CHAPTER VII.
THE AMERICAN RACE HORSE.
Antiquity of American racing—First race course at Hempstead Plain, 1665— Racing in Virginia, 1677—Conditions of early races—Early so-called Arabian importations—The marvelous tradition of Lindsay’s “Arabian”— English race horses first imported about 1750—The old colonial stock as a basis—First American turf literature—Skinner’s American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, 1829—Cadwallader R. Colden’s Sporting Magazine short-lived but valuable—The original Spirit of the Times—Porter’s Spirit of the Times—Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times, 1859—Edgar’s Stud Book —Wallace’s Stud Book—Bruce’s Stud Book—Their history, methods, and value—Summing up results, showing that success has followed breeding to individuals and families that could run and not to individuals and families that could not run, whatever their blood.
Horses were kept for running, and horse racing was a common amusement in some of the American Colonies for about a hundred years before the first English race horses were imported. This embraces a century of horse history that, hitherto, has been practically unexplored and unknown. For the details of what I have been able to glean of this neglected and unknown century my readers are referred to the chapters on the different colonies. The first racing in this country of which we have any historical knowledge was organized by Governor Nicolls. In 1664 the Dutch surrendered the province of New Netherlands to the English, and the next autumn, 1665, the new race course at Hempstead Plains was inaugurated by the new governor of the colony. This course was named Newmarket, after the famous English course, and Governor Nicolls’ successors continued to offer purses on this course for many years, and after a time there were two regular meetings held there, spring and autumn. Owing to the distance of this course from the city, other courses, near at hand, were soon constructed and racing of all kinds and at all gaits held high carnival. The principal prizes were called “Subscription Purses,” the distance almost invariably two miles, and the weight carried ten stone. The horses that ran were known as “Dutch horses,” and were descended from the original stock brought from Utrecht, in Holland. They were larger than the English horses, and brought better prices, although the latter were esteemed more highly for their saddle gaits. I think the Dutch horses, originally, had no natural pacers among them, but for the pleasures and uses of the saddle they were inter-bred with the English horses and the mixed blood soon produced many pacers. It is probable also that this mixture increased the speed of the whole tribe. Thus racing continued with but few interruptions and without any known changes in the rules or conditions governing performances, except that after fifty years or more the weight to be carried was reduced from ten stone to eight stone. In the year 1751, which was eighty-six years after Governor Nicolls had established the Newmarket course on Long Island, we find the following significant condition inserted in the terms of entrance to the races, for the first time: “Free to any horse, mare, or gelding bred in America.” The simple meaning of this new condition was to “head off” the scheme of some “sharp” fellows who were, probably, then on the ocean with two or three English race horses, with which they expected to “gobble up” whatever stakes or purses came within their reach.
The first record we have of racing in Virginia is to be found in the court records of Henrico County, in the year 1677—twelve years after the establishment of racing in New York. For fuller particulars of this, the reader is referred to the chapter on that colony. The Virginians were a horse-racing people from the start, and it is impossible to tell how long before racing first commenced, but probably just as soon as any two neighbors met, each owning a horse, a few hundred pounds of tobacco were put up the next day, to make it interesting, in determining which was the faster. This racing feeling was not confined to neighbors nor to neighborhoods, but it pervaded the whole colony, and the people of every county had their annual and semi-annual meetings, which everybody attended. Their methods of handicapping will strike the present generation as somewhat peculiar. In their advertisements of the meetings, such language as the following was very common: “Sized horses to carry one hundred and forty pounds and Galloways to be allowed weight for inches.” From this we learn that the tribe of little Scotch pacers were still to the fore on this side of the water and that they were just as fleet as the larger horses, provided the weight was graduated to their inches. There was one feature in these race meetings that will be a surprise to many of my readers, as it was to myself, and that is the fact that at most of these meetings there was one four-mile race. Smaller prizes were run for by horses classed as to size, and it may be noted that there was one class “not exceeding thirteen hands.” At these meetings the distance never seems to have been less than one mile, while on the southern border of the colony and in North Carolina, quarter racing was very popular and very common from the earliest dates, and it was kept up through the greater part of the eighteenth century. For a fuller account of the racing of those early days the reader is referred to the chapter on Virginia.
In this old English, Irish and Scottish blood, full of the pacing element, which we may now call “native” blood, we have the real foundation upon which the English race horse was bred and from which has come the approximate if not the complete equal of the highest type of the English horse, in both speed and stamina. The English and the American race horse came from the same source and possess the same blood, with this trifling distinction—the native mares in England were bred to horses of exotic, Saracenic origin, while the native mares of America were bred to the descendants of that native-exotic combination. Hence, with the original maternal ancestry of the same blood, the combined and improved English descendant of that blood became the paternal ancestor of the American race horse. We must not forget that this “paternal ancestor” had been the result of crossing and recrossing, selecting, breeding and developing for nearly a hundred years, and that he was, therefore, a far better horse and far more prepotent as a sire than the produce of the first cross made under the direction of the Duke of Newcastle. We must not ignore the fact that while there were many stallions brought over in the early days there were also a few mares, but they were so few in number that their influence was hardly appreciable in the new breed to be established. Saracenic blood was touched very sparingly in the colonial days, as even the names of not more than three or four have been preserved in history. The only one of that period fully identified was named Bashaw and was kept on Long Island about the year 1768. Like all the others, he was called an Arabian, but according to the showing of his advertisement he was bred by the Emperor of Morocco, and was not an Arabian. Of the later period and coming down to about 1860 there are twenty-five or thirty that have been called “Arabians.” Near the head of the list stands one called “Arab Barb” or “Black Arabian Barb.” He was claimed to be an imported Barb from Algiers, and was seventeen hands high, “and coarse in proportion.” Many other so-called “importers” were equally absurd and dishonest in their claims, but there horses all passed as genuine “Arabians.” Out of the whole number called “Arabians” not more than five or six seem to have had a shadow of right to the name, and these exceptions were practically restricted to the animals imported by Mr. A. Keene Richards, of Kentucky. That each and all of these exceptions were irredeemable failures is a fact well known to all intelligent horsemen. This motley crew of “Arabian” importations came from all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, except Arabia, were all called “Arabians,” and they were all flat disappointments both as race horses and as producers of race horses.
Out of this list of thirty-five or forty so-called Arabian horses, there is one that requires special mention, not only because a correction may be made in his history, but because I have frequently spoken of him as the only Arabian that had left any mark upon the horse stock of the country. Lindsay’s Arabian, as he was called, was a grey horse and represented to be over fifteen hands high. The story is that he was a Barb and had been presented to the commander of a British man-of-war, when a colt, by the ruler of one of the Barbary States, as an expression of gratitude to the captain for having saved the life of his son. The captain sailed away for a South American port, and while lying there he took his present ashore to let him have a little exercise. The colt was given the free range of a lumber-yard, as the story goes, and in his playfulness a pile of lumber fell upon him and broke three of his legs. The British officer was greatly grieved at his loss and proposed to put the colt out of misery by knocking him on the head. There happened to be an American trading vessel in port and the skipper “allowed if he had that critter on his vessel he could save him.” The officer at once gave him to the skipper and told him his history. Yankee ingenuity and thrift soon got him aboard the trader and he was swung up and his legs properly bandaged. The surgical treatment was good, the bones knit, and in due time the vessel arrived at New London, and the colt was taken to the vicinity of Hartford. Just where this story originated it is not possible now to say, nor do I know that it ever had currency in Connecticut, but it was certainly rehearsed and probably believed in Maryland. He was owned by Colonel Wyllis of Hartford, and was advertised in 1770 under the single name of Ranger, and described as “a fine English stallion of the Barbary breed, bred in England.” From this it would appear that nothing was then known of his romantic history. As a part of his Maryland history it was said that General Washington’s attention had been attracted to a body of Connecticut cavalry by the excellence of their horses, and at his instance Captain Lindsay bought Ranger, because he was the sire of many of those horses, and took him to Maryland, where he was ever afterward known as “Lindsay’s Arabian.” The story of the indorsement of Washington made an excellent stallion card, and it is not necessary that we should inquire into it too closely, for the dates might raise a question. The horse passed from Colonel Wyllis to James Howard, of Windham, and was advertised by him as “The Imported Arabian Horse called The Ranger to stand at his stable the season of 1778.” Hence we must conclude that he was not taken to the South before the season of 1779, or possibly later. Then, as now, to catch the popular fancy, North and South, the horse is no longer an “English stallion of the Barbary breed” but an “Imported Arabian Horse.” His cross was well esteemed in his day, and it has held its place in the estimation of all the experienced horsemen as a good cross in an old pedigree. We now see that he was bred in England, that he was got by a Barb horse or the son of a Barb horse, and that it is not probable there was a single drop of Arabian blood in his veins. This little sketch will serve to illustrate the methods, general and particular, that were invariably used to place a fictitious value upon the so-called imported “Arabians.” In no other department of human knowledge has there been such a universal and persistent habit of misrepresenting the truth of history as in matters relating to the horse. It seems to have been, and still is, a kind of psychical contagion that has been generating dishonesty and a habit of lying in the minds of the great body of horsemen for the past two hundred and fifty years. If a horse is brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, he is at once called an “Arabian.” This is worse than a misnomer, for it is an essential untruth, and its universal use does not redeem it from its essence of deception and fraud. It must be conceded, however, that this deception may have sprung from bad teaching and ignorance rather than from a depraved moral sense, for many people, as well as the poets and the novelists, may have concluded that as the nations named above got their religion from Arabia, so they got their horse stock from the same country, and thus the horses brought from Turkey, or Syria, or Egypt, or Spain, or Morocco, or any of the Barbary States, are descendants of the Arabian horse and thus entitled to the name “Arabian.” This seems to be the only theory upon which this universal misrepresentation can be palliated. Let us repeat a sentence or two here, to show what history reveals on this point. Strabo says there were no horses in Arabia at the beginning of the Christian era. Philostorgius says that in the year 356, two hundred “well-bred” Cappadocian horses were sent as a present to the prince of Yemen, by the Emperor Constantius. These were the first horses in Arabia. In the days of Mohammed horses were exceedingly scarce in Arabia, and they have remained so to the present time. The horse is an expensive exotic in Arabia, as he is never used for any domestic purpose, nor for any other purpose except robbery or display. For all domestic and commercial uses the camel is far better. All the countries named above were abundantly supplied with horses, at least eight hundred or a thousand years before there were any horses in Arabia. The Moslems got their religion from Arabia, but not their horses. This topic is more fully discussed in the chapter on the Arabian horse.
The importation of English race horses to this side of the water commenced about the year 1750, and that being the middle of the last century it is easy to remember the date when the line was drawn between the old and the new elements appearing on the race course. The following six animals were brought over within a year or two of that date—Monkey, Traveller, Dabster, Childers, Badger, and Janus. A few others might be named, but some at least are mythical. Of those here named, Traveller was the great horse. Janus became the progenitor of a tribe of very fast quarter horses, and although he did not found that tribe, which had been in existence for a hundred years on the border line between Virginia and North Carolina, he doubtless improved it. Monkey was twenty-two years old when he came and did not live long. The whole number imported into all the colonies before the war of the Revolution counts up to about fifty, and some of these are practically unknown, and a few of them were wholly fictitious. Maryland, I think, was first in the field of importations, and then followed Virginia, New York, and North Carolina. Possibly the very earliest importations were made in South Carolina, but there is not much evidence that those importations were utilized to any extent for racing purposes, and hence we know but little of the doings of that colony till a later date. There were not more than about twenty mares of English race-horse blood imported, in the quarter of a century preceding the Revolution, into all the colonies. As many of these animals of both sexes were stolen or destroyed during the war, we can approximate with some degree of certainty the great reduction in this producing force by the time the war ended and importations again commenced.
Now, we have before us the old colonial running stock that had been tested in many a battle and found able to cover the distance of two to four miles, and we have also the new running stock that had never been asked to go any further, but we have no actual, authentic and reliable knowledge of the comparative speed of the two classes. There were no stop watches nor records of time kept in those days. This much only we know, that prizes were offered for “half-breds” for a few years, but when it was found that some of the half-breds could run just as fast and as far as some of the whole-breds, this class of prizes was withdrawn. Then commenced the manufacture of fraudulent pedigrees, for, it was argued, “How could an American horse beat an English horse unless he had English blood and plenty of it?” Hence, when a horse won that fact was taken as proof that he was full bred, and no time was lost in investing him with a first-class, pure-bred pedigree. This was a little onerous on the few imported mares that were known and named, as in the case of imported Mary Gray, for she had to produce eleven filly foals by imported Jolly Roger in order to accommodate her numerous progeny, as alleged, and how many more claims were made of the same pedigree it would be very difficult to estimate. When it began to appear a little awkward to require Mary Gray to have, on paper, more than eleven filly foals by Jolly Roger, it was soon, discovered that it was less perplexing and at the same time less liable to be “cornered” by saying “dam an imported English mare.” No doubt there was a great deal of sharp practice, to say nothing of cheating and lying, about horse matters in Colonial times, but those little venialities were only the blossoms indicating the mature fruits of deceptions and frauds that were to follow when pedigrees would be considered an element of value in the running horse, and when every man would have the power, in fact, to make and print his pedigrees to suit himself. This brings us to a very brief consideration of what has been done in the direction of correcting the frauds of the past and preventing them in the future.
The period of fable and of falsehood in the genealogy of the American race horse seems to have commenced not long after the first importations of English race horses. In the first generations from the imported English horse and the native mare, it was rather difficult for a man to fix up a pedigree for his half-bred colt that would show him to be full bred, but after forty, fifty, or sixty years had elapsed the events became misty, and then every man exercised the right to make his own pedigrees to suit his own fancy. This seems to have been the condition of things for many years, and while there were a few honest men who would stick to the truth, the great majority either made their pedigrees to suit themselves or employed some “expert” to make them for them. The confusion which ensued was most perplexing, and the slipshod manner in which editors and writers on the horse did their work was most discouraging. Whatever was found in print on a crossroads blacksmith shop door was taken as authentic, because it was in print.