550 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



plement was the part of his "Stud Book" most used and appreciated. 

 He saw that the trotter was coming to be the horse of the American 

 people, and that there was a great and new field opening in which a lit- 

 erature had yet to be formed. His experience with the " Stud Book " gave 

 him the training necessary for the work before him, and thus equipped, 

 with little capital outside of his newly acquired knowledge, and marvel- 

 ous natural industry and perseverance, with an unusual capacity for 

 hard work, he turned in 1870 to the work before him the literature of the 

 trotter. 



" WALLACE'S AMERICAN TROTTING REGISTER." 



He had as a nucleus the supplement to Volume I. of the " Stud Book," 

 added to which was the work done and knowledge gained in compiling 

 the second volume, together with an increasing library and written data. 

 Thus in incidentally adding a few pages of trotting pedigrees to his " Stud 

 Book," Mr. Wallace had builded better than he knew, but he even now 

 had little conception of the extent and richness of his new field of explora- 

 tion. He traveled all over the country, levying upon every source of in- 

 formation for his "Trotting Register;" but, taught in the dear school of 

 experience, depended chiefly upon personal investigation, taking monthly 

 and yearly less and less for granted. He gradually became more trained 

 in meeting the natural human fondness for embellishing, extending and 

 completing pedigrees without reference to fact or evidence, and the 

 equally common predilection for stating as known facts those things con- 

 cerning pedigrees that were only of common report. This work was 

 excellent training for the more extended duties of the future, and it gave 

 Mr. Wallace an insight into methods of the olden time, and a knowledge 

 of men and horses that later made him, backed by uncompromising 

 honesty, absolute fearlessness, and a quite unusual disregard for " policy," 

 a "terror to evil-doers" in the realm of manufacturing in whole or in 

 part fraudulent pedigrees. 



Still the knowledge, the caution, the system that made it almost im- 

 possible in the last years of Mr. Wallace's administration to impose a fraud 

 upon the * 'Register" were of slow, gradual, but constant growth. The work 

 improved with every volume, with every year of experience, and the evi- 

 dence that would be accepted in the compilation of the early volumes 

 would not suffice later. Mr. Wallace had also the quality of just as re- 

 morselessly overthrowing his own errors as those of others, and thus a 

 system of correction was continually going along, in which work Wallace's- 

 Monthly, founded in 1875, was a particularly effective agency. 



The first volume of the " Trotting Register" was published in 1871, and 

 was a neat book of 504 pages. It contained, besides the pedigrees gathered, 

 tables of all trotting and pacing performances up to the close of 1870, and 

 this was the first time in which the records of the trotting turf were 



