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BELMONTS INITIAL WINNER Ruthless, Daughter of Eclipse, Gained Lasting Fame by Winning Inaugural of Race. NEW YORK, N. Y., June 1. When the field of the countrys best three-year-olds in training gets away from the gate in the sixty-eighth Belmont Stakes ..at Belmont Park Saturday, another brilliant chapter will have been written into Americas "True Derby" annals, stretching back through the years to 1867, when the gallant filly, Ruthless, was victorious in its inaugural. The story of Ruthless promised that a rich vein of the romantic was destined to run through the history of the Belmont, for her story contributed much of the material that makes for thrills of the turf. Ruthless was the greatest filly of the "Sixties," according to racing experts of that day. Besides winning the first Belmont, she won the Inaugural running of the Nursery Handicap as a two-year-old, thus launching two of the Westchester Associations oldest strikes She was owned by Francis Morris, Westchester County sportsman, and was by imported Eclipse, from an imported mare, Barbarity. An old turf manual describes her as "a bay, very tall and well developed." So Ruthless raced to lasting fame as the first Belmont winner. A long forgotten jockey, Gilpatrick, guided her around the tortuous "figure eight" course at Jerome Park to bring her to the end of the mile and five-eighths, the distance until 1874. She defeated De Courcey and Rivoli. The Morris filly went on to win the ancient Travers, and the defunct Sequel at Saratoga. Then her .owner retired her to the stud where her first foal was the successful Battle Axe. But Morris was fond of experiments, and he tested her at inbreeding. She was bred to her sire, Eclipse. The foal was deformed, his legs bent almost double and useless for racing. Ruthless came to an untimely end. One crisp fall day, while she was ranging in her paddock, a poacher or vagrant hunter mistook her for a wild animal and shot her.
