82 TRAINING THE TROTTING HORSE. 



we will devote this chapter to that purpose as an 

 appropriate preface to what follows, concerning the 

 achievements of its horses, and the exposition of the 

 S3^steiu of training that pertains peculiarly to Palo 

 Alto. 



The story of Leland Stanford is too eminently a 

 matter of common history to call for recapitulation, 

 except in the briefest manner here. In the history of 

 the development of California — and, indeed, of the 

 whole farther West, for who can estimate what the 

 Central Pacific Kailway has done ? — his name will go 

 down as that of a master spirit just as it will in the 

 small sphere of development of the national American 

 horse — the trotter. The following sketch, by a Cali- 

 fornian writer, of the proprietor of Palo Alto, is a 

 concise and brief biography which will interest every 

 reader : " Leland Stanford was born in Albany County, 

 l^ew York, on the 9th day of March, 1S24:. The alter- 

 nation of work upon the homestead farm, with study 

 at a neighboring school, after the manner of the sons 

 of intelligent and thrifty farmers in those days, con- 

 tributed to give him that well-balanced mind, keen 

 perception and perfect equipoise of faculties for which 

 he has ever been distinguished. Endowed by nature 

 with a powerful physical organization, he was, in 

 youth, somewhat impatient of purely scholastic methods, 

 which imposed too much in-door constraint upon a 

 mind linked to a body full of vigorous life, which 

 demanded a lartre deo^ree of freedom and exercise in 

 the open air. But this very impatience of confinement 

 threw wide open to him the book of nature, laid the 

 foundation for an enthusiastic love of the natural 



