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EASTERN OWNERS HOLD TRUMP CARD First Running- of Latonia Championship Stakes Seems at the Mercy of Atlantic Coast Turfmen. SARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y., August 22 For its first running, at least, the 0,000 Eatonla Championship Stakes will be what racing folk will be apt to call an "eastern affair." That is to say, the horses that will figure most prominently in the inaugural running of the Kentucky Jockey Clubs great race of one mile and three-quarters for threc-ycar-ohls will bear the silks of sportsmen who, as a general thing, do most of their racing about New York, although some of them are westerners and seventy-five per cent of the horses tli.it race under their silks, as well as under the silks of bona-fide resident easterners that claim American nativity at all, are Kentucky bred. Newspaper writers are over fond of talking of the turf struggles between the east and the west in races like the Kentucky and Latonia Dcrbys and the two and three-year-old specials which are annually decided up here on a track on which horses from all parts of the country and from Canada meet each August for twenty-six or twenty-seven days racing. As a matter of fact, it is most difficult to tell who is east and who is west. The congress of experts from all parts of the United States gathered at Saratoga now, and there are more of them than Saratoga has been privileged to entertain sinco 190G or 1007, are agreed on the proposition that about the only Championship eli-giblcs of out-and-out western ownership that may be considered to have chances arc W. F. Poisons Vulcanite and George J. Longs Clermont. And it is the consensus of opinion, expert and otherwise, that the chances of these colts arc rather remote. SOME REAL FORMIDABLE CANDIDATES. Of the really formidable Championship candidates Dunboyne, the Futurity winner of last year, is the property of Burton, L. Cassclls, a New York broker, although ho races under the silks of Philip A. Clark, another New York broker. Mad Hatter, which, if lie starts, will bear the silks of Samuel C. Ilildreth, is the property of August Belmont, chairman of the Jockey Club of New York, and one of -the foremost producers of thoroughbreds in the United States. Natural Bridge, an English-bred son of Bridge of Allan and Isette, belongs to W. It. Cue, another business habitue of the anathematized financial district of the new Babylon, but who has something of ah alibi in that he is the owner of a ranch in Wyoming. Pastoral Swain, a splendid bay colt, which may, in the running of the first Championship, revive the fame of the unbeaten Colin, belongs to Joseph I!. Elwell, who about the race tracks camouflages his identity under the so-called assumed name The Beach Stable. Ophelia is the property of Joseph E. Davis, a prominent member of the powerful Democratic-Republican clan of Davis and Elkins, or Elkius and Davis, of West Virginia. Mr. Davis does business in the Washington building, which towers where Broadway siirouts from Battery Park. Davis is a member of the Meadowbrook Hunt in addition to being a coal and iron baron. Balustrade belongs to Major Robert L. Gerry, the scion of a family of Massachusetts Democrats, one of whom, the first Elbridgo Gerry, contributed that mouth-filling and picturesque expression "gerrymander" to the jargon of politics. Cirrus and Lord Brighton are the property of Samuel C. Hildreth, who long since foreswore his western affiliations and began to wear spats. Vancouver and Mormon, if they race in the Championship, will appear undcK the silks of Willis Sharpe Kilmer of Binghamton and Middlesex County, Virginia, who is not unknown to fame in the west, his Kentucky-bred gelding Exterminator having won the Kentucky Derby and the Latonia Cup of 101.S. Rodgers and Gath race for George W. Loft, former member of Congress, candy manufacturer and Tammany politician of Now York City. Translate, a handsome son of Transvaal and Eustis, for which Robert Walden of Maryland got 10,000 at Pimlico in May a few days after ho had galloped a mile and an eighth in 1:53, is now the property of Howard Marshall, a young banker of Baltimore. BOTH SECTIONS CLAIM J. W. McCLELLAND. It is difficult to place James W. McClelland, under whose silks Eternal is pretty sure to start in the Championship. McClelland came from Lexington originally, but lie lias a flawless eastern record politicallyr He voted against the late politically late Charles E." Hughes for governor in New York in 190S, and lie came all the way to New York from Maryland in November, 1910, to put a spike in the presidential aspirations of Mr. nughes. McClelland races a stable in the east as well as a stable in the west. Also ho recruits his stables annually from .Edward F. Sims Xalapa Farm, which is situated near Paris, Kentucky. Perhaps McClelland should bo divided as King Solomon offered to divide the baby of scriptural tradition. Richqrd E. Watkins, the man who developed that great long distance runner of fourteen years back, St. Bellanc, winner of the Municipal Handicap and the Belmont Park Autumn Wcight-for-Age race, and who is now .the owner of the formidable Ticklish, the best race horse, barring Spur, King James, of glorious celebrity, has sent to the races, sprouted in east Tennessee and matured in Texas. But he has been elbowing plutocrats on the eastern race courses so long he wears white collars and regularly gets his nails manicured about once a week. It is proper, perhaps, to call Watkins an easterner. George-Odom, who owns King Plaudit, hails from Georgia, and is distinctly a development of eastern racing. Commander J. K. L. Ross calls Montreal home, and no one will deny that Montreal is on the Atlantic watershed. In addition to owning War -Pennant, which he bought last fall from A. K. Macomber, Commander "Ross has established one thoroughbred "studin the "Province of Quebec on the right bank of the St. Lawrence, just below Montreal, and another at Yarrow Brae Farm in Howard County, Maryland. Harry Payne Whitney, whose silks Vindex will bear if that splendid son of St. Victrix and Belle-fontaine, whose mind and heart have, so far, been too- full of romance for racing, will only buckle down to the business of racing, is. a Yank of Yanks. The Whitneys are Berkshire. Hill folk of Massachusetts and prodigiously proud of it. Like his father, the late AVilliam Collins Whitney, one of the greatest Americans of his time, Harry Payne Whitney is one of the mainstays of the eastern turf. He will be remembered in Kentucky as the owner of Regret, the only mare that has succeeded in winning the great Derby at Churchill Downs. Mr. Whitney has long maintained a. thoroughbred stud at Brookdale Farm, which is in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Recently lie has established another stud in Kentucky. William J. Starr, who may have a Championship candidate of class in War Zone, a foreign-bred colt, is another Canadian. He hails from Montreal,-
