The fastest of these trotters can go a 2.20 clip, but I have heard that a rate like this can be maintained only a short while. They are not so symmetrical as our Morgans or Clay-Arabians, but they have immensely more substance than the Standard Bred Trotters. I do not see how they can find any very useful place in this country. We could from our own stock quickly develop a better looking coach horse, and I believe we will do it, but never until we keep in mind that type is nine-tenths of any horse breeding battle that is ever won.
The English Hackneys at one period promised to be popular in this country. This popularity was stimulated by fashion, and the English breeders did not fail to take advantage of the fad that possessed some Americans of wealth. The Hackney comes from the Dutch horses by way of the Norfolk trotter. He is a horse of substance and easily acquires a high step with much knee action. In the show ring he is exhibited after the English fashion and makes a very lively picture. But his step is not light. He pounds the ground as though he wished the earth to tremble, and the Chinese feel his tread on the other side of the world. He has no very fitting place here, no more than the Orlof, either in his purity or as a cross with our own horses. We can easily do without him, and accomplish the creation of heavy harness and coach horse without the assistance of this English type. Originally in England the Hackney was a knock-a-bout horse, good under the saddle and in harness; but he has been bred up to large size and very heavy weight. Some of the American breeders of hackney ten or fifteen years ago when they went to England for stock to breed from paid such prices that the English laughed with delight, for they never dreamed of such a market at home. The fad is fastly dying out, and it is likely that in a few years there will not be opportunity even in the show rings for their exhibition. As they are deficient in courage and staying qualities, this will not be a bad result of lack of popularity.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE BREEDING OF MULES
On the first day of January, 1905, we had in the United States 2,888,710 mules with a taxable value of $251,840,378. This shows how extensive an industry mule-breeding is, and also what an important place the mule occupies in the economy of the country. The mule is an ideal farm animal. They would find it hard to get along without him on the plantations in the South. The negro is the poorest horseman in the world. As a groom he is careless and neglectful. A horse must be attended to or he will get ill and die. The mule seems, if not to thrive on neglect, at least not seriously to deteriorate. On many of the Southern plantations mules never know either currycomb or brush during all their long lives. And they live to a great age. I have never seen any statement based on carefully ascertained statistics at to the comparative length life of the horse and mule, but I am persuaded, from my own observation that on an average a mule lives twenty-five per cent longer. And there is pretty nearly as much work in an old mule as in a young one. They can also be put to hard work sooner than a horse. So the working life of a mule is lengthened at both ends. Moreover, they can subsist on what would be starvation for a horse.
If mules were bred at all in America in the Colonial era it was to a very limited extent. But after the Revolution they were bred a little, and George Washington was the man who encouraged this new industry. In 1786, before his election to the Presidency, Washington accepted from the King of Spain the present of a large Spanish Jack. He called the jack Royal Gift, and thus advertised his services in a Philadelphia paper:
“Royal Gift—A Jack Ass of the first race in the Kingdom of Spain will cover mares and jennies (she asses) at Mount Vernon the ensuing spring. The first for ten, the latter for fifteen pounds the season. Royal Gift is four years old, is between 14½ and 15 hands high, and will grow, it is said, until he is twenty or twenty-five years of age. He is very bony and stout made, of a dark colour with light belly and legs. The advantages, which are many, to be derived from the propagation of asses from this animal (the first of the kind that was ever in North America), and the usefulness of mules bred from a Jack of his size, either for the road or team, are well known to those who are acquainted with this mongrel race. For the information of those who are not, it may be enough to add, that their great strength, longevity, hardiness, and cheap support, give them a preference of horses that is scarcely to be imagined. As the Jack is young, and the General has many mares of his own to put to him, a limited number only will be received from others, and these entered in the order they are offered. Letters directed to the subscriber, by Post or otherwise, under cover to the General, will be entered on the day they are received, till the number is completed, of which the writers shall be informed to prevent trouble or expense to them.
“John Fairfax, Overseer.
“February 23, 1786.”
Washington believed in mules and in the inventory of live stock in his will made in 1799, mention is made of two covering jacks, three young ones, ten she asses, forty-two working mules, and fifteen younger ones. It was a much later period, however, before mules were extensively bred in the United States. With the exception of Royal Gift, it is likely that the jacks brought from Europe were rather inferior. But in 1832, Henry Clay imported two pure-blood Catalan asses, a jack and a jenny. They were landed in Maryland, and there the jenny had a foal. This foal was called Warrior. This jack was fifteen hands high, and he became a great ass progenitor in Kentucky. The jennies there at that time were not well bred, but mongrels, mostly a light shade of blue, with gray, buff and grizzly hair, nearly as stiff as hog bristles, generally with a colored stripe across the shoulders and down the back, ewe-necked, flat in the rib, low carriage, and heavy headed, entirely destitute of any good quality except hardihood and ability to get a living where any other animal, save a goat, would have starved to death. With such jennies began the first effort to improve the race in Kentucky, and they flocked to Warrior in droves. He seemed to cross advantageously with them, just as the Cashmere goat crosses on the common hairy goat. His progeny seemed rapidly to lose the leading traits of their dams, and to inherit in a remarkable degree the color and outward characteristics of their sire. Four years later Dr. Davis imported in South Carolina another Catalan jack. He was 16 hands high and of great weight. This jack, Mammoth, was mated to the young Warrior jennies then just maturing, thus making the second cross of pure blood, and upon these two crosses rest to-day the breeding of the race of jacks known throughout the United States as the Kentucky Jack. These Kentucky jacks are still popular, and last year the British Government bought a number of them to take to India.
Mr. J. L. Jones, of Columbia, Tennessee, is a recognized authority on mule breeding, and I prefer to give my readers his counsel in a matter with which he is better acquainted than I am.