Best Laid Plans

I arrived at Middlebury on Monday...two hours late for the lecture on Joseph Battell that I had intended to see. I swore, a lot, and stomped around a bit. Then I spent a few minutes drawing smiley faces on the boards of friends in the history department (professors have these white boards outside their doors now...kids these days!) and settled down to read Eleanor Waring Burnham's Justin Morgan: Founder of His Race. I might as well get some work done now that I'd driven an hour away from home.

The more I think about this project - and the more secondary sources I read, especially those from the 20th century - the more I think that this is in part a twofold story to tell. There's the history of the actual horse, Figure, the colt that Justin Morgan brought to Vermont in 1792, and who died in a field in Chelsea, VT in 1821.

Then there's the story of the legend: Figure, the "founder of his race," the "Morgan horse," who pulled logs no other horse could budge, who beat the best Thoroughbreds in America, who went tirelessly from job to job, and who had a near-magical ability to sire horses who were his image. That story is built, layer by layer, through hearsay and reporting and fiction. Sometimes there is an historical basis for a story. Sometimes it's made up out of whole cloth, as the story about Figure as James Monroe's parade mount seems to have been.

Burnham's book is a really seminal text for the second story. There's so much to unpack there; thick sentimentality, turn-of-the-century ideas about proper American patriotism, the importance of origin stories, the anthropomorphism of equine characters that leads in a straight line to Black Beauty, mythology-within-mythology, and more gender politics than you can shake a stick at.

So, I find myself torn. The original story of Figure is what got me started on this quest, but the puzzle of historiography is what really needs to be untangled. The question is then, how to shape that into a narrative? how to tell those two stories alongside each other?

In Search of Robert Evans

Figure was passed through a bewildering number and array of hands during his lifetime. Some early sources refer to him not as "the Morgan horse" but as "the Goss horse" because he beloved to various members of the Goss family for over ten years - and to Justin Morgan for just over three.

Morgan historians have traditionally pieced together Figure's history through a variety of sources. There are timelines floating out there that place him with anywhere from 10-15 owners every two or three years. Sometimes his actual ownership is murky; was he leased as a breeding stallion or a working horse, rather than directly transferred?

It's not clear to me what historical basis there is for the various owners, beyond Linsley or Battell's collecting of secondary sources many years later. Betty Bandel did a great job of tracing the first 2-3 owners in her biography of Justin Morgan, and was able to provide sources. Beyond that? I will grant that I have a lot more reading to do, but so far, nothing is jumping out at me.

All that is a very long way of saying that I'm more or less starting from scratch. I'm using the timelines provided in secondary sources and online as a jumping off point, and taking an attitude of "trust but verify." Though perhaps "trust" is a strong word to use in this situation.

Justin Morgan has been pretty well documented by Betty Bandel, so I'm starting with the next name classically associated with Figure: Robert Evans.

In Morgan mythology, Evans is the hired man who leased Figure from Morgan to clear land for his employer. He was the one who discovered Figure's extraordinary strength; he was the one who was supposed to have set up the pulling contest at the mill. Most sources put that sometime between 1792 and 1795. Later, after Figure passed through a few other owners, he was purportedly owned by Evans from 1801 - 1804.

So, what do we actually know about Evans? Not a whole lot, as you may have guessed. Again, starting from scratch. I started with the absolute basics and treated it like a genealogy problem. Off to Ancestry.com, where I turned up my first bit of evidence: the 1800 census.

click to embiggen

Here's the census for Randolph, VT, in 1800. Because it was 1800, sigh, all we get are white male heads of household and a tally of others in the household. In this case, we see a Robert Evans (and a few other Evans families; possibly he was not a lone hired man but someone with larger community connections?). 

In his household were a white male under 10, a white male between the ages of 10-15, a white male between the ages of 26-44, and a white female between the ages of 26-44. That puts Robert Evans as a younger man with a wife and two sons in 1800. It doesn't appear they had any extra family members, servants, or slaves living with them, given that the total number of household members was 4 and they are all enumerated. (Though Vermont had nominally outlawed adult slavery with its constitution, de facto slavery persisted and does show up on the 1800 census from time to time.)

After some of the other rabbit holes I've gone down on this project, it's encouraging to see Robert Evans as a real person who really existed!

Slumping Vaguely Onward

I know everyone in the whole world is singing the same tune, but: seriously, this winter. I am bereft of motivation, energy, warmth, and basically all good things.

Anyway, in an attempt in the last few days to un-stick myself, I've done a few things to progress on this project.

The first was to attend a workshop through Geek Mountain State on writing science fiction. Yes, I know, history is not precisely writing science fiction. Or really, not at all the same thing. But it was good to talk about writing, and to be among people who aspire to write. It's been a long time since I have thought of myself as a writer. I have fallen into thinking of myself as an historian first, and the writing being one method of communication. I like getting back to that identity as writer.

(Plus, two of the speakers were friends, and it was good to support friends who write.)

The second is an upcoming lecture about Joseph Battell. I've only mentioned Battell obliquely here on the blog, because his role in the work I'm doing is more historiographical than historical, but he is a crucial figure in the history of the Morgan horse in general. He picked up the work that Linsley did in reconciling early accounts of Figure and in tracing progeny and expanded on it tenfold, publishing the first true stallion register. He was also responsible for reinvigorating the breed through his breeding decisions around the turn of the century, when that true foundation style was all but lost. His Morgan horse farm in Weybridge eventually became the Government stud, which is today the UVM stud.

Anyway: Battell. Interesting guy, and learning and thinking more about him will help inform some of the general framing on the project.

Third, this article from the Harvard Business Review about making time for your passion project: yeah. Yeah. I needed that kick in the pants.