THE EARLY DAYS OF THE HORSE IN AMERICA

Why the horse, the fossil remains of which are found so abundantly in the middle West of this country that these places are known in the Scientific world as "Equus Beds," became extinct, there being no horses here at the time of the Spanish Conquest, is a mystery.

It is the more remarkable, for when the horse was introduced here and ran wild in South America and Texas, he increased and multiplied rapidly, showing that the climate, food, and general conditions were exceptionally well adapted to him.

Various animals have been used as beasts of burden, and even as cavalry, all over the world. In the old days of Cape Town, the Hottentots broke their oxen to the saddle and used them even for cavalry purposes in time of war.

In a report of the Treasurer-general of Peru, written in 1544, it is stated that the Spaniards even in those days used the large sheep or llama of that country both as beasts of burden and to ride.

The first importation of horses into the new world, credited by authentic history, was made by Columbus in 1493, when he landed in what is now known as San Domingo with seventeen vessels.

When Cortes landed at what is now known as Vera Cruz, having sailed thither from Cuba, he had with him the first horses that any man had ever seen in the Western hemisphere, and this was in 1519. The Indians thought these visitors were from the sun, and that the horses were fabulous creatures of incomparable prowess, and brought offerings of bread and flesh to them.

Later, in the bloody wars of Mexico and Peru, the war-horses, whose riders were slain, escaped and reproduced themselves rapidly in the great and luxurious plains, well provided with food and water and in a climate especially suited to them.

De Soto had horsemen with him on his expedition when he discovered the Mississippi River, and doubtless many of the horses were left behind to run wild when the survivors of that disastrous expedition, without their leader, returned in rough boats and rafts.

It is thought by some investigators that the horses found by Cabot in La Plata in 1530 could not have been imported, but this is highly improbable. There is practically no doubt but that the wild horse of America is a direct descendant of the Spanish horse, and therefore of the selfsame blood, which later made the thoroughbred in England, and the trotter in the United States, the fleetest and most valuable of their race.

The first importation of horses into what is now the United States was in 1527 by Cabeza de Vaca; these, forty-two in number, were brought to Florida, but through accident, disease, and ill-usage, all of them died.

The next importation was by De Soto from Spain, and these no doubt were the progenitors of our wild horses of the West and Southwest.

In 1625, the Honorable Pieter Evertsen Hueft agreed to ship, and did ship, to Manhattan Island, one hundred head of cattle, including a certain number of stallions and mares. These horses were of the Flanders breed, from which descended the Conestoga horse, afterwards justly prized in Pennsylvania.

The first horses came to Massachusetts probably in 1629. At any rate, we know that Governor Winthrop, writing on board the Arabella, at Cowes, March 28, 1630, says: "We are in all our eleven ships about seven hundred persons and 240 cows and about sixty horses."

English horses were landed at Jamestown, Virginia, as early as 1609, and there is a tradition that the first horse to land in Canada was brought to Tadousac in 1647.

As early as 1641-2 we read of horses and carts crossing Boston harbor on the ice, so severe was the winter of that year. In 1636, when the Reverend Thomas Hooker and his followers left the colony to found Hartford, Mrs. Hooker, so a letter of that date reads, was carried in a horse-litter. But the diligence and care of these first settlers in New England is nowhere more clearly shown, than by the fact that already, in 1640, Governor Winthrop writes of shipping eighty horses from Boston to the Barbadoes. Hardly had they imported horses for themselves before they were breeding them and shipping them to other parts of the world.

These horses were not of very valuable stock. As early as 1650 a young mare with her second or third foal was valued at about $60; a five or six year old stallion at about $55—this in Manhattan. In New England, where cattle were especially abundant, horses were worth about one-third less.

This is accounted for by the fact that horses in England even as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century were held in low esteem at home, where they were valued at about fifty shillings each. The better class of horses in England at this time were brought from Barbary or from Flanders. The well-known saying, "The gray mare is the better horse," arose from the recognized superiority of the gray mares from Flanders over the English horses of that date.

Even as late as 1700, dogs harnessed to small trucks did most of the teaming in the narrow and badly paved streets of the English towns, and were by no means uncommon in London for many years after that time.

One may judge of the condition of the roads, and the difficulties of transportation, by the charges. Seven pounds sterling a ton was charged for transportation from London to Birmingham; and twelve pounds sterling a ton from London to Exeter. Coal in those days was unknown except in the districts where it was mined, owing to the fact that the transportation of coal over the roads as they then were in England, would have made the price prohibitive.

The demand for the better class of horses in England at the time of the earlier importations of these animals to America, was mainly for the army, and for heavy horses to pull the carriages and heavy travelling coaches of the nobility and gentry. Such horses as were needed for these purposes were pretty generally imported from Barbary and Arabia, and from Flanders.

There seems to have been, however, a native horse in Great Britain; for CÆsar notes the fact that the Britons drove war-chariots.

William the Conqueror, who represents to England genealogically what the Mayflower represents to America, gave to a certain Simon St. Liz, a Norman friend of his, the entire town of Northampton and the whole hundred of Falkley, then valued at £40 a year, "to provide shoes for his horses."

From 1066 to the close of the twelfth century there was renewal and improvement of the British horse by importations from the continent, and also by stray animals brought back by the Crusaders under Richard and others; but such improvements of the native breed as these importations imply were of small importance, and without system or aim of any kind.

During the reigns of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, important legislation looking to the care and breeding of horses was passed, and when James I., who was fond of racing, came to the throne, he bought from a Mr. Markham an Arabian stallion, afterwards always known as the "Markham Arabian," paying for him what was for those days the extravagant amount of five hundred guineas.

This purchase by King James marks the beginning of high-class breeding in England. From then on, down through the reigns of Charles I., Charles II., and William III., not to mention Oliver Cromwell who raced horses with the same enthusiasm that he sang psalms, many horses were imported, much interest was taken in racing and breeding, and for the last three hundred years, from 1603, when James came to the throne, till now, England has been the home of, probably, the best horses in the world, and nothing pleases her people as a whole more than to have the reigning sovereign win the Derby.

The first volume of the English Stud Book, then known as the "Match Book," was published in 1808, and from then on we have had a more or less orderly sequence of breeding history, and the English thoroughbred race-horse, the progenitor at one time or another of the best types of horses in this country, became a recognized standard of horse.

Our own horse history may be said to begin at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Treaty of Peace with Great Britain was signed in Paris, July 3, 1783, and the British troops left November 25. The population of the United States at that time was less than four millions, about the number of people settled in and around New York City to-day.

The carriage roads of Boston were unpaved; and marked off by a line of posts and gutters, and laid with ill-assorted pebbles. The horseman who rode too fast over these pebbles, and thus threatened their disarrangement, was fined three shillings and fourpence.

The mail was carried between Boston and New York thrice a week in summer, and twice a week in winter, taking six days in summer and often nine days in winter, and all carried in one pair of saddle-bags. The post-riders knitted mittens and stockings as their horses jogged along over the well-known roads.

The very first coach and four in New England began running in 1744, and the first coach and four between New York and Philadelphia, the two most populous cities in the colonies, was put on in 1756 and accomplished the journey in three days.

Two stages and twelve horses carried all the goods and passengers between New York and Boston, doing forty miles a day in summer, and scarce twenty-five miles a day in winter. Josiah Quincy, writing at this time, tells us that he once spent thirty days in his own coach going from Boston to Washington.

The streets of New York were so badly paved that Benjamin Franklin was wont to say that you could distinguish a New York man in Philadelphia by the awkward way in which he shuffled over the smoother pavements of the latter city.

There were but three roads out of New York in those days: the Knightsbridge road, a continuation of the Bowery Lane, which went to Knightsbridge and thence along the river to Albany; the old Boston post-road, which started from the neighborhood of what is now Madison Square, thence to Harlem, and then east toward Boston; and the so-called middle road, direct to Harlem.

In the southernmost states there were no public conveyances of any kind except a stage-coach between Charleston and Savannah.

It is only one hundred years ago, only the span of two lives, and the population has grown from four millions to eighty millions; the gross receipts from postage from $320,000 (the gross receipts for the year ending October 1, 1801) to over $121,000,000 in 1902. The total estimate for the expenses of the city of New York in 1800 was for $130,000.

These were the days when the fashionable assemblies were advertised to "open with a Passe-Pie and end with the Sarabund À l'Espagnole"; days when eight bags of cotton were seized by the officers of the customs in England, because it was claimed no such enormous amount of cotton could have come from America; days when, so writes Josiah Quincy at any rate, the minister alone had white bread, "for brown bread gave him heart-burn, and he could not preach upon it;" and it was some fifty years later even than this, before we had the wheel-plough of iron, the reaper and binder, the drill, the hay-rake, and the corn-cutter.

There was little leisure, and little money to be devoted to sport of any kind, and the horse and the dog existed in New England, at least, in varieties little suited to sport.

In the South it was somewhat different. A jockey-club was organized in Charleston, South Carolina, as early as 1735, and there was horse-racing in Maryland, Virginia, and other Southern states for years before the Revolution.

In New England, on the contrary, racing was strictly forbidden on moral and religious grounds. No such thing as a running-race could be tolerated by the Puritans of that section. As a consequence of this, we may trace the pedigree of the American trotting-horse straight to Archbishop Laud, who having infuriated the Puritans to the point of desiring emigration for themselves and their families to the new world, they founded New England.

The scandalous levity and apparently papal leanings of Charles and Laud were not to be permitted for a moment in their new home, and pretty much all amusements were frowned upon. But the Cromwellian love of a fast horse survived in some of his fellow-Puritans living in New England, and men trained to the theological hair-splitting of that day made a distinction between horses trotting in friendly competition between church-members and horses running for money prizes!

"Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition."

Two horses trotting down the streets of Hingham, Massachusetts, and one, perhaps, going a little faster than the other, would hardly lead even the godly Rev. Ebenezer Gay to suppose that he was looking on at the beginnings of the sport of trotting-races, and that a mare called Goldsmith Maid would win for her owners over $200,000 between 1866 and 1878 at this same sport. Strangely as it may read, there is little doubt but that Puritan principles or prejudices, as you please, gave the impetus to the development of the trotting-horse. Horses used for racing had always run, but when it was discovered that horses could also be raced at a trot, those that showed speed at this gait were used to breed from, and pains were taken to develop their speeding qualities. Hence it is not flippant humor that traces the trotting-horse back to Laud.

"Fast Trotting.—Yesterday afternoon the Haerlem race-course of one mile distance, was trotted around in two minutes and fifty-nine seconds by a horse called Yankey, from New Haven; a rate of speed, it is believed, never before excelled in this country, and fully equal to anything recorded in the English sporting calendars."—From the Connecticut Journal, June 19, 1806.

The first trotting-match of which there is any authentic account was in 1818, when Boston Blue was produced to win the wager, that no horse could trot a mile in three minutes, and won it; what the amount was is not stated. From that time on, trotting horses against one another and against time became a popular amusement. In 1834, Andrew Jackson trotted a mile in 2 minutes 42½ seconds; in 1858, Ethan Allen trotted a mile in 2 minutes 28 seconds; in 1859, Flora Temple trotted a mile in 2 minutes 19¾ seconds; in 1874, Mambrino Gift lowered the record to 2 minutes and 20 seconds; in 1874, the famous Goldsmith Maid trotted a mile in 2 minutes and 14 seconds.

In 1843 there were only two horses that could trot a mile under 2 minutes and 30 seconds; while in 1881 there were over twelve hundred horses with records of 2 minutes 30 seconds or better.

Trotting in those early days was mostly under saddle, and some of the races were even three miles in length. Since about 1850 trotting-races have been over a mile stretch, best three in five heats.

It is noted as a curious fact in the history of the trotting-horse that Messenger, who served a number of thoroughbred mares, served a far larger number of cold-blooded mares, and it was in these latter that the trotting instinct was almost invariably developed. This is repeated through the trotting register—almost no thoroughbreds have been trotting dams. Palo Alto is about the only half-breed that was a successful trotter, and one campaign finished him. Messenger was imported in 1792 and was at stud in New York and in Philadelphia for many years.

The first known importation of a thoroughbred to America was that of a horse called Bully Rock, by the Darley Arabian, out of a mare by the Byerly Turk, brought over to Virginia in 1730. A number of Derby winners were imported to America before 1800, including Diomed, the winner of the first Derby in 1780, Saltram, John Bull, Spread Eagle, Sir Harry, and others.

It must not be forgotten in dealing with the subject of driving that not only the history of the harness-horse in America is all very modern history, but that the condition of the roads and the state of the carriage-building trade prevented any great progress until lately.

Carriages, indeed, were hardly an ordinary article of manufacture until late in the reign of Charles II., or about 1675. It is maintained that a rough coach or wagon ran as a public conveyance between Edinburgh and Leith as early as 1610, but little is known on the subject. The in-little-things-omniscient Pepys writes in his diary under date of 1665 of springs on certain carriages. But coach and carriage-building had not progressed very far till later than this. The state coach of George III., 1762, weighed four tons, was 24 feet long, 8 feet 3 inches wide, 12 feet high, and had a pole 12 feet long. "Hansom's Patent Safety Cab" did not appear until 1834.

In the spring of 1669, a coach, described as the "Flying Coach," went from Oxford to London in one day, a distance now covered in an hour and three-quarters by rail. This Flying Coach departed on its first trip from Oxford surrounded by the dignitaries of the town and the university, and was welcomed in London by no less imposing official personages.

With this coach and others to follow, began all sorts of objections to conveyances going at this rate of speed. It was contended that they would spoil the roads, ruin the inns along the route by not stopping at them, and do great harm to the breed of horses by promoting speed at the expense of bone and weight.

It is curious to think that even the first mail-coach was criticised on much the same grounds as the first railroad trains. There was little danger either in England or in America of unduly fast travel with horses and vehicles in their then condition.

Even now in the United States the condition of the roads, except in and around the wealthier cities, is deplorable. In the last quarter of a century in this country we have built 132,865 miles of steam railway and we now have 203,133 miles of railroad. During the past fifteen years we have built some 23,000 miles of trolley road; we have spent in ten years $176,226,934 for the improvement of rivers and harbors, but for the inland farmer almost nothing has been done to give him good wagon roads. There are 74,097 miles of public highway in the state of New York alone.

It is calculated that $1.15 will haul a ton—

Five miles on a common road,
Twelve and one-half to fifteen miles on a well-made road,
Twenty-five miles on a trolley road,
Two hundred and fifty miles on a steam railway,
One thousand miles on a steamship.

France has 23,603 miles of wagon roads built and maintained by the government. Italy has some 5000 miles of road built and maintained by the government. Here in the United States, where more and more depends upon the ability of the farmers, small and large, to get their produce quickly and safely to market, nothing has been done as yet by the Federal government. It is worth knowing that a pair of horses drawing a load of 4000 pounds on a level road with a certain effort, can only draw with the same effort—

3600 pounds on a road with a grade of 1 foot rise in 100 feet,
3200 pounds on a road with a grade of 1 foot rise in 50 feet,
2880 pounds on a road with a grade of 1 foot rise in 40 feet,
2160 pounds on a road with a grade of 1 foot rise in 25 feet,
1600 pounds on a road with a grade of 1 foot rise in 20 feet.

It is worth knowing, too, that careful experiments prove that wide tires—3 to 4 inches—are lighter in their draught than narrow tires. That they are better for the road is very apparent. The wider tires act almost as a stonecrusher, and actually help to keep roads in repair.

In Austria, all wagons carrying a load of more than 2¼ tons are obliged by law to have wheels with rims 4? inches wide.

In France, the tires of wheels on wagons used for carrying heavy loads are from 4 to 6 inches wide and some of them as much as 10 inches wide. In France, too, the rear axles on such wagons are made from 12 to 14 inches wider than the front axles, so that the rear wheels run outside the track of the front wheels, thus making a very effective road improver of every heavy wagon.

In Germany, the law requires that all wagons carrying heavy loads shall have tires to their wheels at least 4 inches wide.

It is now within the jurisdiction of boards of supervisors, in the state of New York at least, to enact laws regulating the width of tires on heavy wagons.

What good roads and wide tires and properly cared for and properly harnessed and handled horses would mean to us, in this, now the greatest agricultural and manufacturing country in the world, is almost beyond calculation.

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