HOW THE TROTTING HORSE IS BRED. 535 



out of about one hundred and twenty in Kentucky bred running 

 horses and grades and raced them, but no records were kept of 

 their breeding and nobody knows with certainty to-day anything 

 about the more remote crosses. For a time the union of two or 

 three trotting horses upon the top of a line of nameless dams ex- 

 tending ten or fifteen generations was looked upon as the perfec- 

 tion of a trotting pedigree. This notion, foolish as it was, gave 

 Kentucky a great advantage over the breeders of all other sec- 

 tions of the country, and every exposure, with the evidence, that 

 in nine cases out of ten these lines of nameless dams were in 

 whole or in part pure fictions, was cutting the ground from under 

 their supposed superiority in the breeding of their trotters. 

 Under the arguments and illustrations of the Monthly, supported 

 by the incontrovertible statistics of the "Year Book," the Ken- 

 tucky cry for "more running blood in the trotter," was silenced 

 .as the child of ignorance and prejudice, and instead of looking 

 for pedigrees tracing back to Godolphin Arabian, everybody began 

 to look for pedigrees that traced to individuals and families dis- 

 tinguished for producing trotters, no difference what blood they 

 possessed. Here the public mind reached the truth, and in 

 grasping it the boasted predominance of Kentucky was crushed, 

 and producing trotting blood was again placed on an equality in 

 all parts of the land. The loss of the pretensions of one section 

 could not be of any specific pecuniary advantage to any other 

 section, but the establishing of the truth was of inestimable ad- 

 vantage to all. The loss of mere "pretentious" would not, in 

 ordinary affairs, be considered a very great loss, but in this in- 

 stance it was looked upon as a grievous wrong, because it inter- 

 fered with their "business." Every slippery fellow who failed to 

 pass a bogus pedigree complained that it interfered with his 

 "business." Every gang of cheats that got together and hired 

 the use of a track for a few days for the purpose of giving their 

 horses bogus records, when detected, cried out vigorously that 

 this was interfering with their "business." Besides these, there 

 were scores, perhaps hundreds, of others, ready for some such 

 game to cheat the public, but when they learned the ordeal was 

 severe, their courage failed and they contented themselves by 

 threatening the "Register" for interfering with their "business." 

 Here was an army of jockeys and cheats, and all they needed to 

 make their numbers formidable was a leader with courage and 

 money, and whose "business" was their own, to seize regis- 



