Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/248

 *try in France. They appeared to me still worse in Georgia and Upper Carolina. In short, I must say that throughout the United States there is not a single draught-horse that can be in any wise compared with the poorest race of horses that I have seen in England. This is an assertion which many Americans may probably not believe, but still it is correct.

Many individuals profess to treat sick horses, but none of them have any regular notions of the veterinary {189} art; an art which would be so necessary in a breeding country, and which has, within these few years, acquired so high a degree of perfection in England and France.

In Kentucky, as well as in the southern states, the horses are generally fed with Indian corn. Its nutritive quality is esteemed double to that of oats; notwithstanding sometimes they are mixed together. In this state horses are not limited as to food. In most of the plantations the manger is filled with corn, they eat of it when they please, leave the stable to go to grass, and return at pleasure to feed on the Indian wheat. The stables are nothing but log-houses, where the light penetrates on all sides, the interval that separates the trunks of the trees with which they are constructed not being filled up with clay.

The southern states, and in particular South Carolina, are the principal places destined for the sale of Kentucky horses. They are taken there in droves of fifteen, twenty and thirty at a time, in the early part of winter, an epoch when the most business is transacted at Carolina, and when the drivers are in no fear of the yellow fever, of which the inhabitants of the interior have the greatest apprehension. {190} They usually take eighteen or twenty days to go from Lexinton to Charleston. This distance, which is about seven hundred miles, makes a