While this exploration of De Soto seems to furnish a breeding basis of sufficient breadth to account for all the wild horses that have appeared on this continent, there is another consideration that we must not overlook, and that is the inborn tendency of the domestic horse to become wild when in wild associations. By turning to the chapter on the colony of Virginia you will see that there were many wild horses there at the beginning of the last century. On the frontiers, near the habitat of wild horses, they became a great nuisance to the settlers in “coaxing” away their domestic horses and making them as wild as the wildest. These accretions to their strength from the domestic horse have been going on for generations, and thus the wild horse became conglomerate in the elements of his blood, with the Spanish traits still predominant. Fifty or a hundred years ago the pens of many writers were employed in idealizing “The Wild Horse of the Desert.” He was made the leading figure in many a romance, and the hero of many a triumph. Tom Thumb, the great trotter that was taken to England, astonished all the world with his speed and his endurance, and, following the fashion of the day, he was represented to have been caught wild on the Western plains. For many years the wild horse was the “fad” of American writers, just as the Arabian was of English writers, and the writers on one side were just about as far from intelligence and truth as those on the other. When, forty years ago, great droves of the half-breeds, Mustangs, were brought from the plains to the border prairie States, seeking a market, the scales began to drop from the eyes of the worshipers of the wild horse. They were homely little brutes, and they were as tough as whit-leather. But the countless multitudes that roamed at will over their grazing grounds, making the earth tremble when they moved, have dwindled down to a few insignificant bands, and the whole glamour around the wild horse of the desert has vanished. CHAPTER XVII. MESSENGER AND HIS ANCESTORS. Messenger the greatest of all trotting progenitors—Record of pedigrees in English Stud Book—Pedigrees made from unreliable sources—Messenger’s right male line examined—Flying Guilders’ “mile in a minute”—Blaze short of being thoroughbred—Sampson, a good race horse—His size; short in his breeding—Engineer short also—Mambrino was a race horse with at least two pacing crosses: distinguished only as a progenitor of coach horses and fast trotters—Messenger’s dam cannot be traced nor identified— Among all the horses claiming to be thoroughbred he is the only one that founded a family of trotters—This fact conceded by eminent writers in attempting to find others.