THE BLACK HAWK OB MOKGAN" FAMILY. 371 



are very important in two particulars, for they not only knock 

 out the "featherheads" who have been always maintaining that 

 the imported Traveler meant Lloyd's Traveler of New Jersey, 

 son of Morton's Traveler, that was imported from Yorkshire into 

 Virginia about 1750, but it convicts Selah Norton of inventing 

 this pedigree, for there was no such horse brought from Ireland. 

 It is certainly unnecessary to say another word in illustration of 

 Selah Norton's character. When we study these advertisements 

 it becomes as clear as the light of day that nobody believed him 

 or the story that "one Smith" stole the horse from Colonel De 

 Lancey. The crimes of horse stealing and desertion were ex- 

 ceedingly common during the period of the revolution and it is 

 quite possible that "one Smith" may have stolen a horse out of 

 somebody's stable and sold him to Mr. Ward or Mr. Norton as 

 the same horse that Lieutenant Carpenter stole from Colonel De 

 Lancey, but neither "one Smith" nor "one Norton" knew any- 

 thing more about his pedigree than he did about the man in the 

 moon, and I will here end the second chapter of this investiga- 

 tion. 



I am clearly of the opinion that Justin Morgan was an honest 

 man and that he would not tell a lie, even if he knew it might 

 accrue to his present and personal advantage. He was poor, 

 feeble in health, and had hard scuffling to get along. As a 

 means of livelihood, in part at least, it seems to have been his 

 business for a good many years to keep stallions on shares for 

 different owners. As late as 1795 he had a horse from Hartford, 

 Connecticut, called Figure, to which we will refer later on. In 

 1788 he sold his little place in West Springfield, Massachusetts, 

 and removed to Randolph, Vermont, where he died in March, 

 1798 In the autumn of 1795 he visited West Springfieid again, 

 for the purpose of collecting some money that was still due him 

 there, probably some deferred payments of his former home, and 

 as he was not able to get the money he took two horses in lieu 

 thereof. One was a three-year-old gelding, and the other was a 

 two-year-old bay colt, entire. He led the gelding beside the 

 horse he was riding and the colt followed all the way. The evi- 

 dence that fixes the date of this trip in the autumn of 1795 and 

 the age of the colt that followed seems to me to be completely 

 bomb-proof. This evidence not only embraces the recollections 

 of Justin Morgan's neighbors, but when he died the colt, in 1793, 

 was sold by his administrators as a five-year-old. In all the 



