Ferry. George Washington Custis
tells us that the Farmer kept blooded horses and that his colt
"Magnolia" once ran for a purse, presumably losing, as if the event had
been otherwise we should probably have been informed of the fact. In
1786 Washington went to Alexandria "to see the Jockey Club purse run
for," and I have noticed a few other references to races, but I conclude
that he went less often than some writers would have us believe.

Washington was decidedly an outdoor man. Being six feet two inches tall,
and slender rather than heavily made, he was well fitted for athletic
sports. Tradition says that he once threw a stone across the
Rappahannock at a spot where no other man could do it, and that he could
outjump any one in Virginia. He also excelled in the game of putting the
bar, as a story related by the artist Peale bears witness.

Of outdoor sports he seems to have enjoyed hunting most. He probably had
many unrecorded experiences with deer and turkeys when a surveyor and
when in command upon the western border, but his main hunting adventure
after big game took place on his trip to the Ohio in 1770. Though the
party was on the move most of the time and was looking for rich land
rather than for wild animals, they nevertheless took some hunts.

On October twenty-second, in descending the stretch of the Ohio near the
mouth of Little Beaver Creek and above the Mingo Town, they saw many
wild geese and several kinds of duck and "killed five wild turkeys."
Three days later they "saw innumerable quantities of turkeys, and many
deer watering and browsing on the shore side, some of which we killed."

He does not say whether they shot this game from the canoe or not, but
probably on sighting the game they would put to shore and then one or
more would steal up on the quarry. Their success was probably increased
by the fact that they had two Indians with them.

Few people are aware of the fact that what is now West Virginia and Ohio
then contained many buffaloes. Below the mouth of the Great Hockhocking
the voyagers came upon a camp of Indians, the chief of which, an old
friend who had accompanied him to warn out the French in 1753, gave
Washington "a quarter of very fine buffalo." A creek near the camp,
according to the Indians, was an especial resort for these great beasts.

Fourteen miles up the Great Kanawha the travelers took a day off and
"went a hunting; killed five buffaloes and wounded some others, three
de