Chapter XIV. 



AMERICAN TROTTERS. 



While not yet recognized as a separate breed, the American Trotter is 

 fast approaching that distinction, and the long lines of fast moving off- 

 spring from the famous stallions that founded the several strains of mod- 

 ern Trotters point unmistakably to that constant transmission of char- 

 acteristic qualities which alone determines a breed. 



ORIGIN AND IMPROVEMENT . 



The history of the origin and improvement of American Trotters 

 furnishes one of the most, if not the most, remarkable examples of hu- 

 man skill in developing and training to desired lines qualities which 

 before had remained partially developed or entirely latent. The courage 

 and stamina of the Trotting Horse, in brief, are found in the use of 

 oriental blood in and through the royal blood of the Thoroughbred; but* 

 to those remarkable individual animals hereinafter mentioned in which 

 the trotting gait seems to have been a spontaneous development of the 

 trotting instinct combined with the energy and speed of the Racer 

 belongs the credit for his immediate origin. 



Among the horses which may be thus considered original sources of 

 trotting blood, and first in the list, by acknowledged right, stands 



IMPORTED MESSENGER, 



himself a Thoroughbred, and embracing some of the choicest blood of 

 the desert in his make-up, as will be seen by a simple statement of his 

 paternal ancestry: Imported Messenger was a gray horse, foaled in 1780; 

 imported to United States in 1788, and died on Long Island in 1808. 

 His first sire was Mambrino, second sire Engineer, third sire Sampson, 

 fourth sire Blaze (?), fifth sire Flying Childers, sixth sire Darley Ara- 

 bian. His dam was sired by Turf, by Matchem, by Cade (who was a so4i 

 of Godolphin Arabian), and his second dam was by Regulus, also a son 

 of Godolphin Arabian. His great grandsire, Sampson, was a black horse 

 out of all keeping with the ideal Thoroughbred in appearance, being 

 large, coarse and heavy boned, but with a wonderful power of speed and 

 bottom. Sampson's reputed and recorded sire was Blaze, a bay Thor- 

 oughbred, but his conformation and the inclination to trot which he 

 transmitted to his offspring have led students of equine history to doubt 

 the record of his paternity, and assert that his dam was covered by a 

 coach horse. If this were true and it seems at least reasonable it was 



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