In that grand old repository of ancient, curious, and valuable things relating to colonial affairs, the New York Historical Society, to which I am greatly indebted, I found a file of the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, commencing with the year 1729, published by “B. Franklin, printer.” In that day the term “editor” or “reporter” was not known in the vocabulary of any well-regulated newspaper office, and for anything of a local character you had to look in the advertising columns. To these I resorted, as usual, and they presented results that were a great surprise to me. Pennsylvania has long been famous for the production of great massive draft horses, and before the days of railroads just suited, with six or eight of them in a team, for the transportation of freights from the seaboard to the Ohio River. This was a great business at the beginning of this century and for forty or fifty years afterward. The fame of those great teams, the great wagons and the great loads they hauled over the mountains, spread far and wide, and as a special designation that went with them they were called Conestoga horses, and the wagons were called Conestoga wagons, named after a creek in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where many large horses were bred. There was no particular line of blood to be followed, for a large horse bred west of the mountains was just as certainly a Conestoga as though he had been bred in Lancaster County. The Conestoga was simply the horse that was best suited for a big team with an enormous load, and he varied in size from sixteen and one-half to eighteen hands in height and from one thousand six hundred to one thousand nine hundred pounds in weight. These measurements he reached by breeding for the one purpose of strength and weight. It is safe to conclude that in the latter part of the last century breeding animals of large size were brought over the water, for we can hardly conceive of their being descended from the little pacers preceding them only fifty or sixty years.