COLONIAL HOUSE HISTORY NEW ENGLAND. 133 



and especially to the Connecticut public for supposing them 

 guilty of any such fraud. The naked truth of the matter is, 

 that while this horse may have been imported from England, his 

 public advertisements clearly indicate that his owners knew noth- 

 ing of his blood or early history. 



The colony of Rhode Island was planted by Roger Williams 

 and his followers in 1636, and the first patent giving it a- legal 

 existence was obtained 1647. It was an offshoot from Massachu- 

 setts and a protest against the intolerance of that colony in re- 

 ligious affairs. For several years I made renewed and persistent 

 efforts to discover whether in the early colonial period Rhode 

 Island had ever imported any horses from foreign countries, and 

 after exhausting every source of recorded information, I have 

 not been able to find a single intimation of such importation. 

 It is evident, therefore, that the famous Narragansett pacer is 

 simply the result of carefully selecting and breeding from the 

 best and the fastest of the descendants of the English pacers, to 

 ~be found everywhere in the colony of Massachusetts. The 

 superiority of the Narragansett pacer over all others of his kind 

 seemed to suggest the probability that he must have possessed 

 blood that was superior to all others, and to supply this "want," 

 a Rhode Islander advanced the claim that his grandfather had 

 imported the original stock from Spain. Unfortunately for this 

 "claim" there were two difficulties in the way of accepting it. 

 First, there were no pacers in Spain, and second, the Narragan- 

 sett pacers were famous for their speed and value before the 

 grandfather was born, or at least before he was out of his swad- 

 dling clothes. 



The horse interests of Rhode Island seem to have been active 

 and successful from the very founding of the colony, and the 

 fame of her pacers extended to all the American colonies at a 

 very early day. When the authorities made their report to the 

 Board of Trade at London, in 1690, showing what they had pro- 

 duced and where and how they had disposed of their surplus, 

 they place horses at the head of their products and state that 

 they are shipped to all the English colonies on the American 

 coast. This statement is sustained by corresponding facts that 

 are known in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Trading 

 with the French colonies in Canada was rigorously prohibited, 

 but it is quite probable that many a good pacing horse found his 

 "way to the St. Lawrence in exchange for pelts and furs. But, 



