INVESTIGATION OF DISPUTED PEDIGREES. 453 



^outlaw in the neighborhood of Portsmouth, Ohio, and the story 

 he told will be found in Wallace's Monthly, Vol. I., p. 53, and Vol. 

 VII., p. 597, besides other references. The search has been so 

 barren that I have not even the shadow of a theory as to what 

 his blood may have been. He got two or three trotters and one 

 or two pacers, I think, and here we have to leave him as the most 

 completely unknown horse in all my experience. 



GEORGE WILKES. It is 'a grievous misfortune that the pedi- 

 gree of this great progenitor should be in doubt. The misfor- 

 tune is not in the fact that his descendants lose the supposed 

 Clay cross in his dam, for that was not of very great value, but 

 in the fact that we should not know just what belongs in its place. 

 In December, 1877, I had the good fortune to meet with Mr. 

 Harry Felter and Mr. William L. Simmons at a breeders' banquet, 

 .and it was not long until we were in conversation about the blood 

 of the dam of George Wilkes. I knew that the breeding of that 

 horse had never been established, but I was greatly surprised 

 ihat these two gentlemen one the breeder and the other the 

 owner of Wilkes had never made any effort to trace and estab- 

 lish so important a fact. Mr. Felter stated that he had bought 

 the mare from Mr. W. A. Delevan, and that Mr. Delevan had 

 bought her from Mr. Joseph S. Lewis, of Geneva, New York. 

 Thereupon I wrote to Mr. Lewis and the following is his re- 

 sponse: 



"Some twenty-six years since I bought a brown mare from a gentleman by 

 the name of James Gilbert, then living in the town of Phelps, in this county, 

 for a friend, and very soon after sold her to W. A. Delevan, of New York. 

 She was then about five years old, a fine roadster, and could speed in about 

 3:30. He took her to New York, and after driving her some time sold her to 

 my esteemed friend, Harry Felter. I think she passed into the hands of his 

 father, and met with an accident. She was put to breeding, and had a colt by 

 Rysdyk's Hambletonian, that grew up to be the famous George Wilkes. For 

 the benefit of many persons in New York I lost no time in looking about to 

 learn the pedigree of the mare and of the horse that got her. On seeing Gil- 

 bert I learned that he got the mare of an old man who is now dead, by the 

 name of Josiah Philips, of Bristol, in this county. I lost no time in sending 

 a man, who lived with us at the time, by the name of John S. Dey, to Bristol, 

 to get all the facts in the mare's pedigree that he could get hold of. He learned 

 through Philips that the father of this mare was the old Wadsworth Henry 

 Clay, owned for many years by General Wadsworth, of Genesee. There is 

 no mistake about this, as I have since learned from his neighbors that she was 

 a Clay colt. Philips further stated that the mother of the mare was got by a 

 horse called Highlander, a good horse, and owned in that section of country. 



