WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT FIGURE
distributed in space. It is obvious that Figure’s sire and dam could not have belonged to breeds which did not exist or which are highly unlikely to have been available to common people like Justin Morgan in Colonial New England.
Mapping the locations and movements of livestock can tell us which breeds, or even individual horses, are most likely to have been ancestral. In the previous installment of this series, I provided this zoogeographical information to the reader: To summarize, the “light” breeds that were available in colonial New England include the Narragansett Pacer; Hobbies imported from England or, more commonly, from Virginia; Paso-related horses (“Jamaica horses”) imported from the Caribbean; crosses of these with the Narragansett Pacer (“Surinam horses”); Canadian horses of Breton-Norman extraction; and a very few Thoroughbreds. There were no Arabian horses whatsoever in the country at the time. Names such as “Dey of Algiers,” “Arabian Ranger” and “Lindsay’s Arabian” were given to part-Thoroughbred horses in America for precisely the same reason that many contemporary English horses of mostly Turkmene or Turkmene-Barb extraction were given Oriental-sounding names: because doing so increased the horse’s marketable value. Today’s breed fanciers and prospective buyers are wise to keep this in mind when attempting to discern what is reasonable and probable from what is downright impossible.
The Morgan horse breed takes its name from Justin Morgan, an 18th-century music teacher, entrepreneur and sometime hardscrabble farmer who lived in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and later in Randolph, Vermont.
Justin Morgan, the man, is remembered as a composer of church hymns--and for being the first known owner of the bay stallion called Figure, later known as “the Justin Morgan horse.” The colt, born in 1789, lived to be 32 years old, finally---according to the testimony of local residents who were interviewed years later---dying, as a forgotten pensioner, of an untreated kickwound in the back pasture of a Vermont farmstead. To avoid the circular reasoning criticized above by Herbert, we must keep in mind that Figure’s value as a “progenitor” or “foundation stallion” was appreciated only in hindsight. Fully 100 years elapsed after his death before a Morgan horse registry was established, and even the term “Morgan” as the name of a particular stamp of horse did not come into use until the middle of the 19th century.
By compiling reports from elderly people who claimed to have seen Figure as children or teenagers, and by digging up old newspaper advertisements, Linsley formulated a description of the stallion which is as close to accurate as we are ever likely to get: “[He] was about 14 hands high and weighed about 950 pounds. His color was dark bay with black legs, mane, and tail. He had no white hairs upon him. His mane and tail were coarse and heavy, but not so massive as has sometimes been described; the hair of both was straight and not inclined to curl. His head was good, not extremely small, but lean and bony, the face straight, forehead broad, ears small and very fine, but set rather wide apart. His eyes were medium size, very dark and prominent, and showed no white [sclera]. His nostrils were very large, the muzzle small, the lips close and firm.