The first Tom Hal of which there is any record was a roan pacer about fifteen hands high or a little over, with a black mane and tail, very strong and well muscled, and of a great deal of style. He was a clean-limbed, beautifully-turned little saddle horse (if tradition has it right), remarkably fast at the pace and going all the saddle gaits, especially the running walk or fox trot, so desirable then, as now, when a business gait under the saddle was needed. This was about the year 1824-5; and he was ridden (so says tradition) by a Dr. Boswell, who bought him in Philadelphia and rode him from that city to Lexington, Ky., his home. Boswell called him a Canadian, and declared he was the best saddle horse he ever rode. He also said he was an iron horse, and later, to prove it, he agreed for a wager to ride the horse from Leesburg, Ky., to Louisville, a distance of about seventy-five miles, and back, in the same day. It was midsummer at that. He did it, but tradition says the hard, hot ride came nearly ruining the horse, causing him to go blind. I have often thought of this Dr. Boswell. A right gallant pill mixer and letter-of-blood he must have been. I have never heard anyone describe him, but I think I can: A good natured, horse-loving, poker-playing, jolly cuss, a little fat, with a well padded seat, or else he had not been so fond of a saddle and seventy-five miles a day. No skinny man ever sticks to a saddle long. They prefer to walk, even in those days when all the goods for the Western Settlement (as Kentucky and Tennessee were called) were purchased in Philadelphia and hauled across the mountains five hundred miles, or floated down the rivers a thousand. So Boswell loved a horse, and loved to ride. He was not averse to sharp horse-trading (as was customary in those days), nor did he fail to put up a little wager now and then, as witness his bet that he could ride Tom Hal from Leesburg to Louisville and back in a day.
Now, in studying Boswell and his horse, we must go back to the times in which they lived. Philadelphia was the city which then rivaled New York, and was the business market for nearly all the Western and Southwestern States and Territories. In our story of the Hermitage we have seen that General Jackson bought all the goods for his store, even as far as Nashville, in Philadelphia. It was the great mart for the Western world. And all men rode in those days. There were few roads, and rough ones, and when the now famous Dr. Boswell (it is very likely he was a young fellow, who finished his medical education at old Jefferson College) started back to Kentucky, the cheapest and best way to get there was to buy a Canadian pony, ride him through, and sell him in Kentucky. Anyway, that is what he did.
A sad pity it was that the booted mixer of pills and calomel did not leave some record behind as to just what the little roan was. A sad pity he did not tell us in enduring lines why he called him Tom Hal, whom he beat in a horse trade when he got him, whom he robbed when first he mounted the original Tom Hal and rode him to Kentucky to fame.
For Boswell is famous—yea, as the other one was, for the other one is known as the biographer of Johnson, and this one as the biographer of the little Canadian pacing stud horse, the immortal Tom Hal, the pregenitor of the tribe of Hals.
Glorious Boswell, we know not what was his life, nor how nor when his taking off; nay, nor whom he took off—though we may be sure that in his day and generation he did his share with his lancet, his blue-mass and his calomel. Doubtless around the classic town of Lexington, perhaps even from Leesburg to Louisville, he left in his track lamenting widows and heart-broken orphans, whose sires first called in the horse-trading Boswell, and whose widow next called in the undertaker. Many a night, too, he rode the little pacer through the mud and sleet to the cabin of some lusty pioneer who had partaken too freely of biled cabbages and moonshine, and let a quart of blood from his guzzled body at the time he needed it most, or put a hot rock on the stomach that already had too much thereon. Often—often—the little pacer followed the trail of the stork at a two-minute clip, until, doubtless, in the language of Sentimental Tommy, he knew the difference between the wail of a “kid” and the groan of a “deader.”
And the pride of it—the glory of it! Didn’t every barefoot boy know him? “That’s Dr. Boswell an’ Tom Hal.”
“Didn’t the boys around the old fort store know him?
“Doc, thet’s a hell of a good little pony you’re ridin’.”
Didn’t all the old grannies know him: “Thar comes the Doctor, Sal, a-ridin’ his little amblin’ stud. Lemme get some clean sheets on the bed.”
Didn’t all the world know him—all the great, wide world, extending from Leesburg to Louisville? For there was nothing beyond. You bet your life they did. They all knew “Doc an’ his pacin’ stud.”