He was a horse with good and bad points of conformation, but it turned out that the good ones were very useful and the bad ones didn’t matter at all. Little Sorrel proved to be a horse of remarkable soundness and endurance, despite his sloping croup, upright pasterns, and other flaws.
The question of beauty apparently didn’t matter to either John Harman, who made the initial selection, or Thomas Jackson, who purchased and kept the little horse. Both must have realized that the horse wasn’t classically handsome and they didn’t care. Or perhaps they realized that he was perfectly good looking for what he was—a pacing horse of traditional American conformation. He was built exactly as he should have been to be a good pacer. Little Sorrel’s pacing gait was noted by almost everyone who wrote about him. His gait was one of the reasons Jackson liked the red horse so much and decided against giving him to his wife.
The trot is a natural gait of most horses and almost all other four-legged animals. It’s the intermediate gait between the walk and the canter in horses, or the walk and the run in other species. Members of a few species, the camel for one, always use a pace when they go faster than a walk but not quite as fast as a run. This gait is sometimes called an amble, although that term is usually reserved for a similar but distinct four-beat gait.
Three nineteenth-century harness racehorses demonstrating the pacing gait.
Library of Congress
In horses, the pacing gait has been used by choice by a certain percentage of animals throughout recorded history. In this method of locomotion, the horse’s legs on the same side of the body move forward and backward at the same time. In a trot, the legs at each corner of the body move forward and backward in unison—right rear and left front, right front and left rear, and so on. French cave paintings show horses pacing, as do medieval European woodcuts. The gait has been around for as long as people have used horses.
Horse breeders have known almost as long that there’s a genetic component to pacing. Offspring of pacing horses usually—but not always—pace, and offspring of trotters usually—but again not always—trot. That knowledge has allowed breeders to select for the desired gait. Centuries ago Europeans liked pacing horses for riding because it felt like rocking in a cradle to ride a pacer at speed. As roads improved, trotters became dominant because of the belief that trotting led to a more comfortable ride for people in wagons or carriages.
Today most horses trot, but many still pace, and the gait is desirable and selected for in several horse breeds. In Standardbred racing, pacers account for 80 percent of the harness racehorses in North America. They are faster than trotters, stay on the correct gait more consistently, and are more appreciated by bettors. The percentage of pacing racehorses is lower in the rest of the world.
There are horse breeds that feature pacing or ambling-like gaits, including the Tennessee Walking Horse, the American Saddlebred, the Paso Fino and other South American breeds, the Missouri Foxtrotter, the Icelandic Pony, and others. Most of these horses don’t precisely pace. Instead, they have been bred and trained to use specialty gaits that are similar, usually featuring four separate and distinct footfalls rather than the unison steps that a true pacer employs.
Today we know why some horses pace. Swedish scientists have discovered a genetic mutation that appears in the genomes of all pacing horses. The gene, DMRT3, is now called the “gait keeper” and beyond question Little Sorrel possessed it. Scientists theorize that the gene resulted from a spontaneous mutation in an ancient equine ancestor and has been passed down through the centuries.
Oddly, trotting Standardbreds also possess the mutation, and scientists believe that in trotters it inhibits the tendency to break from the trot to the gallop, an important quality for harness racehorses since a break of gait requires the horse to be pulled to the back of the field. The mutation is also present in the genomes of members of the other so-called gaited breeds who exhibit pacing-like gaits.
There’s a good reason that Little Sorrel and almost all modern harness racehorses possess the pacing gene. Most of today’s gaited breeds in North America descend from a unique American horse breed. Little Sorrel appeared to have been so closely descended that he should probably be considered a member or near-member of that breed, the mysterious and marvelous Narragansett Pacer.
The Narragansett Pacer, now gone, was North America’s first true horse breed. Although by the second half of the seventeenth century the mustang had already developed in the Spanish southwest, and horsemen in the southern colonies were breeding horses good at quarter-mile racing, these were types rather than breeds. The Narragansett did qualify as a breed well before 1700 since individuals could be chosen for specific physical characteristics, including appearance, and they almost invariably produced offspring that possessed precisely those same characteristics.
The three most obvious and most often reported characteristics of the Narragansett Pacer were color, gait, and size. The pure Narragansetts were invariably chestnut, they consistently paced rather than trotted, and they were almost always reported as being small. Other traits became known with use. Narragansetts were hardy, tireless, calm, and easy to keep. Journal after journal reported them as being able to travel incredibly long distances without discomfort.
The breed was named for the region where they first gained attention. The “Narragansett Country” was the southern half of what became Rhode Island, an area inhabited by the Narragansett Indians at the time of European contact. This tribe of Native Americans had no horses at contact, but their name lived on with the superb little pacing horses developed on farmland that had been their hunting territory.
The ancestry of the Narragansett Pacer is unknown. Theories about its origin abound, most of them contradictory and some of them much more grand than the truth. It’s similar to literary scholars refusing to believe that a man of an ordinary background like William Shakespeare could have produced some of the most sublime works of the English language.
The Narragansett Pacer suffered from the same skepticism. The superb animal must have sprung from splendid roots, so the theory developed that an Andalusian stallion was lost in the shipwreck of a Spanish galleon off the Rhode Island coast early in the eighteenth century. The stallion, renamed Old Snip, swam ashore and produced a line of fine pacing horses that populated the farms of Rhode Island. An alternative story had Old Snip swimming away from coastal Spain or North Africa and being picked up by a Rhode Island–based sailing ship.
There are problems with the theory, including the fact that records exist of horses that were almost certainly Narragansett Pacers well before the supposed shipwreck or rescue. What’s more, Andalusians are big and muscular, seldom chestnut, don’t possess sloping croups, and primarily trot rather than pace. Even if some pacing blood had made its way into the Andalusian gene pool, it’s almost certainly untrue that an Andalusian stallion was the progenitor of the Narragansett Pacer. But much older Spanish and Portuguese genes may have contributed in a more roundabout way.
What is definitely true is that the man who supposedly found Old Snip was an enthusiastic user and breeder of Narragansetts. He was William Robinson, born in Rhode Island in 1691 and one of the largest landowners in New England. Robinson was politically connected, serving nine terms as a member of the colonial assembly of Rhode Island and two as deputy governor. But Robinson was at heart a farmer, although a very rich one.
Robinson didn’t create the Narragansett Pacer but rather used, refined, and promoted it. The breed most likely grew from a shipment of livestock consigned to one of the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Francis Higginson brought nearly two hundred head of livestock, including sixty mares and stallions from his native Leicestershire, in 1629. These were saddle horses of unrecorded type and breed. The Irish Hobby and the related Scottish Galloway, whose ancestors first appeared in Britain in the thirteenth century, were popular for saddle use throughout the British Isl
es at the time, and the Higginson consignment certainly included horses similar to them.
These two extinct breeds were alike: small horses that developed from a cross of native British and imported Spanish bloodlines. The little horses paced rather than trotted and they featured physical characteristics typical of all pacers, including high withers and a sloping croup. They were said to be of all solid horse colors, including chestnut.
Robinson and other Rhode Island enthusiasts loved the Narragansett Pacers that descended from these imports, with the modest addition of other blood. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the pacers were almost exclusively chestnut. Only written descriptions remain of the remarkable little horses. There was no photography while the pacers prospered, and no positively identified contemporary paintings have been discovered.
Much of what we know of their appearance we owe to Dr. James McSparran, whose career nearly paralleled that of the Scots-Irish racing pastor of Virginia, John Hindman. Born in Ireland of Scottish parents, McSparran came to Rhode Island in 1718 as a Presbyterian minister, returned to England to take Anglican orders, then came back to America, where he remained for thirty-six years. He was a great admirer of the Narragansett Pacer, whose glory days coincided with his tenure as minister of St. Paul’s Church of Narragansett. In 1752 his America Dissected, Being a Full and True Account of the American Colonies gave people in the British Isles an idea of the remarkable little pacing horse they had been hearing about.
Reverend James McSparran, admirer of Narragansett Pacers.
Updike, History of the Episcopal Church In Narragansett, Rhode-Island, 1847
It wasn’t unusual, McSparran wrote, to see people ride “ten, twenty, thirty, and more miles, to church.” They had just the transportation to do it easily.
“They have plenty of a small sort of horses, the best in the world, like the little Scotch Galloways,” he wrote, “and ’tis no extraordinary journey to ride from sixty to seventy miles, or more, in a day.” He went on to describe their accomplishments.
“They are remarkable for fleetness and swift pacing, and I have seen some of them pace a mile in little more than two minutes, a good deal less than three,” McSparran said of these little chestnut horses. He believed the pacers to be attractive, although other writers of the era referred to their own horses as “hideously ugly” or having “no beauty.”
McSparran’s descriptions, as well as others from the eighteenth century, could be of Little Sorrel. He was small, chestnut, possessed high withers and a sloping croup, and could pace remarkably fast.
Artillerist William Thomas Pogue, who fought with Stonewall Jackson in nearly a dozen battles, was fascinated with Jackson’s horse. “Little Sorrel was a pacer and could make a mile in about 2-40,” Pogue wrote. “Whenever we saw him it was at this tremendous stride or in a slow lazy walk.” Pogue used racing shorthand for the mile time, meaning that Little Sorrel could pace a mile in two minutes and forty seconds, just about what McSparran said Narragansett Pacers could do a century earlier.
William Robinson and the other Rhode Island landowners used their Pacers to survey their massive plantations because they found the little horses tireless as well as comfortable. They probably called on their “slow lazy walk” for the farm work. The landowners also raced their pacers under saddle on beach courses along the Atlantic Ocean, sent them south to Virginia to compete in intercolonial races, and exported them to the Caribbean, where there was an insatiable demand for the hardy little animals. Robinson and his fellow lovers of Narragansett Pacers also sold them north, and the breed spread through Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and into Canada.
The new owners loved them too, finding them so useful that they contributed to the destruction of the breed. Narragansett mares crossed particularly well with a sturdy bay stallion of largely Thoroughbred ancestry who was offered at stud in Vermont at the turn of the nineteenth century. This stallion was known as the Morgan horse for his owner, a singing teacher named Justin Morgan.
The offspring of the Morgan horse and pacing mares mostly trotted and, after a few generations, the pace was bred right out of most of them, as were tendencies toward the sloping croup, high withers, and unusually small size. The chestnut color popped up occasionally, but the descendants of the Morgan horse were mostly bright bay, reddish horses with black mane and tail.
Throughout New England, road improvement made carriages and wagons practical, and stronger trotting horses were more suitable for harness work than little pacing ones were. Narragansett Pacers were used at stud, but they were invariably crossed with larger, primarily trotting, horses.
By 1800 pureblooded Narragansett Pacers were mostly gone and horsemen knew they had lost something special. The fact that several of the last pure- or nearly pureblood Narragansett Pacers were reported in the Hartford, Connecticut, area makes one of the most intriguing stories about Little Sorrel’s origin a little more possible.
The Wadsworth family of Hartford used Narragansetts into the late eighteenth century, with Jeremiah Wadsworth, best known as George Washington’s chief commissary during the Revolutionary War, offering a pacer named Whirligig for stud service in the 1780s. Wadsworth and others also offered the services of sons of Whirligig, including the handsome Young Rainbow, advertised as being seven-eighths Narragansett Pacer and one-eighth Arabian.
By 1787 the owner of the supposedly pureblooded Narragansett stallion Free and Easy, standing at stud in East Windsor, Connecticut, urged owners of Narragansett mares to “bring them that the breed so valuable may not be lost.” In 1793, the owner of King Philip, “supposed to be the only one in the world of the Narragansett breed unmixed,” stood in Berlin, Connecticut, but it was already too late. King Philip was a bright bay and must have had the blood of another breed in his veins.
All these Narragansett stallions, each mentioned as being one of the few or the only one left, served their stud careers within a twenty-mile radius of each other and of Somers, a small Connecticut town northeast of Hartford. Somers, a rural village of fifteen hundred people in 1850, today celebrates itself as the birthplace of Little Sorrel.
Somers, Connecticut, drawn four years before Little Sorrel was foaled.
John Warner Barber, Connecticut Historical Collections
In Somers the story is accepted without question, but it’s difficult to pin down its origin and it’s even harder to determine the truth. The story goes back a very long way and was in circulation while many of the principal characters were still living and able to refute it if they chose to. Somers’s location, so close to the last few Narragansett stallions, was a place where a horse of the appearance and characteristics of Little Sorrel might well be expected to appear.
The story of Little Sorrel and Somers traces to a farmer by the name of Randolph Fuller, born in the town in 1827. Fuller’s farm lay along the west side of Springfield Road, a well-traveled route between Somers and Springfield, Massachusetts. Directly across the road from the Fuller farm was property owned by Noah Chapin Collins, a sawmill operator who bred and owned horses and was active with the local Four Town Agricultural Fair. Fuller’s mother and Collins’s wife were sisters, but the two men were near contemporaries, with Fuller just thirteen years younger than Collins. Randolph Fuller and Noah Collins knew each other well both because of family ties and because they were near neighbors. Both bred horses and both competed with those horses at local fairs.
It’s not clear when Fuller began telling a story of how Noah Collins bred Stonewall Jackson’s Little Sorrel. Collins died in 1871, eight years after Jackson’s death, but Fuller lived on until 1901. At some point, he gave details of the story of Little Sorrel’s origin to Erwin Daniel Avery, a man who later took over Fuller’s house and farm. Avery was born in 1845 and would have been an adult, twenty-six years old, at the time of Collins’s death. In so small a town they would certainly have known each other.
> From the written account left by Avery, the story appears to have come from Fuller and not from Collins himself. But Collins’s widow, Elvira, Randolph Fuller’s aunt, lived on until 1882 and at least one of Noah’s children lived into the twentieth century. There was plenty of opportunity for members of the Collins family to contradict the story being told by their neighbor Randolph Fuller. None did.
In addition to the name of the breeder, Fuller gave another morsel of information to Avery—that Little Sorrel’s original name was American Traveler. Noah Collins was indeed once involved with a horse named American Traveler, who was reported to be the sire of a stallion that Collins stood at stud in Somers, presumably in the ten-year period between the start of the Civil War and his death. That stallion was named Ben Butler, probably for the Union general. Ben Butler was advertised as a seventeen-hand bay horse, an unlikely son of a chestnut of less than fifteen hands. If Little Sorrel’s original name was indeed American Traveler, he probably shared that name with Ben Butler’s sire. Names were so often reused during the nineteenth century that it was possible that there were two American Travelers in the same area a few years apart. The name Traveler was common for horses of all breeds in all parts of the country at the time. In addition, Narragansett Pacers were sometimes called Narragansett Travelers, either for their way of going or to identify a line of pacers descending from a horse named Traveler.
Somers’s claim to Little Sorrel is on a historical marker in the center of town.
author
The possibility that Noah Collins bred and owned the horse that became Little Sorrel has another point of support. The key figure in this part of the story is Noah Collins’s brother, William Oliver Collins, who made his way from Somers to Ohio in 1833. William joined a long line of ambitious young Connecticut men making that trip. A strip of northern Ohio had been Connecticut’s Western Reserve, land claimed during colonial times as part of the Connecticut Colony. After the American Revolution, Connecticut and other states relinquished their western claims, but there were private claims that lured Connecticut people west, and the attraction of a “western Connecticut” remained.
Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel Page 6