Orange County was rich in the Arab and Barb blood of the daughters and granddaughters of that great and unbeatable trotting horse, Andrew Jackson. No stallion ever had a better chance, and it was almost impossible that there should not have been good horses among his get. And there were. But the bad blood of his ancestry, sire and grandsire being worthless degenerates, together with the utterly unmixable Conestoga blood in his grandam, have been continually cropping out in his progeny—for faults more readily reappear than perfections—until now, when it must be acknowledged that the boasted horse type of which he is said to be the founder is no type at all. Footnote 6: I had a friend who was with the Confederate Cavalry when Lee invaded Pennsylvania to meet defeat at Gettysburg. He told me that the sleek, large Conestoga horses that were abundant in the section traversed were too tempting to be neglected, so many of the cavalry men abandoned their lean and battle scarred mounts and replaced them with the Conestogas. Before they reached the Potomac on their retreat southward, these cold blooded draft horses were completely used up and the soldiers swore at themselves for their folly in making the exchanges. The Conestogas are good draft horses and serviceable on farms where no quick work is required, but they are totally lacking in speed and the courage and stamina which speed requires. A more impossible cross than that between a Conestoga and a Thoroughbred could hardly be imagined. When the pedigree manipulators were manufacturing this line of descent for Rysdyk’s Hambletonian, Alexander Campbell, of Bull’s Head, was offered a thousand dollars to certify to the stated pedigree of the Charles Kent mare. Campbell declined, and ordered the Hambletonian emissaries out of his office. Here is another rather amusing evidence of the careful way in which the pedigree of Hambletonian was bolstered up. There was no such horse as Bishop’s Hambletonian. The horse alluded to was Alexander Hamilton, or Bishop’s Hamiltonian. Nobody ever thought of calling a Hamiltonian a Hambletonian until old Bill Rysdyk did it, simply because he was not gifted in the art of spelling. But this did not bother the record makers. They simply misspelled the name of the elder horse. Surely old Bill Rysdyk laid a spell on the gentlemen of the press, and he kept it to the end as his horse, shaped like a cart horse, rather than one filled with high blood, was a great money-maker in the stud. His earnings by the record were $184,725.