“When Henry Clay was being brought from the East to his home in Western New York, he stopped one night at the hotel then kept in Bristol by Dr. Durgan, deceased (the breeder of Castle Boy), and made a season at this place the following year, when he became the property of Kent & Bailey. He was kept in that town for several years, etc.”

Now, as between the original and voluntary statement of Captain Lewis and the investigation carried through by Mr. Ray, there is no conflict and all is smooth sailing, and upon the information derived from these two sources the pedigree of George Wilkes was decided as established by the Board of Censors. But more recent discoveries made by Mr. Ray, in which I have no doubt he is thoroughly conscientious and possibly thoroughly right, have raised a conflict that is irrepressible, for dates are involved and insisted upon that make the pedigree impossible. In his original statement Mr. Ray says that Henry Clay made the season of 1846 at Bristol, “when he became the property of Kent & Bailey. He was kept in that town for some years.” Up to this point there is no contradiction and no impossibility; Ray agrees with Lewis and Lewis agrees with Ray. But in the past two or three years Mr. Ray believes he has secured additional information, and this places Captain Lewis in a very unenviable position. The whole point of Clark Philips’ evidence is that he bred his mare “Old Telegraph” to Henry Clay when that horse was owned by Bailey Brothers, of Bristol, and I suppose they were the successors of Kent & Bailey of an earlier date. Now, as Mr. Ray told us in his first investigation that Henry Clay passed into the hands of Kent & Bailey in 1847, and as he tells us later that he did not pass into their hands till nine or ten years after that date and then fails to fix the precise year, it must be conceded by all that his information is not wholly satisfactory. Recollections may be ever so honest, but they are of various degrees of reliability. The best and final evidence is the service book of the horse. My best judgment of the whole matter is that Mr. Ray’s later information is probably correct, but until all doubt is removed by the production of some contemporaneous record covering the case there must remain an element of uncertainty attaching to the pedigree.

CHAPTER XXXI.
HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED.

Early trotting and pacing races—Strains of blood in the first known trotters —The lesson of Maud S.—The genesis of trotting-horse literature—The simple study of inheritance—The different forms of heredity—The famous quagga story not sustained—Illustrations in dogs—Heredity of acquired characters and instincts—Development of successive generations necessary —Unequaled collections of statistics—Acquired injuries and unsoundness transmitted.

As preparatory to taking up the consideration of the breeding problem, it may be well to look back a little and see what had transpired in the trotting-horse world, leading up to the serious consideration of how he was bred. It has been generally accepted as true that there were no trotting contests in this country till about the second decade of the present century, but this impression has grown out of the fact that the newspapers, down to that period, failed to report such contests. It is historically true that pacing races were a common amusement among the people of different portions of the colonies nearly two hundred years ago. This is established by the legislative action of some of the colonies, in the first half of the last century, in suppressing all “pacing and trotting races.” It is well to note, in passing, that pacers and trotters of that early period were commingled, just as they are to-day, with the former the more prominent, and the more highly prized. Of that hundred years of silence we have no details and but few historical references that were contemporaneous with the events. Hence we are practically dependent upon the legislative action of the colonies to establish the truth beyond question.

When we reach the period when the newspapers began to report some of the more conspicuous and important trotting events about Philadelphia and New York, we find a condition of things for which we are hardly prepared. The pacer has lost his prominence and is but little in evidence, and all the best trotters seem to be descended from the imported horse Messenger. The best performers of that period were as follows:

These were all descended from Messenger, and with the exception of Edwin Forrest and one or two others, believed to be descended from pacing blood, they were the leading performers of their day. All of the above animals were not equally strong in Messenger blood as three of them were by sons and out of daughters of Messenger, five were by sons of Messenger, and all the others had more or less of his blood. More than eighty years ago the descendants of Messenger, wherever known, were recognized as a family of trotters and this broad fact became a kind of universal belief among horsemen. This belief, being founded on a truth, was all right, but a plausible deduction from it, which was not a truth, inflicted a terrible penalty upon the pockets of otherwise intelligent men for a period of more than fifty years before they discovered their error. The postulate was in this form: “Messenger was a thoroughbred horse and founded a great family of trotters, hence, any other thoroughbred horse, under the same conditions, would have accomplished the same results.” This “stock” form of the argument was plausible and it was in everybody’s mouth from one end of the land to the other. Every stable boy, every breeder, every editor believed the deduction was sound, and, I may as well own it, I believed it myself until I had gathered together all the accessible trotting statistics of this country and reduced them to order and method, so that they might be studied and their true teachings be drawn from them. As an illustration of the ignorant intolerance and dishonesty with which certain editors and their followers maintained, less than twenty years ago, that all that was of any value in the trotter was inherited from the runner, take the following: In the autumn of 1878 the famous Maud S., then four years old, came out and trotted a mile in 2:17½, which was then a world’s wonder. She was a pacer of the plastic type, but she had to wear toe-weights through all her brilliant career to keep her on her gait as a trotter. Everybody was astounded at this phenomenal performance and went wild over it as something that had never been done before, by a four-year-old, and probably never would be done again. On this performance I simply remarked, in the Monthly: