CHAPTER XXX.
INVESTIGATION OF DISPUTED PEDIGREES.—(Continued.)

How Belle of Wabash got her pedigree—Specimen of pedigree making in that day and locality—Search for the dam of Thomas Jefferson—True origin and history of Belle of Wabash—Facts about the old-time gelding Prince—The truth about Waxy, the grandam of Sunol—Remarkable attempts to make a pedigree out of nothing—How “Jim” Eoff worked a “tenderfoot”—Pedigree of American Eclipse—Pedigree of Boston—Tom Bowling and Aaron Pennington—Chenery’s Gray Eagle—Pedigree of George Wilkes in doubt.

At Louisville, Kentucky, October, 1860, a ten-mile race was trotted which excited a good deal of local interest and comment. The contestants in this race were entered as follows:

The names of the parties making the entries are given in the entries of the first and second, and the Louisville Journal of the week before remarks that “J. J. Alexander will represent his State honorably with the Belle of Indiana.” Captain Magowan held the lead from start to finish, and at the end of the eighth mile, some say the seventh, Belle of Wabash was drawn. It will be observed that, so far as given, each one of these animals was furnished with a first-class race-horse pedigree; for it was then held as firmly as any religious tenet that no horse could go that distance at any gait unless he was strictly thoroughbred, and, in Kentucky, if he did not have such a pedigree they gave him one on the spot. At that time they never bothered their heads hunting up the breeder of an animal to learn how it was bred. They simply wanted to see the performance and then make the pedigree to suit it. These three pedigrees were all bogus in all their elements, and I knew so little of the ways of the horse world, at that time, that I accepted and recorded them as genuine.

Captain Magowan was a roan gelding, willful and bad tempered, and all that seems to be known about his origin is the conceded fact that he was bred in Kentucky and that he was probably descended from the tribe of Copperbottoms, or possibly the Tom Hals. The roan color prevailed in both tribes and the horse himself looked like the Copperbottoms.

Gipsy Queen, at the time of the above race in 1860, was owned by a “sporting man” named George Bidwell, of Chicago, or at least she raced under his direction. About the time of this race, Mr. Thomas J. Vail bought the mare and took her to Hartford, Connecticut. He bred her to Toronto Chief and she produced a black colt. The mare and colt afterward passed into the hands of Mr. William B. Smith, and this colt grew up to be the famous Thomas Jefferson—“The Whirlwind of the East.” In connection with Mr. Smith I devoted a good deal of labor to a futile search for the origin and pedigree of this mare, and the result of our search amounted to nothing more than a reasonable probability that she was bred at Rochester, New York; was got by a son or grandson of Vermont Black Hawk and was taken from there to Chicago. This latter point of the transfer to Chicago seemed to be quite circumstantially fixed in Mr. Smith’s mind.