The Kentucky Thoroughbred

Lexington

LEXINGTON KENTUCKY'S association with the Thoroughbred antedates its admission as a state, even its settlement, though the connection is admittedly tenuous. In 1750 the Loyal Land Company was formed at Charlottesville, Virginia , and secured a grant of800,000 acres in the "district of Kentucke." To get a line on what it had, the company sent out an exploring party headed by Dr. Thomas Walker, who found a gap through the mountains and a river which took his party farther into the wilderness beyond. He named all three-the gap, mountains, and river-after the Duke ofCumberland, son ofKing George II, who as commander-in-chief of the British army had gained some military renown, and the lasting hatred of the Scots, at Culloden. The royal duke's defeat by the French at Hastenbeck in 1757 ended his military career, however, and thereafter he devoted himself to horseracing and gambling as a founding member of the English Jockey Club, and to his stud at Windsor. An unattractive man, whose vices and defects may have been magnified by the Scots, he died ofobesity at the age offorty-four, the year Eclipse was foaled. Whatever his military and social shortcomings were, no man ever was to exert such profound or lasting influence on the Thoroughbred breed as did the Duke of Cumberland: He bred two of the three foundation sires, both Herod and Eclipse. 12 All Thoroughbreds today descend directly in tail-male line from three eighteenth-century English stallions. The tail-male line of a horse's pedigree is the paternal line, traceable in human genealogy by following the surname from father to grandfather and back to its originator. Tracing the tail-male line in any Thoroughbred pedigree today, one invariably encounters one ofthe three foundation sires: Matchem, foaled in 1748; Herod, foaled in 1758; and Eclipse, foaled in 1764, unbeaten on the race course and forebear in direct male line of about 90 percent of today's Thoroughbreds. On his 1769 hunting trip to the Bluegrass region, Daniel Boone brought some horses with him through the Cumberland Gap. Indians promptly made off with these horses, and there is no evidence that they were other than pack animals anyway. Kentucky as a whole is not really the earthly paradise Boone's description promised. The paradise is a relatively small, central portion of the state, an area of some 2,800 square miles within a thirty-mile radius of Lexington , which has become world-famous as the birthplace of blood horses. The land is fertile, with a rare outcropping of the deep Ordovician limestone, at the apex of what geologists call the Cincinnati anticline. It is rich in calcium and phosphorous, inherited from millions of shells and skeletons deposited centuries earlier when Central Kentucky was an ocean bed. It is gently rolling land and the porous nature ofits subsoil assured adequate drainage, to the exclusion of marshy, soggy lands. Paa pratensis, today's Kentucky strain of bluegrass, was not native to the region; it is not certain when the woods and canebrakes were cleared to become bluegrass pastures, but early on the area became known as the "Yorkshire of America," which in all honesty lends greater compliment to the celebrated fertile region of England than to the Bluegrass section of Kentucky. Early settlers came from the East either by boat down the Ohio River to what now is Maysville, or by land 13 through the Cumberland Gap and over the Wilderness Trail. They walked or they rode horses, for the Wilderness Trail was not made suitable for wagons until 1795, and there was a considerable number of horses in the Lexington area priorto then. The Fayette County tax rolls for 1789 accounted for 9,607 horses, 56 stallions, 2,522 slaves, and nine taverns. These were not Thoroughbreds, but they were raced, for the character of the people who came to be called Kentuckians, second sons from Virginia and Carolina seeking adventure, action, fortune in free lands, was such that when there were no Indians to chase and no stumps to be cleared, there were arguments to be settled; in Kentucky, arguments usually were settled by a horse race. Court records show that in 1783 there were horse races at Humble's race paths and Haggin's race paths outside Harrodsburg. For betting a mare worth £12, Hugh McGary was tried at Oyer and Terminer court in August 1783 and...