The Forgotten Foundation
by Lisa Harkema
He was discredited and a victim of manipulation of historical facts. As head of the family carrying his name, Henry Clay was the offer of malicious rumors, but did play a role in the development of both the American and French trotter.
In A History of Horse Racing – A Large Collection of Historical Articles on Horse Racing in England and America, published in 1869, it read that “Green’s Bashaw, foaled in 1855, and owned in Muscatine, Iowa, has some superior colts, among them Kirkwood and Bashaw Jr, both fast, and this, together with his remarkable pedigree justifies the expectations that he will become the head of a distinguished family.” What the author couldn’t know at the time was that US trotting was on the brink of complete Hambletonian dominance, but this still indicates that other horses and stallions were also held in high regard. Until Hambletonian and his sons settled the matter conclusively, a few other families had many fans – and the Clay family was one of these. (The statement that Green’s Bashaw have a “remarkable pedigree” refers to the fact that he was out of Belle, a half-sister to Hambletonian – but by Webber’s Tom Thumb, a fast horse believed to be descended from Justin Morgan on the paternal side.)
The term “Clay family” hides the fact that it is really a subdivision of the “Bashaw family” so let’s go back to the start, in 1818. According to the common story, that year Richard B Jones, the American consul in Tripoli (presently capital of Libya, back then part of the Ottoman Empire) had loaned a precious Arabian stallion of his to some Danish officers but the horse was “accidentally killed” and one morning “he found in his stable a beautiful iron grey Barb”, presumably a replacement offered by these destructive Danes. They beautiful grey horse was named Grand Bashaw. Jones gifted this horse to his good friend Joseph C Morgan who sent it to the US, along with two other horses (named Grand Sultan and Saladin), through Italy and Marseille before reaching Boston and then Philadelphia.