1883.] THE AMERICAN TROTTING HORSE. 227 



I have been thus particular, perhaps tedious in these details, 

 because of their close connection with trotting events. The in- 

 troduction of light one-horse wagons with steel springs is coinci- 

 dent with the formation of the first organizations for the breeding, 

 training, and speeding of trotters, and such wagons only began 

 to be common just at the time when we had developed the first 

 2.30 trotters. Fast trotters had to develop in a country where 

 there was a passion and taste for the animal, and something to 

 make a trotting sulky of, and America is the native land of the 

 hickory as it is of the trotter. "Without hickory to make our 

 wheels of, could we have trotters with such low records as we now 

 have ? The development of trotters and of vehicles have gone on 

 together; we did not need the fast trotter for driving, until we 

 had suitable wagons. Without springs, no roughness escaped 

 the traveler. My father had one of these so-called light wagons, 

 with the box down upon the axle, and he had a mare he thought 

 would trot a mile in three minutes. One of the most vivid rec- 

 ollections of my childhood is of that mare before that wagon, 

 and a bit of corduroy road near the old home. But that was the 

 common experience of all, and as it had been from the beginning 

 of cai'riages. How often I have looked and wondered at the 

 pictures of the ancients in their chariots. A Roman Emperor in 

 his triumphal chariot in all his pride and glory must have been 

 riding about as comfortably as he would have been in a modern 

 oxcart. There was some mitigation by cushions, but no one 

 traveled for pleasure with light carriages until steel springs came, 

 and until then there was no need and no place for fast trotters. 



And yet trotting attracted attention much earlier than that in 

 this part of the country. I am by no means clear as to why this 

 fancy, for fancy it was, should spring up here, but from all I can 

 learn, it had its origin in New England and in eastern New York. 



The American horse, as he was the last part of the last century, 

 sprung from a number of sources. Over the whole of South 

 America, the West Indies, and Mexico, it was of Spanish origin. 

 Sir Walter Ealeigh, already in his time, said that the horses of the 

 West Indies were as fine as any he had ever seen. But in the 

 United States the origin was more composite. Horses had been 

 brought mostly from England, France, and Holland, a few from 

 Sweden and from Spain, and Frank Forester has argued, from the 

 build of some, that there must have been importations from Ireland. 



