14. Fastest team, Direct Hal and Prince Direct, 2:05 1/2.
15. Fastest three-heat in race to wagon, Angus Pointer, 2:06 1/4, 2:04 1/2, 2:06 1/4.
16. Fastest green performer, stallion, Direct Hal, 2:04 1/2.
17. Fastest team in a race, Charley B and Bobby Hal, 2:13.
18. Fastest pacing team, amateur trials, Prince Direct and Morning Star, 2:06.
It will be observed that all of these records except a few were made in races and not against time.
Whence came this wonderful family of horses? What is this pacing gait? What mingling of blood lines have brought these horses of the plow, the saddle and the wheel to the grandstand and the pinacle of fame?
This is the story I shall tell as a serial during the first twelve issues of Trotwood’s Monthly.
The light-harness horse has come to be a type of its own. It is distinctly an American type, as distinguished from the English running, or thoroughbred horse, the German and French coach, the Russian Orloff and horses of other nationalities. There is a wide gap, however, between a race horse, whether runner or harness horse, and other breeds, however pure, their blood lines. It is the difference of intelligence, speed, endurance, of lung development, of steel bone. It is the difference between genius and mediocracy—for speed is to the horse what genius is to man.
Whence began this speed—in the English runner, in the American trotter and pacer? Traced back, the sheiks of the desert might tell; they who worshipped the midnight stars, or chased on steeds of fire the wild antelope of the plains, before Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldees.” Knowing the past now from the present, seeing it so clearly through the glasses of twentieth century science, knowing the laws of the “survival of the fittest,” that land and air and sand and sun make both the physical man as well as the physical horse, we can easily guess what centuries of wild gallops across the desert will do for the horse, supplemented by that natural love of him in his master—that love which brings care and kindness and the exercise of common sense in mating and maternity.