450 THE HOESE OF AMERICA. 



near the finish Henry made his dash and covered Eclipse's 

 quarter with his head, but he could get no further and abandoned 

 the contest. Eclipse had been punished unmercifully from start 

 to finish, and the time of the heat was 8:24. This shows an 

 average rate of speed in the third heat of two minutes and six 

 seconds to the mile, a rate which half a dozen trotters and a 

 round dozen of pacers have beaten for a single mile. It shows 

 also the cruelty, to say nothing of the absurdity, of heat racing 

 at the distance of four miles. Still American Eclipse was the 

 greatest running horse of his generation. 



BOSTON was a chestnut horse, foaled 1833, and bred by Mr. John 

 Wickham, the very eminent jurist, of Richmond, Virginia. He 

 succeeded to the great fame of American Eclipse, and although 

 about two generations, in a racing sense, after him there was no 

 horse between them that was the equal of either of them. He 

 was a terror to all competitors whether of the North or the South. 

 But it is only my purpose here to put on record the real facts 

 about his pedigree and to expose a glaring fraud that has been 

 propagated concerning his breeding for many years. Mr. Wick- 

 ham, the breeder of Boston, bought a mare by imported Alder- 

 man (1802 or 1803) from John Randolph, of Tuckahoe (not 

 "Roanoke" as sometimes stated). This mare was out of a mare 

 by imported Clockfast, and here, to sum it up and give Mr. 

 Wickham's exact language, as he wrote in 1827: "This mare, a 

 dark bay, foaled about 1799, was got by Alderman, her dam by 

 Clockfast, out of a mare said to be full-blooded, of the Wildair 

 blood." This Alderman mare he bred to Florizel, and she pro- 

 duced the race horse Tuckahoe, and a filly that was bred to 

 Timoleon and produced Boston. Then Boston's pedigree stands; 

 G-ot by Timoleon; dam by Florizel; grandam by imported Alder- 

 man; great-grandam by imported Clockfast; great-great-grandam 

 "said to be of the Wildair blood." This is down to "hard pan," 

 and there is no authority in the wide world to add anything to it. 

 If we admit the Wildair mare to be genuine and authentic we 

 are still one degree short of the thoroughbred standard. The 

 six additional crosses that have been added to this pedigree are 

 entirely fictitious. They were copied from the advertisement of 

 a stallion descended from this maternal line, that had neither 

 indorsement nor name attached to it. This was seized upon by 

 the late Benjamin Bruce, and boasted of as a "discovery" of the 

 extension of Boston's pedigree. After the appearance of this 



