368 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



key to the main question to be settled, and it is fixed by Justin 

 Morgan, Jr., then a lad of the right age to remember such things, 

 and by Soloman Steele and Judge Griswold, who fix the date in 

 the late summer of 1795. The horse was sold and resold and 

 sold again, as a foal of 1793, and that date never left him till he 

 died in 1821. I look upon this date as perfectly immovable, and 

 every attempt that has been made to overthrow it has not been 

 based on any reasonable evidence, nor prompted by a desire to get 

 at the truth, but only to make a fictitious sire a possibility. This 

 was the original Morgan Horse, and this date was thoroughly 

 fixed by Linsley, without knowing that it upset the pedigree he 

 had labored so hard to establish. After a lapse of fifty years an 

 attempt was made to fix up a pedigree for the "Original Morgan 

 Horse/' claiming that he was got by True Briton or Beautiful 

 Bay represented to be a great race nofse, stolen from the great 

 race horse man, Colonel De Lancey, in the Revolutionary War. 

 I must, therefore, consider, briefly, this part of the fiction. 



First As a starting point in the pedigree, it is assumed that 

 the race-horse in question was stolen, during the War of the Revo- 

 lution, from James De Lancey, perhaps the largest and most 

 widely known of all the colonial horsemen of that day. He was 

 the first man to import race horses into this colony, and his name 

 and the fame of his horses were discussed everywhere. He was 

 very rich, in politics a Tory, and on the eve of hostilities he sold 

 out every horse he owned, of whatever description, went back to 

 England and never returned. This disposes of the false assump- 

 tion that the sire of the original Morgan horse was stolen from 

 him. 



Second There was another James De Lancey, cousin to the 

 preceding, and not a rich man, who was colonel of a body of 

 Tory cavalry operating in Westchester County from 1777 to the 

 close of the war in 1782. It is not known whether he ever owned 

 a race horse in his life, but it is certain he was a dashing fighter, 

 arid at the head of the cowboys he was known to the inhabitants 

 of all that region. His name is not to be found anywhere in con- 

 nection with horses. He bore, in full, the same name as the dis- 

 tinguished horseman, and was mistaken for him, although he was 

 on the other side of the ocean. 



Third It is claimed that "one Smith" stole the horse in 

 question from Colonel De Lancey and sold him to Mr. Ward, of 

 Hartford, Connecticut, who kept him a few years and sold him 



