The desirable qualities in a pack of hounds are
uniformity of type, substance, speed, and color. These points have to do
not only with the style of a pack, but also with its hunting quality.
Thus in the Piedmont pack they breed for a red hound with white
markings, so that the pack may have an individual appearance, but in all
packs a great effort is made to secure even speed, for a slow hound
lags, while a fast one becomes an individual hunter. The unusual hound
is therefore likely to be "drafted" from the pack.
There has been a long controversy as to whether the English or American
type of hound is best suited for hunting in this country, and the matter
seems still to remain one of opinion. Probably the best English pack in
the United States is that of Mr. A. Henry Higginson. Some years since,
Mr. Higginson and Mr. Harry Worcester Smith, of Worcester,
Massachusetts, master of the Grafton pack, made a bet of $5000 a side,
each backing his own hounds, the question being that of the general
suitability of the American versus the English hound for American
country. The trials were made in the Piedmont region of Virginia, and
Mr. Smith's American hounds won the wager for him.
In the last ten or twenty years hunting in the United States has been
organized under the Hunts Committee of the National Steeplechase
Association.
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