Mrs. Louise Eustis Hitchcock, MFH and huntsman of the Aiken Drag Hunt and Mr. Thomas Hitchcock / Courtesy Hitchcock Woods Foundation
Drag hunting was once a gloriously competitive sport, the roots of which go back to seventeenth-century England. During the reign of King James I (1603–1625), it began as a sport known as running a train scent. A “drag was laid, hounds were put on the line, and ran it at a racing pace. The horse in the lead at the end of the drag was declared the winner,” wrote the late Alexander Mackay-Smith in his Foxhunting in North America.
Later in the same century, during the reign of King Charles II (1649–1685) , a gentleman could enter his hound or hounds to compete for the Woodstock Plate, a race for hounds following a four-mile drag as a test of both the hound’s speed and its ability to follow a scent. When houndsmen and spectators discovered that the best and, not incidentally, the most enjoyable way to follow the hound race was on horseback, the sport of drag hunting was born according to John Philip Hore in his History of Newmarket.
Even Hugo Meynell, the father of modern foxhunting, played his part in drag-hunting history when, in 1763, he participated in a celebrated hound match in the form of a drag hunt between his Quorn Foxhounds and those of Mr. Barry’s Cheshire Foxhounds. By the nineteenth century, the notion of a guaranteed, sustained gallop over jumps appealed to many sportsmen, especially those who mainly hunted to ride.
The histories of some of the early hunts in North America bear testament to that appeal. Two of the oldest, the Myopia Hunt and the Norfolk Hunt, both organized in Massachusetts in the late 1800s, were drag packs nearly from the start. Drag hunting gave the followers guaranteed sport on a predictable schedule. After the last run of the morning, the businessmen could change their clothes and get to the train station in time to be in their downtown Boston office at a working hour.
Foxhunting in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia has been live from Colonial days, because settlers to those areas were recruited largely from families of the English land-owning gentry, and hunting with hounds was a part of their upbringing. By contrast, the early sportsmen from New York and New England generally descended from men of commerce. Their forebears, mostly from East Anglia, had little or no heritage of hunting with hounds. When they came to embrace the sport of foxhunting, it was through the horse, and from there it was but a small step to hunting at a racing pace
One such group of wealthy Northerners discovered a horseman’s paradise in Aiken, S.C., where they could continue to play polo and hunt through the winter months. Many of the most adventurous men and women of American sporting legend organized the Aiken Drag and rode with that hunt: Louise Eustis Hitchcock, MFH and huntsman; her husband Thomas Hitchcock, known today as the father of steeplechase racing in America; son Tommy Hitchcock Jr., who ranks with his father as one of the greatest American polo players of all times; plus the Belmonts, Vanderbilts, and Whitneys.
In his 1935 book Life and Sport in Aiken, Harry Worcester Smith wrote, “I must admit that the spirit of racing enters into these so-called drags.”
He continued: “The drag is laid outside the lines so there is no danger of hounds being jumped upon, the desire being to have the riders and the hounds reach the finishing point at the same time…
“We used to think that any horse that jumped the English Grand National was a wonder, as the obstacles averaged about five feet, but let anyone go down to Aiken and ride over the new lines… and he will find out how easy it is to jump five feet or five feet, six inches, which is often necessary.”
Many of the same families that developed the sport at Aiken were instrumental in the formation of the famed Meadow Brook Club on Long Island in 1881. These men, their wives, sisters and daughters hunted both the drag and the fox. They jumped line fences made of pinned locust posts with chestnut rails “as thick as a man’s thigh,” many a full five feet high.
The Long Island footing was the best, but hunting over it was a remarkable test of men, women, and horses. In 1886 Teddy Roosevelt wrote about a drag hunt at Sagamore Hill:
“We ran about ten miles, at a rattling pace, with only two checks, crossing somewhat more than sixty fences, most of them post-and-rails, stiff as steel, the others being of the kind called ‘Virginia’ or ‘snake,’ and not more than ten or a dozen in the whole lot under four feet in height. I had the curiosity to go on foot over the course we had taken, measuring the jumps. The highest measured five feet and a half an inch, two others were at four feet eleven, and nearly a third of the number averaged about four-and-a-half.
“When the hounds were cast off, some forty riders were present, but the first fence was a savage one, and stopped all who did not mean genuine hard going. Twenty-six horses crossed it, one of them ridden by a lady. A mile or so farther on… we came to a five-bar gate, out of a road—a jump of just four feet five inches from the take-off. Up to this, of course, we went one at a time, at a trot or hand-gallop, and twenty-five horses cleared it in succession without a single refusal and with but one mistake; which speaks pretty well for the mounts we were riding.”
Not everyone was comfortable with the manner in which drag hunting was practiced, though. Frank Gray Griswold, one of the founders and a former master of the Meadow Brook, wrote in his 1913 book, Sport on Land and Water:
“As drag-hunting is carried on today, there is really no reason for three or four couples of hounds… A man in a pink coat could lead the field just as well without any hounds. As it is, you have a good ride, but it is not drag hunting. I admit it is much easier for the Master and the so-called huntsman; but a man must be young, in good condition, and a lightweight to ride such a drag, and he must be mounted on a Thoroughbred.”
Despite a colorful history of speed and formidable fences, most Masters of drag hunts today strive to make their sport resemble live hunting as closely as possible. Even before the middle of the last century, the Masters of Foxhounds Association’s leaders were determined to encourage this goal among their registered hunts. According to the section on drag hunting in the MFHA Guidebook: “Mounted foxhunting must be simulated; not a steeplechase.”
Posted January 11, 2014
This article was previously published in similar form in the Annual Foxhunting Issue of The Chronicle of the Horse, November 18 & 25, 2013.