HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 481 



sinister in their origin brought to light. Doubtless this same 

 fact might have been developed in the origin of Edwin Forrest 

 and others, if action had been taken in time. In that day say 

 the first half of this century it is not remarkable that the 

 plebeian origin of some of our most famous early trotters was con- 

 cealed, for everybody was claiming a thoroughbred ancestry, and 

 the more famous the performer the more certain he was to be 

 furnished with a thoroughbred pedigree. 



" Whatever is of value in the trotter must come from the run- 

 ner, and whatever is of value in the runner must come from the 

 Arab," was the view that was universally accepted when I was 

 a boy. And yet there were thousands of fast trotters and fast 

 pacers in this country long before the first running horse was 

 brought from England, and England itself was abundantly sup- 

 plied with horses several hundred years before there was a horse 

 in Arabia. These two facts are historical, and the dates make 

 them incontrovertible. Some forty or fifty years ago William 

 Wheelan, a successful trainer and driver of trotting horses in this 

 country, took some trotters over to England, to try his "luck," 

 as others had done before him, in making matches and winning 

 stakes. He was quite successful, and when he came home he was 

 kept busy answering questions about English horses and why 

 they did not have more trotters there. He replied that "there were 

 plenty of horses that could trot as well or better than our Ameri- 

 can horses, if they were trained; they had plenty of blood and 

 most of them good limbs and feet, with all the substance that 

 was needed." This made William Wheelan an authority, and 

 his opinion was quoted all over the land; which went to prove 

 that the way to breed the trotter was to get plenty of running 

 blood into his veins. About this time the English running horse 

 Trustee was bred on a famous trotting mare, Fanny Pullen, a 

 daughter of Winthrop Messenger, of Maine, and the produce was 

 the gelding Trustee, the first to trot twenty miles within the 

 hour, or at least the first to make that distance regularly and to 

 rule. This gave a tremendous "boost" to running blood, as 

 everybody except Hiram Woodruff ascribed the result to the 

 great powers of the imported running horse. All subsequent ex- 

 periences fully demonstrated that Hiram Woodruff, although 

 alone, was right; for although Trustee's blood commingled more 

 kindly with trotting blood than most of the other running 

 horses, he left no trotters but this one. The highest rate of 



