.
During the two or three last years of her public life, Flora Temple had
nothing to beat, so she was sent all over the country “hippodroming”
with Princess and George M. Patchen, variously. On the farm she dropped
a few colts. Two were by sons of Hambletonian, and one by imported
Leamington. They have not done much to perpetuate her prowess. My own
idea is that in selecting mates for her the great cardinal principle of
breeding: “like begets like,” was utterly disregarded. The blood of a
Hambletonian was probably too cold to mate with hers, though we do not
know what hers was, and Leamington’s conformation was too great a
contrast. Though she has left no descendants that do her particular
honor, she has left by her performances imperishable fame as the
greatest trotter of her day, and her day lasted for more than a dozen
years.
There was a lull in trotting during the Civil War, just as there was in
racing, but after the war the trotting tracks became even more popular
than the running courses—not the most fashionable, but the most popular.
Fashion has never forsaken the running horse, and probably never will;
but in the main, the trotting races have been patronized and managed by
men of a slightly different social status. To be sure, there are notable
exceptions, exceptions so notable, indeed, that they ought to be
sufficient to lift the ban from the trotting world; but they have never
been able to do it. And even during the ten years after the Civil War,
when trotting was immensely popular, it was considered slightly a
reproach to be interested in the sport. It was during this period that
Dexter took the trotting primacy away from Flora Temple, and the tribe
of Hambletonian came into such prominence that the legislators who
framed trotting-match rules, established a register and made laws fixing
a standard entitling a stallion or a mare to a place in these sacred
books. And so the “Standard Bred Trotter” came into being, and his has
been a long day—his advocates and admirers say a great day.
CHAPTER SIX
RYSDYK’S HAMBLETONIAN AND THE STANDARD BRED TROTTERS
After Dexter, in 1867, took away from Flora Temple the trotting record
by doing a mile in 2.17¼, his reputed sire, Rysdyk’s Hambletonian was
held in such high esteem by those trying to breed fast trotters, that
they considered any horse not by him or of his breed to be not in the
least worth while in any attempt to improve these light harness horses.
So it is quite impossible to treat of the Standard Bred Trotters without
also treating of Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. There are many who do not, and
never have, agreed with the Hambletonian admirers, and as I am one who
once believed in the fictions as to his breeding and other excellences,
I propose to be perfectly fair by giving both sides of the story of a
horse that cuts a most considerable figure in American horse annals.
Now, here is one side of the Hambletonian story, and I take the liberty
of quoting from Mr. Hamilton Busbey, a noted writer on trotting horses,
and the editor of a paper devoted to trotting horse interests. He says:
“Lewis G. Morris bred a mare by imported Sour Crout to Messenger, and
the produce in 1806 was a bay colt who developed into a horse of 16
hands, and is known to history as Mambrino. He was never trained in
harness, but was a natural trotter. Betsey Baker, the fastest mare of
her day was sired by him. Amazonia, a snappy chestnut mare of 15.3
hands, showing quality, but of untraced blood, and who could trot to
2.50 was bred to Mambrino, and whose outcome was Abdallah, whose
register number is 1. He was bred by John Tredwell, of Saulsbury Place,
Long Island, was foaled in 1823, and developed into a bay horse of 15.3.
As a four-year old, he trotted a mile in 3.10, but was not kind in
harness, and was principally used under saddle. He made seasons on Long
Island, in New Jersey, and in Orange County, and spent 1840 in the Blue
Grass Region of Kentucky. In 1830 he passed to Isaac Snediker, and after
many changes of fortune died of starvation and neglect on a Long Island
Beach, and was buried in the sand....
[Illustration: RYSDYK’S HAMBLETONIAN]
“The Charles Kent mare was a bay of 15.3 hands, foaled in 1834, with
powerful stifles, and as a four-year old trotted a mile under saddle in
2.41. She was by Bellfounder, a Norfolk trotter of 15 hands, imported
from England to Boston in 1822, by James Bort. Imported Bellfounder was
foaled in 1815, and the blood of his sire, Bellfounder, is at the
foundation of the hackney breed. One Eye, a determined mare by Bishop’s
Hambletonian (son of Messenger), out of Silvertail, a hardy brown mare
by Messenger, was the dam of the Charles Kent mare, who found a happy
nick in Abdallah.
“The fruit of this union was a bay colt, foaled May 5, 1849, at Sugar
Loaf, near Chester, Orange County, New York. This colt, when five weeks
old, was purchased from the breeder, Jonas Seely, by a plain farmer with
a lean pocket-book. The price named for mare and colt was $125, and the
farmer, William M. Rysdyk, sat on the top rail of a fence and pondered
for some time the vital question. The outlay would embarrass him if the
mare or colt should die. He finally said yes, and the mother and son
were taken to Chester. The bay colt, with star and hind ankles white,
grew into a powerful horse 15.2, and was named Hambletonian. His head
was large and expressive, his neck rather short, his shoulders and
quarters massive and his legs broad and flat. His triple line to
thoroughbred Messenger, over the substance imparting cross of
Bellfounder, gave us the greatest progenitor of harness speed the world
has seen.”
I once believed all this just as sincerely as I am sure Mr. Busbey
believes it, and, some ten years ago, I wrote this fiction about
Hambletonian:
“Messenger begat Mambrino, and Mambrino begat Abdallah, and Abdallah
begat Hambletonian. Now, the race may be said to have fairly begun, for
there is scarcely a trotting horse in America which has not in its blood
one, two, or three strains of this Hambletonian blood, for Hambletonian
was the great-sire of trotters. He was a Messenger on both sides,
great-grandson in the male line, and grandson and great-grandson in the
female line, from which also came a new English cross, for his dam was
by the imported hackney Bellfounder.[5] In him the Messenger blood was
strong, and, himself a trotter of much speed, though never trained, he
had the capacity of transmitting the trotting gait in a greater degree
than any horse in history.”
Footnote 5:
No human being in the world knows anything whatever about the breeding
of the Charles Kent mare, Hambletonian’s dam.
There are a good many misstatements in that paragraph; but when I wrote
it I was deceived by the false pedigrees which have been manufactured
and recorded in the trotting-horse registers and stud-books. The truth
is, that Hambletonian was a bull-like horse that was trained by Hiram
Woodruff, but could never develop a speed equal to a mile in three
minutes—3.18, to be exact, being the best mile he ever did. As to his
pedigree: Mambrino, the grandsire, was by Messenger; but he was
worthless and also vicious. He could neither run nor trot. He was bred
by Louis Morris, of Westchester County, New York, and sold to Major
William Jones of Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. As he was worthless
and a serious disappointment, Major Jones virtually gave him away, and
he was used as a traveling stallion at a small fee. John Treadwell, a
Quaker farmer near Jamaica, Long Island, had two Conestoga[6] or
Pennsylvania Dutch draft-mares. Out of one of these mares, by Mambrino,
was born Abdallah. This horse was so bad-tempered that he could never be
broken to harness, but was ridden under the saddle. He had no speed
either as a runner or trotter, not being able to do a mile in four
minutes at any gait. He had a mule-like head and ears, a badly ewed
neck, and a rattail. But he was a Messenger, despite the Conestoga
crossing, and he was sold to Kentuckians for $4500. In less than six
months the Kentuckians repented of their bargain, and sold him back to
New Yorkers for $500—Messrs. Simmons & Smith, Bull’s Head dealers,
buying him as a speculation. No purchaser could the speculators find at
any price, and the stallion was virtually given away to stop expenses of
keeping. About this time Charles Kent wanted a new horse for his butcher
wagon, and traded, through Alexander Campbell, of Bull’s Head, his worn
out mare to Edmund Seeley, a farmer in Orange County, New York, for a
steer for butchering. The butcher’s mare had, originally, been sold to
him by Campbell, who had obtained her in a drove of western horses,
paying $40 for her. Her pedigree was quite unknown. This mare is known
in American horse history as the Charles Kent mare, and is said to be by
imported Bellfounder. She was in foal to Abdallah when Seeley got her,
and the colt and mare became the property of Bill Rysdyk, a hired man on
Seeley’s farm. Rysdyk looked around for a name for his colt—a name which
should indicate the Messenger blood in him. There had been in the early
years of the century a famous son of Messenger named after Alexander
Hamilton. This horse finally became known as Bishop’s Hamiltonian. In
his effort to borrow the name, Rysdyk, being weak in his orthography,
called his horse Rysdyk’s Hambletonian. And so he lives in history—false
in his pedigree as in his name. The public of that day believed this
horse to be a son of Bishop’s Hamiltonian, and for the sake of the
Messenger blood he was served to the best mares in Orange County, and
Orange County was rich in the Arab and Barb blood of the daughters and
granddaughters of that great and unbeatable trotting horse, Andrew
Jackson. No stallion ever had a better chance, and it was almost
impossible that there should not have been good horses among his get.
And there were. But the bad blood of his ancestry, sire and grandsire
being worthless degenerates, together with the utterly unmixable
Conestoga blood in his grandam, have been continually cropping out in
his progeny—for faults more readily reappear than perfections—until now,
when it must be acknowledged that the boasted horse type of which he is
said to be the founder is no type at all.
Footnote 6:
I had a friend who was with the Confederate Cavalry when Lee invaded
Pennsylvania to meet defeat at Gettysburg. He told me that the sleek,
large Conestoga horses that were abundant in the section traversed
were too tempting to be neglected, so many of the cavalry men
abandoned their lean and battle scarred mounts and replaced them with
the Conestogas. Before they reached the Potomac on their retreat
southward, these cold blooded draft horses were completely used up and
the soldiers swore at themselves for their folly in making the
exchanges. The Conestogas are good draft horses and serviceable on
farms where no quick work is required, but they are totally lacking in
speed and the courage and stamina which speed requires. A more
impossible cross than that between a Conestoga and a Thoroughbred
could hardly be imagined.
When the pedigree manipulators were manufacturing this line of descent
for Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, Alexander Campbell, of Bull’s Head, was
offered a thousand dollars to certify to the stated pedigree of the
Charles Kent mare. Campbell declined, and ordered the Hambletonian
emissaries out of his office. Here is another rather amusing evidence of
the careful way in which the pedigree of Hambletonian was bolstered up.
There was no such horse as Bishop’s Hambletonian. The horse alluded to
was Alexander Hamilton, or Bishop’s Hamiltonian. Nobody ever thought of
calling a Hamiltonian a Hambletonian until old Bill Rysdyk did it,
simply because he was not gifted in the art of spelling. But this did
not bother the record makers. They simply misspelled the name of the
elder horse. Surely old Bill Rysdyk laid a spell on the gentlemen of the
press, and he kept it to the end as his horse, shaped like a cart horse,
rather than one filled with high blood, was a great money-maker in the
stud. His earnings by the record were $184,725.
When there was a great many men interested, and most sincerely, too, in
the breeding of trotters, it was thought to be a good thing to
inaugurate a systematic method of breeding and establish a standard
which should regulate the records that were to be kept of trotters. By
general consent the suggestion of the _Turf, Field and Farm_, Mr.
Busbey’s paper, a horse that could go a mile in 2.30 was considered
worthy to get a place in the register. This would have excluded all the
trotters previous to the time of Lady Suffolk. But the matter was
discussed, and Wallace’s “American Trotting Register” was accepted as
the official record of pedigrees, thus putting the business in the hands
of the most ingenious partizan that has ever been interested in the
horse business in this country. These were the rules that were adopted:
“In order to define what constitutes a trotting-bred horse, and to
establish a _Breed_ of trotters on a more intelligent basis, the
following rules are adopted to control admission to the records of
pedigrees. When an animal meets with the requirements of admission
and is duly registered, it shall be accepted as a standard
trotting-bred animal.
“_First_—Any stallion that has, himself, a record of two minutes
and thirty seconds (2.30) or better; provided any of his get has a
record of 2.40 or better; or provided his sire or his dam, his
grandsire or his grandam, is already a standard animal.
“_Second_—Any mare or gelding that has a record of 2.30 or better.
“_Third_—Any horse that is the sire of two animals with a record
of 2.30 or better.
“_Fourth_—Any horse that is the sire of one animal with a record
of 2.30 or better; provided, he has either of the following
additional qualifications:—