THE OLD FRENCH CANADIAN HORSE:

ITS HISTORY IN CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

From: THE CANADIAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

Vol. XXVIII           Toronto, June, 1947                  No. 2

Almost ninety years ago Henry William Herbert protested against a tendency among the horse breeders and the agricultural writers of his day to study elaborate treatises on Shires, hackneys, Suffolk Punches, Cleveland Bays, and other English horses, all then found in North America only in the form of individual importations, and to neglect to investigate the really serviceable local breeds they were acquainted with, such as the Conestoga and the French-Canadian.  His remark went unheeded.  Attention was shortly diverted to a considerable degree from the British horses, but it came to be concentrated on the Hambletonians, the Morgans, the Pilots, and other families of American trotters.  The definitive history of the Conestoga horse is yet to be written, and so little has been published with reference to the old French-Canadian horse that even those who in recent years have tried to revive the breed have had to depend almost wholly on tradition for their knowledge of it.  The old French-Canadian horse does not deserve this oblivion.  A century ago it was well known not only in the Lower Canada, but in the Acadian settlements in the Maritime Provinces, in Upper Canada, in Michigan, in Illinois, in New York, and in New England, and in every one of these regions it was for the most part well thought of.  It was the misfortune of the old French-Canadian horse that the consequence of this popularity was not that the breed was strengthened and perpetuated, but that as an outcome of crossing with inferior animals for the sake of improving the common stock it practically lost its separate identity.

The old French-Canadian horse was not a breed developed in the New World, but traced its ancestry back to the foundation stock brought to Acadia and New France in the seventeenth century.  The first horses from France were imported into Acadia in 1610, when the colony at Port Royal was revived by Poutrincourt.  The Jesuits brought in more in 1613.  All of these horses, or, at least, all that could be caught, were carried off in 1616 by Samuel Argall's marauding expedition from Virginia.  This disaster was of only temporary significance, however, for incoming colonists had horses which shortly replaced the animals thus lost.  From the early seventeenth century, accordingly, there were always horses in Acadia, but never very many, owing to the fact that the French settlers were not numerous, and were in any case invariably more interested in the fisheries than in agriculture.  As the marsh-land farming carried on along the Bay of Fundy did not require the use of horses, the one or two owned by each family were kept primarily for riding.  This condition still prevailed among the Acadian peasants a couple of generations after the Peace of Utrecht made their settlements British.  The only part of the future Maritime Provinces where horses of French origin ever became relatively numerous was Prince Edward Island, where, after the Peace of Paris of 1763, they are said to have run in practically a feral state.  On the whole, therefore, Acadia contributed little in comparison with the St. Lawrence Valley to the development of the old French-Canadian horse. 

The effective introduction of French horses into New France dates from 1665, for the single horse imported in 1647 as a gift of the Compagnie des Habitants to Governor de Montmagny either died or was taken away from Quebec within a year or two of its arrival.  In 1665 Louis XIV sent two stallions and twenty mares from the royal stables to the colony, but eight of the mares perished during the voyage.  The King sent additional shipments in 1667 and 1670,  that of 1667 comprising fourteen of fifteen horses, and that of 1670 a stallion and eleven mares.  Thereafter the King sent no more horses, as the Intendant Talon considered that there were now enough in the colony to furnish a dependable supply of colts to all who were in need of them.  The horses remained the property of the King for three years, but they were let out to the leading farmers for an annual rental per horse of 100 livres or of one foal.  At the end of the three years, the horses and any colts not turned over to the intendant in rental became the property of the farmers.  The colts that came into the possession of the intendant were reared at government expense till they were three years old, when they were parcelled out to the farmers on the same terms as the original horses from France.  So successful was the horse-breeding programme that in 1679 there were 145 horses in the colony, in 1688, 218, and in 1698, 684.

The horses from the royal stud, with probably a few others imported by the seigneurs during later years at their own expense, formed the basis of the French-Canadian horse of the Old Régime.  Whether imported under royal or private auspices, they came from Normandy and Brittany, then two of the most renowned horse-breeding provinces of France.  The Breton horse of that time, though small, was noted for its soundness and vigour.  The Norman horse closely resembled the Breton, except that it gave more evidence of an infusion of oriental blood.  This strain came from Andalusian sires brought into Normandy and The Perche for breeding purposes, some direct from Spain and others - between the latter part of the sixteenth century and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession - from the Spanish Netherlands.  There can be little doubt that the hardiness, the bottom, and the prepotency of the old French-Canadian horse were traceable to this Andalusian inheritance.

There was in any case no single settled type of either the Norman or the Breton breed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but rather several types of each, which were bred with one another in their home provinces to bring out the features popular at the moment.  Among the horses brought from France there were accordingly some which were distinctively draft horses, and which as a consequence probably contributed to the development of the heavy working-horses reared in Kamouraska and other parts of the St. Lawrence Valley below Quebec at the close of the eighteenth century.  Others were just as distinctively trotters, a kind of horse for which France had enjoyed a reputation for generations.  Still others were pacers, in spite of the assertion sometimes made that the pacers found in Lower Canada in the nineteenth century owed their origin wholly to the Narragansett Pacers imported into the province and crossed on the native stock.

George Barnard of Sherbrooke was a horse dealer, a horse breeder, and perhaps the outstanding authority of the midnineteenth century on the old French-Canadian horse.  His opinion that the pacing blood of the seigneuries was to be traced back to Normandy must therefore be treated with respect, though he gave no specific authority for it.  Fortunately there is evidence to substantiate his idea that pacers were once numerous enough in that section of Old France.  "The roussin," we read, "was formerly trained to move in an amble, and with a high step and rounded knee by means of cords and shackles, which were applied, like the double fetters of a sheep, from the fore to the hind legs, and caused the peculiar movement desired."  It is probable that the Norman pacers gradually disappeared during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in consequence of the construction of all-weather roads, just as did the english pacers.  It is likewise probable, as was the case in England, that at the time pacers were losing their popularity at home, they were in greatest demand for export to the colonies, where the lack of carriage roads of course put a premium on their particular qualities.  In this connection it is surely not without significance that in 1774 two travelers in Nova Scotia observed of the horses kept by the Acadian settlers (who still had little contact with New Englanders, from whom Narragansett Pacers might have been obtained) that "they all naturally pace."  While the pacing propensity was probably developed indigenously within Normandy, just as it was elsewhere, it may well have been fortified there by transmission from some of the sires imported from Spain and the Spanish Netherlands.  It is quite probable, indeed, though not yet proved, that the pacers of French Canada in the nineteenth century shared the Andalusian ancestry of the pacers of Sardinia (a Spanish possession till 1720), Colombia, and Peru.

The wide variations within the old French-Canadian breed, even before the British Conquest, when there was no intermixture whatever with foreign horses, are to be accounted for in large part by the breeding practices of the habitants.  Like the peasants of Old France, they eschewed inbreeding, and like them too, they seldom gelded their horses.  British observers were certain that promiscuity in breeding inevitably resulted, and that this steadily deteriorated the stock.  This judgment is not necessarily sound.  The breed developed its characteristic merits throughout its relatively long history in spite of the practice.  This was probably because, as was pointed out in defence of the lack of gelding in France, the farmer would breed from the best horse available, and if all the males were stallions, he would be able to choose from those which, as working-horses, had given the most evidence of docility, soundness, and vigour.  The habitats were satisfied to obtain a fair average stock, without worrying very much over the production of superior horses or over the perpetuation in later generations of the individual qualities of such superior horses as they had.

According to those who made a study of the old French-Canadian horse, the pure breed as it existed in 1850 was scarcely altered from its prototype of a hundred years before.  Indeed, in spite of more than a century of separate breeding, it still resembled very closely the small horse of Normandy and The Perche.  Edward Harris of Moorestown, N.J., the importer of the first Percherons brought to the United States, when casting about for a way to describe the diligence type of Percheron, stated the "those who are acquainted with the thorough-bred Canadian horse, will see in him a perfect model, on a small scale, of the PERCHERON horse."  Another individual, identified only as "a very intelligent gentleman residing in the State of New York,"  remembered that when I was in Quebec, in 1852, I saw a very fine light or dappled grey stallion, much in the style of Mr. Dunham's Success ... except he was finer in his points.  He was about 14 hands high, possibly not over 13½ hands -- a real beauty, with fine action, &c. in Paris, in 1867, I saw the exact counterpart of this stallion."  Edward A. Barnard, Director of Agriculture for the Province of Quebec, writing in the  early eighteen-eighties, was of the same opinion as Harris and the New Yorker.  "We know, from experience in France, that they [the small percherons] are as good a breed as can be found of their size, and they resemble the French-Canadian horse more closely than any other breed in the world."

Though there were considerable variations within the pure French-Canadian breed of horses, these did not prevent all members of it from having such a clearly impressed general character that there was no disagreement among observers as to what the typical French-Canadian horse of mid-nineteenth century was like.  Perhaps the best description is that written by Henry W. Herbert:

The Canadian is generally low-sized, rarely exceeding fifteen hands, and oftener falling short of it ...

His characteristics are a broad, open forehead; ears somewhat wide apart, and not infrequently a basin face; the latter, perhaps, a trace of the far remote Spanish blood, said to exist in his veins ...

His crest is lofty, and his demeanor proud and courageous.  His breast is full and broad; his shoulder strong, though somewhat inclined to be heavy; his back broad, and his  croup round, fleshy and muscular.  His ribs are not, however, so much arched, nor are they so well closed up, as his general shape and build would lead one to expect.  His legs and feet are admirable; the bone large and flat, and the sinews big, and nervous as steel springs.  His feet seem almost unconscious of disease.  His fetlocks are shaggy, his mane voluminous and massive, not seldom, if untrained, falling on both sides of his neck, and his tail abundant, both having a peculiar crimpled wave, if I may so express myself, the like of which I never saw in any horse which had not some strain of this blood.

He can not be called a speedy horse in his pure state; but he is emphatically a quick one, an indefatigable undaunted traveller, with the greatest endurance, day in and day out, allowing him to go at his own pace, say from six to eight miles the hour, with a horse's load behind him, of any animal I have ever driven.  He is extremely hardy, will thrive on any thing, or almost on nothing; is docile, though high-spirited, remarkably sure-footed on the worst ground, and has fine, high action, bending his knee roundly and setting his foot squarely on the ground.

As a farm-horse and ordinary farmer's roadster, there is no honester or better animal; and, as one to cross with other breeds, whether upward by the mares to thoroughbred stallions, or downward by the stallions to common country mares of other breeds, he has hardly an equal.

.. He is said, although small himself in stature, to have the unusual quality of breeding up in size with larger and loftier mares than himself, and to give the foals his own vigor, pluck and iron constitution, with the frame and general aspect of their dams.

This, by the way, appears to be characteristic of the Barb blood above all others, and is a strong corroboration of the legend, which attributes to him an early Andalusian strain.

To this description it is necessary to add only the information that the old French-Canadian horse was of no established colour, though he was ordinarily either bay or black -- most often the latter -- and that his wight ranged from 900 to 1 100 pounds.  As a general-purpose horse, useful both on the winter roads of Lower Canada and in light farm work,m he was unsurpassed.  William Evans was right when he remarked that the habitants would "never possess a better or more suitable breed of horses for this country than the real Canadian of good size."

The French-Canadian horses were, as Herbert mentions, noted for being extremely hardy.  They had to be hardy, for otherwise they could not have survived the abuse to which they were universally subjected by the habitants, who derived this deplorable tendency from their Norman forbears.  In summer, when the horses were little used, they ran in the woods, and were tormented by the flies, against which they were defenceless, owing to the fact that, in accordance with traditional French practice their tails were docked.  In winter their condition was much worse.  The colts were usually given no shelter at all, and the working-horses frequently nothing except a rough shanty through which the winds blew till the interstices between the logs were piled with drifted snow.  The habitants cured no hay for their cattle and sheep, and so little for their horses that they too in many cases were wintered mostly or entirely on straw.  Moreover, the horses seldom got enough grain.  William Evans calculated that in the early eighteen-thirties the amount of oats grown in Lower Canada was no more than a quarter of that needed by the horses of the province if they were to be adequately nourished.  So far did this famishing of the horses go that in parts of Lower Canada, between Three Rivers and Quebec for example, they were sometimes reduced to eating frozen fish!  When the habitants took to the roads with their horses, they thought nothing of driving them as fast as they would go for a dozen miles or more, and then leaving them to stand uncovered for hours in the blizzardly snow.  Indeed, the French Canadians were of the opinion that deliberate exposure was an excellent was of toughening an animal.  It may be pleaded in extenuation that the habitants were not alone in harsh treatment of livestock, for colonial New Englanders and New Yorkers abused their horses in very much the same manner.

Under ordinary circumstances the horses of French Canada were not overworked, though mentions of this kind of mistreatment are not lacking.  There was actually little farm work of a taxing kind for them, because, like their Norman counterparts, the habitants customarily plowed with oxen, or with a combination consisting of a span of oxen and a horse of two.  Horses were needed, however, for harrowing, for drawing in grain and wood, and for hauling salable articles to the towns.  Their hauling they performed in a sleigh or in a clumsy two-wheeled cart.  If the load was too heavy for one horse, two would be hitched to it, one before the other.  This helps to explain, incidentally, the docking of the tails already mentioned.

Early in the history of New France the Intendants began to be concerned over the propensity of the habitants to keep more horses than they could use in the actual work of the farm.  The result, so the officials thought, was the prevention of the development of a diversified livestock industry, for manifestly if there were so many horses that they consumed all the forage, it would be impossible for the habitants to raise cattle and sheep sufficient for the needs of the colony.  Such being the case, the Intendant Raudot in 1709 issued the first of what was destined to be a long series of regulations designed to limit the number of horses.  This first regulation forbade any settler in the Montreal district to have more than to horses (or mares) and a foal, and provided for the slaughter of the surplus the next year.  It proved impossible to enforce either this ordinance or any of those which followed it.  In the midst of the last intercolonial was Montcalm, deploring the necessity of feeding his troops horse-meat, complained, like many of his predecessors, that it would be in the interest of New France to have the number of horses diminished, so that there would be enough cattle to meet local demands.

To the Intendants and the generals, the habitants seemed both stupid and wilful, but they had reasons satisfactory to themselves for keeping so many horses.  It was perhaps partially a matter of prestige with them, but mostly it was one of convenience.  They needed, or at any rate wanted, enough horses to enable them to visit their friends in the neighbouring parishes or even in the distant  parts of the colony.  In the latter part of the seventeenth century, when they had as yet only a few horses, they travelled along the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal in sleighs drawn by a couple of mastiffs.  Later, every habitant had a cariole, a light sleigh drawn by a single horse, and usually a caleche, a springless two-wheeled cart.  It was not unusual for a horse to draw a cariole over the ice as many as eighty or ninety miles in a single day.  While the habitants kept their horses and carioles mostly for local trips to market or to the scene of one of the countless festivities which characterized the winter evenings along the St. Lawrence, they had other uses for them, as is shown in a vignette by George Barnard, which was as true probably of the mid-eighteenth century as it was of the mid-nineteenth.

With Roman Catholics many innocent yet enlivening diversions are liberally permitted after mass on Sundays, which some of our Protestant brethren would think it perilled their eternal welfare to indulge in.  Such are visiting, courting, and innocent or sober exercises and amusements generally.  With this latitude to his conscience, and a glorious little nag to convey him from the church door on a cold winter's day, when speed is gain, the Canadian engages in racing even at the close of divine service.  The practice has gone to such [an] extent as to endanger the safety of persons on foot, and the law now ordains that no fast driving shall be permitted within a certain short distance of the sacred edifice.  As many of the churches stand near the rivers, and the worshippers pass upon the ice, - when this is smooth and glare, the trials that take palace in returning from service are sometimes interesting to witness, and the mode of handicapping, when one horse is allowed to be more powerful or fleeter than another, by transfer of a passenger, perhaps a woman or child from the weaker to the stronger team, is really comical in a high degree.

The Canadians drive single, that is only one horse to a sleigh; a mode which gives at once the most perfect control of the animal, and taxes his powers to the utmost ... The social disposition and simple mode of life of the Canadian peasant make him dote on his horse almost like the Arab, and he has little less cause in the excellency of the animal.  Prone to indulge in contests of speed on Sundays, and festivals, of which his calendar affords a goodly number, Jean Baptiste is not less inclined to rejoice in swift riding on convenient occasions at other times.

To the English-speaking settlers who came into the St. Lawrence Valley after 1760 these activities seemed the rankest hedonism, and those who participated in them the very embodiment of shiftlessness.

New France furnished the horses taken to the western settlements at Detroit and in the Illinois Country.  Inasmuch as the French population of these communities was never large, and was moreover engaged in the fur trade rather than in agriculture, the number of horses found in them during the French régime and the early years of the British régime was inconsiderable.  There were, according to the census, 216 horses at Kaskaskia and 260 at Vincennes in 1767, and 1 112 at Detroit in 1782.  While it is possible that some of the horses enumerated at Vincennes were mustangs from the western plains rather  than French-Canadians, all available accounts refer to those in the other settlements simply as "French" or "Norman" or "Canadian," meaning in every case French-Canadian.  A less rigorous climate, the existence of prairies, and the sparseness of the population at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Detroit made it possible for the horses owned in these centres, unlike those kept on the farmlands around Quebec and Montreal, to run at large in herds winter and summer.  Their masters branded them for identification, but otherwise paid no attention to them except when they needed them for farm work.  "No care was taken of them for more than one hundred and fifty years," it was stated by an early Illinois historian, "and the breed scarcely ever crossed."  The breeding true to type generation after generation of these half-wild horses is simply explained.  Among the feral horses of the Great Plains of those days and later, each herd was dominated by an old stallion who drove out and fought off younger rivals, and this was doubtless what happened in the Detroit and Illinois settlements.  The only source of new blood, therefore, even after the advent of American pioneers, came from occasional estrayed or escaped mares which were attracted into the herds.  The French settlers at Detroit and in the Illinois Country seldom used their horses for plowing, as they were too light to tug the clumsy wooden plows then in service.  They did , however, utilize them in the heavy "bare-legged" carts, to which they were always hitched tandem, and driven without reins.  For the rest, they rode them for pleasure, and at least at Detroit, raced them on the ice in carioles.

After the conquest of New France, French-Canadian horses found a market in the older British colonies.  In 1780 the French traveller Chastellux met a horse dealer at Rhynbeck, N.Y., who was evidently one of the first to share in the trade, if not the very first.  Before the American Revolution, this dealer had been accustomed to go to Montreal in the winter, buy a considerable number of horses -- seventy-five on one occasion -- drive them down Lake Champlain on the ice, and ship them from New York to the West Indies.  According to his account, which there is no reason to doubt, he was responsible for getting Benedict Arnold interested in the business, at a time when the latter's early commercial ventures at New Haven were turning out badly.  At any rate, Arnold engaged quite extensively in the business, beginning evidently in the middle seventeen-sixties.  In the winter he took cheese, stockings, and other articles into the St. Lawrence Valley, and exchanged them for horses.  Some of these he drove to New Haven, from which place he shipped them, with other horses collected in New England, to the sugar islands.  Others he shipped direct from Quebec to the West Indies.  The number of horses exported from the Old Province of Quebec before the Revolution was not large, for the trade attracted no attention whatever from the author of American Husbandry.  Those which did reach the West Indies met with favour, however, for it came to be the accepted belief there that they could stand the climate better than either American or British horses.

After the close of the American Revolution the trade southwards in French-Canadian horses was resumed, and continued actively till the outbreak of the War of 1812.  It was stated in 1804 that "the Exportation of Horses from Lower Canada to the United States, is a Trade that has existed to a considerable extent for these twenty years past."  Other contemporary references bear out he truth of this remark.  Other horses, but not many were exported by sea to the West Indies during the same period.  A much more important market than that in the West Indies, even if it attracted little notice at the time, was furnished by the new settlements established by the Loyalists in 1784 in the future Upper Canada.  Most of the horses here were obtained form the St. Lawrence Valley rather than, as was the case with cattle, from the United States.  The result was that the old French-Canadian horse came to provide the solid foundation for the later development of the common horses of Upper Canada.

One outcome of the horse trade to New England after the American Revolution was the introduction into the St. Lawrence Valley of the once-famous Narragansett Pacers.  There has heretofore been a vague tradition that a considerable trade northward in these horses once existed, but historians have found very little contemporary or near-contemporary evidence to support it.  However a precise statement respecting the trade was made by George Barnard, previously mentioned as a leading authority on the old French-Canadian horse.  He asserted in 1846 that "nearly fifty years ago my father bought Narragansett Pacers coming from Rhode Island, and took them in droves to the French Country about and beyond Quebec, where they were readily sold, or exchanged for the stout native work horses."  The Narragansett Pacers were exported from Rhode Island seemingly because, being primarily saddle horses, they were in diminishing demand locally when the country roads throughout southern New England became readily passable for wheeled vehicles.  They were exported to the St. Lawrence Valley because the habitants liked them and would pay comparatively well for them.  As John Lambert explained, the French Canadians "are very ford of a horse which runs with a quick shuffling pace, and the Americans bring in with them a parcel of rickety animals who possess that accomplishment.  The Canadian willingly exchanges his fine little horse for the pacer, and often gives a few pounds to boot."  It may be suggested that the partiality of the habitants for the Narragansett Pacers is to be accounted for on the ground that they already had many pacers among their own horses, and preferred them to the trotters.  As a matter of fact, for short races on the ice the pacers were superior in speed to the trotters.  The French Canadians, it will be noticed, did not ordinarily use the pacers as saddle horses.  It is probable that very few Narragansett Pacers, or even horses passing as such, were imported into Lower Canada after the War of 1812, for by that time the breed was almost extinct.  There were, however, enough of them imported before 1812 to help create, by continued interbreeding with the old French-Canadian horses, especially with those having pacing tendencies, the distinctive strain called the Canadian Pacer, of which more hereafter.

The horses taken south by Benedict Arnold and his fellow -traders of the period before the American Revolution were evidently mostly shipped to the West Indies.  This was not true of those driven away from the parishes along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu after the Revolution, for the trade from New Haven and New London to Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba steadily declined.  Lambert, writing of the trade to the United States during the first decade of the nineteenth century, stated that the French-Canadian horses were sold by the American dealers at either Boston or New York.  It is doubtful, however, if a really large proportion reached either city.  Once across the border, they were more likely to share the fate of the horses of New Hampshire, of which Jeremy Belknap wrote that "the most are continually shifted from one owner to another, by means of a set of contemptible wretches called horse-jockies."  Many of the French-Canadian horses - perhaps most of them - were sold or traded to freighters or farmers in northern New England, especially in the western part of Vermont.  Here within a few years, probably before the War of 1812 and certainly before 1820, they were interbred to a considerable extent with the nondescript local horses.  The result was the production of horses which in the eighteen-twenties and thirties were so noted for strength, endurance, and freedom from disease that the operators of the celebrated line of stages running between Boston and Portland preferred them above all others.

After the War of 1812 the trade in French-Canadian horses grew rapidly.  Droves were collected by American dealers every year, mostly at Montreal and Quebec, but also to some extent in the country districts.  So great was the demand at Quebec in the eighteen- twenties that the "multitudes of horses for sale" were a feature of the market place, and so great was the demand at Montreal that no later than 1834 a specialized horse market known sometimes as "the Tattersall's of Montreal" was established in a hotel-yard in the centre of the city.  Because horses could always be disposed of at either city to advantage, the habitants were encouraged to rear them in even greater numbers than they had done theretofore, the more so as the continued failure of the wheat crop throughout Lower Canada after 1815 left them with scarcely any other salable products.  The American dealers likewise obtained French-Canadian horses from English-speaking farmers in the Eastern Township, men who, like George Barnard, did not as a rule breed them, but bought them in different parts of the seigneuries from those who did, and conditioned them for a year or two.  As to the number of horses exported from Lower Canada, it is impossible to be precise.  Perhaps the statistics of the horses exported through St. Johns are representative.  The number cleared by way of that port between April 5 and October 10 of 1829 amounted to 245 horses and six colts; in 1848, 1849, and 1850 it amounted to 639, 1 181, and 1 125 horses respectively.  Many more were smuggled during these years, as at other times.

The French-Canadian horses in demand in the eastern United States before 1850 were of several kinds.  George Barnard, writing in 1846, declared that "yearly, ever since my recollection, the northern residents of the United States have been taking away numerous droves of the best Canadian horses, but mostly for draught and recently the fastest trotters.  Few of the pacers have gone -- obviously for two reasons; first, the Yankees do not like their gait, and second, Jean Baptiste does not care to part with his favori for either clocks or nutmegs."  Those bought as draft horses were, it should be explained, intended for use on freighting and staging lines.  While it is true, as Barnard says, that the demand for trotters for the use of city gentlemen and others who liked fast horses for pleasure purposes did not become of outstanding importance till towards 1840, it was stated in 1830 that many of the trotters then in the northern United States were of French-Canadian origin.  Adam Fergusson saw a French-Canadian trotter sold at auction at New York in 1831 for $700.  By 1840 the habitants were taking advantage of the glare ice formed on the sheltered smaller rivers when the water was backed up by ice jams at their mouths to train their horses as trotters, sometimes to be kept for their own pleasure, but increasingly with the intention of selling them to Americans at or about their maturity.  Trotters trained in this fashion were sometimes brought to public notice by entering them in the famous ice races held at Quebec, Three Rivers, Montreal, or Missisquio Bay.  It was as a result of the records they made in these races that the two best known of the French-Canadian trotters, Lady Moscow and St. Lawrence, were acquired by Americans, the former in 1846, the latter in 1848.

Besides the horses obtained in Lower Canada as roadsters or trotters, there were many bought primarily for breeding.  Indeed, the trade in stallions was so important that ultimately it had deleterious effects on the entire race of French-Canadian horses.  One factor was their relative cheapness.  This was to be accounted for through the fact, previously mentioned, that the habitants did not geld their horses.  Where all the horses were stallions, the best ones did not fetch a price greatly in excess of that asked for the mediocre ones.  Americans had in consequence their choice of the stallions of the St. Lawrence Valley.  Sometimes they bought the very best ones, but at other times they obtained merely the largest.  The other factor was the prepotency of the French-Canadian horses.  Even comparatively inferior sires had the capacity of improving the common stock.  With average or superior stallions the results were often surprising, as George Barnard pointed out.  "Many of our best, and some of our largest horses in this district [the Eastern Townships] are out of common nares of less then 15 hands; and got by Canadians of 14.  The offspring of such often grow to 15½, and sometimes to 16 hands, and are both heavy and agile.  The loss of the coarser marks of the parents in these crosses is sometimes astonishing."  Lower Canada was the only place where such stallions could be obtained, for the French-Canadian horse was almost never bred in its purity in the United States.

The beneficial result of the crossing of these French-Canadian horses on the ordinary stock of the adjacent states was universally admitted.  The French-Canadian horses, Edward Harris wrote in 1842, "are well known and highly prized in this section of the country [New Jersey], and still more to the north, where they have, undoubtedly, given that stamina and character to the horses of Vermont, George Barnard stated, "the blood is most commonly intermixed by putting mares of unknown origin, which are a cross of the Canadian race, to American horses of some blood, or at least some figure.  Such mares are kept on the farms for their excellence in the collar, and when the colt arriving at maturity, fetches a good price, the farmer in his simplicity, usually views its merits as accidental, or attributes them to the vaunted sire."

It was this kind of intermixture which evidently contributed largely to the development of the Morgan horse in Vermont.  According to the information available, the original Justin Morgan, brought from Springfield, Mass., to Randolph, Vt., in 1795, was the son of a Thoroughbred (some say a partly blooded) horse and a dam of unknown origin, which may, however, have been a half blood.  His three most famous sons, Bulrush Morgan, Sherman Morgan, and Woodbury Morgan, together supposedly the progenitors of all but a few of the horses later included in the Morgan family, had as dams respectively a French-Canadian mare and two mares of whose antecedents nothing is known.  The dams of the next generation were equally innocent of pedigree.  Though the puffers of the Morgans in the eighteen-forties and fifties ascribed their undoubted merits to the Thoroughbred blood inherited from Justin Morgan, this blood, supposing it to have been pure in the first place (which it almost certainly was not), must have become so diluted after three or four crossings on the common stock that it could no longer have had any influence.  Such Thoroughbred blood as the Morgans of mid-century did have was probably derived through the dams from sires other than those descended from Justin Morgan.  The Morgans too had probably some Cleveland Bay blood, probably some Suffolk Punch blood, and certainly a considerable amount of French-Canadian blood.  The presence of the French-Canadian blood was indicated by specific characteristics such as the excellent legs and feet and, above all, by the heavy, crimpy mane and tail.  The champions of the Morgans, foremost among them D.C. Linsley, were, however, reluctant to admit any French-Canadian influence in their favourites, preferring to derive their merits from the Thoroughbreds, as already noted.  As one Vermonter wrote long afterwards, "there was [in the eighteen-forties and fifties] a terrible fear the Morgan horse would be found to have some French blood in him."

Till after the British Conquest, as has already been mentioned, the French-Canadian horses of the St. Lawrence Valley were bred generation after generation without any admixture with foreign horses.  After the Conquest this was no longer true.  Horses were imported from the British Isles, first by the army officers at Quebec and Montreal, and then by moneyed settlers, and to an even greater extent from the United States.  These horses were crossed on the French-Canadian stock, and therefore contributed to the development of what were regarded as new and distinctive varieties of horses within Lower Canada, as well as to a somewhat general mongrelization of the entire horse population.