Published by JOHN B. RUSSEIX, at tbe comer of Conyr'-e^ finrl I.iiulnll Strprtg. (Six ilnors from thi' Fo<^t Officr-) Tioston.— TIIO^^ ,<g O. T FSaFXDT'.N. F.jiitoti. 



VOL. IV 



FRIDAY. SEPTEMBER 9, 182.,. 



No. 7. 



ORXGZNAIi COIMEII/IUNXCATIONS. 



FOn THE NEW ENGLAND FARMER. 



COLONEL PICKERING, 



ON IMrROVING THE NATIVE BREED 



OF NEW ENGLAND CATTLE. 



Letter VII. 

 Mr PowEL, in yn^p 73 of the Memoirs of the 

 Penii«vlvania Airriciilluriil Socictv. ititrodiices a 

 (lescrii'lion of Aldeniey cattle from " Parkinson 

 on Live stock" — a book I Iv.ivo not soen. There 

 Tvas an English farmer, namoil Riclinrd Parkin- 

 son, who came In the Unitorl Slates, perhaps a- 

 bont the year 1797 or 1790. In 1799 he ob- 

 lained snliscriptions for repniitin!:;- hi* honk cal- 

 led " The Experienced Farmer." Al'ierivards, 

 ns I tmderstand, he took a farm near Baltimore : 

 hnt in two or three years reliinied to England, 

 where he published a honk Cuncerninir the U- 



nited Slates, represented to abound in f.ilsehoods.J p^nt is, to be slanf hiered while youni;, or in the 

 Of these 1 remember seeing: n lar-e collection..^^^,-,,,^ ^j- ^-r^ like the improved short horns, in 

 in some American (probably a Ball .more) "fi^f p^L„.d, mcrrhi for beef.] " that -ji-oidd subsist on 

 r. If my memory becorrect, one o( t^^^',.-s,';Tan,p,antituoffo,n);he^t: 



his Experienced Farmer. In page 13 he says, | j,onrhood, T went to spo the coiv. The lady 

 "The Cattle at present in America are very ' called her, " her /w'^/e Aldcrney"— a very nai- 

 gnod, and may soon be equal in value to the cat- , y^y^\ distinction by a person who for two or three 

 tie in England." In regard to the character of ,,e.,p, miorht often have seen the /ffri,'e milk cow* 

 the Alderney Cattle, I should have supposed that , npi,r London. This now calved the latter end 

 =nme respect would have been paid, by Mr I of last April ; and for the first month afterwards 

 Powel, to the statement of his " excellent and i npyp^ grave less than 20 quarts of milk a day, 

 zealous friend"' (and I have the satisfaction to i (Vnm which 3 pnnnils of excellent butter were 

 call him also my friend,) Reuben U.iines, Esq. of , rnnde weekly, besi.les supplying milk for a fam- 

 Germantown, near Philadelphia, whose letter, j j|y pf ejorht grown persons and two children.— 

 addressed to the President of the Pennsylvania j [„ June^ when I saw her, she gave 18 quarts of 

 AgriciilturalSociety,ispi)blisheiIinitsMemoirs, milk daily, and the former quantity of butter 

 page 20. weekly. A'n cnzv covlil he more gentle. She wa<! 



Mr Haines says, that as n farmer he had de- 1 purchased of a Mr Stiles, a farmer on a large 

 voted more of his attention " to the selection of' scale in the county of Kent, residing near Graves- 



the host breed of cows for a butter dairy,"' than 

 to any other subject. " Whilst other gentlemen 

 («ays he) were selecting the finest cnu-s to feast 

 the eye, and a carcass which, if well fed, would 

 grow to an enormous size, 1 wantej a small ani- 

 raal, whose carcass was too valuable for heef^" 



r"p° 



declarations was to this elTect — That in the U- 

 nited States he could get neither beer noT bread. 

 I presume it is this honest English t'armer who 

 wrote the treatise on Live Slock, from which 

 Mr Powel has extracted what appears in the 

 73d page of his Memoirs. The substance is as 

 follows. 



Parkinson says of the Alderney cattle, That 

 their size is sm.ill, and of as ba<l a form as can 



fjuantUy nffonti, bear the heat and drought 

 ot our summers and autumn, and produce the 

 greatest quantity of rii:h and dilicious butter, ii> 

 proportion to the food consumed. In pursuance ol 

 this idra, I procured a pair of catlle of the island 

 ol .Mderney, an:l to compare with them, import- 

 ed from Irelanil the celebrated Kerry cow, and 

 irom France the beauliful litlle Brillanny. I 

 ioon satisfied myself that neither these, nor any 

 o'her breed in the country, would bear n com 



possibly be described. The bellies of many of j ,,:,r,j,f,n with the Aldernevs ; and an experience- 

 them are (our-fifths ol their whole weight, [llius 

 far the description seems to coincide with Mr. 

 Powel's own views] He admits, indeed, that 

 the hones are small, [a decisive evidence, with 

 graziers of a disposition to fatlen well] that the 

 ndder and paps [teats] are well formeil, that the 

 milk is said to be rich, and it ought (-ays he) as 

 they give hut a -mall quantity in proportion to 

 the food consumed. Of this last property he had 

 made no trial ; but tells a story of a neighbour 

 ■who kept an Alderney cow two or three years, 

 on a piece of land ol which she consumed the 

 w/io/c produce: Thai he then got a large York- 

 shire cow,* which waf- supported in summer and 

 •winter by the same field, in pasturage and hay, and 

 isias in better plight than the Alderney. — Parkinson 

 concludes his account as follows. " When I a-k- 

 ed this gentleman if the milk from the large 

 cow was as rich as that from the small, he 

 replied, Oh ! yes. This seems a fair expeiimini 

 in regard to the goodness of milk. Tbe family 

 ha-^ found no other difference than in doubhnu 

 the quantity. She is a large, well foruied, and 

 complete Yorkshire cow, and if madel'al, would 

 be as heavy as three of the Alderney breed." 

 — There may possibly be found soine bolievers 

 in this extraordinary tale. Does Mr Pi.wel him 

 self believe it? But if on live stock Pirkinson's 

 expressed opinion is entitled to any r'-^pect. take 

 it ol American Cattle, in his own word.s, from his 

 Supplement ((irinied at Washington in 1801) to 



ol now six yeais has tended lo confirm that con 

 cluiion. Still it was said that the Alderney cat 

 tie Wfre too ilelicalo to bear our severe winters. 

 — and that their descendants would only partake 

 of their good qualities in "n inferior degree. -- 

 My experience has been suflicicnl to retule ihesp 

 nnloundfd allegations. 1 have now a little I'ul! 

 bred Alderney cow reared on my farm, that will 

 be only four years old next harvest. She had 

 her ihird calf on the 1st of last month,* and on 

 the ]9ih we made rather mope lh:in ID pounds 

 n(' delicious butter from 12 quarts of her cream 

 obtained from 14 milkings, that is, one week. 

 Her only food through the winter has been good 

 hay and brewers' grains; the latter well known 

 to he usetui in promoting the secretion ol milk, 

 but not increasing the qnantily or improving the 

 quiililv of the butter. One remarkable properly 

 of the cream of the .Mderney cow is, the readi 

 ness with which it is converted to butter. The 

 week ill which we kejit it separate, " it came,'" 

 as the phrase is, in five minutes." 



To this instance of the excellence of the Al- 

 derney cows, for the objects mentioned by Mr. 

 Haines, I can add another. — A Massachusetts la- 

 dy, with her husband and family, being about to 

 return home from London, Mr Charles Williams, 

 the same who sent the bull Denton to his broth- 

 er Stephen, presented to that lady, for the ac- 

 commoilation of the family on the passage, an 

 Aldernfv cow. In June last, being in the neijih- 



••■ The Yorlishirc cnws, the re aiter will please to take 

 ■Olice, are of the iS/i«r< Horned race. 



* '1 his letter of Mr Haines's, as published in the Me- 

 moirs, 14 without date. 



end, and gencally employed lo supply livestock 

 to ships bound lo the E:l^l Indies and North A- 

 merica. Being askeil what was the breed of the 

 cow, he answered, — An Alderney, raised on his 

 rtwn farm. But the husband of the lady thinks 

 she was not wholly of Alderney blood, biH a 

 mixture, " retaining the best half of that breed." 

 In size she appeared to me to be about as big as 

 the Oakes cow — perhaps not quite so long in 

 the body, but with legs as short. In n word, if, 

 without knowing her origin, I had seen her in 

 a herd of cows, I slioiild have called her a good 

 .Yezi! England cozv ; of the. common size. Her col- 

 our is broziin — the Sussex cattle are said to be 

 generally re<l or brozi'n. The supposed ini.rture 

 in the cow in quc-lion, if real, may be of the 

 Sussex with ihe.Alderney blood. Tlie county of 

 Keni, for half its length, joins on Sussex. 



Mr Powel Calls the Alderney a '-savage race." 

 If this clRiracler were apjilicabic to them, I am 

 disposed lo believe our friend Haines would not 

 have kept lliemforsix years, and apparently 

 with increased approbation. — 1 have some re- 

 rollection, that a few years ago, the news pa- 

 pers informed u", that captain Samuel Bowman 

 of Wyoming [Wilkesbarre] in Pennsylvania, had 

 been killed in a lield there, by a bull; and I 

 tiiink he wa* called an Alderney bull. 1 knew 

 Capt. Bouman : he was a Massachusetts man» 

 and an oflic-er in the Revolutionary war. Whe- 

 ther any of the circumstances attending this dis- 

 Iressing occurrence were related, 1 do not re- 

 member. But noiliing is better known than that 

 our nplive bulls, when pa«t three or four years 

 old, often become vicious and dangerous ; and 

 are therefore slaughtered, or altered to stags. — 

 Whether tbe killing of Capl. Bowman, or any 

 other acts of Alderney bulls, led Mr Powel to 

 call the Aldernevs a " savage race,"' I do not 

 knriw. In my second letter 1 mentioned the es- 

 Iraordinarv gentleness which distinguished Bake- 

 well's biilis. '• All his bulls (says Young) stand 

 still in the field to be ex.imined. The wav of 

 driving them from one field to another, or home 

 is by a litlle switch ; he or his man walk by 

 iheir side, and guide him with tho stick wher- 

 ever Ihey please ; and they are accustomed to 

 this method from being calves. A lad, with a 

 stick three feet long, and as big as his finger, 

 will conduct a bull away from other bulls and 

 his cows, from one end of the farm to the other. 

 All ihis gentleness is merely the effect of man- 

 agement; and the mischief often done by bull»i 



