John H. Wallace was born August 16, 1823, and reared on a farm in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. As a boy he evinced no particular liking for farm work, but had a great fondness for reading. He was educated chiefly at the Frankfort Springs Academy, where he was prepared to enter the junior class at college. There occurred a little incident at this time that illustrates how seemingly slight a thing may change the current of a life. The then member of Congress for that district, Mr. Dickey, a scholarly man, advised Professor Nicholson, of the Academy, that if he had a young man in his institution whom he could recommend, he (Mr. Dickey) would appoint him a cadet to West Point. Mr. Wallace was selected, provided his father’s consent was forthcoming. When Mr. Wallace, Sr., was approached on the subject his reply was, “John, I think there is some better employment in the world for you than studying the most approved methods of killing men”—and that ended the West Point incident. Young Mr. Wallace, about this time, became alarmed, however, at his then persistently delicate health, and decided to seek an outdoor life rather than one of study. In 1845 he married Miss Ellen Ewing (who died in 1891), of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and settled on a farm at Muscatine, Iowa. Iowa was then a new country, and Mr. Wallace did much in the way of organizing the industrial and educational interests of the State. There, as related below, he began work in the line in which he became famous. With an invalid wife he returned to Allegheny in 1872; and in 1875 in company with the late Benjamin Singerly, of Pittsburg, started Wallace’s Monthly at New York, which has been his home ever since. Mr. Wallace in 1893 married Miss Ellen Wallace Veech, a niece of the first Mrs. Wallace; and since his retirement from active business he has spent his time, at home and abroad, chiefly in prosecuting investigations into the horse history of the remote periods, the results of which are seen in this, his crowning life-work.
We will endeavor here to sketch, in the abstract, the history of Mr. Wallace’s publications to as great a degree as possible separately, though they cannot be entirely separated. The “Trotting Register” was an outgrowth of the “Stud Book,” and Wallace’s Monthly and the “Year Book” outgrowths of the “Register,” and both auxiliary thereto. The career and usefulness of all were intertwined, yet each had its own peculiar mission, and to that extent their histories will be kept distinct.
“Wallace’s American Stud Book.”
During the early “fifties” Mr. Wallace, then in the prime of early manhood, was Secretary of the Iowa State Board of Agriculture, and as such had much to do with the management of State fairs. He was thus frequently called upon for information about the pedigrees of animals, and the need of an authority on horse pedigrees was pointedly and constantly forced upon his attention. If the pedigree of a cow was asked for he had only to turn to the “American Herd Book” to find it, but when the breeding of a horse was wanted there was no authority to which to turn. Mr. Wallace had been dabbling more or less in such horse literature as there was at that day, and in 1856 began collecting information with the ultimate purpose of publishing a stud book of thoroughbred horses—for the thoroughbred was then here, as in England, supreme as the only horse of literature. He already possessed certain of the publications that were the best horse authorities of the day—a file of the Spirit of the Times, Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, and a number of volumes of the “English Stud Book,” and English Sporting Magazine. Added to these, later, were other sources of information and misinformation most notable in this latter class being the alleged “Stud Book” published by Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, of North Carolina, in 1833—an utterly unreliable work, but the only American stud book in existence prior to Wallace’s. From these, and every other available source, Mr. Wallace began to glean and systematically compile the pedigrees of thoroughbred and so-called thoroughbred horses. Of these sources by far the most valuable was Skinner’s periodical, begun in Baltimore in 1829. Novice as he was at the time, Edgar’s work was regarded with more than suspicion by Mr. Wallace, and, as a matter of caution as well as of honesty, whenever he borrowed pedigrees from Edgar they were so credited.
Modern methods of investigating pedigrees were not dreamed of by our compiler then. His principal aim seems to have been to get as large a collection as possible, and whatever was found in print, whether newspaper, book, or hand-bill, was taken for granted; and pedigrees gathered from private sources were, like the others, submitted to little scrutiny. Neither men’s motives nor their knowledge of what they represented to know were questioned, and in this way, after years of labor, a great mass of pedigrees was gathered, written in new form and order, and the thoroughbred stallions numbered—which was the first instance of numbering horses in registration. While compiling the thoroughbred pedigrees, Mr. Wallace also incidentally seized upon such information as he found about trotting pedigrees and records, and these he arranged as an appendix to his work. Finally, in 1867, “Wallace’s American Stud Book,” a great, handsome volume of 1,017 pages, bound pretentiously in green and gold, was published in New York.
The trotting supplement embraced about 100 pages, and that the editor was pretty well satisfied with it is shown by a sentence in the preface: “It is believed that this compilation of trotting horses, embracing over 700 animals, is very nearly perfect, but it is not claimed to be entirely so.” Of course, from the method of its compilation it was decidedly imperfect, but it was the best and only compilation of trotting pedigrees up to that time.
Meanwhile Mr. Wallace was pushing forward the compilation of the second volume of the “Stud Book,” and in this traveled much, making personal investigations. In 1870 this was completed, all the ground up to that year having been gone over, but in the course of the work “a great light” began to dawn upon the compiler. He found that he had been proceeding on a wrong plan entirely. Experience in compiling and investigating taught him that a pedigree may be printed in a newspaper, or even in a book, and still not be true. He discovered that the sources from which he had drawn were largely unreliable, that hundreds of pedigrees, through ignorance or dishonesty, or both, were fabrications and frauds, especially in their extensions in the maternal lines, and with the realization in full force of this knowledge came the determination, even though the last page of the manuscript for the second volume of the “Stud Book” was complete, that it should never see the light.
At the same time Mr. Wallace had discovered that the trotting supplement was the part of his “Stud Book” most used and appreciated. He saw that the trotter was coming to be the horse of the American people, and that there was a great and new field opening in which a literature had yet to be formed. His experience with the “Stud Book” gave him the training necessary for the work before him, and thus equipped, with little capital outside of his newly acquired knowledge, and marvelous natural industry and perseverance, with an unusual capacity for hard work, he turned in 1870 to the work before him—the literature of the trotter.
“Wallace’s American Trotting Register.”
He had as a nucleus the supplement to Volume I. of the “Stud Book,” added to which was the work done and knowledge gained in compiling the second volume, together with an increasing library and written data. Thus in incidentally adding a few pages of trotting pedigrees to his “Stud Book,” Mr. Wallace had builded better than he knew, but he even now had little conception of the extent and richness of his new field of exploration. He traveled all over the country, levying upon every source of information for his “Trotting Register;” but, taught in the dear school of experience, depended chiefly upon personal investigation, taking monthly and yearly less and less for granted. He gradually became more trained in meeting the natural human fondness for embellishing, extending and completing pedigrees without reference to fact or evidence, and the equally common predilection for stating as known facts those things concerning pedigrees that were only of common report. This work was excellent training for the more extended duties of the future, and it gave Mr. Wallace an insight into methods of the olden time, and a knowledge of men and horses that later made him, backed by uncompromising honesty, absolute fearlessness, and a quite unusual disregard for “policy,” a “terror to evil-doers” in the realm of manufacturing in whole or in part fraudulent pedigrees.