Transatlantic Hounds

So it was in 1905 when the burning issue was—which was the superior foxhound: the one bred according to British standard, or the more recent version that had come along in what many a fox-hunting man back in the mother country still surely thought of as “the colonies.” There were two fox-hunting men who advocated for their dogs and arranged a showdown. In Virginia. And in that part of the state, to be precise, that is known as “hunt country.”

While fox-hunting, then and now, is not exactly a widely popular spectator sport, the thing stirred up interest beyond the pastime’s insular world. The match was set for November, and as Martha Wolfe writes:

Throughout the summer, north and south and back and forth across “the puddle,” debate raged and the respective camps swelled. The Washington Post, The New York Herald, The New York Post, The Boston Herald, The Boston Evening Transcript, The Baltimore Sun, The Richmond Times Dispatch, and The London Times kept a running commentary.

Prize money was put down on the table: one thousand dollars from each side, winner take all. The rules were agreed upon and the crux of them was that whichever side’s dogs killed more foxes would be declared the winner. There were judges named to enforce the rules. And the thing was on.

On the side of the British hounds there was Alexander Henry Higginson, whose pedigree stretched back across the Brahmins of New England and included a great-grandfather who “was a ship owner and Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Congress in 1783.” Alexander himself was not inclined to go out and add to the accomplishments of his line in the traditional way; he was all about sport. Snarkers might call it “idleness,” but what do they know? Fox-hunting, after all, was the pastime of royalty, among whom idleness had always been a virtue and honest work considered, well, vulgar.

That the British side in the dispute was advanced by an American might seem odd. But then, no actual fox-hunting Englishman would deign even to consider the question. As the author writes, “If asked to match his hounds against a pack of American hounds, an Englishman would have (politely, behind closed parlor doors, among fellow Englishmen) laughed in the American’s face.”

Well, there are American Anglophiles; but there are Anglophobes, too. And one supposes that 1905 would have been a good year for them: Great Britain still ruled the waves and the sun never set, etc., but Theodore Roose-velt was in the White House and America was on the rise and on the march and full of a kind of confidence and arrogance typified by one Harry Worcester Smith, the advocate for the American-bred hounds. Smith was a prototypical capitalist of the can-do school, aggressive and blustering and full of a righteous belief that competition was something approaching life’s essence. And he prospered, as Wolfe writes, “in what we call industrial consulting or mergers and acquisitions—conglomerate building—which he named ‘harmonizing.’ ”

So the antagonists could not have been much more unalike in temperament. And they manifestly did not like each other—so much so that, a few decades earlier, the thing might have been settled on a dueling field, between the two of them. But, it wasn’t really about them; it was between the dogs. (The foxes figured in there somewhere but they carried no nation’s flag or pride: They were not running for the honor of foxes, merely for their lives.)

Higginson’s British dogs (American, actually, but bred to English standards) were trained to hunt almost as a unit and to conform, obediently, to the commands of a human leader. They tended to remain relatively close together, which certainly added to the enjoyment of the humans riding along behind who could see—and hear—the dogs and follow along behind the chase.

American dogs were inclined to run the country and to go pretty much where they wanted to go, which meant that they were often not merely out of sight but out of hearing as well. They were bonier and rangier than their British counterparts. It doesn’t require much imagination to see the British hounds as equivalent to redcoats marching to battle in orderly ranks and the American dogs as lean frontiersmen clad in buckskin and fighting from ambush and on the run.

When the great showdown finally occurred, the dogs performed as they were bred. The English hounds stayed in tight formation and responded obediently to commands. The American dogs behaved in the fashion of that famous son of nearby soil, the Confederate cavalryman J.E.B Stuart. Which is to say, they went where instinct and impulse drove them to go.

All this happened a long time ago and Martha Wolfe, obviously, was not a witness. But she does a fine job of recreating the wild rides across the Virginian countryside and the enmity between the rival humans. She does, however, sometimes try for her book to carry more weight than it should. We are talking here, after all, about fox hunting, dogs, and horses, so meditations on the theory of relativity and the fin de siècle can seem a little strained. At one point, she asks (rhetorically): “Could it be that our Match, our contest of men on horseback and their foxhounds in the Virginia countryside, was also an exposition, an illustration of the central conflict in the regeneration myth: spontaneity versus authority, release versus control?”

Well, one thinks, maybe—and maybe not. And can we now, please, get on with the competition and learn who wins? For this, the reader keeps turning the pages and, in the view of this reviewer, it’s well worth the effort. It is also wrong to give away the ending here. I can reveal, however, that while one breed of dogs won, and the other lost, the foxes did better than anyone might have expected. And some readers might have been pulling for them all along.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.