114: THE HORSE OP AMERICA. 



known that an Irish gentleman shipped many cattle to the 

 colony, and it is quite possible that he shipped horses also, and if 

 this reasoning be right, these "Galloways" may have been Irish 

 "Hobbies." It will be observed, also, that the distance to be run 

 is not definitely stated, but it is fairly to be concluded that the 

 race of the second day was to be four miles, and none of them less 

 than one mile, and that in heats. Races of four-mile heats were 

 very common long before the first English race horse was imported. 



We here have a stock of horses that the people of Virginia 

 have bred and ridden and raced for a hundred years, and we 

 know comparatively nothing about them. They seem to have 

 been specially adapted to the saddle, but they could run four 

 miles, or they could run a quarter of a mile, like an arrow from 

 a bow. They were not a breed, although selecting and crossing 

 and interbreeding for a hundred years would make them quite 

 homogeneous. There is a romantic interest attaching to these 

 little horses, for we have reached the middle of the eighteenth 

 century, and all the successive idols of this race-loving people 

 are about to be dethroned by their own act, and their homage 

 transferred to a stranger a larger and finer animal and faster 

 over a distance of ground. Whatever of glory and honor, to say 

 nothing of money, that was to be achieved from this time for- 

 ward was to be ascribed to the newly arrived English race horse. 

 But the truth should not be concealed that this old stock 

 furnished half the foundation, in a vast majority of cases, for the 

 triumphs of future generations of the Virginia race horse, and 

 the same may be said of the old English stock upon which the 

 eastern blood was engrafted. About the middle of the eighteenth 

 century the line was drawn, and there was thereafter developed 

 the engrafting of the new upon the old. In 1751-52, Moreton's. 

 imported Traveller was there, and he was the only English 

 race horse advertised that year. There may have been two or 

 three others, but they had not made themselves known to the 

 public, and I very much doubt whether there was any other. A 

 very few years later there were many others, and some of them 

 of great celebrity. 



Mr. J. F. D. Smith made an extended tour of the colonies, 

 especially of Virginia, before the Revolutionary war, and he suf- 

 fered some of the inconveniences growing out of the rising 

 hostility to the mother country. In speaking of quarter racing 

 he says: 



