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

by John Hankins Wallace

At the very inception of the idea that the trotting horse could be bred and developed into a breed, an opinion prevailed everywhere that it could not be done. The theory that speed at the trot came from speed at the gallop was universally held and advocated. In 1868 I made a tour among the breeders and horsemen of Tennessee and Kentucky, for the purpose of gathering information about both runners and trotters. Those States were then beginning to pull themselves together after the war. At General Harding’s, among others, I was shown a large, heavy-boned colt, and the General remarked that if he did not make a race horse he would make a capital stallion to take to the West and breed on trotting mares. At Balie Peyton’s I was shown a great big, coarse horse that had run some races and won in very slow time, and that was unsound at many points. He was over sixteen hands high, and had very bad limbs. Mr. Peyton remarked that “he was too big for a race horse, but he would do well in the West as a trotting sire.” This was the remark everywhere as applied to big colts that couldn’t run. About the same time Mr. Joseph Cairn Simpson, then in the employ of a sporting paper in New York, as an editorial writer, expressed his sorrow that Hambletonian did not have a thoroughbred cross, close up, and his opinion that such a cross would have made him a much greater sire. Thus, East and West, North and South, the opinion prevailed everywhere that the way to breed the trotter was to go to the runner. This universal belief, wholly without foundation, soon generated the cry, “more running blood in the trotter,” and the instincts of all the rogues in the country were quickened to make their pedigrees conform to the popular belief of what was best. This resulted in a period of fictitious claims, for when a man had a colt out of a mare of unknown breeding the rule was to say, “dam thoroughbred,” and if the owner was unusually conscientious and knew the breeding for one or two crosses, he would give them correctly, but seldom failed to tack on two or three thoroughbred crosses that were wholly fictitious. After all my years of experience with the pedigrees of horses, it is my deliberate and candid opinion that no word in the English language has been so much abused as the word “thoroughbred.” It has been the medium of more deceptions and downright falsehoods than any other word in the vocabulary. For many years it was the word above all other words that the unscrupulous jockey employed to defraud his inexperienced victim. And if there had been no strong hand to take the improper and dishonest use of the word by the throat there would be no breed of trotters, and the whole business of breeding and developing the trotting horse would be to-day just where it was thirty years ago. The old, threadbare stock argument was in everybody’s mouth, to the effect that “Messenger was an English thoroughbred and he founded a family of trotters, hence any other English thoroughbred could do the same thing under the same circumstances.” When this ancient formula was submitted to the test it was found to be fatally unsound at both ends, as has been shown in another chapter. Messenger was found to be far short of being thoroughbred in his inheritance; forty other English thoroughbreds had been in competition with him and bred upon the same mares, yet no other English thoroughbred, in the experiences of a hundred and fifty years, ever founded a family of trotters. The two ablest advocates of “more running blood in the trotter” that this country has produced, Mr. Charles J. Foster and Mr. Joseph Cairn Simpson, when challenged to produce an English thoroughbred horse that had founded a family of trotters, conceded the whole contention by naming Bishop’s Hambletonian and Mambrino, both sons of Messenger and the principal channels through which Messenger had founded his family of trotters. This knocked all the noise out of the famous formula, and instead of the braying of an ass we have heard nothing since on this subject but an occasional and very feeble squeak of a mouse.

In the earlier portion of the period when the American Trotter was beginning to assume the shape and character of a breed, the term “thoroughbred,” meaning English racing blood, was adhered to with astonishing tenacity, as an indispensable element in the breeding of the trotter. A few men of clear and independent minds commenced to study the question in the light of experiences, and they were not long in reaching the truth; but, as a rule, the less a man knew of the question, whether a breeder or a writer, the more blatant and vociferous he was in maintaining that all trotters were dependent for their speed on the blood of the “thoroughbred English race horse.” When Maud S. made her four-year-old record and astonished the world, the acclamations of this class went up in tremendous volume pointing to the Boston blood of her grandam as the element that did it. Now, it never has been shown, and it never can be shown, that there was a single drop of Boston’s blood in her veins. Besides all this, Boston was not a thoroughbred horse, for neither his sire nor his grandam was thoroughbred. A curious phase of the interest attached to the mere word “thoroughbred” was brought out by a Catholic priest, in New Jersey, in a very cranky and ill-natured letter addressed to the editor of Wallace’s Monthly protesting against the frequent use of the term “running-bred” instead of “thoroughbred.” Priests are generally educated men, but this poor man struck out into a field where he was entirely ignorant. A horse with two or three immediate and direct running crosses may be properly and truthfully called “running bred,” because that blood predominates in his veins, but to be justly and truthfully called “thoroughly bred” he must have at least five direct and distinct crosses, and each and every one of them pure and without any contamination from any other blood. As an illustration of what results from this definition of the word “thoroughbred,” we may take the very cream of our old American racing families and not one in fifty is “thoroughly bred.” American Eclipse was far short of being thoroughbred, even if we admit that Messenger was thoroughbred. Timoleon, the greatest son of Sir Archy, had an impossible and untruthful pedigree on the side of his dam. His great son Boston was short and deficient on both sides, and with these taints how could he get the great blind horse Lexington and make him a thoroughbred? These horses were distinctively “running bred,” but not technically “thoroughbred.” It is not to be presumed the priest was angry because I preferred not to use a word that conveyed an untruth and to use one that told the exact truth, for he was not qualified to judge which was true and which was not true, but like hundreds of others he feared the value of his property might be affected by the refusal to apply the term “thoroughbred” to some supposable cross in some of his pedigrees.

“More running blood in the trotter” was a “fad” that has been completely extinguished by all the experiences of later years. It was a freak that never had any foundation either in nature or in reason. No animal can transmit to his posterity qualities and capacities which he has not inherited, or which he does not possess by acquirement. This is a rule which seems to be perfectly plain to the comprehension of everybody, and in observation and experience it proves itself true every day of the year. To breed a horse that can go fast at the trotting or pacing gait we must go to the horse and the blood that has gone fast at one or the other of these gaits. It seems like a needless work to expend any time or space on what is self-evident in all human experiences. A few years ago I offered a money reward, of sufficient amount to justify some labor in a search, to any one who would report to me any thoroughbred running horse, with the proofs, that had ever made a trotting record of a mile in three minutes, and there was no response. Some years later I renewed the offer, doubling the amount of the former offer, and still there came no response. I regret now that I did not make the offer for a mile in four minutes instead of three, for I very much doubt whether there ever was a thoroughbred horse able to trot a mile in four minutes. What is the use, then, of giving further attention to the consideration of the value of thoroughbred running blood in the trotter?

But after conceding that the instinct to stick to the trot and the step of the trotter must come from the trotter, the advocates of “more running blood in the trotter” plant all their heavy guns on the proposition that running blood is needed to give the trotter more courage, endurance, and beauty of form. In all the past years we have had so many grand panegyrics on the will power and undying courage of the “courser of the desert” that they have become threadbare and have an “ancient and fish-like smell,” and we would prefer to exchange them for something more recent and practical. When we go to a race meeting and see so many contests at various distances less than a mile, a few at something over a mile, and all these merely single dashes, we naturally and justly conclude that the distance of ground to be covered in each contest is adjusted to the courage and stamina of the racers. I cannot conceive of any fairer criterion by which to determine the measure of gameness and pluck of running horses than simply to consider the distance chosen, and that for a single dash. Trainers and owners know just where each horse will quit, if hard pressed, and they will not enter him in any distance beyond the point where they know his courage will fail. With the data of distances for these single dashes already fixed for the accommodation of horses with different degrees of staying qualities, and after making a liberal allowance for age and lack of condition, we seem to have a solid foundation for a safe conclusion that the crucial test of the speed of the average race horse fails him before he reaches the first mile-post.

When the trotter starts out for his summer’s campaign he has no choice as to the length of his races, and he is not looking about for single dashes of four, five, six or seven furlongs, but enters the field boldly and throws down the glove to all the best strains of trotting and pacing blood. Every race will be mile heats, best two in three or three in five, and it often requires six, seven or eight heats before the victor is declared. This experience is repeated, week after week, during the whole season. Such a weekly experience as this, continued through twenty consecutive weeks, would probably destroy the best and stoutest running horse now living. This is the test to which the trotter is subjected, and no man can say it lacks in severity in determining his qualities as a race horse, in his stamina, his courage and his gameness. In touching this point I will here take the liberty of entering my protest against what I consider the unnecessary severity of this test. We want all these tests, and from the standpoint of the breeder we cannot progress without them, but we want them to stop short of injury to the animal. When a contest is drawn out to six, eight or ten heats, it not only becomes cruel as a sport, but it is liable to inflict irreparable injury to the soundness of the animal. Unsoundness, either external or internal, is liable to result from all such abuses. This is a dominant fact, and while we may not be able to see the injury with the eye, we are likely to see the evil results in the progeny. Animals of the kind most likely to be subjected to this over-severity of test are the hope of the future as producers, and by all means wise and possible we should seek to preserve them in their pristine soundness and vigor. As breeders we cannot afford to let them go without development and test, neither can we afford to impair or destroy their producing qualities, in the test. This can be done only by shortening the race; not the distance of ground, but the number of heats that can be trotted. With an inflexible rule that not more than five heats should be trotted in any race, and that at the conclusion of the fifth heat the money should be divided according to the places of the contestants, I would not be particular as to whether the race was for the best two in three, or the best three in five. The invariable results have been that in long-drawn-out contests of many heats there have been bargains and combinations for or against certain horses, and all managed by and in the interest of the so-called “speculators.” If this were done the combinations of the gamblers would be checkmated, the cruelty of the sport would be eliminated, and our best horses would come through the campaigns ready and fit to propagate their species.

In breeding for a particular purpose or qualification all experience goes to show that the elements entering into the new creature must be carefully selected as possessing the quality that we seek to propagate. Nobody would think of breeding a running mare to a trotting horse if he was seeking to breed a running colt. No thoughtful and intelligent man would think of breeding a running horse upon a trotting mare if he were seeking to breed a trotting colt. The runner to the runner and the trotter to the trotter has been demonstrated ten thousand times as the right way. The cross-bred or half-and-half-bred animal may be something of a trotter or something of a runner, doing neither well; and this uncertainty never can become a certainty as to which it may be till you try him. The evil of half-and-half breeding does not cease with the life of the animal, for the division in his own inheritance will manifest itself in his progeny for generations, or till it is bred out. But, strange as it may seem, there are still a few old men living who, from pride of opinion advanced in their younger days, still maintain that trotting speed must come from the “thoroughbred” and “point with pride” to the great horse Palo Alto as the complete illustration of their belief. In relation to the breeding of Palo Alto I will here tell a little story, premising that I neither accept it as true nor reject it as false, for I know nothing about it. The late Mr. William H. Wilson, of Cynthiana, Kentucky, was in many respects a remarkable man. He was full of energy and push, and his brain seemed to teem with formidable ideas, chiefly relating to his prospects, and the management of his own business. He was intelligent in horse matters, and very well informed on local horse history. He did a great deal of work for me in the way of straightening out tangled skeins, and in tracing obscure pedigrees. In this way I came to know Mr. Wilson very well, and as I never found him wrong on these questions I came to place great confidence in his word and his judgment in all pedigree matters that he had investigated. Some time about 1889, probably, he asked me to investigate the pedigree of Dame Winnie, the dam of Palo Alto, for, he said, he had every reason to believe she was not by Planet, but by a trotting-bred horse that he named, but that name has escaped me. I replied that I had not time then, but I would think about it. Some months afterward he was again in my office and he again urged the investigation. My reply was that there were some very upright and honest men in Kentucky as well as some great rogues, and if I were to undertake to investigate this pedigree the rogues could get forty men, if so many were necessary, for a bottle of whisky or a half-dollar a head, who could remember just what it was necessary to remember, and forget just what it was necessary to forget in order to prove that the mare was by Planet. I recalled my experience with suborned evidence in the past, and knew just what I might expect in the future, and so I had concluded to make no more investigations in certain portions of Kentucky until I had an opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses. Dame Winnie was a plain, common-looking mare, with nothing about her to indicate high breeding, and if we lay aside Mr. Wilson’s story and accept the pedigree as usually given she was strongly running bred, but at several points in her pedigree she fails of being thoroughbred. The internal evidence as to the breeding of this mare, brought to light in the performance of her produce, suggests very strongly the probability that she possessed some trotting blood, from some source not far removed. She has five representatives in the 2:30 list, and this of itself strongly supports Mr. Wilson’s untold story, that I would not listen to. In passing I will say I would be glad to listen to it now; for this solid foundation of experience is so stoutly corroborative of what he suggested as to justify an effort to reach the exact truth. When it was known in Kentucky that Senator Stanford had sent his representative down there to gather up a lot of “thoroughbred” mares from which to breed trotters in California, every dealer in the State had just what he wanted. He was looking for pedigrees, and it was a very easy matter to shape up the pedigrees just to suit him.

Whatever may have been the breeding of his dam, Palo Alto was a great horse, but he came to his speed slowly, and this would seem to indicate that if his dam had any trotting inheritance it was weak in the direction of attaining a high rate of speed. From the day he was weaned till the day he died he was Senator Stanford’s idol, and with this horse as an object lesson he was going to teach the world how to breed the trotter. At two years old he was driven a mile privately in 2:22¾, and his owner, feeling that his dream was realized in breeding the greatest horse the world had produced, named him “Palo Alto,” as he deemed him worthy of being at the head of the greatest breeding establishment of the world. He was in the hands of the most skillful and careful of all trainers, and the training went on without respite, year after year. When four years old he went through the Eastern circuits, winning the larger share of his purses, and making a record of 2:20¼. Now let us consider for a moment whether the Senator did not make a great mistake and select the wrong horse as the typical representative of his great establishment. In 1888 he bred a colt by Electioneer out of Lula Wilkes, grandam the famous trotting mare Lula, 2:15, by Norman, etc., intensely trotting bred, and when he was three years old he made a record of 2:16. This is better than 2:20¼ as a four-year-old, for this fellow had not to take one-half the training that Palo Alto was subjected to. The next year he bred another colt by Electioneer called Arion, out of a mare by Nutwood; she out of a sister to Voltaire, 2:20¼, by Tattler, 2:26; and she out of the famous trotting brood mare Young Portia, by Mambrino Chief; and the next dam Portia by the pacer Roebuck. This colt came out and trotted a mile in 2:10¾ as a two-year-old. The four-year-old had a great “boom” and was considered by many as the phenomenal colt of his year, but when we place his record of 2:20¼ beside the 2:16 of the three-year-old, it looks very sickly, and when we compare it with the 2:10¾ of the two-year-old it is shaded into a deathly pallor. The four-year-old is largely the result of skill and art; the two-year-old is the result of nature. Arion is the best horse, by the record, that the world has ever produced, and the Senator was mistaken in his dream. We must judge of the value of a fast performance by the degree of naturalness which it represents and the measure of its freedom from the arts of the trainer. The “born trotter” is what we want, and at two years old Arion, or any other colt, was at the right age to determine whether a fast performance was the result of nature or of art.

It is a fact well known to everybody that some trotting-bred stallions have shown greater power in controlling the action of their progeny than others that seemed to be equally well bred. If out of the great mass of stallions, past and present, that have been more or less successful as trotting progenitors, we pick out thirty of the very best, as shown by their progeny, it will probably surprise many of my readers to learn that only three of that number have been able to triumph in the supreme test of getting trotters out of running-bred mares. Of these three Electioneer stands first, Almont second, and Pilot Jr. third. After making all allowance for the anxiety of certain Californians and certain Kentuckians to prove the need of “more running blood in the trotter,” and their manifest willingness to help along with pedigrees in that direction, I am fully convinced that these three horses, in some cases, were able to meet and overcome the hostile elements of the galloper. Not in every case, certainly, nor in a majority of cases. When Senator Stanford was showing me the step of Palo Alto, on his own track, as a three-year-old, I remarked, “Well, Electioneer certainly triumphed in that case,” and the Senator replied, “Yes, but none of my other stallions can do it, and there are some thoroughbred mares upon which Electioneer can’t do it.” When approached by others on this subject in the riper years of his experience, he was in the habit of replying: “There are thoroughbreds and thoroughbreds; some of them will produce trotters to Electioneer, and some will not.” He accepted everything as thoroughbred that had been bought by his agents as thoroughbred, whether in Kentucky or California, and he claimed to be able to pick out those that would produce trotters by their appearance. When pressed to give the characteristics by which he was able to make his selections, he spoke of the shape of the animal, in a general way, and especially by the head and the expression of countenance. In selecting his mares to put in the trotting stud by their “appearance” he would naturally select such as had the “appearance” of trotters, and as he personally knew no more about their pedigrees or the inheritance of the animals than the mares knew themselves, he was very liable to be deceived in the breeding of the animals as he selected them. In selecting a mare by “appearance” as indicating that she might throw trotters to Electioneer, there is a strong suggestion that this “appearance” may have been a legitimate “inheritance” sought to be covered up by that sadly abused term “thoroughbred.” Whether this suggestion ever entered the Senator’s mind I have no means of determining. But whether some of the mares called “thoroughbred” had really a mixed inheritance or not, the fact remains that the three horses named above did succeed in getting some trotters from mares that were strongly running bred. Then the question arises: Why did these three horses succeed where all others failed? We are not able to give an answer to this question that is complete and irrefutable, for there is so much in the laws of generation that we do not and cannot know. Take two brothers, for example, and one is a great success and the other a great failure, and often the failure is the better formed and the better looking horse of the two. All that science teaches us here is that one took after some ancestor, near or remote, that was good, and the other after some ancestor that was not good. Electioneer, Almont and Pilot Jr. all had short pedigrees composed exclusively of trotting and pacing blood, except possibly a few drops of running blood that may have trickled down from the runner through trotting or pacing channels. Their instincts to stick to the trot had been encouraged and more or less completely developed. Electioneer and Almont both had pacing blood some distance away, and Pilot Jr., so far as we know, had nothing but pacing blood, and yet he never paced a step in his life. This embraces all we know of the three horses that proved themselves the most prepotent in overcoming all antagonisms of race or blood. Others equally great, no doubt, have come up since their day, but as breeding is now better understood and as the laws of nature are now more carefully followed, tests of this kind are not often made.

After all the “wiring in and wiring out” of the tortuous advocates of “more running blood in the trotter” had found that their efforts had borne no fruit and that all intelligent breeders had left their theories away behind, a remarkably brilliant genius struck out a new line of thought and argument, which unfortunately died “a bornin’” just as the attention of all intelligent breeders was turning away from “more running blood in the trotter” as a senseless “fad,” and looking to the pacer as a possible source of increased trotting speed. In formulating and exploiting his idea, our genius seems to have reasoned after this manner: “The crisis is here, the breeders are all turning away from the thoroughbred as a source of trotting speed and considering the pacer, and now if I can convince them that the pacer is at least half-thoroughbred I will beat the standard and win the day.” Here we have the motive and the subject, and now we are ready for the manipulation. In due time the article appeared, and I must do the writer the justice of saying I never have been fully satisfied that he believed a single word of it himself. He starts out to show that the pace is not the result of hereditary transmission but the result of “structural incongruity.” He declared that this “structural incongruity” is the result of breeding the thoroughbred horse on the slab-sided, ill-shapen mares of the West and Southwest. From the inheritance, part of the animal is structurally formed to run and the other part structurally formed to trot, and between the two a compromise is made on the pace. In this “structural incongruity,” between the two parts the pacing gait originated, and hence whatever speed the pacer may possess comes from the “thoroughbred;” and, therefore, of necessity, whatever speed the trotter gets from the pacer comes from the “thoroughbred.” There are many humbugs in the literature of the horse, but this is the craziest humbug I have ever met with. What a pity he left his work unfinished, and failed to tell us which end of the horse was running bred and which end trotting bred, so that we might locate the “incongruity” and cut it out! But to look at this “structural incongruity” seriously, it lacks but little of a scandal on the intelligence and honesty of American writers on the horse. Here is a gentleman of reputed intelligence, who wields a facile pen and has been writing on breeding subjects for about thirty years, and much of his work was well done; and now at the close of the nineteenth century he undertakes to tell us how the pacer originated in this country. The veriest tyro in horse history knows that pacers abounded in England in the twelfth century, and indeed long before that. Every colony in this country was full of pacers a hundred years before the first thoroughbred crossed the Atlantic. But wild and absurd theories can safely be left to the public judgment.

It required several years of labor and iteration to convince the breeding public that the trot and the pace were simply two forms of one and the same gait. When first advanced it was received by the more intelligent breeders as an abstraction that had nothing practical in it, while those of less ability to think for themselves only laughed at it. Since then the inevitable processes of experience have demonstrated its truth, and the question of today is how to separate these two forms of the same gait and to breed either form, as we may desire, as a distinct and certainly transmissible gait. With a few it will still remain a matter of indifference whether the colt comes a pacer or a trotter, but with the great mass of breeders the question of profit in breeding the harness horse must be considered. Everybody knows that in the market for road horses the clean-stepping trotter is worth more than the smooth-gliding pacer. This is not a question to be determined by fashion, but a fact of universal experience that the trotting action is better suited to harness and the pacing action better suited to the saddle. Fashions may change, but these two facts are unchangeable, for they are founded in the nature and mechanism of the two forms of action. The difficulties in the way of separating the diagonal from the lateral form of the trot are very great, and there is no use or wisdom in attempting to blink this fact. Speed at both forms of the gait comes from the same source, the same blood, the same inheritance; and source, blood and inheritance, in a breeding sense, are the hardest things in nature to overcome. So far as experience teaches there is but one method or treatment that has ever been successful in wiping out the pacer. In the first half of the seventeenth century England was full of pacers, and about a hundred years later she did not have one. The trouble about this remedy is that the trotters were wiped out also, and today England has neither a pacer nor a trotter. When she now wants a trotter she has to send to this country and get some of the blood of the little despised pacer that was shipped from her own shores in the early colonial days. The blood of the Saracenic horse has not lost its potency as a pacing expunger, as shown by modern experiments, and all our breeders have to do is to use it in copious effusions, and we will soon be rid of the pacer, and the trotter along with him. The pacer and the trotter are never found separate from each other, so far as my information goes. In Russia they breed trotters methodically, and they have a full supply of very fast pacers that are used as shaft horses in their droskies. As in the past, so in the future, we never need expect to see the two forms of the gait entirely separated.