A History of the Hals
By John Trotwood Moore
CHAPTER II.
THE PACER’S FAST DEVELOPMENT.
De Record’s Gwine Down.
De pat’idge is in de cohn-field, his courtin’ days am pas’,
He am waitin’ fur de hunter wid his gun and whiky flas’,
De squirl’s in de hickernut, de shell am droppin’ ’roun’,
But de pacer’s still de racer, and
de
record’s
gwine
down!
De coon am up de white-oak, an’ de price er powder’s riz,
He am layin’ up de coon-grease dat am good fur rheumatiz.
De ’possum’s way up yonder whar de wild grape’s turnin’ brown,
But de pacer holds de market, and
he
keeps
dat
record
down!
Oh, ebery thing am risin’, and’ hog-meat’s in de sky,
E’en de chickens got de panic an’ hev gone to roostin’ high!
De onliest thing dat’s fallin’—an it makes de trotter frown—
Am de pacin’ race-horse record, and
dat
keeps
on
gwine
down!
OLD WASH.
The achievements and development of the pacer in the past ten or fifteen years, since the advent of the Hals, and the swift tribe of trotting-bred pacers, has been so marked and so great that a special chapter is needed for its explanation. The old “side-wheeler” has gone—the new, beautifully gaited, true striding pacing race horse has taken his place. No other feature of a race meeting brings out the crowd and the enthusiasm equal to the free-for-all pace. Never before had such races been witnessed as those first seen in the days of the Big Four—the queen of which was Mattie Hunter 2:12½, the first great Hal mare to attract the attention of the world. She was the star of the Big Four, the others being Blind Tom, Lucy and Rowdy Boy. Later, some of the great free-for-allers were Little Brown Jug, Brown Hal, Hal Pointer, Robert J, Direct, Joe Patchen, John R Gentry and many others whose names will be readily remembered by every horseman. The very mention of these names brings a thrill to the heart as, toward the last of the century, Robert J, John R. Gentry and Joe Patchen and Star Pointer began to bring the pacing record to the two-minute mark. This was first done by Star Pointer, an inbred Hal, crossed again and again in the thoroughbred blood which, undoubtedly, gave to the Hals the staying power so characteristic of the family. And so, looking back, the following article, written by Trotwood December 29, 1892, seems prophetic—that is, if there were such a thing as prophecy. But, alas, there is not, for prophecy is merely another name for the cause of the future as foreseen in the present’s effect. And though this was written thirteen years ago, it is embodied into this history, as fitting so well the present:
“There can no longer be any doubt that the pacer, as a future product on the light harness race course, will be a still stronger factor than he is to-day. Even if desired, it is now not possible to eliminate him from the light harness breeding world. He has come to stay. It matters not to us whether the honest, but sturdy, rascal can trace his ancestors to Marsh’s five-toed orohippos, weighing about forty pounds, and which had all he could do to keep out of the way of Darwin’s “missing link,” and thus save himself from drudgery, even before the days of the Silurian serpents, or whether he was developed in Trojan wars as carved on the frieze of Grecian temples; the fact remains the same, that to-day he is here by a large majority, and though snubbed by his more aristocratic brother, he persistently refuses to stay behind in the procession, and is never happier than when he can get up a good, rattling fight in a five-heat race, or stick his common, but inquisitive, nose a few seconds beyond the trotting record securely placarded on the front of old Father Time. Flung into the world without prestige, friends or influence; his coming regarded as the epitome of a breeder’s ill luck; condemned before he was born, and damned before he could walk; a little too good to kill, yet hardly good enough to be allowed a square meal once a week that he might grow up like any other horse; toe-weighted and hobbled and banged about, and forced to trot in spite of the laws of nature herself, yet the game and honest little fellow, when relieved of his owner’s prejudices and hobbles, has flown to the front with the ease of a swallow through the air and the grace of a game fish in the lake, and now holds the first record for speed and the chief place on the program in the eye of a grand stand that paid its way to see an honest horse race.
“It is the old story of the rejected stone, and he now holds up with surprising popularity his corner of the race horse structure. And yet twenty years ago a pacer was scarcely allowed on a fashionable race course; his pedigree, they said, took to the woods on the first cross; he was regarded by the trotting world as a camel-backed, cat-hammed, narrow-chested, curby-legged beast who paced because he couldn’t trot, and was alive because nobody cared to buy powder enough to kill all of them in the woods of Tennessee and Kentucky. He was allowed to exist on the race course very much on the same idea that a slave is allowed to breathe the same air and view the same heaven his master does. He began his career because he was a good kind of an animal to have around to do the race act at the pumpkin show and come in along with the fat woman and the five-legged calf. His coming to the front was his own work; and to use a classical phrase, he was purely the architect of his own fortune. The American people are a long time finding out merit, but nothing helps them to see it as quickly as the image of the American eagle stamped on the back of a silver dollar—and this the pacer has shown them.
“Despite the oft-repeated theory of ‘the Canadian pacer,’ there is no doubt that the pacer as now found in Kentucky, Tennessee and the West came originally from the older Atlantic States, such as Virginia and the Carolinas, and that he was brought there by our forefathers from England. The fact that there are pacers in Canada merely proves that in that Dominion also they have been brought from the mother country. To trace their origin in England is both a tedious task and a most uncertain one. Yet, from the best information obtainable, there appears to be but little doubt that the pacer was originally a product of Spain, where many years ago he was bred in the purple as a pleasure animal for the nobility of Andalusia and other Spanish states. In fact, it is more than probable that he was bred with more care than was bestowed by the Spanish upon their now favorite animal—the ass. We know that the pacer was safely domiciled in England as far back as the Norman Conquest, for in ‘Ivanhoe,’ written by that most painstaking scholar and novelist, Sir Walter Scott—a man who wrote truer to nature and with as much historic accuracy as any novelist who has ever lived in England—we find many allusions to the pacer under the style of the palfrey and the ambler.
“The following is an extract from Ivanhoe, Chapter II., the scene being in the time of Richard I. In reading it we must remember that the name jennet did not mean then as now the female of an ass, but it meant the palfrey which the lay brother was riding. Says Sir Walter: ‘This worthy churchman rode upon a well-fed, ambling mule, whose furniture was highly decorated and whose bridle, according to the fashion of the day, was ornamented with silver bells.... A lay brother, one of those who followed in the train, had for his use on other occasions one of the most handsome Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth and distinction. The saddle and housings of this superb palfrey were covered by a long boat cloth which reached nearly to the ground, and on which were richly embroidered mitres, crosses and other ecclesiastical emblems.’
“From other writings of Sir Walter Scott we find that the knight usually, when not in battle, rode upon an ambler, and a page, riding also upon the same kind of a horse, led the knight’s large war horse, with his armorial trappings. The fact that in the above extract the mule also paced, goes to show how strong must have been the pacing instinct in his dam, being able to overcome entirely the gait of the ass. But to go further into the history of the pacer in England would be foreign to the ends of this brief article.
“We will only add that in spite of the fact that many English breeders assert that not a pacer has been kept in that country for many years, yet we believe that this is not true and that there are many of them there to-day. But to return to our own pacer. It is quite easy to trace his career as he came from the mother colonies, spreading out through Kentucky, Tennessee and the States of the Northwest, under the name of the ‘saddle horse,’ by which name he was held in the highest esteem and filled an humble but most important position in the pioneer work of State making. Before the roads were cut out through the forests, and when only blazed Indian paths were the highways of the country, he was an absolute necessity, and to-day there belongs to him the proud honor of having been the first common carrier of American civilization. He was with Marion and Sumter in their partisan warfare in the Carolinas; he saw, no doubt, with patriotic emotion, the ignoble surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown; he followed the intrepid Boone across the Alleghanies into Kentucky, and came along with the immortal Jackson—the man of destiny—into the ‘basin of middle Tennessee.’ Pulling the plow for an honest living in the rich cornfields during the week, he carried the women and the children on his back to the primitive church on Sunday. As civilization advanced he improved with it, being crossed with thoroughbred blood in rich profusion, until to-day his lines of breeding are thoroughly established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing, and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the grand stand.
“A scrub, indeed! He was here fighting for independence and an honest living when the forefathers of the Wilkes and Almonts—since old imp. Messenger is regarded as the fountain head—were courting the favor of royalty in England ‘that thrift may follow fawning,’ or carrying soup-drinking Britons on their jolting backs to the wharves of Liverpool, to be shipped over here as food for Tennessee rifles at New Orleans. Plebian, did you say? Why, he ought to be pensioned. He is older and more respectable than the Dutch governors of New York and has a greater claim to patriotism than half of the pensioners who never smelled the smoke of battle.
“In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there is no doubt in the world. And that this thorough blood has been as good, if not better, than that in old Messenger himself, is also true. But the astonishing thing about this amalgamation is the very small per cent of pacing blood it required to leaven the thoroughbred loaf. A pacing sire bred to a running mare and that offspring to another running mare, and so on for several generations, will end with the last, as with the first, in getting a ‘saddler.’
“We have always regarded this fact as the strongest evidence of the intensity of the pacing instinct—an instinct that has such a pure and strong fountain-head somewhere that it is able to overcome the running instinct, though crossed and recrossed upon the pure running blood, is abundant evidence of its own purity and prepotency. And the fact that so many fast pacers are continually thrown from the trotting ranks, now commonly called ‘trotting-bred pacers,’ is but another illustration of the same fact. Verily, back somewhere in the past the pacer was a thoroughbred at his way of going. His remote ancestor, whether in the myths of fables, or in the woods of northern Germany, or the vine-clad hills of Spain, or around the frozen lakes of Canada, was an Alexander, a Julius Caesar and a Napoleon Bonaparte, all in one, in the greatness and gameness of his gait. How else could the fact that every great family of trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory? The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait; and we are also led to believe that it often requires but a small portion of pacing fluid to overcome several generations of the diagonal gait in the veins of the trotting-bred horse.
“Take from the trotting ranks those out of mares or descendants of mares by old Pilot, Jr., and other pacers, and the truth of this assertion will be most plainly seen. In fact, every noted family of trotters, such as the Wilkses and the Almonts—wherever there is any pacing blood, even away back in the fourth and fifth generation—have to the credit of that family some pacer who is faster at his way of going than the star trotter of that family is at his. No Hambletonian trotter has ever attained the speed that has been shown by Direct, unless it be Nancy Hanks, who has some pacing blood in her own royal veins and is inclined to pace a bit herself; nor has any Almont trotter ever equalled Flying Jib and hosts of others we might mention. Among the Wilkses they are thicker than the leaves of Valambrosa, until one is forced to believe that the Clay blood, if such it was, in the pedigree of George Wilkes was about as good as any the great horse had in his veins.
“These facts being true, it is evident that the pacer is not a scrub. If he is a scrub, then we are forced to the conclusion that nothing in all the breeding world may be likened to the intensity of his cold-bloodedness. This scrub blood overcomes the hot running blood, though continually diluted for successive generations; and it needs only a little of it to knock out the hopes of the bluest blooded trotter descended from Hambletonian lines. If he is a scrub, then he is the veritable ‘original sire’ of the scrub horse business, which, like that in man, is ever on top. But as this sin of the pacer helps him to the wire first, and has given him the harness records of the world, we trust no trotting moralist will attempt to entirely obliterate it. We don’t need any crucifixions there! To our mind, we believe that if the curtain of the past could ever be unrolled upon the pacers of old we would find that centuries ago he was bred for no other way of going, and bred so long and so purely and so consistently that in him has been planted an instinct that will never be obliterated. To argue that a cold-blooded horse can be thus preponent is to argue against the well-known laws of heredity!
“In the second place, the pacer has undoubtedly come to stay. The American people are nothing if not quick in realizing real merit and honoring it when clearly proven. As they make no pretensions to the shams of royalty, so are they not bound by the iron rules of court custom from ‘hustling’ to horse-racing. They do not care for so much trappy action; nor does the matter of a banged tail cut as much of a figure in their calculations as does the intense patriotism which lies within them for their own almighty dollar. Passing over the generally admitted fact that the pacer is naturally faster than the trotter, comes to his speed more quickly, may be more evenly matched in a race, and is preserved longer by reason of the smoothness of his gait, there is yet another cause why the pacer is destined to become more popular.
“A great English commoner, whose ire had been aroused on one occasion by a member of the House of Lords, in reply, in a speech of burning oratory, spoke of the aforesaid gentleman as being in his titled position merely by reason of the fact that he was ‘the accident of an accident.’ There is no doubt that Hambletonian 10, the present head of the trotting family, was even more of an accident than the English lord was. Bellfounder mares of trotting propensities were rarer than imported Messengers, and if the mating of Abdallah with this mare was not an accident, but the plan of a thoughtful intellect looking to the future, the descendants of the man who thought it out should have risen up and told it last month, that their forefathers might have been honored along with Columbus at the opening of the World’s Fair. Now the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ is quite an accident himself. He is here by reason of the fact that many trotting breeders in their wild vagaries and theories regarding the best way to breed a trotter, ranging all the way, in the theory of breeding, from thoroughblood to jackass, have accidentally honored a few thousand pacing mares with a service to some of their Hambletonians. As a result the ‘trotting-bred’ pacer is with us. As it is quite impossible for the trotting turf to get rid of this rascal if they wished to, and as he has managed to be quite a game and fast money-making machine himself, he has clinched the popularity of the pacer as a pacer and has stuck a peg in the map of popular favor that would be hard to be removed.
“And it is safe to say that by reason of the blood of Pilot, Jr., Clay, Blue Bull, Tom Hal, Pocahontas and many others being so generally distributed in the pedigrees of trotters, the ‘trotting-bred pacer’ will continue to come from such trotting sources in the future in geometrical proportion and to pace in the same ratio. What will be done with them? Each one, with speed, is simply a money-making machine, and his owner will not be long in putting him at the work which nature cut out for him. To destroy him merely because he paces belongs to the dark ages when the pacing gait was one which made no money, but now, since the pacing purses have gotten to be so liberal and getting more so each year, it is only common sense to suppose that owners of pacing horses will begin to take more pains in their development and their breeding. This will improve their speed. As it is now, we do not suppose there is a betting horseman alive who would not give large odds that the pacer will be the first two-minute horse.
“And in this connection another thing must be taken into consideration. The pacer’s gait has itself been greatly improved in the last ten years. He is no longer the rotary-motioned mud-flinger of old, whose forefeet pawed the air in circles parallel with and above his ears, while his hind feet described semicircles over the ground, but he is now a smooth-gaited, straightforward, quick-actioned fellow, with plenty of knee action in front and the stride of a bullfrog behind, and at his highest speed it requires more than a glance for one to say whether he is trotting or pacing. In other words, the pacer has come to be a well-rounded, symmetrical and well-bred horse. His gait is the poetry of harness motion, his courage is unquestioned and his staying qualities, especially with the pacing-bred ones, of whom we are more familiar, are equal to those of any horse that ever stretched his neck in the home stretch. In view of these facts it doesn’t require even the grandson of a prophet to predict he is destined to a still greater career on the light harness race course.
“We can only judge the future by the past and the present, and with that in view from a study of the 2:20 list, which a most exclusive list in the light harness race course, we are startled with the enviable position the despised side-wheeler holds in that charmed circle this season. There can be no sham in the 2:20 list. A horse must be able to trot or pace that enters it. Up to November 15 there were, according to the statistics at my command, 189 new 2:20 performers; and by new performers we mean horses that had no record as good as 2:30 trotting or 2:25 pacing before the opening of this season. Of these 189 new 2:20 performers we find that the pacers constitute 128 of the number, while the trotters are credited with sixty-one. This table includes but seven pacers that have lowered their records from the 2:30 list last year to the 2:20 list this year, and we use it to get at the number of green horses to enter this list, and from it we are able to form a more correct idea of the material coming fresh from both ranks. It cuts off such stars as Kremlin, Stamboul and Nancy Hanks among trotters, as well as Hal Pointer, Mascot, Guy, Direct and Storm among pacers.
“But a still more exclusive list is the 2:15 class, and in order to show your readers what has been accomplished by the new material from the pacing ranks this year as compared with the same material from the trotters, we publish that list in full, and in a spirit of generosity we place the despised pacer on the left in the goat’s place. The fact that it looks something like the last electoral college, with Cleveland on the pacer’s side, need not lead any one to think we are at all partisan in this matter.
“New pacers with records of 2:15 or better:
| Flying Gib | 2:05¾ |
| Jay-Eye-See | 2:06¼ |
| W. Wood | 2:07 |
| Robert J. | 2:09¾ |
| San Pedro | 2:10¾ |
| Wisconsin King | 2:11 |
| Online 2 | 2:11 |
| Walnut Boy | 2:11½ |
| Ella Brown | 2:11¼ |
| Cleveland S | 2:11¾ |
| Prima Donna | 2:11¾ |
| Colbert | 2:12¼ |
| Dandy O | 2:12½ |
| Charley Ford | 2:12½ |
| La Belle | 2:12½ |
| John R. Gentry | 2:12¾ |
| Gilileo Rex | 2:12¾ |
| Expert Prince | 2:13¼ |
| Fleetfoot | 2:14 |
| Henry O | 2:14 |
| Eclectic | 2:14 |
| To Order, 2 | 2:14 |
| Rebus | 2:14¼ |
| Clint Cliff | 2:14½ |
| Joe Jett | 2:14½ |
| Chris Smith | 2:14½ |
| Lydia Wilkes | 2:14½ |
| Diabolo | 2:14¾ |
| Merry Chimes | 2:14¾ |
| Nuthurst | 2:14¾ |
| Bob | 2:15 |
| Alhambra | 2:15 |
| Blondine | 2:15 |
| Wardell | 2:15 |
“New trotters with records of 2:15 or better:
| Directum | 2:11¼ |
| Muta Wilkes | 2:14¼ |
| Azote | 2:14½ |
| Hulda | 2:14¾ |
“Total number of pacers not having a record of 2:30 or better in 1891, but now having a record of 2:15 or better, thirty-four; total number of trotters, four. Finally, when we consider the fact that a very much larger number of trotters are trained, or attempted to be trained, than pacers, these figures become still more expressive of the great future possibilities lying within the pacer’s reach at a light harness race horse.”
What wonderful progress has been the pacer’s since the above was written! If we were to attempt to publish the 2:15 list to-day, it would take the next issue of the Monthly, there being now about five thousand, while the 2:10 list surpasses belief. Three of them have paced miles better than two minutes, and such names as Star Pointer, Joe Patchen, John R. Gentry, Direct, Robert J. and others have made the turf bright with glorious deeds. Truly the pacer’s development surpasses even prophecy!
(To be continued.)
The Past is Yesterday’s present. Remember it as you build to-day.