548 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



" John, I think there is some better employment in the world for you than 

 studying the most approved methods of killing men " and that ended the 

 West Point incident. Young Mr. Wallace, about this time, became 

 alarmed, however, at his then persistently delicate health, and decided to 

 seek an outdoor life rather than one of study. In 1845 he married Miss 

 Ellen Ewing (who died in 1891), of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, and 

 settled on a farm at Muscatine, Iowa. Iowa was then a new country, and 

 Mr. Wallace did much in the way of organizing the industrial and educa- 

 tional interests of the State. There, as related below, he began work in 

 the line in which he became famous. With an invalid wife he returned to 

 Allegheny in 1872; and in 1875 in company with the late Benjamin Singerly, 

 of Pittsburg, started Wallace's Monthly at New York, which has been his 

 home ever since. Mr. Wallace in 1893 married Miss Ellen Wallace Veech, 

 a niece of the first Mrs. Wallace ; and since his retirement from active busi- 

 ness he has spent his time, at home and abroad, chiefly in prosecuting 

 investigations into the horse history of the remote periods, the results of 

 which are seen in this, his crowning life-work. 



We will endeavor here to sketch, in the abstract, the history of Mr. 

 Wallace's publications to as great a degree as possible separately, though 

 they cannot be entirely separated. The " Trotting Register" was an out- 

 growth of the "Stud Book," and Wallace's Monthly and the "Year Book" 

 outgrowths of the "Register," and both auxiliary thereto. The career 

 and usefulness of all were intertwined, yet each had its own peculiar mis- 

 sion, and to that extent their histories will be kept distinct. 



" WALLACE'S AMERICAN STUD BOOK." 



During the early " fifties " Mr. Wallace, then in the prime of early man- 

 hood, was Secretary of the Iowa State Board of Agriculture, and as such had 

 much to do with the management of State fairs. He was thus frequently 

 called upon for information about the pedigrees of animals, and the need 

 of an authority on horse pedigrees was pointedly and constantly forced 

 upon his attention. If the pedigree of a cow was asked for he had only 

 to turn to the "American Herd Book" to find it, but when the breeding 

 of a horse was wanted there was no authority to which to turn. Mr. Wal- 

 lace had been dabbling more or less in such horse literature as there was 

 at that day, and in 1856 began collecting information with the ultimate 

 purpose of publishing a stud book of thoroughbred horses for the thor- 

 oughbred was then here, as in England, supreme as the only horse of 

 literature. He already possessed certain of the publications that were the 

 best horse authorities of the day a file of the /Spirit of the Times, Skin- 

 ner's American Turf Register and /Sporting Magazine, and a number 

 of volumes of the "English Stud Book," and English Sporting Magazine. 

 Added to these, later, were other sources of information and misinformation 

 most notable in this latter class being the alleged " Stud Book " published 

 by Patrick Nesbitt Edgar, of North Carolina, in 1833 an utterly unreliable 



