Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses

I have, to be honest, not a lot to report right now on my research. I'm in a reading-and-thinking stage, in which I'm taking in large quantities of information and and taking lots of notes - mostly about other things to find, or look at.

I've gotten about 100 pages into Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses, which was the first concerted effort to document and catalogue the history of the original Morgan, Figure, and to properly establish the Morgan horse as a breed.



It's an interesting thing: Linsley spends almost a hundred pages setting up his book, by way of a world tour through different breeds of horses, then an American tour of the types of horses that are used in various regions of the country. He spends a long time describing the type of work a horse in American ought to be able to do, and then he spends pages and pages detailing what he thinks is an objectively perfect conformation for that work. In utterly exhausting detail.

At the end of that - after he has defined what makes a breed and then described his ideal horse - he concludes that Morgans fit all these characteristics. Then he spends a dozen pages or so utterly trashing one or two people who happen to have evaluated Morgans and not been wild about them.

Only then is he ready to begin to discuss the origins of the breed, which he does in his trademark exhausting manner. On that, more later.

Linsley's book is like so many others about the Morgan breed. It has a thesis. He sets out to prove that Morgan horses are a distinct, valued breed, and that they are moreover the best possible American breed. He fuses the work he is doing in trying to establish Morgans as a respected breed with a sense of regional (Vermont) and national (American) identity.

He is not the first, nor will he be the last, writer to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible that he set up a storyline for writing about the Morgan that is still very much in play today, both in fiction and nonfiction writing about the Morgan horse.