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?