A History of the Hals
By John Trotwood Moore.
CAPT. THOMAS GIBSON.
Owner of Gibson’s Tom Hal and John Dilliard.
CHAPTER I.
THE PACING RACE HORSE.
Full-muscled, clean, clear-cut, without a flaw,
Deep-chested—shallow where the quick flanks draw—
Round-footed, flat and flinty in the bone,
Eyes full and flashing, as the opal stone,
Neck like the deep-grooved classic column’s ply—
Massive at base, tap’ring towards the sky,
Ears thin and slender, velvet-pointed, fine
As the unbursted leaflets of the columbine.
Shoulders well back, slanting, thin and strong,
Ribbed close as steel, where girders run along;
Quarters long and massive, rubber-hard and round,
Quick in the stride, but quicker in rebound—
Back like the beam that held Pantheon’s dome—
Gods, give the word, and see this horse come home!
JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.
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.
2. Fastest 4-year-old mare, The Maid, 2:05 1/4.
3. Fastest green performer (1905), Walter Direct, 2:05 3/4.
4. Fastest heat in a race, stallion, Star Pointer, 2:00 1/2.
5. Fastest heat in a race, mare, Fanny Dillard, 2:03 3/4.
6. Fastest first heat in a race, Star Pointer, 2:02.
7. Fastest third heat in a race, Star Pointer, 2:00 1/2.
8. Fastest fifth heat in a race, The Maid, 2:05 3/4.
9. Fastest two heats in race (Dariel and) Fanny Dillard, 2:03 3/4, 2:05.
10. Fastest three consecutive heats in a race, Star Pointer, 2:02 1/2, 2:03 1/2, 2:03 3/4.
11. Fastest three heats in a race, Star Pointer, 2:02 1/2, 2:03 1/2, 2:03 3/4.
12. Fastest seven-heat race, The Maid, 2:07 1/4, 2:07 1/4, 2:05 1/4, 2:09, 2:05 3/4, 2:07, 2:08 3/4.
13. Fastest mile in a race to wagon, Angus Pointer, 2:04 1/2.
14. Fastest team, Direct Hal and Prince Direct, 2:05 1/2.
15. Fastest three-heat in race to wagon, Angus Pointer, 2:06 1/4, 2:04 1/2, 2:06 1/4.
16. Fastest green performer, stallion, Direct Hal, 2:04 1/2.
17. Fastest team in a race, Charley B and Bobby Hal, 2:13.
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.)
THE LAST HYMN OF THE BILOXI
(The Biloxi, a noble tribe of Indians who lived on the Gulf Coast many centuries ago, were defeated in battle and besieged in their last remaining fortress by an unrelenting enemy. Choosing rather to die in the sea than to be captured and enslaved, they marched out of their gate on a moonlit night, singing a death chant, a stately procession of men, women and children, and continued seaward until the waves swallowed them up. Their enemies stood on the shore and watched them, struck with surprise and admiration. The remains of their last fortress is said to be still standing at Biloxi, Miss., and to this day there is heard a weird music which comes in from the Gulf, oftenest on still, moonlit nights, which the natives call “The Last Hymn of the Biloxi.”)
Over the sea, the silent sea,
Faint is the music that comes to me.
Pitifully pealing.
Silently stealing.
Kissing the waves so tenderly.
Starlight above—June—chirrup of crickets—
Fireflies and phantoms of stars in the glow.
Corn in the tassel—faint odor of pollen—
Blow! ye soft night winds, our requiem, blow—
Dear land that has known us, no more will ye know.
Over the sea, the moonlit sea,
Sad is the music that comes to me.
Echoing—dying—
Sobbing—sighing—
Song of a race that would ever be free.
Death in the land—grim death in the battle—
Death—and worse death—for mother and maid.
Bravely we fought, but Fate did not favor—
Sons of Biloxi, ye were never afraid—
In caverns of corals our bones shall be laid.
Over the sea, the crooning sea
(Weird as the wail of a wraith, to me).
Soft as the light dew
Falling the night through.
Faint as a sea-shell’s lullaby.
Moonlight around—mist, mist on the water—
Mist—’tis the drapery of Death on the deep.
White-robed we come—babe, mother and maiden—
Priest—warrior—pity us, sweet sea, and keep—
Dear Sea that has nursed us, in thee let us sleep.
Into the sea, the soothing sea.
Singing, they entered, and died to be free.
Now, when the echoing wave
Sobs o’er their coral grave.
It sings the last hymn of the brave Biloxi.
JOHN TROTWOOD MOORE.