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Cavalry Trooper

The Soldiers

The most heroic figure in the unending Indian wars along the frontier was an individual who would have been startled had he been informed that he qualified for a pedestal - the hard-swearing, hard-drinking, "kinder rough and may be tough Reg'lar Army man."

To the cavalry trooper was assigned the thankless task of riding herd upon an audacious foe as elusive as a prairie antelope, wily as a coyote and fierce as a cornered panther. To the infantry soldier was assigned, theoretically, the less arduous chore of guarding some isolated, sun-blasted outpost - theoretically because to each post was assigned a contingent of infantry as garrison and cavalry as a mobile task force. Actually the infantryman usually found himself walking alongside his mounted comrade, sometimes outwalking the horses when the route was long and forage poor. A grudging tribute was paid in an Indian name for infantrymen - "walk-a-heaps."

If he performed some particularly heroic action he might be awarded the Medal of Honor, but it was not practical to send him to Washington to receive it at the hands of the President. It might be presented by his commanding officer with formal ceremonial at dress parade. After 1888 the Regular Army man, if given a choice, might prefer the Certificate of Merit, which he could stow away in the bottom of his trunk locker. At that time it bore no medal, but it did get the soldier two dollars extra pay a month, which the Medal of Honor did not. If the veteran survived until 1905 he might wear the red, later red and black, Indian campaign badge. No campaign badges were authorized prior to 1905.

The Indian-fighting soldier got little honor and less pay. When the Regiment of Dragoons was raised in 1833 - to become the first mounted troops to serve against Plains Indians and, three years later, the crack regiment of the army under Colonel Stephen Watts Kearny - the going rate for a private was six dollars a month. Five years later it went up to eight dollars, and by the beginning of the Civil War a private was getting eleven. Wartime inflation boomed the entering recruit's pay to sixteen dollars by the close of the war - a rate not exceeded until 1917. It reverted to thirteen dollars for most of the period of the Indian wars. Even this was not all take-home pay, for "one bit" each month went to the Soldiers' Home - to be practical about it, the paymaster took out "two bits" (twenty-five cents) every two months-and one dollar of each month's pay was withheld until the end of the soldier's enlistment.

What kind of man would be attracted by this governmental largess to sweat out his days in a desert waste, enduring iron discipline, primitive living and frequent threat of death ? Opinions differ among those in a position to know - officers and enlisted men who recorded their impressions in letters and diaries. Obviously few were educated men of good families. But it was a period of frequent economic depressions, then called panics, and many a jobless laborer took to the army in desperation. The pay scale should not be judged in the light of a century-of-inflation later. The $11.87 1/2 a month the private got at the pay table was all spending money. He was fed, housed, and he received a clothing allowance on which he could save even when it was at only $3.50 a month. This was a time when "another day, another dollar" meant just that for many a laboring man keeping a family on six dollars a week.

The great cities contributed their quota to Regular Army ranks. Officers have said that a majority of enlisted men were recent immigrants, mainly Irish and Germans. During the period of large and unrestricted immigration, many a youngster fleeing conscription in Europe found the United States Army a refuge when penniless in a strange land. It mattered not if he knew only a word or two of English; he could learn.

Not unexpectedly, desertion was heavy, for many joined to get free transportation west during a gold rush or silver strike. And, despite army protests, the ranks included young toughs and bums, who had been given a choice of going to jail or enlisting. Debtors, too, helped fill the ranks; no creditors and few sheriffs would trace them to a post on the Indian frontier.

Yet these men often became good soldiers. So, of course, did the lads who discovered too late that the monotony of farm life was preferable to the utter boredom of a winter in an army post on the Plains. Many of these adventurous youngsters were attracted by the glamour that even then enveloped the West - and Indian fighting - as a result of dime novels, stage melodramas, Buffalo Bill's Wild West and the military novels of Captain Charles King.

During the entire period of the Indian wars it was almost impossible for an enlisted man to be commissioned from the ranks, yet there were a few who made it, which speaks well for the Indian-fighting soldier. It was almost impossible because nearly every year West Point graduated more officers than there were vacancies. Surplus graduates were commissioned brevet second lieutenants and were allowed to serve until a vacancy occurred. Promotion was slow. An officer could be given a brevet in the next highest rank after ten years' faithful service in the same grade, and it frequently happened. These brevet commissions, usually bestowed as battle honors, carried pay when an officer was called to duty in his higher rank.

The army officer on the frontier, and his wife, suffered isolation, boredom and hardship that are almost inconceivable to a later generation. Pay was no great inducement, for as late as 1878 an entering second lieutenant got only $1,400 a year. Yet few resigned, and the great majority were able, dedicated men who served their country well.

Despite the long service of officers and the five-year enlistments of men in the ranks, few had opportunity to become experienced in Indian fighting. This fact, of course, is directly contrary to the impression created by television programs, motion pictures and novels about the Indian wars. It can be readily proved, however, by statistics. From the beginning of the republic in 1789 to the Mexican War the Regular Army recorded 96 Indian fights in which there were casualties, excluding those fought during the War of 1812. That averages less than two fights a year. From the Mexican War to the Civil War there were 206 Indian fights. The number during the rebellion is difficult to determine because Indians fought in both armies as well as independently, so the statistics are uncertain. However, from the end of the Civil War to the last fight between soldiers and Indians at Leech Lake, Minnesota, in 1898, there were 938 fights, an average of more than 27 fights a year for the two periods after the Mexican War. This appears to be like almost constant warfare, but most of the fights were very small affairs involving a few men or a company or two, and it seems to work out that a soldier might expect to be in one fight during a five-year enlistment.

Before rating the soldier as a good insurance risk, let us take a look at casualty figures. In these 1,240 Indian fights, 1,105 officers and enlisted men were killed, and 1,391 wounded. The casualties, then, average less than one killed and a little more than one wounded for each fight. Some authorities estimate that casualties among Indians were even fewer. All of this bears small resemblance to what we see in wide-screen spectaculars, where soldiers and Indians are shot down by dozens.

It was, however, a small-scale army that fought these battles - always too small for its task. Had it not been for the Indian wars there might not have been a Regular Army, for the Fathers of the Republic were much opposed to the idea of permanent military forces. But even as the Constitution was adopted, a regiment of infantry and a battalion of artillery were in the field against Indians of the Old Northwest, and this force was accepted reluctantly into the service of the United States, with the hope that it might be discharged when the Indian troubles were over.

Instead they grew worse, with only intermittent periods of peace until after the War of 1812 in which Britain encouraged Indians to fight white settlers. After that there were high hopes of a permanent solution of the Indian problem, for the frontier line was marked by a chain of posts stretching from Fort Snelling, Minnesota, to Fort Gibson, Arkansas Territory (now Oklahoma).

President Andrew Jackson proposed to move all of the eastern tribes west of this frontier into an Indian paradise where the buffalo roamed and the antelope played. In actual practice, though, his Indian removal policy was less successful than is commonly assumed. Many Indians were driven ruthlessly along a "Trail of Tears" to territories that became Kansas and Oklahoma, but many stayed behind - in Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Mississippi and North Carolina, to mention only a few.

The Seminole in Florida who refused to go kept soldiers busy for eight years and still remained in their swamps. A powwow in Tallahassee in 1957 announced, somewhat facetiously, the end of the Seminole War, 122 years after it began. The Black Hawk War of 1832 in Illinois and Wisconsin was the only other important Indian war prior to the Mexican War. During most of this period the Regular Army consisted of seven or eight regiments of infantry, each of ten companies scattered in small garrisons among the frontier forts, and four regiments of artillery, also of ten companies each, mainly employed in seacoast defense.

The artillery had small part in the Indian wars. After the Mexican War the regiments were increased to twelve companies, of which two were light, or field, batteries. The remaining companies manned the heavy guns of coastal forts. During the Mexican War most of these companies were sent to the front to fight as infantry, and in occasional emergencies during the Indian wars artillery companies served as infantry. Artillery stationed in Pacific Coast forts got into a number of Indian fights, and on rare occasions artillerymen manned forts as far from the seacoast as Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Fort Ridgely, Minnesota; or Fort Randall, Nebraska (later Dakota) Territory, as was the case in 1861. But more commonly, even when artillery weapons were used against Indians, the guns were manned by infantry or cavalry detachments.

From the end of the War of 1812 until the Black Hawk War in 1832 there were no mounted troops in the Regular Army, but that year Congress authorized a battalion of mounted rangers of six companies to serve for one year. It was organized too late to fight Black Hawk and is remembered principally because Washington Irving, in A Tour of the Prairies, described one of its companies which guarded his expedition into Indian country. Another ranger company escorted the annual caravan of traders along the Santa Fe Trail to guard it from the Pawnee and Comanche. As early as 1829 soldiers had accompanied traders on this trail, but these were infantry under Brevet Major Bennett Riley, and they proved ineffective.

The rangers were replaced in 1833 by the Regiment of Dragoons of ten companies. Three years later Colonel Kearny took command and started the cavalry custom of an annual expedition into Indian country. To the Indians, Kearny's dragoons looked tough, and there was no fighting, but the troops got good training and some new country was explored.

The marches of the dragoons were long and arduous. In one of them five companies rode from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, over the Oregon Trail to South Pass, swung cross-country to Bent's Fort, and returned by the Santa Fe Trail - covering 2,200 miles in ninety-nine days. Policing the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail after it opened in the early 1840's, as well as the country between them, was plainly beyond the capacity of a single mounted regiment. In 1836 the 2nd Regiment of Dragoons was formed but was of little help because it was diverted almost immediately to Florida to take part in the Seminole War.

By 1846 many immigrants were rolling over the Oregon Trail, and Congress provided the Regiment of Mounted Riflemen for their protection. By the time it was organized, however, the Mexican War had begun, and the regiment was sent to General Scott's army. Thus the 1st Dragoons was the only mounted force available for Kearny's Army of the West and formed the backbone of the volunteer army that took Santa Fe and marched on to California.

The end of the Mexican War, the annexation of Texas and the settlement with Great Britain of the Oregon boundary, all occurred between 1845 and 1848. The old frontier line running a few miles west of the Mississippi River was no more. One million, two hundred thousand square miles were now added to a nation that had previously occupied less than 1,800,000 square miles. Throughout this new country were numerous tribes of Indians, about which the people and their government knew little or nothing. Many were to prove hostile for a long time to come.

Scarcely had the ink dried on the treaty with Mexico than gold was discovered in California, and a new wave of covered wagons began rolling west. Yet the army that was to protect the immigrants and fight Indians scattered over more than a million square miles of the West was reduced from an authorized strength of 12,539 to an aggregate of 10,317. Now available for the purpose were two regiments of dragoons, one of mounted riflemen and eight of infantry, with some possible aid from the four regiments of artillery. Only two other branches of service had any enlisted men: A company of sappers, miners and pontoniers that had served in the Mexican War and was retained in service as a demonstration company of engineers at West Point, and the Ordnance Department, which employed 500 enlisted men in arsenals and maintained a sergeant at each important army post.

Fiction writers have sometimes employed quartermaster regiments or units from other staff departments in their Indian fights, but there were no such units. The Quartermaster Department employed wagoners and master wagoners during the Civil and Indian wars, but had no enlisted men until 1898. The Medical Department had hospital stewards but no privates until 1889, the same year the Signal Corps got its first enlisted men.

The small army of 1848 had forty-one fights with Indians in the six years before it was reinforced by two regiments of infantry and two regiments officially designated as cavalry. This gave the army three branches of mounted service - dragoons, mounted riflemen and cavalry - with separate promotion lists for officers in each service. Early in the Civil War they were consolidated as cavalry and the regiments renumbered, the 1st Dragoons becoming 1st Cavalry; the 2nd Dragoons, the 2nd Cavalry; the Mounted Riflemen, the 3rd Cavalry; the 1st Cavalry of 1855 the 4th Cavalry, and the 2nd the 5th. A new regiment, the 6th Cavalry, was added.

Jay Monaghan. The Soldiers. The Book of the American West. Simon & Schuster New York, NY 1969.

The Horse Soldier, 1776-1943: The United States Cavalryman : His Uniforms, Arms, Accoutrements, and Equipments Depicts the uniforms, insignia, decorations, horse equipment, and weaponry of cavalry regiments against the background of events in American military history.

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