“There can no longer be any doubt that the pacer, as a future product on the light harness race course, will be a still stronger factor than he is to-day. Even if desired, it is now not possible to eliminate him from the light harness breeding world. He has come to stay. It matters not to us whether the honest, but sturdy, rascal can trace his ancestors to Marsh’s five-toed orohippos, weighing about forty pounds, and which had all he could do to keep out of the way of Darwin’s “missing link,” and thus save himself from drudgery, even before the days of the Silurian serpents, or whether he was developed in Trojan wars as carved on the frieze of Grecian temples; the fact remains the same, that to-day he is here by a large majority, and though snubbed by his more aristocratic brother, he persistently refuses to stay behind in the procession, and is never happier than when he can get up a good, rattling fight in a five-heat race, or stick his common, but inquisitive, nose a few seconds beyond the trotting record securely placarded on the front of old Father Time. Flung into the world without prestige, friends or influence; his coming regarded as the epitome of a breeder’s ill luck; condemned before he was born, and damned before he could walk; a little too good to kill, yet hardly good enough to be allowed a square meal once a week that he might grow up like any other horse; toe-weighted and hobbled and banged about, and forced to trot in spite of the laws of nature herself, yet the game and honest little fellow, when relieved of his owner’s prejudices and hobbles, has flown to the front with the ease of a swallow through the air and the grace of a game fish in the lake, and now holds the first record for speed and the chief place on the program in the eye of a grand stand that paid its way to see an honest horse race.
“It is the old story of the rejected stone, and he now holds up with surprising popularity his corner of the race horse structure. And yet twenty years ago a pacer was scarcely allowed on a fashionable race course; his pedigree, they said, took to the woods on the first cross; he was regarded by the trotting world as a camel-backed, cat-hammed, narrow-chested, curby-legged beast who paced because he couldn’t trot, and was alive because nobody cared to buy powder enough to kill all of them in the woods of Tennessee and Kentucky. He was allowed to exist on the race course very much on the same idea that a slave is allowed to breathe the same air and view the same heaven his master does. He began his career because he was a good kind of an animal to have around to do the race act at the pumpkin show and come in along with the fat woman and the five-legged calf. His coming to the front was his own work; and to use a classical phrase, he was purely the architect of his own fortune. The American people are a long time finding out merit, but nothing helps them to see it as quickly as the image of the American eagle stamped on the back of a silver dollar—and this the pacer has shown them.
“Despite the oft-repeated theory of ‘the Canadian pacer,’ there is no doubt that the pacer as now found in Kentucky, Tennessee and the West came originally from the older Atlantic States, such as Virginia and the Carolinas, and that he was brought there by our forefathers from England. The fact that there are pacers in Canada merely proves that in that Dominion also they have been brought from the mother country. To trace their origin in England is both a tedious task and a most uncertain one. Yet, from the best information obtainable, there appears to be but little doubt that the pacer was originally a product of Spain, where many years ago he was bred in the purple as a pleasure animal for the nobility of Andalusia and other Spanish states. In fact, it is more than probable that he was bred with more care than was bestowed by the Spanish upon their now favorite animal—the ass. We know that the pacer was safely domiciled in England as far back as the Norman Conquest, for in ‘Ivanhoe,’ written by that most painstaking scholar and novelist, Sir Walter Scott—a man who wrote truer to nature and with as much historic accuracy as any novelist who has ever lived in England—we find many allusions to the pacer under the style of the palfrey and the ambler.
“The following is an extract from Ivanhoe, Chapter II., the scene being in the time of Richard I. In reading it we must remember that the name jennet did not mean then as now the female of an ass, but it meant the palfrey which the lay brother was riding. Says Sir Walter: ‘This worthy churchman rode upon a well-fed, ambling mule, whose furniture was highly decorated and whose bridle, according to the fashion of the day, was ornamented with silver bells.... A lay brother, one of those who followed in the train, had for his use on other occasions one of the most handsome Spanish jennets ever bred in Andalusia, which merchants used at that time to import, with great trouble and risk, for the use of persons of wealth and distinction. The saddle and housings of this superb palfrey were covered by a long boat cloth which reached nearly to the ground, and on which were richly embroidered mitres, crosses and other ecclesiastical emblems.’
“From other writings of Sir Walter Scott we find that the knight usually, when not in battle, rode upon an ambler, and a page, riding also upon the same kind of a horse, led the knight’s large war horse, with his armorial trappings. The fact that in the above extract the mule also paced, goes to show how strong must have been the pacing instinct in his dam, being able to overcome entirely the gait of the ass. But to go further into the history of the pacer in England would be foreign to the ends of this brief article.
“We will only add that in spite of the fact that many English breeders assert that not a pacer has been kept in that country for many years, yet we believe that this is not true and that there are many of them there to-day. But to return to our own pacer. It is quite easy to trace his career as he came from the mother colonies, spreading out through Kentucky, Tennessee and the States of the Northwest, under the name of the ‘saddle horse,’ by which name he was held in the highest esteem and filled an humble but most important position in the pioneer work of State making. Before the roads were cut out through the forests, and when only blazed Indian paths were the highways of the country, he was an absolute necessity, and to-day there belongs to him the proud honor of having been the first common carrier of American civilization. He was with Marion and Sumter in their partisan warfare in the Carolinas; he saw, no doubt, with patriotic emotion, the ignoble surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown; he followed the intrepid Boone across the Alleghanies into Kentucky, and came along with the immortal Jackson—the man of destiny—into the ‘basin of middle Tennessee.’ Pulling the plow for an honest living in the rich cornfields during the week, he carried the women and the children on his back to the primitive church on Sunday. As civilization advanced he improved with it, being crossed with thoroughbred blood in rich profusion, until to-day his lines of breeding are thoroughly established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing, and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the grand stand.
“A scrub, indeed! He was here fighting for independence and an honest living when the forefathers of the Wilkes and Almonts—since old imp. Messenger is regarded as the fountain head—were courting the favor of royalty in England ‘that thrift may follow fawning,’ or carrying soup-drinking Britons on their jolting backs to the wharves of Liverpool, to be shipped over here as food for Tennessee rifles at New Orleans. Plebian, did you say? Why, he ought to be pensioned. He is older and more respectable than the Dutch governors of New York and has a greater claim to patriotism than half of the pensioners who never smelled the smoke of battle.
“In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there is no doubt in the world. And that this thorough blood has been as good, if not better, than that in old Messenger himself, is also true. But the astonishing thing about this amalgamation is the very small per cent of pacing blood it required to leaven the thoroughbred loaf. A pacing sire bred to a running mare and that offspring to another running mare, and so on for several generations, will end with the last, as with the first, in getting a ‘saddler.’
“We have always regarded this fact as the strongest evidence of the intensity of the pacing instinct—an instinct that has such a pure and strong fountain-head somewhere that it is able to overcome the running instinct, though crossed and recrossed upon the pure running blood, is abundant evidence of its own purity and prepotency. And the fact that so many fast pacers are continually thrown from the trotting ranks, now commonly called ‘trotting-bred pacers,’ is but another illustration of the same fact. Verily, back somewhere in the past the pacer was a thoroughbred at his way of going. His remote ancestor, whether in the myths of fables, or in the woods of northern Germany, or the vine-clad hills of Spain, or around the frozen lakes of Canada, was an Alexander, a Julius Caesar and a Napoleon Bonaparte, all in one, in the greatness and gameness of his gait. How else could the fact that every great family of trotters is continually throwing pacers be explained by any other theory? The fact that the trotting breeders have been careless in breeding to mares of strong pacing instinct or breeding, we admit; but the fact remains the same that the pacing blood in the pedigree of such trotters does not appear to have acted as a brake in their way of going, but, on the contrary, has given to them a smoothness of action and an elasticity of stride which has carried them to the foremost rank at their gait; and we are also led to believe that it often requires but a small portion of pacing fluid to overcome several generations of the diagonal gait in the veins of the trotting-bred horse.
“Take from the trotting ranks those out of mares or descendants of mares by old Pilot, Jr., and other pacers, and the truth of this assertion will be most plainly seen. In fact, every noted family of trotters, such as the Wilkses and the Almonts—wherever there is any pacing blood, even away back in the fourth and fifth generation—have to the credit of that family some pacer who is faster at his way of going than the star trotter of that family is at his. No Hambletonian trotter has ever attained the speed that has been shown by Direct, unless it be Nancy Hanks, who has some pacing blood in her own royal veins and is inclined to pace a bit herself; nor has any Almont trotter ever equalled Flying Jib and hosts of others we might mention. Among the Wilkses they are thicker than the leaves of Valambrosa, until one is forced to believe that the Clay blood, if such it was, in the pedigree of George Wilkes was about as good as any the great horse had in his veins.