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

by John Hankins Wallace

When, therefore, it was announced that the horse was far more than a mere machine, that he had a mental as well as a physical organization, that these were both equally matters of inheritance, that one horse ran fast because his ancestors ran fast and that another horse trotted fast because his ancestors were able to trot fast, and that no fast runner was ever a fast trotter, there was a tremendous hubbub. This was a new gospel, and it threatened to annihilate the stupid Anglo-Arabian fetish that all that was good in horsedom must of necessity come from that source. For generations the belief had been universal that the only way to improve the horse for any purpose under the sun was to “breed up” to the running horse and thus get back to the blood of the pure Arabian. On the other hand, and as opposed to this ancient fallacy that the way to breed the trotter was to go to the runner, it was urged, with a thousand proofs at the back of it, that the way to breed the runner was to go to the horse that could run, and the way to breed the trotter was to go to the horse that could trot. Here was a direct issue squarely made, and it was not to be expected that such men as Charles J. Foster, Peter C. Kellogg, Joseph O. Simpson, etc., all writers of ability, would quietly surrender without a battle. They had committed themselves to the running-blood traditions, some rich men had shaped their breeding studs in that direction, and without deciding whether a rich man had necessarily more sense than a poor one, they knew instinctively that a rich man could be more liberal in advertising, and that he could be more generous in properly recognizing the little courtesies that might be extended in the way of keeping his establishment before the public in an approving light. Thus, with an eye to the weather-gauge, the editors were able to maintain their own consistency. As the experiences of every succeeding year added thousands of proofs to the plain proposition that the trotter inherits his speed from a trotting ancestry, the “irreconcilables” began to shift their ground, conceding that there must be trotting blood to give the action, but that there must be “speed-sustaining” blood from the thoroughbred to give courage and endurance. This was the second position, and in a commercial sense it was shrewdly chosen for the advantage of certain localities. This position furnished the “thoroughbred foundation” argument, and for a time it had its supporters. This theory also furnished its promised commercial advantages to such localities as had formerly bred running horses, and it was but a week till everybody in those localities had “thoroughbred foundations” for their trotting pedigrees, and those who did not have them could easily procure them. This brought an avalanche of pedigrees, especially from Kentucky, with “thoroughbred foundations,” consisting of long strings of dams by famous horses, but without names, dates, breeders or histories, and many of them impossible. To checkmate this inundation of manufactured foundations, in the office of the Register, a rule was adopted requiring satisfactory identification and history of each dam, and where that could not be given the pedigree would be cut off. This rule saved the “Trotting Register” from becoming the mere dumping place for countless frauds, but it aroused such a feeling of antagonism on the part of the manager of Woodburn Farm that he, at once, started an opposition Register to be compiled at the farm, under his own personal direction. Of this, and what came of it, I will speak further on. It is but just that I should say here, that from a wide knowledge of men and from a study of their moral fiber extending through many years in connection with horse affairs, I have found many Kentuckians that were thoroughly truthful and reliable in pedigree matters; but at the same time it must be admitted that the conditions there for generations past have not been favorable, among horsemen, for the cultivation of the highest type of truthfulness. Many of them have been making their own pedigrees for so long, and padding them out with nameless dams by suppositious sires, to suit themselves—and the market—that they don’t take kindly to any restraint in what they consider their own business.

The great central truth in reproduction, whether of animals or plants, is summed up in the homely but axiomatic phrase, “like begets like.” With the rank and file of intelligent breeders who were able to think, this axiom was soon accepted as a fundamental and basic truth. The phrase “trotting instinct” was soon in everybody’s mouth, and the broad, plain distinction between that and “running instinct” was so palpable and easy of practical comprehension that the fallacy of a “thoroughbred foundation” was buried out of sight. When it was considered that the instinct of the one was to put forth his supreme effort at the trot, and of the other to put forth his supreme effort at the gallop, the irreconcilable antagonism between the two gaits was apparent. The cumulative evidences furnished year after year by the official records of performances on the tracks, and all going to show that the trotting horse must have a trotting inheritance, soon became so overwhelming in the uniformity of their teachings, and so completely unanswerable in the force of numbers, that no man able to observe and think could any longer doubt the truth of the position taken. But, unfortunately, some men can neither observe nor think, and, what is still more unfortunate, they not infrequently undertake to fill the rôle of public teachers and leaders of public thought. We can understand how a man of average intelligence may be wise in many things and foolish in others. When we come to study the phenomena he presents, we find he has studied the subjects on which he is wise, and he is ignorant on the subjects on which he is foolish. Like “Brother Jasper,” the negro preacher, he is ready to maintain against all comers that “the sun do move.” Another class of men in the writing fraternity, but fortunately they are restricted in numbers, have brains enough to apprehend the facts surrounding them and their teachings, but they have not conscience enough to lift them above their toadying instincts, for fear they might miss the crumbs from a rich patron’s table. Another type of man, generally a beginner in the breeding business, has a half-and-half-bred stallion at the head of his little stud, and he is uniformly an enthusiast for the “thoroughbred foundation.” As might be expected, he fills the columns of all the papers accessible with his “views of breeding,” which are always shaped to fit his own stallion and bring him patronage. We might here go on and point out other types of would-be “teachers” that would be entertaining, but certainly not profitable or instructive. We might follow the vagaries of different writers and show the origin and reason for those vagaries, but as the breeding world has become far more intelligent, and I think more honest, than it was twenty-five years ago, one vagary after another has disappeared and been buried out of sight. All such trumpery as, “to breed the trotter you must go to the runner,” “more running blood in the trotter,” “thoroughbred foundation,” etc., are phrases that are never heard in our day among intelligent breeders. A mile in two minutes and thirty seconds is “played out” as an evidence of trotting speed, but it is still held in its place as such evidence to suit the blood and methods of development at one particular establishment, and to gather in the money for registration from the little fellows.

Anything slower than “two-twenty” is no longer looked upon as of any value in a trotting sense.

This astonishing increase of speed has come hand in hand with a closer and more careful observance of the law of inheritance, or heredity. If we breed the merino ram upon a merino ewe, we know that the produce will be a merino. If we breed the cotswold on the cotswold we know the produce will be a cotswold, but if we breed the merino on the cotswold the produce will be a mongrel. The physical inheritance is destroyed, and in propagating from this mongrel confusion, uncertainty and disappointment always follow. If we go a step higher and consider those types of domestic animals endowed with a species of mentality that we call instinct, we find the illustrations still more marked and effective. The finely bred greyhound coupled with the finely bred pointer produces neither a greyhound nor a pointer, but only a nondescript cur. Sometimes the instincts of the greyhound and sometimes the instincts of the pointer may be the more masterful, but the inheritance is broken and divided, and the mongrel should never be used for propagation. If we couple the very best specimen of the English race horse with the very best and fastest American trotting mare, the produce would be literally half-and-half bred. The sire never could trot a mile in four minutes and the dam never could run a mile in two minutes, and what is the produce good for? Once in a hundred times the running instinct might predominate and develop something of a runner, and once in a hundred times the trotting instinct might predominate, as in the case of Bonnie Scotland and Waterwitch, and produce something of a trotter, but of what value would the half-and-half progeny be for breeding purposes? Whatever might be the characteristics of their progeny, physically, they would undoubtedly and invariably inherit and transmit not only divided, but antagonistic, instincts that would require generations of careful selection and training to get rid of. While the “featherheads” may, for the sake of personal consistency, which is a very weighty matter of public concern, still advocate “more running blood in the trotter;” and while one great concern may still look one way, on this question, and row the other, it being literally true that she has not added a single drop of running blood to her trotting stud in a quarter of a century, it is safe to say that the whole body of intelligent breeders of this country have come to accept and obey the great central truth that the American trotter has reached his present state of perfection by the development of his unbroken and undivided trotting inheritances. These inheritances have been cumulative and thus made stronger in each developed generation of ancestors, and if this high development of speed is kept up for a series of successive generations the speed of the American trotter will be placed at a point of which we have never yet dreamed. The inherited and developed instinct to stick to the trot as the fastest gait of which the horse is conscious, coupled with skillful preparation and handling, are the two factors that will always put the American trotting horse in the front rank and keep him there.

In the early chapters of this work we have considered the horse in his original habitat and his distribution among the different peoples of the then known world, but we have not considered the distribution of the trotter through the different regions of our own country. Fifty or sixty years ago the trotting horse was hardly known outside of a limited territory embracing the cities of New York and Philadelphia. In the New England States the trappy little Morgan filled the place of the driving horse with very great acceptance, but he had no speed as a trotter. We then began to see and hear something of the “Maine Messengers,” that were trotters in reality and able to demonstrate their speed and courage on the track. Occasionally a converted pacer would strike a trot and show speed that was phenomenal in that day, but it was uniformly treated as “accidental.” There was a great deal of high-class trotting blood in the region of Philadelphia, and for a time that was the leading center of the trotting interest, but it did not receive that measure of encouragement and support that was necessary to its permanent growth, and the seat of empire was transferred to Long Island and Orange County, New York. South of Mason and Dixon’s line the trotter was tabooed, as a mongrel nondescript, and “not worthy of the attention of a gentleman, sah.” They had runners and they had pacers, and as all excellence in the shape of a horse, at whatever gait, as they argued, must come from the running horse or his progenitor, the Arabian, they had already the very best material in the world for the production of the fast trotter. The belief as expressed in their motto, “Speed at the gallop was a guarantee of speed at any other gait required,” pervaded all minds and directed all action in matters of breeding. Thus they worked away for years trying to breed trotters from blood that never could and that never did trot, and, strange as it may seem, there are still some people in that region, at the close of the nineteenth century, trying to breed trotters from runners. From New York as a common center all the breeding States obtained their supplies of trotting blood, and they in time became sources of supply. The only exception to this is that of the pacer, which eventually developed into a trotting element of some prominence and value, especially in the West and South.

The prominence of Kentucky as a breeding center is wholly due to the trotting blood she obtained from New York. She had plenty of pacing blood that was good, of its kind, but it was so uncertain and sporadic that it did not commend itself to the breeders of that section as a source of trotting speed. From an early period in the history of the State the habits and fancies of the people, in the richer portions, had been “horsey,” from their knowledge and familiarity with running races for many years, and thus when the demand came for trotters they struck out vigorously to meet that demand. When Mr. R. A. Alexander organized the great Woodburn Farm he established a department of trotters, which was among the very first of any magnitude in the State. As he had been reared abroad he knew nothing about American pedigrees, and in making his purchases of breeding stock he was victimized by every sharper who came along with a brood mare to sell. He was a man of honest purpose and excellent natural judgment which told him to buy such breeding animals as could trot themselves or had produced trotters, and if he had been content to stop with what little he knew of their breeding he would have been all right; but, meantime, the professional pedigree-maker—the successor to the famous Patrick Nesbitt Edgar—came along and tricked them out in an excellent quality of pinchbeck pedigrees containing plenty of running blood that had never trotted nor produced a trotter. When the first Mr. Alexander died he was succeeded in the proprietorship of the great estate by his brother, a very worthy gentleman who made it a law to the establishment that none of his horses should ever start in a race. His fancy and knowledge were all in the line of cattle, and he seemed to neither know nor care anything about horses. Soon after this change in the ownership of the estate a new manager was placed in charge, and it was soon manifest that however absurd and untruthful the pedigrees of breeding stock might be, they must not be questioned nor corrected by any authority whatever. This doctrine of infallibility as applied to Woodburn pedigrees was wholly incompatible with what I conceived to be my duty to the breeding public. I had accepted the Woodburn pedigrees, at the start, as trustworthy, on the grounds of the eminence and high character of the first Mr. Alexander, and it was far more than a surprise to me when I discovered something of the extent to which the pedigrees of the whole establishment had been honeycombed with the dishonesty of “sharpers” and “pedigree-makers.” These fictions antedated any compilation or known authority of trotting pedigrees, and there can be no doubt they were accepted as honest statements of the blood of the animals in question, while many of them were wholly fictitious and all of them contained crosses on the maternal side that were merely imaginary. These embellishments, to call them by no harder name, were uniformly in one and the same direction, all stretching out to embrace as much of the blood of the running horse as possible, and often a great deal that was impossible. Here I may state the general fact that all Kentuckians had claimed and exercised the right so long to shape up their pedigrees to suit themselves and to bring the most money in the market that a number of them still claimed that as a right and became somewhat restive when told that their pedigrees would be recorded just as far as they were proved, and no further. Two or three breeders expostulated against this rule, and in reply they were assured that they had a perfect right to shape their pedigrees as they pleased, but that insertion in the Register was the same as my personal indorsement, and that this indorsement could not be given to any pedigree that I did not know or believe to be honest and true. This ended all doubts about the position and character of the Register, and I think that every breeder of any standing in Kentucky submitted to the rule, with the solitary exception of Woodburn Farm. The manager of that establishment was not only unwilling to have the infallibility of Woodburn pedigrees called in question, but he aspired to the control of the pedigrees of all other breeders in the whole country. When the National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders was organized in December, 1876, he was not only asked, but pressed, to become a member and take part in its management and control. But no, he would be “boss,” or he would be nothing. New York was not the right place to organize it. It should be organized in Kentucky, and with the manager of Woodburn at the head of it. The arrogance of this young manager was something amazing, his intrigues to get control of registration were continued for a number of years, and the means employed to accomplish his ends were of such a character as clearly to demonstrate that of all the men in the world he was the last one who should be placed in the control of such a trust. As this controversy extended through the period of building up the breed of trotters, it is of necessity a part of the literature of the formation of that breed, and as some of the more salient points seem to be of sufficient importance to hand down to future generations, I will here consider them very briefly. In doing this I am conscious of some feeling of embarrassment on account of the personal matters that must enter into the recital, but it is a part of the trotting history of the times, and I prefer that the truth may be preserved, whatever may be the teachings of the canons of taste.

In the collection and registration of pedigrees that seemed to be more or less closely allied to trotting blood, embracing all contained in the first, second and third volumes of the “Trotting Register,” there was no guide or rule to determine what was worthy of registration, in a trotting sense, and what was unworthy. I had a general conception of the families that had produced trotters and those that had not, but I had no rule by which I could decide what to admit and what to reject, except that all actual performers of reputable speed must be admitted. To undertake, on individual responsibility, to determine what amount of trotting blood should be requisite to admission, and how that amount should be measured, was quite too hazardous, except when backed by a strong moral and numerical force of breeders. Hence my active interest in the organization of the National Association of Trotting Horse Breeders, and my earnest desire that it might be composed of breeders of high standing and character from all parts of the country. Upon the organization of the association, its character was so entirely acceptable to me that I did not hesitate to place in its hands the supervisory control of the registration of pedigrees for the “Trotting Register,” to be exercised by a Board of Censors to be appointed annually. The first board was appointed and entered on its functions January 15, 1877, by formulating the first set of rules relating to the requisites necessary to the acceptance of pedigrees, in their form and completeness. The third volume was then approaching completion and the Board of Censors commenced their supervisory duties on that volume.

The members of the Breeders’ Association were generally men of intelligence, and capable of thinking, and every suitable opportunity was improved to get their individual views on the question as to whether a set of rules could be adopted by the association that would distinguish between animals that had trotted themselves or produced trotters in say 2:30, and animals that had not. Not many had ever thought of the subject, but all were ready to think of it more. The only objection urged was that such a scheme would certainly reduce the fees for registration in large degree. To this I assented as doubtless true for the time being, though in the end it would largely increase them, but declared that it was not for the fees I was working, but to establish a breed of trotting horses. When satisfied that a good number of the leading breeders were thinking favorably of the subject, it was presented to the public in a very modest and unpretentious way. In discussing “The Future of the Breeders’ Association,” in Wallace’s Monthly for April, 1878, the following language occurs:

“In addition to the thought and labor necessary to secure such an organization as the interest demands, there is another topic that will require great deliberation and wisdom, in the near future. The association must fix a standard of admission to the official record of pedigrees. Up to the present time there has been no standard of blood requisite to secure a place in the Register. This matter has been left wholly to the compiler, without even so much as advice on the subject. The Register, therefore, has no value as a classification of blood, but only as a reliable record of the pedigrees of the animals it contains, whatever their blood may be.”

This is the first intimation ever given to the public, so far as I know, that any body of men ever contemplated the construction of a standard to control the admission of trotting horses to specific rank and registration. The question was thus placed openly before the public and it was looked upon favorably by those most immediately interested. In due time, at a meeting of the Breeders’ Association, a committee was appointed to whom was referred all the suggestions that had been made for the proposed scheme. Soon afterward (November 19, 1879) the committee reported the standard to a large, enthusiastic and harmonious meeting of the Association, and it was unanimously adopted as follows: