Our English cousins had learned to run and had held organized track games many years before we went in seriously for track athletics. Early in the fifties athletic clubs were formed at Oxford and at Cambridge, and in 1857 the colleges of the latter universities met in the first intercollegiate contest. Those were days when the young men of America needed no mimic struggles in which to develop their manly virtues, when a sterner game was being played than that of the field or track. It was in 1860 that the Oxonians held their first intercollegiate sports, and four years later, twelve years before our Intercollegiate Athletic Association was formed, the wearers of the light blue and the dark met in the first dual meet in Christ Church Cricket Ground, almost at the same time that our armies were fighting the fight of the Wilderness and Sherman was marching to the sea.
Sport, as it exists to-day in America, that is to say what we may call "polite sport," was then a thing unknown. The athletic girl was then as scarce as the dodo bird; small boys did not then begin to dream of varsity initials when they put on their first pair of knickerbockers; scarcely a person on this side of the water had ever heard of a spiked shoe; and such a thing as a cinder path was unknown both here and abroad. Sport had not yet become important and had not acquired with us that quasi-fashionable significance which has made it at the same time one of the most blessed and one of the drollest phenomena of contemporary life. One could read about it in Bell's Life, but one generally did not read Bell's Life. Even in England there was much opposition to the growing cult of athleticism. Not even the participation in the new athletics of the socially eligible sufficed at first to make them appeal to the class that they appeal to now. The late Sir Leslie Stephen was referee at the first Oxford-Cambridge games; men of title competed, and the Times observed that "the sports were held in the presence of a vast number of persons, including some hundreds of the fair sex, who took a keen interest in the proceedings," but even this favorable beginning failed to gild the sport with sufficient prestige to dazzle down its opponents. The same cries were raised then that are raised to-day against football and rowing, and Mr. Wilkie Collins took pains to caricature the whole movement in his "Man and Wife."
In America, naturally, the most of those who went in for running were professionals. Foot races were on about the same social status as prize fights are to-day. The crack sprinter of one town or neighborhood was matched for so much a side against the crack sprinter of another, and a crowd of worthies gathered to back their favorite and pat the back of the winner. Runners stripped to the buff in those days, or ran in tights and gymnasium trunks. Sprinters took the standing start, and the races were on any smooth path or stretch of level, firm turf. Of the men who ran in this country in those days of quaint half-caste athletics, one stands out rather noticeably from the rest. This man was George Seward, who, even in an age when training was only guesswork and established records unknown, so astonished his contemporaries here and abroad that his name has been handed down as that of a phenomenon. Seward was a professional, of course. He ran in this country and he ran in England—the same year that the Whigs were carrying log-cabins in political parades and shouting for "Tippecanoe and Tyler too "—and everywhere he met the best men and defeated them at every distance up to the quarter mile. Although his apocryphal one-hundred-yard dash in 9-1/4 seconds is no longer accepted, his name still stands on the record book beside a one-hundred-twenty-yard dash of 11-1/2 seconds, and a two-hundred-yard dash of 19-1/2 seconds done as far back as 1847. Another wonder of those days—that is, the days before track athletics were regularly established in this country, although this runner shone some twenty years later than Seward—was Deerfoot, the Seneca Indian, whose performances on the track here and in England were like Leatherstocking tales come to life. Deerfoot ran as nature made him except for a breech-clout, a pair of moccasins, and a feather in his hair. He seemed practically tireless, and swung on mile after mile in the same long, light, easy stride. In 1863, in London, he did twelve miles in 62 minutes 2-1/2 seconds, and in the exact hour he did eleven miles and nine hundred seventy yards, according to the records that have come down. Among the professionals whom Deerfoot met in England was William Lang, who gave him all he wanted, and more. Lang's alleged record of 9.11-1/2 for the two miles, made in 1863, is still accepted, although there is little likelihood that it is genuine, and for many years there was a story that he had run a mile in the preposterous time of 4.02. Various similar tales have come down from those days of haphazard athletics, but when they are examined closely one soon learns generally that the course was short, that a hurricane was blowing behind the runner's back, or that the man was running down hill. Little more dependence, in fact, can be put on performances of this sort than on the dreamy traditions that have come down to us about the prowess of the ancient Greeks, whom exuberant classicists now and then credit with standing jumps of twenty-nine feet, and similar neat performances. And in this country, except for Seward and Deerfoot, little tangible remains of the running of the early days; and it was not until the war was well over and the country had settled down to peace and prosperity that modern times, from the standpoint of sport, began, that track athletics came in with other sports, and Americans began to learn what is now so important a part of their curriculum—the art of playing in the open air and doing it for fun.
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