The Horse of America in His Derivation, History, and Development

by John Hankins Wallace

ETHAN ALLEN.

Son of Vermont Black Hawk.

From this synopsis of all that has been developed in the blood lines of Black Hawk, there can be no longer any mystery about where he got the characteristics making him so intensely different from the representatives of the typical Morgan. His sire was out of a high-class Narragansett pacer, and his dam was probably a fast Narragansett pacer, thus giving him presumably seventy-five per cent. of Narragansett blood and twenty-five per cent. of Morgan blood. The fight that was made against him all his life, as not being a genuine Morgan, had its foundation in justice and truth. He was not a Morgan in either blood or character. He founded a very valuable line of trotters, something that no other branch of the Morgan family has ever accomplished, and of right his descendants should be designated as “the Black Hawk Family,” and not jumbled up with the heterogeneous mass of nondescripts still called “the Morgan Family.” Black Hawk’s gait was spluttery and uneven, rather than square and mechanical. A few of his progeny were very perfectly gaited, but a great many of them manifested their evil inheritance, which, together with unskillful handling, destroyed all possible value as trotters. He placed three in the 2:30 list; fourteen of his sons were sires of 2:30 performers, six of them with two or more, and two daughters produced 2:30 performers. He died November, 1856.

Ethan Allen, 43.—This was a handsome, bright bay horse, less than fifteen hands high, with three white feet and a star. He was foaled 1849, got by Black Hawk, 5; dam, a fast trotting grey mare of unknown pedigree. With a list of all the celebrated American horses before him, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for the best informed horseman to select an animal that has been so great a favorite with the American people, and for so long a time, as the famous Ethan Allen. When four years old he gave the world a sensation by eclipsing everything that had appeared before him at that age; and again when he was eighteen years old he renewed and intensified the sensation by trotting in 2:15 with a running mate. These sensations of his youth and his old age, did much to give him a standing with the people; but his wonderful beauty and remarkable docility and kindness, with the elegance and ease of his action, made him the favorite of everybody. His trotting gait was recognized by the best judges and experts as probably more perfect than that of any horse of his day. Others have gone faster singly, but no one has done it in greater perfection of motion. In his great flights of speed he was not bounding in the air, but down close to the ground, with a gliding motion that steals from quarter-pole to quarter-pole with inconceivable rapidity. He was bred by Joel W. Holcomb, of Ticonderoga, New York, and as the result of a practical joke he played, for the purpose of annoying his uncle, David Hill, the owner of Black Hawk, against whom he had some pique just at that time, many well-meaning and no doubt honest people once believed, and possibly still believe, that Ethan Allen was by Flying Morgan and not by Black Hawk. The fact that Ethan Allen was the same color as Flying Morgan and that there was some resemblance in size and style of action of the two horses, lent a strong suggestion to the joke as a truth. I am indebted to Mr. I. V. Baker, Jr., of Comstock’s Landing, S. B. Woodward, then of Ticonderoga, and B. H. Baldwin, of Whitehall, New York, for the details of the way the Flying Morgan story started, and need only say the narrator was an eye-witness to the whole affair. In the spring of 1852, in the barroom of S. B. Woodward’s hotel, at Ticonderoga, quite a number of the villagers being present, Mr. Joel W. Holcomb came in and said he was going to write a letter to R. M. Adams, of Burlington, Vermont, the owner of Flying Morgan, and he was going to have some fun with him; and, going to the desk in the room, he wrote, substantially as follows: “I don’t know but I have made all the reputation for David Hill and old Black Hawk that I care to. I am willing to have the credit go where it belongs, and desire to let yourself and the public know that my colt Ethan Allen is got by your horse Flying Morgan.”

“There,” he said, “you will see this in all the Vermont papers next week. Won’t Uncle David be mad?”

“What!” exclaimed some of his neighbors, after hearing it read, “you won’t put your name to such a falsehood as that? It’s a shame.”

“Well, well,” said Holcomb, “I’ll add a postscript.” And going to the desk he wrote below his signature, leaving a good wide space between his signature and the following words:

“Flying Morgan never covered the dam of Ethan Allen, never smelt of her and never saw her, consequently Ethan Allen was not by Flying Morgan, but he can beat Flying Morgan or any other stallion in the State of Vermont.”

The next fall Mr. Adams visited many of the fairs with his horse and showed Holcomb’s letter, and, it is said, with the postscript torn off. Every man in Ticonderoga knew as well as Mr. Holcomb how Ethan Allen was bred, and this letter created much indignation. But Holcomb was a reckless man and cared for nothing more than what he called a good joke, and the more it hurt any one’s feelings the better it suited him.

This account of the “joke” was written down by Mr. Baker, at the dictation of Mr. Woodward, April 22, 1875, and I have implicit confidence in its substantial accuracy. It has been said that the reason Holcomb did this was out of ill feeling toward Mr. David Hill, the owner of Black Hawk, and Holcomb’s uncle, because he dunned him for payment of the horse’s services in getting Ethan Allen. One day at the Fashion Course, in the spring of 1867, as I was looking at Ethan while he was taking his daily exercise, either Mr. Holcomb or Mr. Roe, his partner—I knew them both by sight as the owners of Ethan Allen, but not well enough to distinguish one from the other, but I think it was Mr. Holcomb—came up to me and expressed a good deal of solicitude to know how I was registering the horse. He appeared gratified when I assured him I had no doubt he was a son of old Black Hawk and would so enter him. He remarked “that was right,” and said the Flying Morgan story originated in a practical joke and should not be permitted to go into history as a fact. This is the full history of the basis of the controversy, and certainly, to a reasonable man, it does not leave a single peg on which to hang a hope for the Flying Morgan story.