equipping. The men were issued colorful
new uniforms: dark blue jackets, pale blue
trousers, silk sashes, yellow-braided trim,
and black, broad-brimmed hats pinned up
on the right with ostrich plumes trailing
behind them. The new hat, immediately
dubbed the “Jeff Davis,” replaced the
leather-visored dragoon cap favored in the
Mexican War. It proved less than popular
with the men, who complained about its
weight and fit. Groused one recruit, “If the
whole earth had been ransacked, it is diffi-
cult to tell where a more ungainly piece of
furniture could have been found.”
It would take more than smart new uni-
forms to fight the Plains warriors. Good
weapons were particularly needed to off-
set the superior mobility and individual
fighting skills of the Indians whom the sol-
diers were about to face. Eight companies
of the 1st Cavalry and two of the 2nd were
issued Sharps carbines; the others were
given U.S. Model 1854 carbines. All car-
ried Colt cap-and-ball six-shooters. A few
companies were issued experimental
arms—muzzle-loading Springfield pistol-
carbines, Merrill breechloaders, and Pruss-
ian-style sabers. The plains would be the
Army’s field laboratory for weapon testing.
To ensure the cavalry had the best possi-
ble mounts, the Army paid top dollar for
Kentucky-bred horses. At $150 per horse,
the price was well above the going market
rate, but the War Department spared no
expense to get its troopers into the saddle.
Horses were divided by type and coloramong the various companies—grays,
roans, sorrels, bays, and browns. The divi-
sion was designed to encourage company
pride and also make the units easily recog-
nizable in the field.
The 1st Regiment, headquartered at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, was the first to take
the field, beginning frontier patrols in the
late summer of 1855. With both Johnston
and Lee called away to temporary court-
martial duty, the 2nd Cavalry took longer
to train. Major William Hardee, the author
of a recent well-received book on infantry
tactics, took over regimental drill instruc-
tion. A brief outbreak of cholera, coupled
with blazingly hot weather and typical mil-
itary slowness in getting supplies to the
recruits, caused some of the more faint-
hearted to desert. Most, however, stuck it
out, and morale soared after the popular
Johnston finally arrived in camp.
Of the two new regiments, the 2nd
undoubtedly had the harder task ahead of
it. While the 1st was assigned to the rolling
grasslands of Kansas, Nebraska, and east-
ern Colorado—ancestral home to 4,000
generally peaceable Cheyenne—the 2nd
had to cover the vastly more inhospitable
region of Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern
Texas, home to 15,000 implacable
Comanche warriors and their families. Uni-
versally considered the best horsemen on
the plains, the Comanche ranged far and
wide, continuing a generations-long tradi-
tion of raids into Texas and as far south as
Mexico. They viewed the Southwest as theirown private hunting ground, and anyone
unlucky enough to wander into their reach
was fair game. Raiding was their life, and
they were enormously skilled at living it.
On October 27, 1855, the 2nd Cavalry
finally broke camp and headed for its
assigned duty postings in Texas. The 710-
man column rode diagonally across Mis-
souri, through northwest Arkansas and the
Indian Territory of Oklahoma, making a
mere 10 to 20 miles a day. Wives, children,
slaves, and servants accompanying the car-
avan slowed it down. Constant rain and a
year-long infestation of grasshoppers that
had stripped the prairie of vegetation made
travel across the forbidding landscape even
more difficult. The weather soon turned
cold, and early blizzards and sub-zero tem-
peratures struck the columns. On some days
the weather was so bad that the regiment
had to remain in camp. Lonely graves dot-
ted the frozen plains. “In the whole course
of my military experience,” future Confed-
erate general Kirby Smith would later write,
“I have never seen men suffer more.”
At last, on December 15, the regiment
crossed into Texas and marched to Fort
Belknap above the Brazos River. Once
there, the column split into two wings.
Hardee took four companies up the Clear
Fork of the Brazos to build an advance
camp and watch over the nearby
Comanche reservation. The rest proceeded
to Fort Mason on the Llanos River, 170
miles away, completing the 750-mile trek
on January 14, 1856.Q-Spr16 1 and 2 Cavalry_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:17 PM Page 38