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

by John Hankins Wallace

As the result of these investigations, the breadth and scope of this volume will be greatly widened, touching upon the originals of most of the lighter types of horses, and many of the idols of the imagination will be demolished. The objective point is the history of the Trotting Horse, but before reaching that point we must consider the beginnings of, practically, nearly all the varieties of horses in the world. The assistance that I may be able to gain from modern writers will be very limited, and restricted Haicus, the great grandson of Japheth, became the ruler of his people. Descending from him, in the direct male line, there were five or six long reigns before the dynasty was overthrown by the Assyrians. They were largely an agricultural people, and the ancient historians have told us they were famous for the great numbers and fine quality of the horses they produced. The market for their horses, the prophet Ezekiel tells us, was in the great commercial city of Tyre, whence they were carried “in the ships of Tarshish” by the Phœnician merchants to all portions of the known world. Having here reached back to the Noachic period and country, with all that this implies, I will leave the problem, with the more extended consideration that will be given it in the chapter on the general distribution of horses in all parts of the commercial world.

Horsemen of average intelligence and writers on the horse, oftentimes much below average intelligence in horse matters, all seem to unite on the Arabian horse as their fetish, when in fact they know nothing about him. The songs of the poets and the stories of the novelists have taken the place, in the minds of the people of all nations, of solid history and sober experience. When a story writer wishes to depict an athletic and daring hero, he never fails to mount him upon an “Arab steed,” when some blood-curdling adventures are to be disclosed. When Admiral Rous, the great racing authority in England, announced some years ago, that the English race horse was purely descended from the horses of Arabia Deserta, without one drop of plebeian blood, all England believed him, and this rash and groundless dictum has served all writers as conclusive evidence ever since. Now, it is not probable that more than two or at most three per cent. of the blood of the English race horse as he stands to-day is Arabian blood. The greatness and value of the Arabian horse is purely mythical. He has been tested hundreds of times, both on the course and in the stud, and in every single instance he has proved a failure. This is what all history and experience teach. There are but few horses bred in Arabia and there are, comparatively, but few there now. From the time of their first introduction into Yemen—Arabia Felix—up to the time of Mohammed, about two hundred and seventy years, they were still very scarce. Mohammed was not a horseman nor a horse breeder, nor is it known that he ever mounted a horse but once, and then he had but two in his army. When he made his first pilgrimage to Mecca he rode a camel; and when he went the second time in triumph, mounted on a camel, he made the requisite number of circuits round the holy place, then dismounted and broke the idols that had been set up there. Then came the triumphant shout of his followers; “There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet.” Since then, this cry has rung over a thousand battlefields, and as I write it is still heard in the homes of the slaughtered Armenians. From a great, warlike, and conquering people, the followers of Mohammed have degenerated into an aggregation of robbers and murderers of defenseless Christians. Since the days of Mohammed, horses no doubt have increased in numbers, but all modern travelers express their surprise at the small numbers they see. The horse is an expensive luxury in Arabia, and none but the rich can afford to keep him. He fills no economic place in the domestic life of the Arab, for he is never used for any purpose except display and robbery. Nobody is able to own a horse but the sheiks and a few wealthy men. Nobody would think of mounting a horse for a journey, be it long or short. The camel fills the place of the horse, the cow and a flock of sheep, all in one, and surely the Arabs are right in saying, “Job’s beast is a monument of God’s mercy.” It is very evident that nearly all the horses said to have been brought from Arabia never saw Arabia. As an illustration of the uncertainty of what a man is getting when he thinks he is buying an Arabian, in the Orient, I will give, in some detail the experiences of Mr. Wilfrid S. Blunt, a wealthy Englishman who had an ambition to regenerate the English race horse by bringing in fresh infusions of Arabian blood. He went to Arabia to buy the best, but he didn’t go into Arabia to find it. He skirted along through the border land where agriculture and civilization prevailed, while away off to the south the wild tribes roamed over the desert, and to the north, not far away, was the land of abundance that had been famous for more than three thousand years for the great numbers and excellence of the horses bred there. Here on the banks of the Euphrates Mr. Blunt found the town of Deyr, and he soon discovered it was a famous horse market. The inhabitants were the only people he met with who seemed to understand and appreciate the value of pedigrees, and there were no horses in the town but “thoroughbreds.” Here Mr. Blunt made nearly all his purchases which amounted to eighteen mares and two stallions “at reasonable prices.” As will be seen in the extracts from his book, he was strikingly solicitous that the friends at home should have no doubt about the quality of the stock he purchased being all “thoroughbred.” No doubt he realized the awkwardness of the location as not the right one in which to secure “thoroughbred” Arabians and hence the vigorous indorsement of the honesty of the “slick and experienced” dealers as honest men and true descendants of the Bedouins of the desert. In this “he doth protest too much” and thus suggests that while the pedigrees came from the tribes of the desert to the South, it might be possible that the horses came from the farmers who bred them to the North. However this may have been, the whole enterprise turned out to be a flat failure, and after a number of years spent in begging for popular support, the whole collection was dispersed under the hammer of the auctioneer, not realizing a tithing of the cost.

While it is not necessary that I should express any opinion as to whether Mr. Blunt was deceived in the breeding of the animals which he brought home, I will make brief allusion to an American experience which is more fully considered elsewhere. Some forty or more years ago Mr. A. Keene Richards, a breeder of race horses in Kentucky, became impressed with the idea that the way to improve the race horse of America was to introduce direct infusions of the blood of Arabia. He did not hesitate, but he started to Arabia and brought home some horses and mares and put them to breeding. The pure bloods could not run at all and the half-breeds were too slow to make the semblance of a contest with Kentucky-bred colts. He concluded that he had been cheated by the rascally Arabs in the blood they put upon him. He then determined to go back and get the right blood, and as a counselor he took with him the famous horse painter, Troye, who was thoroughly up on anatomy and structure. They went into the very heart of Arabia and spent many weeks among the different tribes of the desert. They had greatly the advantage of Mr. Blunt or any other amateur, for they were experienced horsemen and knew just what they were doing. When they were ready to start home they believed they had found and secured the very best horses that Arabia had produced. When the produce of this second importation were old enough to run it was found that they were no better than the first lot, and thus all the bright dreams of enthusiasm were dissipated. Thus was demonstrated for the thousandth time that the blood of even the best and purest Arabian horse is a detriment and hindrance rather than a benefit to the modern race horse. Mr. Richards, with all his practical knowledge and experience, was no more successful than the amateur, Mr. Blunt. The blood which Mr. Richards brought home was, no doubt, purer and more fashionable, as estimated in the desert, than that brought home by Mr. Blunt, but when tested by modern advancement it was no better.

A careful study of the chapter on the English Race Horse will present to the minds of all my intelligent readers the consideration of several points to which they will be slow in yielding assent. These points run up squarely against the preconceived opinions and prejudices of two centuries, and these preconceived opinions and prejudices are well-nigh universal. The first point upon which the public intelligence has gone wrong is in the general belief that horse-racing had its origin in the seventeenth century, when Charles II. was restored to his throne. The truth is we have accounts of racing by contemporaneous historians in the twelfth century, and indeed, we might say from the time of the Romans in Britain. To go back four centuries, however, is far enough to answer our present purpose. After selecting, breeding, and racing four hundred years we must conclude that the English had some pretty good race horses. This is fully verified by the writers at the close of Queen Elizabeth’s reign as well as at the beginning of Charles II.’s. They had native English horses that were able to beat all the imported exotics, including the Arabian owned by King James. We must, therefore, conclude that the race horse was not created by Charles II., but that racing was simply revived by him, after the restrictions of Cromwell’s time, and that the old English blood was the basis of that revival. The importations of so many exotics in his reign were simply so many reinforcements of the old English racing blood.

The next point to which exception will be taken is the conclusion reached as to the character and influence of the exotics that were introduced in the reign of Charles II. These exotics have been designated in a general way, by the phrase “foundation stock,” which has been introduced more out of deference to the popular understanding than to its legitimate and true meaning. For the real “foundation stock” we must look away back in the centuries, long before Charles was born. The analysis of the data furnished by Mr. Weatherby as “foundation stock” clearly shows that the Turks predominated in numbers, but, possibly, the Barbs in influence. The Arabian element, in both numbers and influence, seems to be practically nil, and this is the “gist of my offending.” The one great horse—Godolphin Arabian—exerted a greater and more lasting influence upon the English race horse than any other of his century and probably than all the others of his century, and his blood is wholly unknown. Fortunately, a few years ago I was able to unearth his portrait and prove it a true portrait, and in that picture we must look for his lineage. He was a horse of great substance and strength on short legs, with no resemblance whatever to a race horse. About fifty years after his death Mr. Stubbs, the artist, who prided himself upon representing the character of a horse rather than his shape, came across this picture, from which he made an “ideal” copy of what he thought the horse should have been, which is a veritable monstrosity. These two pictures will appear together in their proper places, where they can be leisurely studied, and the honest and the dishonest compared.

The American race horse is the lineal descendent of the English race horse, and like his ancestor he is very largely dependent upon the “native blood” for his existence as a breed. The first English race horse was imported into Virginia about 1750, and he there met a class of saddle mares that had been selected, bred, trained, and raced at all distances up to four-mile heats, for nearly a hundred years. These mares were the real maternal foundation stock upon which the American race horse was established, as a breed. The phrase “native blood” is here used as applying to the animals and their descendants, that were brought over from England at and soon after the plantation of the American colonies. Up to the time of the Revolution there were but few racing mares brought over—as many as you could count on your fingers—but they must have been marvelously prolific, for thirty or forty filly foals each would hardly have accommodated all the animals with pedigrees tracing to them. Quite a number of our greatest race horses and sires of forty or fifty years ago traced to some one of these mares through links that were wholly fictitious. Indeed, from the period of the Revolution, and even before that, down to our own time, the pernicious and dishonest habit of adding fictitious crosses beyond the second or third dam became the rule in the old American families, and an animal with a strictly honest pedigree was the exception. In spreading abroad these dishonest fictions as true pedigrees, the press—perhaps not venally, but ignorantly—was made the active agent. Whenever a rogue could get a pedigree into print, however absurd, nothing could prevent its spread as the truth. The early sporting and breeding press was not in the hands of men remarkable for conscience and still less remarkable for knowledge. But the worst of all was the “professional pedigree maker” who knew so many things that he never knew, and stopped at nothing. In all this dirty work of manufacturing pedigrees there is a very striking resemblance between the awkward efforts of the early English and the early American pedigree maker. This whole topic of the ignorance of the press and the dishonesty of the pedigree makers will be considered fully in its proper place. Fortunately, although still far from perfect, the methods and care in the preservation of the true lineage of the race horse in our own day have been greatly improved. The many efforts to improve the American race horse by introducing fresh infusions of Saracenic blood will receive due attention, especially as they have nearly all been made within the newspaper period, and their uniform and complete failure will not be new to American horsemen.

When we reach the horses of the colonial period, we are in a field that never has been explored and cannot be expected to yield a very rich harvest. Here and there I have been able to pick up a detached paragraph from some contemporaneous writer, and occasionally a record, or an advertisement, from which, in most cases, I have been able to construct a fair and truthful outline and description of the horses of the different colonies, down to the Revolutionary war. The collection of the material has required great patience and great labor, but it has not been an irksome task, for many things have been brought to light of great interest to the student of horse history. The knowledge of the colonial horse in his character and action, that may be gathered from the chapters devoted to his description and history, I flatter myself, will not only be interesting as something new, but will throw a strong light on the lineage of the two-minute trotter and pacer.

The colonists of Virginia were subjected for a number of years to great suffering, privation, and want. They were badly selected and many of them were improvident and never trained to habits of industry and thrift. There were quite too many “penniless gentlemen’s sons” among them, who had been sent out with the hope that the change might improve their habits and their morals. They were too proud to work, and when they were driven to it by necessity they didn’t know how. After suffering untold hardships for a succession of years, those that survived learned to adapt themselves to their environment and to make their own way in the world. Their first supply of domestic animals were all consumed as food, embracing horses, cattle, swine, and goats, and everything had thus been consumed except one venerable female swine, as reported by a board of examiners. Their second supply of horses, cattle, swine, and goats was more carefully guarded, and from them in greater part came the countless denizens of the barnyard.

There were several shipments of horses at different times, by the proprietors in London, down till about 1620 and possibly later, but they do not seem to have increased very rapidly, for in 1646 all the horses in the colony were estimated at about two hundred of both sexes. This estimate was probably too low, for ten years after this the exportation of mares was forbidden by legislative enactment, and eleven years later this restriction was removed, and both sexes could then be exported. From this legislation and from writers who visited the colony we learn that horses were very plenty, and they are described as of excellent quality, hardy and strong, but under size. It was the custom in Virginia, and indeed in all the other colonies at that period and for long afterward, to brand their young horses and turn them out to hustle for their own living. They increased with wonderful rapidity and great numbers became as wild and as wary of the habitation and sight of man as the deer of the forest. About the close of the seventeenth century the chasing and capture of wild horses in Virginia became a legitimate and not always an unprofitable sport, for an animal caught without a brand became the unquestioned property of his captor. It is a noteworthy fact that off the coast of Virginia the island of Chincoteague has been occupied for probably two hundred years by large bands of wild horses. They are still there, and not till within the last few decades have there been any efforts made to domesticate some selections from them. They are of all colors, but quite uniform in size, not averaging much over thirteen hands, with clean limbs, and many of them are pacers. There is only one way to account for them in that location, and that is, that they were originally a band of Virginia wild horses that wandered or was chased out onto this sandy peninsula, and while there some great storm set the mysterious ocean currents at work and cut off their retreat by converting a peninsula into an island, and there they have lived and multiplied ever since.

The colonial horses of Virginia were of all colors and all very small in size, as we would class them in our day. An examination of a great many advertisements of “Strayed,” “Taken up,” etc., of the period of about 1750, clearly establishes the fact that at that time the average height was a small fraction over thirteen hands and one inch. More were described as just thirteen hands than any other size, and they were nearly all between thirteen and fourteen. From this same advertising source I was able to glean conclusive evidence as to their habits of action, and found that just two-thirds of them were natural pacers and one-third natural trotters. Thus for more than a hundred years they had retained the peculiarities of their English ancestors in the reign of James I., in color, size, and gait. This in no way differs from the description of the Chincoteague Island ponies of to-day. As early as 1686 a law was enacted that all stallions less than thirteen and a half hands high found running at large should be forfeited; but this, like Henry VIII.’s laws in the same direction, had failed to increase the average size of the horses. From the indomitable passion for horse-racing which prevailed universally among the colonists, we may safely conclude that some animals were carefully selected and coupled with a view to the speed of the progeny, both at the gallop and at the pace, but the great mass were allowed to roam at large, and under such conditions no variety or tribe of horses has ever improved in size, or indeed in any other quality.