96 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
The work that the government has taken up recently is along two 
lines: that in Colorado, where the stud has been selected for the purpose 
of developing the carriage horse type, and that in Vermont, where the 
horses have been selected combining the largest proportion and the closest 
adherence to type of the original Morgan, with a view to perpetuating the 
Morgan blood and type as largely as possible, and to developing from 
selected horses of the standard-bred trotting lines or infusions of Morgan 
blood the heavy harness type in the carriage horse. 
Some twenty or twenty-five years ago a great many imported coach 
horses came to this country. They received a great deal of favorable at- 
tention at first, and that importation has continued more or less to the 
present time. But it is well known that there has been less demand and 
that they have received less attention in recent years than formerly. It 
was thought originally that we must look to the imported coach breeds 
for our carriage horses in America, and a great many of them were 
brought to this country. Many of them were fine, magnificent animals, 
and they attracted favorable attention on the part of our farmers and 
stock breeders. But notwithstanding the large importaron of the coach 
breeds, year after year it was found in our commercial centers, in our 
horse markets, and by the people who were dealing in horses, that a very 
large majority of the best horses coming into our markets and commanding 
the highest prices and also coming into our leading shows, were from the 
native American types, and that they in some way, without any intelligent 
or systematic effort on the part of any one to produce a horse of that 
class to compete with the foreign breeds, were producing a larger number 
of high-class horses of the carriage type, or of the coach type, as it is 
sometimes called, than the imported breeds; and the consensus of opinion 
is, I think, that a majority of the imported coach breeds crossed with our 
native stock have not proven satisfactory. There are here and there 
horses that have been an exception, that have reproduced their type, and 
that have proven successful; but the great majority of them have been a 
disappointment. And in spite of the fact that during this time the Amer- 
ican types were being developed on the one hand for speed in the trotting 
horses, for the saddle gaits in the saddle horse, and for beauty and utility 
in the Morgan horse, rather than the modern carriage type in particular, 
some way we were producing a very large number of good horses, and 
naturally our people began to study this question with a view of finding 
out how best and most profitably to produce the kind of horse that meets 
the modern market demand. 
There has been a change in the demand of the modern market with 
reference to the carriage horse. Originally these breeds were called coach 
horses, and the coach horses that came to this country were larger than 
those of to-day. They were used for heavier vehicles in foreign countries, 
and in addition they were used on coaches in the days of coaching. But 
gradually there has been an evolution toward a smaller type of horse for 
carriage purposes, just as there has been toward a smaller type of 
domestic animals along other lines — a smaller and more compact and 
earlier maturing type; and the demand to-day is not for a horse that 
stands 16 1/^ or 17 hands high, but the most of the horses that are com- 
manding the highest prices are standing 16 hands or under, and there are 
