The history of the trotting horse began with Messenger, a gray thoroughbred foaled in 1780, and imported from England to America in May, 1788. He was royally bred for his time, being by Mambrino, son of Engineer, and through both sire and dam he traced to the famous Godolphin Arabian. An old description of him says he was 15-3/4 hands high, with “a large, long head, rather short, straight neck, with wind-pipe and nostrils nearly twice as large as ordinary; low withers, shoulders somewhat upright, but deep and strong; powerful loins and quarters; hocks and knees unusually large, and below them limbs of medium size, but flat and clean and, whether at rest or in motion, always in perfect position.” With this beginning, in 1822, a Norfolk trotter called Bellfounder, who had trotted two miles in six minutes, and had challenged all England to a trot, was imported. It was his daughter in which the strains of Messenger met that produced Hambletonian 10, the head of the trotting type in America, the first great trotting sire of the world, and through him perpetuated by his great sons, such as Geo. Wilkes, Electioneer, Dictator, and their descendants. Through all these years the trotting record has gradually been reduced, first by one great trotter and then another, beginning with the first queen of the trotting turf, Lady Suffolk, and ending with that superb little thing of fire and speed and sweetness, Lou Dillon. Literally, in that century of progress millions of dollars have been spent, not only by thousands of small breeders, but by such financial magnates and great breeders as Vanderbilt, Sanford, Bonner, Backman, Alexander, Forbes, Lawson and others, chiefly in New York, New England, Kentucky and California. The effect of all this was to create that splendid race of trotters now known all over the world, and to produce a horse capable of trotting a mile in two minutes or better. But even before the advent of Messenger there had developed in the eastern coast of the Colonies, chiefly in Delaware and Rhode Island, a family of extremely fast pacers known as the Narragansetts, an account of which will be seen a few chapters further on. These horses were small, but game, docile, excellent under the saddle, and used almost exclusively for travel in those early days of pioneer roads. Their speed was marvelous, if the testimony of Rev. Dr. McSparrow, 1721, an English minister who was stationed in the Colonies, may be accepted as proof. This reverend gentleman, writing to a friend in England says that he has seen them pace in races under saddle, going a mile in “a little less than two and a good deal better than three minutes.”