“After dinner at New London, Conn., Mr. Williams and I took post horses, with a guide to New Haven. Their horses are, in general of less size than ours, but extremely stout and hardy. A man will ride the same horse a hundred miles a day, for several days together, in a journey of five or eight hundred miles, perhaps, and the horse is never cleaned. They naturally pace, though in no graceful or easy manner, but with such swiftness and for so long a continuance as must seem incredible to those who have not proved it by experience.”
This is a very different view of the pacer from that expressed by another Englishman who visited Virginia in 1796. He had never seen a pacer before and he was wholly unwilling to believe his host when he assured him it was a natural gait and that many colts paced from the day they were foaled. This, to the mind of the Englishman could not be true, he says, “for none of our horses ever move in that manner.” (See Virginia, pp. 117-118).
The most noted horse ever owned in Connecticut, at least in colonial days, was the horse named and known in later times as Lindsay’s Arabian. When I was younger I accepted the marvelous story of the origin and early history of this horse, of which a brief account is given in the chapter on the “American Race Horse,” to which reference is here made. This acceptance on my part of the romantic story was largely superinduced by a statement made by a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, that he had examined the animal when he was old and found on three of his legs undoubted physical evidence that they had at one time been broken. This appeared in a reputable publication, but when compared with some other facts in the history of the horse that are known, there can hardly be a doubt that the examination by the justice was a fiction. When I began to realize that the marvelous story was a mere fiction my “wrath waxed hot” against the people of “the land of steady habits,” to say nothing of “wooden nutmegs,” until Mr. O. W. Cook made it very plain that the people of Connecticut never had heard of the remarkable story. (See Wallace’s Monthly, Vol. VI., p. 251). Thus it became evident that the whole story had been fabricated in Maryland and was a kind of “green goods” method for catching the unwary. These are my apologies to the general public and especially to the Connecticut public for supposing them guilty of any such fraud. The naked truth of the matter is, that while this horse may have been imported from England, his public advertisements clearly indicate that his owners knew nothing of his blood or early history.
The colony of Rhode Island was planted by Roger Williams and his followers in 1636, and the first patent giving it a legal existence was obtained 1647. It was an offshoot from Massachusetts and a protest against the intolerance of that colony in religious affairs. For several years I made renewed and persistent efforts to discover whether in the early colonial period Rhode Island had ever imported any horses from foreign countries, and after exhausting every source of recorded information, I have not been able to find a single intimation of such importation. It is evident, therefore, that the famous Narragansett pacer is simply the result of carefully selecting and breeding from the best and the fastest of the descendants of the English pacers, to be found everywhere in the colony of Massachusetts. The superiority of the Narragansett pacer over all others of his kind seemed to suggest the probability that he must have possessed blood that was superior to all others, and to supply this “want,” a Rhode Islander advanced the claim that his grandfather had imported the original stock from Spain. Unfortunately for this “claim” there were two difficulties in the way of accepting it. First, there were no pacers in Spain, and second, the Narragansett pacers were famous for their speed and value before the grandfather was born, or at least before he was out of his swaddling clothes.
The horse interests of Rhode Island seem to have been active and successful from the very founding of the colony, and the fame of her pacers extended to all the American colonies at a very early day. When the authorities made their report to the Board of Trade at London, in 1690, showing what they had produced and where and how they had disposed of their surplus, they place horses at the head of their products and state that they are shipped to all the English colonies on the American coast. This statement is sustained by corresponding facts that are known in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Trading with the French colonies in Canada was rigorously prohibited, but it is quite probable that many a good pacing horse found his way to the St. Lawrence in exchange for pelts and furs. But, as the Narragansett and the pacer generally will be fully considered in another part of this volume, the reader is referred to the chapters wholly devoted to those topics.
That racing was a common amusement of the people of Rhode Island is fully established by the very best of contemporaneous evidence, and by the silver plate prizes won, that are said to be still in existence in some of the old families. Attempts have been made to laugh this statement out of court, on the grounds that Rhode Island was a Puritan colony, and such a thing as a horse race would not be tolerated for a single day. This attempt shows a great deal more smartness than knowledge, for Rhode Island was not a Puritan colony, as that term is generally understood, but had for its very foundation opposition to the spirit of intolerance that prevailed in all the other New England colonies. But, what is still more conclusive, the legislature of the colony in 1749 enacted a law prohibiting all racing, under a penalty of forfeiture of the horse and a fine of one hundred dollars. As in other colonies not in New England racing and betting had become so common that the moral sense of the people rose up and abolished it. If there had been no racing there would have been no law to wipe it out.
When the Rev. Dr. McSparran, of Rhode Island, made a trip in Virginia and rode the Virginia pacers some hundreds of miles, early in the last century, he seems to have observed them closely and spoke very highly of them, but he said they were not so large and strong as the Narragansetts, nor so easy and gliding in their action. It might be suggested that this opinion was the natural result of esteeming one’s own as better than those of a neighbor, but he was certainly right in the matter of size. In 1768 the Rhode Island horses averaged fourteen hands one inch, while the Virginia horses averaged (1750-52) thirteen hands one and three-quarter inches, making a difference of three and one-quarter inches in height. In the matter of gait they were not all natural pacers, for out of thirty-five there were eight that did not pace, and some of the others both paced and trotted. From this it may be inferred that breeders, in order to increase the size, had incorporated more or less of the blood of the early Dutch importations.