Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  “You can depend upon it.”

  “I will thank Mongrel for this. He is a very good sort, for a Mexican Plug. Don’t you think he is?”

  “It is my opinion of him; and as for his birth, he cannot help that. We cannot all be reptiles, we cannot all be fossils; we have to take what comes and be thankful it is no worse. It is the true philosophy.”

  “For those others?”

  “Stick to the subject, please. Did it turn out that my suspicions were right?”

  “Yes, perfectly right. Mongrel has heard them planning. They are after BB’s life, for running them out of Medicine Bow and taking their stolen horses away from them.”

  “Well, they’ll get him yet, for sure.”

  “Not if he keeps a sharp lookout.”

  “He keep a sharp lookout! He never does; he despises them, and all their kind. His life is always being threatened, and so it has come to be monotonous.”

  “Does he know they are here?”

  “Oh yes, he knows it. He is always the earliest to know who comes and who goes. But he cares nothing for them and their threats; he only laughs when people warn him. They’ll shoot him from behind a tree the first he knows. Did Mongrel tell you their plans?”

  “Yes. They have found out that he starts for Fort Clayton day after tomorrow, with one of his scouts; so they will leave tomorrow, letting on to go south, but they will fetch around north all in good time.”

  “Shekels, I don’t like the look of it.”

  Cathy is so proud of her unit that she offers to escort Buffalo Bill to Fort Clayton. Soldier Boy picks up the story in the next chapter.

  Soldier Boy and Shekels Again

  “Well, this is the way it happened. We did the escort duty; then we came back and struck for the plain and put the Rangers through a rousing drill—oh, for hours! Then we sent them home under Brigadier-General Fanny Marsh; then the Lieutenant-General and I went off on a gallop over the plains for about three hours, and were lazying along home in the middle of the afternoon, when we met Jimmy Slade, the drummer-boy, and he saluted and asked the Lieutenant-General if she had heard the news, and she said no, and he said:

  “‘Buffalo Bill has been ambushed and badly shot this side of Clayton, and Thorndike the scout, too; Bill couldn’t travel, but Thorndike could, and he brought the news, and Sergeant Wilkes and six men of Company B are gone, two hours ago, hotfoot, to get Bill. And they say—’

  “‘Go!’ she shouts to me—and I went.”

  “Fast?”

  “Don’t ask foolish questions. It was an awful pace. For four hours nothing happened, and not a word said, except that now and then she said, ‘Keep it up, Boy, keep it up, sweetheart; we’ll save him!’ I kept it up. Well, when the dark shut down, in the rugged hills, that poor little chap had been tearing around in the saddle all day, and I noticed by the slack knee-pressure that she was tired and tottery, and I got dreadfully afraid; but every time I tried to slow down and let her go to sleep, so I could stop, she hurried me up again; and so, sure enough, at last over she went!

  “Ah, that was a fix to be in I for she lay there and didn’t stir, and what was I to do? I couldn’t leave her to fetch help, on account of the wolves. There was nothing to do but stand by. It was dreadful. I was afraid she was killed, poor little thing! But she wasn’t. She came to, by-and-by, and said, ‘Kiss me, Soldier,’ and those were blessed words. I kissed her—often; I am used to that, and we like it. But she didn’t get up, and I was worried. She fondled my nose with her hand, and talked to me, and called me endearing names—which is her way—but she caressed with the same hand all the time. The other arm was broken, you see, but I didn’t know it, and she didn’t mention it. She didn’t want to distress me, you know.

  “Soon the big gray wolves came and hung around, and you could hear them snarl and snap at each other, but you couldn’t see anything of them except their eyes, which shone in the dark like sparks and stars. The Lieutenant-General said, ‘If I had the Rocky Mountain Rangers here, we would make those creatures climb a tree.’ Then she made believe that the Rangers were in hearing, and put up her bugle and blew the ‘assembly’; and then, ‘boots and saddles’; then the ‘trot’; ‘gallop’; ‘charge!’ Then she blew the ‘retreat,’ and said, ‘That’s for you, you rebels; the Rangers don’t ever retreat!’

  “The music frightened them away, but they were hungry, and kept coming back. And of course they got bolder and bolder, which is their way. It went on for an hour, then the tired child went to sleep, and it was pitiful to hear her moan and nestle, and I couldn’t do anything for her. All the time I was laying for the wolves. They are in my line; I have had experience. At last the boldest one ventured within my lines, and I landed him among his friends with some of his skull still on him, and they did the rest. In the next hour I got a couple more, and they went the way of the first one, down the throats of the detachment. That satisfied the survivors, and they went away and left us in peace.

  “We hadn’t any more adventures, though I kept awake all night and was ready. From midnight on the child got very restless, and out of her head, and moaned, and said, ‘Water, water—thirsty’; and now and then, ‘Kiss me, Soldier’; and sometimes she was in her fort and giving orders to her garrison; and once she was in Spain, and thought her mother was with her. People say a horse can’t cry; but they don’t know, because we cry inside.

  “It was an hour after sunup that I heard the boys coming, and recognized the hoof-beats of Pomp and Cæsar and Jerry, old mates of mine; and a welcomer sound there couldn’t ever be. Buffalo Bill was in a horse litter, with his leg broken by a bullet, and Mongrel and Blake Haskins’s horse were doing the work. Buffalo Bill and Thorndike had killed both of those toughs.

  “When they got to us, and Buffalo Bill saw the child lying there so white, he said, ‘My God!’ and the sound of his voice brought her to herself, and she gave a little cry of pleasure and struggled to get up, but couldn’t, and the soldiers gathered her up like the tenderest women, and their eyes were wet and they were not ashamed, when they saw her arm dangling; and so were Buffalo Bill’s, and when they laid her in his arms he said, ‘My darling, how does this come?’ and she said, ‘We came to save you, but I was tired, and couldn’t keep awake, and fell off and hurt myself, and couldn’t get on again.’ ‘You came to save me, you dear little rat? It was too lovely of you!’ ‘Yes, and Soldier stood by me, which you know he would, and protected me from the wolves; and if he got a chance he kicked the life out of some of them—for you know he would, BB.’ The sergeant said, ‘He laid out three of them, sir, and here’s the bones to show for it.’ ‘He’s a grand horse,’ said BB; ‘he’s the grandest horse that ever was! and has saved your life, Lieutenant-General Alison, and shall protect it the rest of his life—he’s yours for a kiss!’ He got it, along with a passion of delight, and he said, ‘You are feeling better now, little Spaniard—do you think you could blow the advance?’ She put up the bugle to do it, but he said wait a minute first. Then he and the sergeant set her arm and put it in splints, she wincing but not whimpering; then we took up the march for home, and that’s the end of the tale; and I’m her horse. Isn’t she a brick, Shekels?”

  “Brick? She’s more than a brick, more than a thousand bricks—she’s a reptile!”

  “It’s a compliment out of your heart, Shekels. God bless you for it!”

  After the horses overhear officers talking about the joys of bullfighting, they try to figure out what is so special about the sport. Here the Mexican Plug Mongrel tries to figure it out with the help of another horse.

  Mongrel and the Other Horse

  “Sage-brush, have you have been listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it strange?”

  “Well, no, Mongrel, I don’t know that it is.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’ve seen a good many human beings
in my time. They are created as they are; they cannot help it. They are only brutal because that is their make; brutes would be brutal if it was their make.”

  “To me, Sage-brush, man is most strange and unaccountable. Why should he treat dumb animals that way when they are not doing any harm?”

  “Man is not always like that, Mongrel; he is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.”

  “Is the bullfight a religious service?”

  “I think so. I have heard so. It is held on Sunday.”

  (A reflective pause, lasting some moments.) Then: “When we die, Sage-brush, do we go to heaven and dwell with man?”

  “My father thought not. He believed we do not have to go there unless we deserve it.”

  General Alison decides to take Cathy to visit her Spanish homeland and gives in to her pleas to bring Soldier Boy along. But Cathy’s beloved horse is stolen shortly after their arrival. He picks up his story several months later.

  Soldier Boy—to Himself

  It is five months. Or is it six? My troubles have clouded my memory. I have been all over this land, from end to end, and now I am back again since day before yesterday, to that city which we passed through, that last day of our long journey, and which is near her country home. I am a tottering ruin and my eyes are dim, but I recognized it. If she could see me she would know me and sound my call. I wish I could hear it once more; it would revive me, it would bring back her face and the mountains and the free life, and I would come—if I were dying I would come! She would not know me, looking as I do, but she would know me by my star. But she will never see me, for they do not let me out of this shabby stable—a foul and miserable place, with two wrecks like myself for company.

  How many times have I changed hands? I think it is twelve times—I cannot remember; and each time it was down a step lower, and each time I got a harder master. They have been cruel, every one; they have worked me night and day in degraded employments, and beaten me; they have fed me ill, and some days not at all. And so I am but bones, now, with a rough and frowsy skin humped and cornered upon my shrunken body—that skin which was once so glossy, that skin which she loved to stroke with her hand. I was the pride of the mountains and the Great Plains; now I am a scarecrow and despised. These piteous wrecks that are my comrades here say we have reached the bottom of the scale, the final humiliation; they say that when a horse is no longer worth the weeds and discarded rubbish they feed to him, they sell him to the bullring for a glass of brandy, to make sport for the people and perish for their pleasure.

  To die—that does not disturb me; we of the service never care for death. But if I could see her once more! If I could hear her bugle sing again and say, “It is I, Soldier—come!”

  Cathy Alison searches for Soldier Boy, finally tracing him to a bullring. She arrives just in time to realize that Soldier Boy has had his abdomen ripped open by a bull. She rushes into the ring toward him. Soldier Boy staggers toward her and falls at her feet, dying before he realizes that Cathy has also been gored. She lives long enough to be carried away, and before she dies she asks that “Taps” be played for Soldier Boy.

  14

  The American Cavalry Horse

  by Captain Wilmot E. Ellis

  In retrospect 1905 seems late to be writing about the importance of the cavalry horse, but mounted soldiers still had value to an army for a few more years. Captain Wilmot E. Ellis was able to describe the kind of horses needed by the cavalry during the last decades of the nineteenth century, when they offered the only means of battlefield transportation. Ellis was a perfect candidate to provide a look backward. Later in his career junior officers complained to the army’s Office of the Inspector General that the then-Colonel Ellis was “an old army fossil.” He retired soon after, tired of what the army had become—an organization where horses had only ceremonial duties. These are his ideas about the making of a good cavalry horse.

  A nation’s strength in war depends not only upon its men, but also upon its horses. Every army needs cavalry and the efficiency of cavalry hinges, to a great extent, upon the quality and quantity of the supply of horses.

  The United States has more horses than any other country except Russia, owning about sixteen millions to Russia’s twenty-five millions. The animal was first carried to America by the Spaniards early in the sixteenth century. The wild herds which abounded in the Southwest until quite recently were probably the direct descendants of horses abandoned in that region by De Soto and other explorers.

  Later colonists brought animals from several European countries. Wherever the settler went, the horse went with him and helped him to subdue the soil, to fight his enemies, and to face the hardships of life in a new world. Naturally, the pioneers’ stock was usually poor; but before the Revolution, as the wealth of the colonists increased, the importation of English thoroughbreds had effected a marked improvement in the prevailing types.

  Since those days, horse-breeding as an industry has grown with the growth of the country, though like any other industry it has had its ups and downs. At the present time it is prosperous, after surviving some particularly hard knocks.

  More than once the prophets have shaken their heads and declared that the days of the horse were numbered. The electric car has driven him from the street railway service—surely a welcome release from an intolerable slavery. The bicycle and the automobile have disputed his possession of the roads, and the traction engine is doing some of his work on the farm. And a few years ago certain military experts, real or pretended, were loudly asserting that even his usefulness in warfare was practically over, for the development of the long-range rifle and the machine gun had rendered cavalry obsolete.

  This last prediction was completely falsified during the recent war in South Africa, when the British government found itself compelled to spend several million dollars in buying horses abroad. Its agents found their best and most satisfactory market in the United States. They organized a great depot at Lathrop, Missouri, and their large purchases did much to stimulate the breeding of saddle horses in that and neighboring states.

  The demand was increased by the expansion of our own cavalry establishment from ten to fifteen regiments in 1901. Many of the Western breeders are now making a specialty of supplying the cavalry with mounts, and it is gratifying to note that a distinct type of animal, specially adapted to the use of mounted soldiers, is beginning to appear.

  Hitherto the United States army has usually purchased its horses by contract made through the quartermaster’s department, but the results have not proved entirely satisfactory. The system has proved extravagant, as several middlemen are involved, and the government frequently pays as much as a hundred and twenty-five dollars for a sixty-dollar horse. The last army appropriation bill provides for purchase in open market, and cavalry officers feel that this policy will result in economy to Uncle Sam and an improvement in the quality of mounts. Some foreign war offices, notably that of Austria, conduct their own stock farms. This scheme has been advocated for the United States by prominent cavalry officers, but the experiment has never been tried, principally because it contravenes the time-honored policy that the government should not come into competition with private enterprise.

  The horses presented for sale are passed upon by a board, ordinarily composed of an officer of the quartermaster’s department, a cavalry officer, and an army veterinarian. The officers pass upon the horses with particular reference to “form,” and the animals that they accept are minutely inspected by the veterinarian for soundness. Each horse—technically referred to as a “remount”—successfully passing the scrutiny of the inspectors is branded “U. S.” on the left fore shoulder. Later it is branded on the hoof of the near fore foot with the designation of the company to which it is assigned.

  The regulation cavalry horse must be a gelding of hardy color, sound and well-bred, gentle under the saddle, free from vicious habits, wit
h free and prompt action at the walk, trot, and gallop, without blemish or defect, of a kind disposition, and with easy mouth and gait. Its height must be between fifteen hands and a quarter and sixteen hands; his weight between nine hundred and fifty and eleven hundred and fifty pounds.

  The prescribed age is from four to eight years, but animals under five years are seldom accepted, and the best authorities recommend a minimum age of six years when hard field service is anticipated. There are other more or less technical requirements as to the points of a well-built, hardy, and active saddle horse. These specifications have been summed up in the following maxim: “Many good, few indifferent, no bad points.”

  It is manifestly out of the question to furnish thoroughbreds for cavalry service, for the supply of suitable ones is limited, the expense would be much greater, and these high-strung, mettlesome animals demand an amount of care quite inconsistent with the exigencies of active field work. Officers—who in our service are required to purchase their own mounts—usually provide themselves with thoroughbred chargers, or at least with very well-bred ones. Just now, however, most cavalry officers of moderate means do not feel disposed to purchase expensive animals, on account of the risk incurred in the Philippine service.

  Our government does not reimburse its officers for losses of mounts in time of war, and only under very limited conditions does it repay them in time of peace. The equine mortality in the Philippines has been large. The enervating climate affects horses as well as men, and a disease called surra has caused serious loss.

  Our two great official centers of instruction in military horsemanship—besides the cavalry regiments, each of which, of course, is in itself a school of training—are West Point, for cadets, and the Fort Riley Cavalry School, for the younger officers. At both places the instructors are senior officers. In the United States service, civilians have never been employed as riding masters.