AMERICAN STAR, PILOT, CHAMPION, AND NORMAN. 339 



me from different responsible persons, all of whom were person- 

 ally cognizant of the facts they related, as follows: On a certain 

 occasion a street contractor had a force at work, grading with 

 shovels and carts, near the foot of Twenty-third Street, I think, 

 New York City. Among the cart horses there was a Canadian 

 stallion and a frisky, high-strung bay mare that wouldn't work 

 kindly. One day during the noon hour, the "boys" for amuse- 

 ment brought this stallion and mare together and in due time the 

 mare proved to be with foal, and she was sent over to Jersey the- 

 next spring. The foal she there dropped was Seely's American 

 Star. When I asked to whom the mare had been sent to be 

 taken care of, the answer came back quickly naming the same 

 man whom I had represented as the breeder. As the contractor 

 had no use for the colt, as a matter of course, the keeper of the 

 mare would take the colt for the keeping. There is nothing 

 unnatural nor unreasonable in this story, and it bears a pretty 

 strong resemblance to the way the dam of the famous George M. 

 Patchen came into the world. 



When the horse was four or five years old he began to show a 

 fine trotting step and he was sold to John Blauvelt, of New York, 

 for a driving horse. His feet not being strong, in the course of 

 a year or two he developed a couple of quarter cracks and he was 

 sent back to the man who raised him to be cured. In the winter 

 of 1844-5 he was sold to Cyrus Dubois, of Ulster County, New 

 York, who kept him in the stud the seasons of 1845, 1846 and 

 1847. His advertisement for the year 1847 reads as follows: 



" American Star is a chestnut sorrel, eight years old on the llth day of April, 

 1847, near 16 hands high, etc. ... He was sired by the noted trot- 

 ting horse Mingo, of Long Island, who was got by old Eclipse. American Star's 

 dam, Lady Clinton, the well-known trotting mare of New Jersey, was 

 sired by Sir Henry." 



Here we have the third pedigree of this horse, and now the 

 question arises, Where did this pedigree come from? Cyrus 

 Dubois is dead, but a living brother of his says this is the pedi- 

 gree that Cyrus brought with the horse from New Jersey. As 

 this same quasi-breeder was the man who delivered the horse to 

 Dubois, the statement of the living brother comes very near 

 proving that the first and the third of the pedigrees here given 

 were the work of the same man. Again, in 1844, this same quasi- 

 breeder kept this horse at Warwick and New Milford, in Orange 

 County, New York, and nobody in that region seems to have 



