Thus, the more we search for the truth about Messenger and his origin, the more dense becomes the mystery. When we find an English authority that seems clear, we find another that contradicts him, and probably neither of them knows anything about it beyond uncertain tradition. When we consider these contradictions of authorities in connection with the fact that men were just as prone to lie and fix up a bogus pedigree a hundred years ago as they are to-day, and that stud-book makers were just as liable to be deceived then as now, we must conclude that there is room for very serious doubts as to whether Weatherby or Pick knew anything about the pedigree of Messenger, or by whom he was bred.

In pushing our inquiries still further in search of this mare, we must consider somewhat in detail Mr. Weatherby’s methods and the degree of responsibility he assumed for the accuracy of his compilations. In 1791 he published what he called “An Introduction to a General Stud Book,” containing, as he says, “a small collection of pedigrees which he had extracted from racing calendars and sale papers, and arranged on a new plan.” In May, 1800, he issued a supplement to his “Introduction” bringing down the produce of mares to 1799. In 1803 he issued what we suppose is the first edition of the first volume of the Stud Book. The title-page reads, “The General Stud Book, containing pedigrees of race horses, etc., from the Restoration to the present time.” The imprint is, “Printed for James Weatherby, 7 Oxenden Street, etc., London, 1803.” The volume contains three hundred and eighty-four pages, while the edition of 1827 contains four hundred and forty-eight pages. There is no “Volume I.” on the title-page, nor is there any indication that this is a continuation or revision of any preceding work. It brings down the list of produce in many cases to and including 1803, but none later than that year, so there can be no mistake as to when it was issued.

I have been thus particular in identifying this first edition of the first volume of the English Stud Book, for it gives us an insight into the methods employed by Mr. Weatherby in the progress of his work. Upon a careful comparison of the editions of 1803 with 1827 extending through the letters A, B, and M, we find that he has thrown out more than ten per cent. of the entire families in the edition of 1803. By “entire families” I mean brood mares, with their lists of produce. In making these exclusions he seems to have confined himself to what may be considered the historic period, at that day, and did not go back further than about twenty years. Beyond that period everything was traditional, and he appears to have shrunk from all responsibility of attempting the exclusion of families. On and near the border line between these periods he seems to have taken the responsibility of cutting off a great many individuals of doubtful identity, even though the family was left to stand on its uncertain basis of tradition. I cannot say positively that the dam of Messenger and her sister were cut off with the multitude of others, but I can say that neither of them ever appeared again in the Stud Book. Other members of the family of the Regulus mare have places for their descendants in subsequent volumes, from which I would infer that Mr. Weatherby considered her breeding all right, but the two fillies, one of them the dam of Messenger, have been treated as spurious and wholly omitted from the records. These are the facts relating to these two fillies claimed originally to be by Turf, and there can be no moral doubt that they were omitted or excluded because Mr. Weatherby deemed them unsustained and probably spurious.

In confirmation of the facts and circumstances already adduced, going to show that Messenger was not thoroughbred, we are now ready to consider one of the strongest arguments that can be advanced in support of that conclusion. This argument is founded on the laws of nature and is not dependent upon the mere writing down of uncertain traditions. Messenger possessed and transmitted qualities that no thoroughbred horse has ever transmitted, from the period when the breed of race horses was formed to the present day. It is practically conceded on all hands that Messenger, by his own power and by his own right, founded a family of trotting horses, and this fact will be fully demonstrated in coming chapters. It is equally plain and, with honest and intelligent people, it is accepted with equal readiness, that no thoroughbred horse has ever done this. This declaration has been much controverted, but always in a general way and without specifying any particular thoroughbred horse that had succeeded in establishing a family of trotters. In the progress of a discussion of this point with the late Charles J. Foster, a very clear and able writer, he was directly challenged, in a manner that could not be dodged, to name the thoroughbred horse outside of Messenger, that had accomplished this feat. Greatly to my surprise, and I might say, gratification, he came back at me with two of Messenger’s sons—Hambletonian and Mambrino. Thus he conceded the whole contention, for out of, literally, thousands he had to come back to two sons of Messenger.

In reply to an article in Wallace’s Monthly for December, 1887, going to show that Messenger was not a thoroughbred horse, Mr. Joseph Cairn Simpson, of California, an able man and a lifelong advocate of more running blood in the trotter, wrote a review of the article in question. After admitting the full force of the demonstration that Messenger was not a thoroughbred horse, there is one sentence to which Mr. Simpson cannot subscribe, and he quotes it as follows: “Complete and conclusive as these facts may be, there is still another fact equally complete and still more convincing. Messenger possessed and transmitted qualities that no thoroughbred horse, in the experience of man, ever possessed and transmitted.” This was a declaration of Messenger as a progenitor against the whole world of thoroughbreds, and Mr. Simpson felt that he could not let it pass unchallenged, and after scratching about among the thousands of thoroughbreds without finding anything, like poor Mr. Foster, he “acknowledges the corn,” and comes back with Mambrino, the son of Messenger, without, seemingly, once realizing that he was proving my contention.

The theory that if any other English race horse had been in Messenger’s place and bred upon the same mares and had his progeny developed as Messenger’s were developed, he would have produced the same results, has always been very popular with the advocates of “more running blood in the trotter.” No doubt there are still some honest, but not well-informed people, who hold to this view merely because they have never heard of any other imported English horses that were contemporaneous with Messenger, and hence have concluded there were none. If Messenger had been all alone during the twenty years of his stud services, as this theory assumes, there might be some reason to doubt whether some other English race horses might not have done just as well in establishing a line or tribe of trotters. But was he alone? From the close of the Revolutionary War to the end of the last century was a period of great activity and enterprise in the way of importing running horses from Great Britain. The blood of Herod and English Eclipse was in the highest estimate, not only in the old but in the new world, and a great many distinguished horses were brought over possessing those favorite strains. During that period racing was carried on with just as much spirit and éclat on Long Island and the river counties of New York, New Jersey, and some of the eastern counties of Pennsylvania as it was in Virginia and South Carolina. Horses of the most fashionable lineage were sought after and patronized, not by a few great breeding establishments, but by the farmers generally, in all the region here designated. The following list of imported English race horses is made up of animals that were contemporaneous with Messenger, covering the same mares and the offspring subjected to precisely the same treatment and conditions. The list is limited to what may be called the trotting latitudes, and embraces such animals only as were brought into New Jersey, New York and Eastern Pennsylvania. We will not only give their names, but the blood elements also, so that all can see that Messenger not only had competitors but competitors of the highest grade of running blood.

Here we have forty-one imported English stallions, contemporaneous with Messenger, occupying the same territory and covering the same mares that he covered. With the exceptions of two or three they were all ranked as not only thoroughbred, but they possessed the most fashionable and successful blood that England had then produced. A few of them were taken southward after a time, but the great body of them lived out their days here.

To this great array of imported English running horses we might add hundreds of their sons, and yet not find one that claimed to be thoroughbred that ever became a trotting progenitor or founded a family of trotters. Mr. Foster and Mr. Simpson, by far the two ablest writers on the wrong side of the question that this country has produced, with this list of forty English stallions before them from which to select their proof that Messenger was not the only progenitor of trotters, were at last compelled to take two of Messengers sons, as trotting progenitors, to prove that their sire was not a trotting progenitor. If the intellectual powers of these two gentlemen had enabled them to scratch ever so little beneath the glittering surface of the word “thoroughbred,” they would have saved themselves from this humiliating exhibition of absurdity.

What was true of Messenger’s contemporaries is equally true of all the strictly thoroughbred stallions that have lived on the earth from his day to the present. No one of them has ever founded a trotting family and no one of them has ever got a trotter out of a mare of his own kind. Out of the half-dozen instances on record where a thoroughbred horse has got a trotter there is no one instance in which the dam did not have a strong pacing or trotting inheritance. If we accept the known and recorded experiences of the past seventy years, in the trotting world, we find two great facts on every page of the record. First, Messenger left a family of trotters; second, no other thoroughbred horse did that. It follows, then, that if Messenger transmitted capacities different from those transmitted by thoroughbred horses, he must have had a different inheritance from thoroughbred horses, and if different, then that inheritance could not have been thoroughbred. From the facts we have developed in the history of his English ancestors; from the ten thousand demonstrations of his American descendants, and from the great laws which govern the transmission of special capacities, we are forced to the conclusion that Messenger was not a thoroughbred horse.