In 1829 Mr. John S. Skinner, of Baltimore, Maryland, commenced the publication of a monthly magazine, entitled “The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine,” and as it really “filled a long-felt want,” it received a very encouraging support. As its name indicated its field, it at once became the authority on sporting events and the receptacle of a great amount of valuable correspondence on the horses of the day, as well as the earlier race horses. Mr. Skinner was industrious in collecting material for his magazine, but unfortunately he published whatever was sent to him relating to the horse, and just as it was sent. If a communication was well written, no difference how many errors of fact it might contain, it never seemed to occur to Mr. Skinner to use his blue pencil. Pedigrees were sent in, amounting to many thousands, during his ownership, with fictitious and untruthful remote extensions, and published without any possibility of tracing the different crosses to a known or responsible source or name. Here was the opportunity of a lifetime to “fix up” the pedigrees of stallions to suit the public demand and the fees sought by their owners, send them to Mr. Skinner, and have them duly spread before the public in all their dishonest finery. The early volumes are very rich in the accumulations of pedigrees, such as they are, and hence very valuable. The magazine received less and less attention from its proprietor each succeeding year and finally it was transferred to the Spirit of the Times, of New York, and died after an existence of some fifteen years.
Mr. Cadwallader R. Colden, of New York, commenced the publication of another sporting magazine, that was of very great merit, and did much to correct some of the errors that abounded in Mr. Skinner’s publication. In the controversies which naturally sprang up he had greatly the advantage of his adversary, for he knew horse history and Mr. Skinner did not. Mr. Colden was a man of marked ability, and over the signature of “An Old Turfman” he made himself famous as a writer. He hated a fraud and wherever he saw one he did not hesitate to hit it. His publication was a large and expensive one, racing was then under the periodical interdict of public opinion, and after about two or three years, and greatly to the loss and misfortune of the truths of horse history, the publication was discontinued. The weekly press had no representative in the field of “horse literature and sporting subjects” until early in the thirties, when the Spirit of the Times was founded by William T. Porter. The conception of a weekly paper devoted to all kinds of sports, such as hunting, fishing, racing, gaming, etc., was not only new in this country, but it was brilliant. Mr. Porter was not only a gentleman in his appearance and manners, but he had fine social qualities and was a writer of ability and polish. Such a personage would naturally gather about him friends and correspondents that were congenial, and very soon The Spirit of the Times became noted as the organ of a great body of educated men who loved sport and enjoyed wit. It was the only publication of its kind on the continent, and it soon obtained a very wide circulation. Mr. Porter knew very little of horses, either theoretically or practically, but he was a ready adapter and wrote some fine descriptions of famous racing contests. His habits were sportive rather than industrious, hence he left nothing behind him of value to his friends or to the world except the mere fact that he was the founder of the first sporting paper in this country. In course of time the paper with all its belongings became the property of John Richards, the former pressman, and Mr. Porter had to look for a living wherever he could find it. Mr. George Wilkes then took him under his wing, and started a new sporting paper called Porter’s Spirit of the Times. The use of this name carried with it the support of a good many friends, but as he was not able to write anything, practically, for the new paper, from its very commencement in September, 1856, it failed to yield any support to Mr. Porter, and not much to Mr. Wilkes and his partners. Litigation arose and Mr. Wilkes finally withdrew from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, and started Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times in September, 1859. We then had three sporting papers all claiming to be the original and only legitimate Spirit of the Times. Among their readers they were distinguished as the Old Spirit, Porter’s Spirit, and Wilkes’ Spirit. The circulation of the Old Spirit was largely in the Southern States, and the war destroyed it, in 1861. Porter’s Spirit having but little money and still less brains, died about the same time. This left Mr. Wilkes in open possession of the field, and his remarkably trenchant articles on the conduct of the war gave Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times a very wide circulation, even among those who cared nothing for sporting matters. At the same time he was fortunate in securing the services of Mr. Charles J. Foster, an able writer on horse subjects, and a very industrious and capable man in managing and discussing affairs connected with the horse. Some years later, Mr. Wilkes dropped his own name from the title of his paper, and not long afterward he added twenty-five or thirty years to its age by changing the numbers so as to cover the period of the original Spirit of the Times founded by William T. Porter. The old sporting publications, one and all, maintained the view, so far as they ever had any view to maintain, that all that was of any value in the American horse, for whatever purpose, had come down to us from the Arabian through the English race horse. Their value, therefore, consists wholly in the naked statistics which they contain.
The first attempt made in this country, in the direction of publishing a stud book of American race horses, was the product of Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, an eccentric and apparently not well-balanced Irishman, who was a resident of North Carolina. This book, which purported to be a “first” volume, was very remarkable in many respects, two or three of which I will enumerate. The prevailing absence of dates and all means by which the truth or falsity of a pedigree could be determined; the astounding number of crosses given, even to the immediate descendants of imported sires; the multitude of animals never heard of before nor since, with pedigrees extended a dozen crosses; the absence of many animals that everybody had heard of. This book had been in print about thirty years before I ever saw it, and the first impression it made on my mind was that the author was “clean daft.” At the same time, through all his work there was a “method in his madness,” going to show the care he had taken to exclude or suppress any little fact that might lead to detection and exposure. As an illustration of his methods I will take the following pedigree, at random, as given by him and copied, literally, by Mr. Bruce, following the particular form of the latter:
CENTAUR, b. h. foaled 1767, bred by ——; owned in Virginia, got by imported Stirling (Evans’) (foaled 1762).
1st dam by imp. Aristotle (imported 1764).
2d dam by imp. Dotterel.
3d dam by imp. David (imported 1763).
4th dam by imp. Ranter (imported 1762).
5th dam by imp. Othello (imported 1755).
6th dam by imp. Childers (imported 1761).