Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 4.djvu/533

 member of the State Agricultural Society and in 1856 was elected secretary and for six years was the chief official in the management of the State Fairs. He was frequently called upon for information relating to pedigrees of domestic animals and the need of an authority on the pedigrees of horses was constantly forced upon his attention. There were herd books for the registration of cattle in those days, but no stud book where the pedigrees of any breed of horses could be found recorded. In 1856 Mr. Wallace began collecting information with the ultimate purpose of publishing a stud book of thoroughbred horses. The thoroughbred, or British racehorse, was then here, as in England, the only horse of literature, though the Morgans and the fast trotting horses had begun to attract attention. From the files of the oldest American sporting journals containing the records of racing and from old turfmen and breeders and from other sources of information Mr. Wallace gleaned a great mass of pedigrees, which he published in 1867 in “Wallace's American Stud Book.” While compiling the thoroughbred pedigrees Mr. Wallace gathered such information as he found about the breeding and records of trotting horses, and these he arranged as a supplement to his work on the running horse. This supplement contained all horses that have trotted in public in 2.40 or better and many of their progenitors and descendants with all that is known of their blood. It was a very meager work covering considerably less than one hundred pages and containing in many instances only the names, color and record of the horse registered. That the editor was pretty well satisfied with it is indicated by a sentence in the introduction: “It is believed that this compilation of trotting horses, embracing more than seven hundred animals, is very nearly perfect, but it is not claimed to be entirely so.” Meager and imperfect as it is now known to have been, this trotting supplement was more used and appreciated than was the main stud book, and soon after its publication Mr. Wallace turned his undivided attention to this new field—the history and literature of the American trotting horse. The first volume of “Wallace's American Trotting Register” was published in 1871. It represented years of untiring labor, travel through all parts of the United States and personal investigation of hundreds of important pedigrees which before had been altogether unknown, or in hopeless confusion. The second volume was published in 1874 and in 1875 Mr. Wallace removed to New York City, where he established Wallaces Monthly, a magazine devoted to the trotting horse. Later he published “Wallace's Year Book,” a statistical work containing reports of all races trotted or paced in the United States and Canada, together with elaborate tables of pedigrees and records designed to bring out the relative merits of the different families of trotting horses. Mr. Wallace continued the publication of the Register, the Monthly and the Year Book until 1891, when a controversy between him and several wealthy and influential breeders, concerning the pedigree of the famous trotting mare Sunol,