Bright Phœbus was foaled 1804, the same year as Hambletonian. He was out of the imported Pot-8-os mare, and his breeder, General Coles, of Long Island, sold him to Bond and Hughes, of Philadelphia. His most noted achievement was at Washington, D. C., in 1808, when in a sweepstakes he more than distanced the great Sir Archy, by catching him when he had the distemper. His racing career was respectable, but not brilliant, and when that ended it is not known what became of him.
Slasher, Shaftsbury, Hotspur.—There was quite a famous brood mare owned somewhere in Jersey called Jenny Duter, or Jenny Oiter, as some authorities have it. She was got by True Briton; dam Quaker Lass by imported Juniper; grandam Molly Pacolet, by imported Pacolet, etc., tracing on six or eight more crosses that are all fudge. This mare was bred to Messenger about 1801, and produced Shaftsbury; her daughter by Liberty was bred to him about the same time and produced Slasher, and about the same time her granddaughter by Slender was also bred to him and produced Hotspur. These three sons of Messenger do not seem to have ever been trained, and very little of their history can be traced, except that they were kept as stallions in different parts of New Jersey. It is not known that their blood has had any influence upon the American trotting horse.
Messenger (Hutchinson’s).—This was a large grey horse, foaled in 1792, and bred by Mathias Hutchinson, of Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. His dam was by Hunt’s Grey Figure, son of imported Figure. He was kept in Monmouth County, New Jersey, 1797, and it is probable that he was often represented as imported Messenger himself. I have no knowledge of this horse or his progeny beyond the mere facts here given.
Messenger (Cooper’s).—This son of imported Messenger was generally known as “Cooper’s Grey” and sometimes as Ringgold. He was sixteen hands high and was foaled about 1803. He was bred in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and was kept about Philadelphia, on both sides of the Delaware, till 1821, when he was sold by the administrators of Jacob Kirk, and it has been said he was taken to the Wabash by Amos Cooper. He ran some races when he was young, and was a horse of a good deal of local fame. He was liberally patronized in the stud and left valuable progeny. It has been suggested that probably he was the sire of Amazonia, the dam of Abdallah; but as there is nothing to support this suggestion except the mere matter of location, and as all that has ever been claimed for her paternity is that she was by “a son of Messenger,” we must not forget that there were plenty of other sons of Messenger in the same locality that might have been her sire.
The name “Messenger” was more sadly abused in its duplication in the closing of the last and the early decades of the present century than that of any other horse, or perhaps of all other horses of that period put together. Multitudes of his sons were called “Messenger,” and, in the next generation, multitudes of his grandsons gloried in the same cognomen, and thus generation after generation perpetuated it, in widening circles, till “confusion became worse confounded,” leaving the historian in helpless and hopeless ignorance as to what was true and what was false. When grey horses in the second, third, or fourth remove from the imported horse became old, it required but little “diplomacy” to satisfy the public that they were true sons of the original, and this became the custom.
ALIX.
By Patronage, record 2:03¾, the fastest to this date.