INVESTIGATION OF DISPUTED PEDIGREES. 433 



Captain Magowan was a roan gelding, willful and bad tem- 

 pered, and all that seems to be known about his origin is the con- 

 ceded fact that he was bred in Kentucky and that he was proba- 

 bly descended from the tribe of Copperbottoms, or possibly the 

 Tom Hals. The roan color prevailed in both tribes and the 

 horse himself looked like the Copperbottoms. 



Gipsy Queen, at the time of the above race in 1860, was 

 owned by a "sporting man" named George Bidwell, of Chicago, 

 or at least she raced under his direction. About the time of this 

 race, Mr. Thomas J. Vail bought the mare and took her to 

 Hartford, Connecticut. He bred her to Toronto Chief and she 

 produced a black colt. The mare and colt afterward passed into 

 the hands of Mr. William B. Smith, and this colt grew up to be 

 the famous Thomas Jefferson "The Whirlwind of the East." 

 In connection with Mr. Smith I devoted a good deal of labor to a 

 futile search for the origin and pedigree of this mare, and the re- 

 sult of our search amounted to nothing more than a reasonable 

 probability that she was bred at Kochester, New York; was got 

 by a son or grandson of Vermont Black Hawk and was taken 

 from there to Chicago. This latter point of the transfer to 

 Chicago seemed to be quite circumstantially fixed in Mr. Smith's 

 mind. 



Mr. Allen W. Thomson, of Woodstock, Vermont a man of 

 great industry and a lover of the truth for the truth's sake also 

 made an exhaustive search, and from a recent contribution to the 

 press he evidently thinks he has found it, and possibly he has; 

 but while I generally agree with Mr. Thomson's conclusions, and 

 prize them as honest and carefully reached, I am forced to dis- 

 sent in this case. Without going into details, he brings the 

 mare from Williamstown, Vermont, and takes her to Woodstock, 

 Illinois, where she is paired with another black mare, and after 

 passing through two or three hands they at last land in a public 

 livery stable in Chicago, and there the identity of the supposi- 

 tions Gipsy Queen is lost, and so far as known she never came 

 out of that stable. One or two years afterward a black mare 

 from Chicago, in possession of George Bidwell, appeared in some 

 public races, notably the one given above, and the conclusion u 

 at once reached that this black mare, Gipsy Queen, was the 

 black filly brought from Williamstown, Vermont. To this all 

 the intermediate owners between Williamstown and Behrens' 

 livery stable were ready to insist that this black mare was the 



