492 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



office and he again urged the investigation. My reply was that 

 there were some very upright and honest men in Kentucky as< 

 well as some great rogues, and if I were to undertake to investi- 

 gate this pedigree the rogues could get forty men, if so many 

 were necessary, for a bottle of whisky or a half-dollar a head, 

 who could remember just what it was necessary to remember, 

 and forget just what it was necessary to forget in order to prove 

 that the mare was by Planet. I recalled my experience with 

 suborned evidence in the past, and knew just what I might 

 expect in the future, and so I had concluded to make no more 

 investigations in certain portions of Kentucky until I had an 

 opportunity to cross-examine the witnesses. Dame Winnie was, 

 a plain, common-looking mare, with nothing about her to indi- 

 cate high breeding, and if we lay aside Mr. Wilson's story and 

 accept the pedigree as usually given she was strongly running 

 bred, but at several points in her pedigree she fails of being thor- 

 oughbred. The internal evidence as to the breeding of this 

 mare, brought to light in the performance of her produce, sug- 

 gests very strongly the probability that she possessed some trot- 

 ting blood, from some source not far removed. She has five 

 representatives in the 2:30 list, and this of itself strongly supports 

 Mr. Wilson's untold story, that I would not listen to. In passing 

 I will say I would be glad to listen to it now; for this solid 

 foundation of experience is so stoutly corroborative of what he 

 suggested as to justify an effort to reach the exact truth. When 

 it was known in Kentucky that Senator Stanford had sent his- 

 representative down there to gather up a lot of "thoroughbred" 

 mares from which to breed trotters in California, every dealer in 

 the State had just what he wanted. He was looking for pedi- 

 grees, and it was a very easy matter to shape up the pedigrees, 

 just to suit him. 



Whatever may have been the breeding of his dam, Palo Alto 

 was a great horse, but he came to his speed slowly, and this 

 would seem to indicate that if his dam had any trotting inherit- 

 ance it was weak in the direction of attaining a high rate of 

 sr>eed. From the day he was weaned till the day he died he was 

 Senator Stanford's idol, and with this horse as an object lesson 

 he was going to teach the world how to breed the trotter. At 

 two years old he was driven a mile privately in 2:22f, and his 

 owner, feeling that his dream was realized in breeding the great- 

 est horse the world had produced, named him "Palo Alto," as> 



