136 THE HOUSE OF AMEKICA, 



could be identified with certainty. Another provision was that 

 no mares should be exported to Virginia or Barbadoes or other 

 foreign plantations. Again, every owner was supposed to keep 

 a certain number of horses at home, for daily use, and he was 

 allowed to keep twice that number running at large. In 1682 no 

 stone horse under thirteen and one-half hands high was allowed 

 to run at large. This was afterward changed to thirteen bands. 

 In 1724 this law was revised and re-enacted so that colts "of 

 comely proportions" and not more than one year and a half old, 

 if thirteen hands high, might run at large; but if older than 

 eighteen months they must be fourteen hands high or suffer the 

 penalty, which was castration. In 1750 horse racing of all kinds 

 was prohibited, under a severe penalty. 



In that grand old repository of ancient, curious, and valuable 

 things relating to colonial affairs, the New York Historical 

 Society, to which I am greatly indebted, I found a file of the 

 Pennsylvania Gazette, commencing with the year 1729, published 

 by "B. Franklin, printer." In that day the term "editor" or 

 "reporter" was not known in the vocabulary of any well-regu- 

 lated newspaper office, and for anything of a local character you 

 had to look in the advertising columns. To these I resorted, as 

 usual, and they presented results that were a great surprise to 

 me. Pennsylvania has long been famous for the production of 

 great massive draft horses, and before the days of railroads just 

 suited, with six or eight of them in a team, for the transporta- 

 tion of freights from the seaboard to the Ohio River. This was 

 a great business at the beginning of this century and for forty or 

 fifty years afterward. The fame of those great teams, the great 

 wagons and the great loads they hauled over the mountains, 

 spread far and wide, and as a special designation that went with 

 them they were called Conestoga horses, and the wagons were 

 called Conestoga wagons, named after a creek in Lancaster County, 

 Pennsylvania, where many large horses were bred. There was no 

 particular line of blood to be followed, for a large horse bred west 

 of the mountains was just as certainly a Conestoga as though he 

 had been bred in Lancaster County. The Conestoga was simply 

 the horse that was best suited for a big team with an enormous 

 load, and he varied in size from sixteen and one-half to eighteen 

 hands in height and from one thousand six hundred to one 

 thousand nine hundred pounds in weight. These measurements 

 he reached by breeding for the one purpose of strength and 



