RANDOLPH HUNTINGTON AND HIS IMPORTED ARAB MARE NAOMI, AND FOAL
From the time that superior horses began to be imported into this country, and that was in the Colonial era, there have always been a few Arabs and Barbs brought over of various degrees of excellence. Of course, all of the English Thoroughbreds were rich in the blood, Messenger among them. They came also into Canada with the French, and the Spaniards who had crossed the Mississippi and gone to California from Mexico brought many horses all presumably of this breed. The hardy Mustangs of the West, which were a very distinct type, were evidently descended from the castaways of the Spanish explorers. To President Jefferson there came a gift of Arab stallions and mares. These were sold and the money turned into the treasury. After Ibraheem Pasha overran Arabia in 1817, and took several hundred head of Nejdee horses to Egypt it was easier for a time to buy them for exportation. And from there at about this time there were several importations into America. This supply, however, was soon exhausted, as the Egyptians are not skilled horse breeders. Besides, the French got the pick of this captured lot.
Then again, Teysul, King of Nejd, made a present of forty stallions and mares to Abdul-Azeez, Sultan of Turkey. From this source came Zilcaadi, the grandsire of the great Morgan horse Golddust, and also the Arab stallion Leopard, given to General Grant in 1879, when the Barb, Linden Tree, was also presented to him by the Sultan. It was with these two Grant stallions, by the way, that Mr. Huntington began the experiment I just alluded to.
What gave the Arab horse a kind of disrepute in America was the experiments of Mr. A. Keene Richards. Mr. Richards was a man of wealth and education and a breeder of race-horses in the Blue Grass section of Kentucky. In studying the history of the English Thoroughbred he came to the conclusion he would like to get fresh infusions of the original blood. He went to Arabia, and personally selected several stallions. These he mated with his Thoroughbred mares, and when the colts were old enough he entered them in the races. They were not fast enough to win even when conceded weight. He went again, this was about 1855, taking with him the animal painter, Troye. They took their time, and came back with a superior lot. Mr. Richards tried over again the same experiment with the same result. The colts did not have the speed to beat the Thoroughbreds. It seems to me that any one except an incurable enthusiast would have anticipated exactly what happened. If Mr. Richards had waited several generations and then injected the new infusions of the Arab blood, the result probably would have been quite different. The Civil War came along about this time, however, and the experiment ended in what was considered a failure. But that blood taken to Kentucky at that time by Mr. Richards has been valuable in an unexpected way, for it has been preserved in the half-bred horses in the horse-breeding section, and it crops out all the time in those wonderful saddle-horses of the Denmark strain, which are sent all over the country to delight the lovers of horseback exercise as well as to monopolize the ribbons in the horse shows. Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in England, has had experiences similar to Mr. Richard’s. But he has gone the same wrong road, and has been in too much of a hurry. Continuity in breeding is something beyond the capacity of an individual; his life is not long enough. That is why every government should have a stud to keep up the standard of the horses. In the United States the interests are so diverse that it is not likely that this will soon be done in an extensive way, though already begun on a small scale, but each State, whose people are horse breeders, should do something of the sort, so that the success of an undertaking might not depend upon the uncertain life and more uncertain fortunes of any one man.
In Arabia the horses are trained at a very early age. Indeed, the suckling colt is handled almost from his birth. As a yearling he is trained to obey, exercised with the halter and the bit. At two-years old he is ridden gently but without fear of hurting him. At three there is a let-up in his work, so that he may acquire his full growth; but he is used enough to keep him from forgetting what he has been taught. At four he is considered full-grown and is put to as hard service as the Arab usually knows. It is a mistaken idea that the Arab horse is considered a member of the family to which he belongs, and that he is pampered, petted and caressed by the women and children, and stabled in the same tents as his owners. Those are all fanciful ideas of the poets. On the contrary, an Arab horse is early immured to hardships, so that in emergency he may subsist on scant food and little water. Every one has heard it said that an Arab would give his last crust to his horse rather than eat it himself. I readily grant that in some cases he would do so, and so would any other man of sense in a like predicament. The Arabs are great robbers and wonderful chaps to run away. In the desert they do not have telegraphs and telephones to intercept a fleeing thief. There it is a question of the fastest and longest enduring horse. So of course, a fleeing Arab, with his pursuers hot on his track, would give his last crust to his horse rather than eat it himself. He would be a fool if he did not. That last crust might be the very fuel that would keep life and strength in his engine of escape. The Arab is not a sentimentalist except when he talks or makes poetry. In his words he exhausts his whole supply. Beneath them he is a very shrewd, cold and able man of affairs.
In his horses the Arab has immemorially had the means to gratify his vanity, to give him his best beloved sport, to enable him to make war, and, above all, to run away. The distances that these horses can go on scant rations and small quantities of water seem incredible, while that they can carry heavy weight without inconvenience is entirely true, for I have tried them. But we have heard weird stories of them from the Arabic poets themselves, and also from the English who have used what they could get for their sports in India, where pony racing has ever been, since the English occupation, a most attractive diversion. A frequent expression that one comes across in old books of life in India is that some named Arab horse had a head so small that it could be put in a quart cup. That, of course, was an absurd exaggeration, but they undoubtedly have very small and handsome heads. Their heads, I am sure, were never so small nor their necks so long as the painters have represented the heads and necks of the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Barb to have been. At that time in England, however, the painters even took the liberty of exaggerating the length of neck and diminutiveness of head of the women who sat to them. It was the fashion of the time, and to that fashion we owe the loss of correct likenesses of two of the famous horses of those breeds that have left their impress upon the fleetest racers in the world, besides contributing the reproducing capacity to all the horse types that amount to anything in the civilized world.
CHAPTER THREE
THE THOROUGHBRED IN AMERICA
In the previous chapter I have told, as well as I could, how the English race-horse was developed by a commingling of Oriental blood with that of horses that had been used for sporting purposes in our mother country. I confess that my explanation must seem very slipshod to any who are looking for a mathematically exact exposition of facts. Nothing would have pleased me better than to have been able to gratify the natural craving that people have for exactness. But I cannot be less general than I have, for more specific information is not at my command. It was simply demonstrated by practical experiments that the mixture of the bloods mentioned produced a very fast and sturdy horse that was superior to what had previously been known in England, together with the more important fact that this new Anglo-Arab was a type that was reproducing and kept on improving in speed and staying qualities so long as the cardinal principle of breeding: “like produces like” was adhered to with the comprehensive intelligence which made the rule embrace performance, conformation and blood. To the narrow-minded the law “like produces like,” indicates that the progeny of the fastest stallion and the fastest mare, when breeding for speed, would be faster than either parent. It is a well-known fact that mares whose fleetness and gameness has been demonstrated by long careers on the turf are rarely successful as dams. Of course, there have been exceptions to this general statement, but notwithstanding these exceptions, the narrow-minded application of the rule breaks down just at this point. It is likeness in blood, conformation and general characteristics that the rule more particularly refers to. At any rate, the English had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, developed a distinctive type of horse of most marvelous fleetness and courage and with a blood prepotency that has been so great, that after a century and a half the Thoroughbred is as much improved over what he was at the beginning as the beginners were better than the common stock of England a century earlier. And this is the type that we call to-day in America the Thoroughbred.
The importation of the Thoroughbred into this country began in Colonial Virginia, where there was then probably more sporting blood than there is now, when it cannot be said to be at all pallid, but on the contrary very red. The first Thoroughbred of which there is record, and the record is not as exact as we should like, was brought to Virginia in 1730, by Messrs. Patton and Gist, and was called Bulle Rock. He was said to have been foaled in 1718, and to have been sired by the Darley Arabian, first dam by the Byerly Turk. That was good breeding, and the gentlemen of Virginia accepted, to an extent, at least, the invitation of Bulle Rock’s owners to use his services in improving the general stock of the Old Dominion, for every now and then in the very oldest records he appears in the genealogy. How good the horses were that were landed in Virginia previous to this time, we can not say, but only presume that they were as good as the importers could find and afford to buy, for they were fox hunters and hard riders from the beginning of their coming. After Bulle Rock’s coming to Virginia, very quickly Dabster, Jolly Ranger, Janus, and Fearnaught followed.