Once when General Wadsworth had a match at mile heats, best three in five, he drove his horse ninety-eight miles the day before the race, rather than pay forfeit, and then won the race, one heat being trotted in 2.35. This was in 1847. Consider the clumsy shoes, the heavy sulkies, and other impedimenta of that time, in comparison with the wire-like plates, ball-bearing, pneumatic-tired sulkies, and cobweb-like harness of to-day, and decide whether even the most phenomenal of our trotters is better than that. Another performance shows the stoutness of heart of this great horse. General Wadsworth needed a doctor for his sister. Henry Clay was harnessed to a two-seated wagon, did the journey from Geneseo to Rochester, thirty-eight miles, and then back again, the whole seventy-six miles being covered in less than five hours. A horse that could do that was worthy to found a family. He did this through his son, Black Douglas, his grandson, Cassius M. Clay, and his grandson, George M. Patchen. His female descendants are conspicuous in the trotting-horse pedigrees, the most conspicuous among them being Green Mountain Maid, the dam of Electioneer, and conceded by the Standard Bred Trotter element to be the greatest dam in American horse history. She was got by Harry Clay,[7] a great grandson of the founder of the family. Footnote 7: It has been said that the Star mare, the dam of Dexter, was served both by Rysdyk’s Hambletonian and Harry Clay the spring before Dexter’s birth, and that it is more likely that Harry Clay was the sire of Dexter because of Dexter’s resemblance to the Clays rather than the Hambletonians, and also because of his stoutness of heart. As Dexter was a gelding and incapable of leaving progeny this question is more interesting than important. I have no opinion in the matter, but as I am convinced of the general inaccuracy of the records of the day, I am not at all prepared to believe that Dexter’s pedigree as put in the books is accurate. About the time he became famous the Hambletonian party was numerous and powerful and by no means scrupulous in claiming everything in sight. The dam of the trotting stallion George Wilkes was also said to be by Henry Clay. The Hambletonian advocates—George Wilkes was sired by Hambletonian—were so bitter in their opposition to the Clay blood, that they refused to accept this and preferred that the breeding of George Wilkes’ dam should be set down as unknown. I have read a good deal that has been written on the subject and can only say that the statements pro and con are equally unconvincing and only illustrate over again the utter untrustworthiness of the early records, together with the partizan discourtesy of the disputants.