The people of the Plymouth plantation were very slow in providing themselves with horses, and it was not till after 1632 that they had any. It is hard to conceive of a colony like that of Massachusetts Bay living and flourishing for a period of, say, eighty years without a newspaper, and yet such is the fact. The Boston _News-Letter_, the first newspaper, so called, in this country, was established May 29, 1704, and it lived many years. The early colonial newspapers, from one end of the land to the other, were anything and everything but newspapers, as we understand the meaning of the title in our day. If a boy fell off a building in London and broke his leg, six weeks before, it was liable to appear as an item of “news” in the local American newspaper, but if the same accident happened the week before, in a neighboring town, it was never mentioned. The name “newspaper” attached to such publications was a fraud.
The following is a copy of the first horse advertisement ever published in this country, and for that reason it is worthy of preservation. It was taken from the Boston _News-Letter_ of November 19, 1705:
“Strayed from Mr. John Wilson of Braintree, at Mr. Havens’ in Kingston, in Narragansett, about a fortnight ago, a sorrel mare, low stature, four white feet, a white face, shod all round, her near ear tore, has a long white tail and mane. Whoever will give any intelligence of her ... will be sufficiently rewarded.”
As this was in the period when the Narragansett pacers had reached their greatest fame, we might argue that this mare had been sent down to Kingston from Braintree, Massachusetts, to be wintered and to be bred in the spring to some famous horse in Kingston, the very center of the horse-breeding interests of that day.
Under the date of June 17, 1706, I find a bay horse advertised as “strayed or stolen: fourteen hands high, hardly possible to make him gallop,” and October 28, 1706, a black gelding “fourteen hands high, paces, trots, and gallops.” Then in the years 1731 and 1732 I find a “black mare fourteen and three-quarter hands, trots and paces;” a “black horse twelve hands,” no gait given; “black gelding, fourteen hands, races, trots, and gallops;” “bay horse large, good pacer;” “roan mare, fourteen hands, paces and trots.” But the field which I specially gleaned was for the years 1756-59, where I found the average height was fourteen hands one inch, the data including eight pacers and two trotters. This, I think, may be taken as fairly representative of the size and habit of action of Massachusetts horses in the first half of the eighteenth century.