dismounted and raced toward the warrior.
Stanley’s pistol misfired, and the wounded
Cheyenne limped toward him, clearly
intending to go down fighting in a hand-to-
hand struggle. Again Stuart charged, rais-
ing his saber and bringing it down on the
warrior’s head. At the same time, the dying
Indian got off one last round from a foot
away. The ball crashed into Stuart’s chest;
he reeled in the saddle while his comrades
finished off their overmatched foe.
The other officers carefully laid Stuart on
the ground and rigged up a cover of shade
with their sabers and a horse blanket. They
were sure he would die—no one could sur-vive a pistol shot at such close range. But
Stuart had more luck than the unfortunate
Cheyenne that day. The pistol was old and
ill kept, and the bullet had deflected off his
breastbone and lodged painfully but not life
threateningly behind Stuart’s left nipple.
Beauty, too, would live to fight another day.
American history might have been very
different had the unknown Cheyenne war-
rior used a better pistol that day. In a few
short years, under a different nickname,
“Jeb,” Stuart would become the Confed-
erate Army’s most famous cavalry com-
mander, serving under General Robert E.
Lee in the Eastern Theater of the Civil War.
He would do well, save for one glaring
lapse before the Battle of Gettysburg, when
his absence on an ill-advised foraging raid
would leave Lee and the Army of NorthernVirginia without adequate cavalry cover as
it prepared to fight the largest and most
crucial battle of the war. In a sense, the
Union victory at Gettysburg was set in
motion by Stuart’s unlikely survival on the
banks of Solomon’s Fork, Kansas, almost
exactly six years earlier.
The brief and insignificant tussle at
Solomon’s Fork was just one in a series of
Army-Indian clashes involving the 1st Cav-
alry and its brother regiment, the 2nd Cav-
alry, in the half dozen years preceding the
Civil War. And Jeb Stuart was just one of a
remarkable number of future Union and
Confederate generals who fought Indianstogether on the western plains before fight-
ing each other in battlefields back east a
few years later. Included on the regimental
rosters were such future luminaries as Lee,
Stuart, Albert Sidney Johnston, Joseph
Johnston, George Thomas, John Bell
Hood, Edmund Kirby Smith, Earl Van
Dorn, William Hardee, and John Sedg-
wick. A stray arrow here or there might
well have changed the entire course of the
Civil War.
The illustrious 1st and 2nd Cavalry Reg-
iments were the particular brainchild of
Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who lob-
bied President Franklin Pierce long and
hard for their creation. Davis and Pierce
had served with many of the regiments’
officers in the recent successful war with
Mexico. But then-President James K. Polk,having won a singular victory in the Mex-
ican War and increased the nation’s size by
more than one million square miles,
reduced the volunteer-swollen army’s tem-
porary size to its congressionally mandated
peacetime size of 13,821 men. In June
1853, five years after the Mexican War, the
army had fewer than 7,000 men on active
duty in the West—124 soldiers for each of
the Army’s 54 western outposts.
In his first annual report to Congress in
1854, Davis complained bitterly about the
reduced numbers. “We have a sea-board
and foreign frontier of more than 10,000
miles, an Indian frontier, and routesthrough Indian country, requiring constant
protection of more than 8,000 miles,” he
noted, “and an Indian population of more
than 400,000, of whom probably 40,000
warriors are inimical and only want the
opportunity to become active enemies.”
Davis petitioned for more soldiers.
Opponents in Congress, led by Union-
leaning Senators Sam Houston of Texas
and Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri,
fought an increase in the military for a
number of reasons, not least of which was
their fear that such an army would be
Southern-dominated, at a time when the
winds of secession were just beginning to
blow malignly across the country. They did
not trust Davis, a Mississippian, to main-
tain a proper regional mix of appoint-
ments. Pierce, too, although a native ofFuture generals who served in western cavalry units before the war included, left to right, Edwin V. Sumner, Richard W. Johnson, David C. Twiggs, and George
H. Thomas. Twiggs was the lone Confederate.Q-Spr16 1 and 2 Cavalry_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:17 PM Page 36