But when de water riz up an’ he see dat bar’l ob brandy
He bust de record gittin’ dar—an’ dun it mighty handy!
An’ when Ole Marster seed de gait, an’ dat dey all hed dun it,
He let ’em all go back to earth an’ live and breed upon it.
So dey all went back er pacin’, frum de bug unto de bisin,
An’ de rain it quit a-fallin’, and de crick it quit er risin’!
—OLE WASH.
It will be news to many of my readers when I tell them that the pacing gait is the oldest and most natural gait of the horse, and that the old pacer was the thoroughbred of antiquity, the companion of kings, the warhorse of mighty warriors, the animal that carried on his back the daughters of Pharaoh and the princesses of Babylon. And yet, when this gait began to outcrop among the trotters, making that grand type of the racehorse known as “trotting-bred pacers,” hundreds of people have been wondering “Where did it come from?” Let us see from whence it came:
There is no real difference in form between the trotter and the pacer. The theory of “structural incongruity” will do to talk about, but as a matter of fact there is no such thing, and a pacer paces and a trotter trots, not from his shape, but his head—his instinct.
When the curtain went up on antiquity, horses were pacing. They paced because it was the natural gait of the animal, the trot of later years being the artificial gait. We know that the horses of the ancients were small—pacing ponies—and the running horse was not developed until centuries after.