The colony of Rhode Island was planted by Roger Williams and his followers in 1636, and the first patent giving it a legal existence was obtained 1647. It was an offshoot from Massachusetts and a protest against the intolerance of that colony in religious affairs. For several years I made renewed and persistent efforts to discover whether in the early colonial period Rhode Island had ever imported any horses from foreign countries, and after exhausting every source of recorded information, I have not been able to find a single intimation of such importation. It is evident, therefore, that the famous Narragansett pacer is simply the result of carefully selecting and breeding from the best and the fastest of the descendants of the English pacers, to be found everywhere in the colony of Massachusetts. The superiority of the Narragansett pacer over all others of his kind seemed to suggest the probability that he must have possessed blood that was superior to all others, and to supply this “want,” a Rhode Islander advanced the claim that his grandfather had imported the original stock from Spain. Unfortunately for this “claim” there were two difficulties in the way of accepting it. First, there were no pacers in Spain, and second, the Narragansett pacers were famous for their speed and value before the grandfather was born, or at least before he was out of his swaddling clothes. The horse interests of Rhode Island seem to have been active and successful from the very founding of the colony, and the fame of her pacers extended to all the American colonies at a very early day. When the authorities made their report to the Board of Trade at London, in 1690, showing what they had produced and where and how they had disposed of their surplus, they place horses at the head of their products and state that they are shipped to all the English colonies on the American coast. This statement is sustained by corresponding facts that are known in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Trading with the French colonies in Canada was rigorously prohibited, but it is quite probable that many a good pacing horse found his way to the St. Lawrence in exchange for pelts and furs. But, as the Narragansett and the pacer generally will be fully considered in another part of this volume, the reader is referred to the chapters wholly devoted to those topics.