Frontier Regulars

by Robert M. Utley

  Although the Civil War uniform stocks were not finally exhausted until about 1880, a shortage in certain sizes led, in 1872, to a revision of uniform regulations. The new uniform, according to General Sherman, was the creation of Insp. Gen. Randolph B. Marcy, who designed it and secured its adoption by Secretary of War Belknap during Sherman’s absence in Europe in 1871–72.18 The most notable changes, reflecting Prussian influence, were in the dress uniform. Cavalry and artillery sported a spiked helmet bearing a large metal eagle and supporting a horsehair plume, yellow for cavalry, red for artillery. Infantry received a handsome shako with a light blue plume for officers and pompon for enlisted men. A subsequent change, in 1881, gave the infantry spiked helmets, too, with white instead of blue plumes.19 Blouses and trousers, trimly cut, better fitting, and ornamented with piping and facings identifying the arm of service, gave soldiers a smarter appearance than previously. Officers presented a dazzling array of gold cords, tassles, epaulettes, and a double row of brass buttons. Undress uniforms, after a brief and unfortunate experiment with plaited blouses for infantry, were also made more acceptable. Both cavalry and infantry rated a simple five-button blouse with falling collar, although the old cavalry shell jacket with yellow trim and the nine-button infantry frock coat, both with standup collars, continued to be issued until the wartime stocks were depleted.

  Even though the new regulations substituted a cut-down chasseur kepi presenting the rakish French appearance absent in the earlier model, undress headgear continued to present problems. Soldiers complained that the kepi gave no protection to the head and indeed could only be kept there with great difficulty. “A clam-shell would be as good,” remarked a soldier in 1876.20 The black 1872 campaign hat, featuring an unusually wide brim that could be hooked to the crown to produce a Napoleonic effect, offered a completely unsatisfactory alternative to the kepi. It lost its sizing after the first wetting and quickly went to pieces. Col. David S. Stanley called this hat “the most useless, uncouth rag ever put on a man’s head.”21 A more orthodox hat, with narrower brim, adopted in 1876, gave scarcely greater satisfaction either for comfort or durability. “Hence in the field,” summed up a campaigner in 1877, “we see no forage caps, but in their stead hats—white hats, brown hats, black hats, all kinds of hats except the Service hat, for that, too, is unsuitable.”22

  Besides a variety of hats in a still greater variety of shapes, a typical column on campaign displayed blue, gray, or even checked shirts and faded regulation trousers. Horsemen often lined the seat with canvas or wore trousers made entirely of canvas. More stylish types affected white corduroy breeches, while “the true dandy,” as a New York correspondent reported from the Yellowstone in 1876, “dons a buckskin shirt with an immense quantity of fringe dangling about in the wind.”23 Cavalrymen stuffed their trousers into troop boots, infantrymen into socks tied up over the cuffs. Canvas leggings replaced the latter method in the infantry in the late 1880s. Leather gauntlets appeared in 1884. Although an occasional shoulder strap identified an officer, evidence of rank was scarce in the field.

  Equally casual and expedient were methods of carrying ammunition, equipment, and utensils. Soldiers disliked the regulation black leather cartridge boxes, originally designed for paper cartridges but adapted to metallic ammunition by adding sheepskin lining or banks of loops. McKeever, Dyer, Hagner, and King were the principal models tested in the 1860s and 1870s. As early as 1866, Capt. Anson Mills sewed leather loops to a standard belt and thus distributed the weight evenly around the waist, and in 1867 Col. William B. Hazen invented a looped leather device that slid on and off the belt. Rather than use the boxes, soldiers improvised their own looped belts until the Ordnance Department at last, in late 1876, bowed to the demand and began manufacturing “prairie belts” of canvas loops sewed on a leather backing. By devising a means of weaving loops and body in a single fabric, Mills vastly improved the prairie belt. His 1881 woven cartridge belt, adopted by the army, was the forerunner of an elaborate system of webbed equipment that spread around the world and made its inventor a wealthy man.24

  The mounted trooper stowed mess gear and other possessions into saddle bags behind his McClellan saddle. He tied his blanket in a roll in front of the saddle and his blouse or overcoat in the rear. The saddle also supported lariat, picket-pin, canteen, and other utensils. The carbine, attached to a broad leather sling across his left shoulder, fitted awkwardly into a socket on the right side of the saddle. A sheath knife hung from the waist belt on his left hip, a black leather holster containing his revolver, butt forward, on his right hip. The foot soldier rarely bothered with the regulation knapsack, preferring instead to distribute the weight of his gear in a blanket roll slung over the shoulder. His bayonet, like the cavalryman’s saber, usually remained behind. A good sheath knife proved as essential as in the cavalry. Rifle and canteen completed the “web-foot” outfit.

  The absence of satisfactory summer and winter garb inflicted continuing hardship. Troops in the desert Southwest appealed for lighter, better ventilated clothing. Farther north, even with the heavy, light-blue overcoat, the regulation wool uniform gave scant protection against the winter blasts of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. The Quartermaster General’s Clothing Bureau tested innovations, but the line as often simply improvised to meet the need.

  In the 1870s the Clothing Bureau experimented with a variety of Arctic overcoats, caps, gauntlets, and boots. Buffalo, beaver, bear, seal, and muskrat furs were tried, along with canvas lined with sheepskin or blanket material. The buffalo garments proved the most effective and in fact gained wide use before winning official sanction. By the late 1870s, special winter clothing had become standard for northern posts. An officer’s wife described the typical soldier thus attired setting forth “in the blackness and bitter cold of a winter night in Dakota”: “Clad in buffalo skins, trousers and overocat with the fur inside, mufflers over his ears, hands incased in fur mittens, his face in a mask, leaving space sufficient only to see his way, he presents an appearance rivaling his Eskimo brother.”25

  Concessions to hot weather came more slowly. In 1875 Quartermaster General Meigs obtained from the British Minister in Washington some white cork helmets such as the Queen’s troops used in India and elsewhere. Tested for five years and slightly modified, the sun helmet won approval in 1880. In 1886 white cotton duck blouses, trousers, and overalls were issued experimentally in Texas and proved so popular that the following year they, too, won approval. Even so, straw hats from the post trader’s store enjoyed greater favor than cork helmets, and cotton uniforms never replaced the more informal apparel frontier soldiers had always worn. As an ultimate in expedient response to hot weather, Captain Lawton’s troops combed Mexico’s Sierra Madre in 1886 attired in moccasins, battered campaign hats, and long underwear (see Chapter Twenty).26

  America’s frontier soldiers, a perceptive English observer summed up, looked like banditti but boasted a “practical adaptability” for their service that would surprise the well-turned-out “barrack-yard” soldiers of Europe.27 More graphically, if also more verbosely, a New York Times reporter said almost the same thing in describing the arrival of the Fifth Cavalry at Fort Fetter-man en route to join Crook in July 1876:

  … They came along in thorough fighting trim, flanking parties out, and videttes too; and the wagon train of forty wagons following with a strong cavalry guard. To a fastidious eye, … there was something quite shocking in the disregard of regulation uniform, and the mud-bespattered appearance of the men; but it was a pleasure to see how full of vim, of spirit, and emphatically of fight, the fellows looked…. About the only things in their dress which marked them as soldiers were their striped pants and knee boots, both well bespattered with mud. Their blue Navy shirts, broad brimmed hats, belts stuffed with cartridges, and loose handkerchiefs knotted about the neck, gave them a wild, bushwhacker appearance, which was in amusing contrast with their polished and gentlemanly manners.28

  With only slight changes of
detail, the journalist might have been describing almost any frontier column on the march between 1866 and 1890.

  NOTES

  1. SW, Annual Report (1867), pp. 17–18. Arcadi Gluckman, United States Muskets, Rifles, and Carbines (Buffalo, N.Y., 1948), pp. 273–89. See also SW, Annual Report (1866), p. 5; (1869), pp. 442–43.

  2. Gluckman, pp. 395–98, 421–22, 438–40. SW, Annual Report (1866), p. 5; (1869), p. 442; (1871), p. 250.

  3. Gluckman, pp. 289–93, 406–9.

  4. Testimony before House Military Committee, April 26, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 264.

  5. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Aug. 26, 1876), 78; 75 (April 27, 1878), 610. SW, Annual Report (1877), p. 52. Colonel N. A. Miles before House Military Committee, Dec. 13, 1877, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, p. 240. Kenneth M. Hammer, The Springfield Carbine on the Western Frontier (Bellevue, Neb., 1970). John E. Parsons and John S. du Mont, Firearms in the Custer Battle (Harrisburg, Pa., 1953).

  6. Arcadi Gluckman, United States Martial Pistols and Revolvers (Buffalo, N.Y., 1939), pp. 213–17, 230, 233–36. James S. Hutchins, “Boots and Saddles on the Frontier,” Westerners Brand Book (Chicago), 12 (March 1966), 6–7. Parsons and du Mont. Exhaustive tests of these three pistols at the Springfield Armory in 1876 produced this conclusion: “The record of this trial shows the Colt revolver to be the most serviceable of the three arms under consideration, and the one best adapted to the military service. It is simple in its mechanism, stable in its structure, and will endure the most severe tests to which it may be subjected in the hands of the cavalry soldier.” Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Feb. 10, 1877), 435–39.

  7. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Oct. 14, 1876). 154. For Cooke see ibid., 15 (May 25, 1878), 678. For other opinions see ibid., 15 (April 27, 1878), 610 (Carr); (May 4, 1878), 628 (Merritt); (July 6, 1878), 778 (Brackett).

  8. Army and Navy Journal, 15 (June 29, 1878), 758. See also Crook’s “The Apache Problem,” pp. 259–60, for further discussion. For Indian arms at the Little Bighorn, see Parsons and du Mont, chap. 3.

  9. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Aug. 26, 1878), 48.

  10. Gluckman, pp. 330–32. Sidney B. Brinckerhoff and Pierce Chamberlain, “The Army’s Search for a Repeating Rifle, 1873–1903,” Military Affairs, 32 (1968), 20–30.

  11. E.g., General Crook (Autobiography, p. 146) and Colonel Merritt (Army and Navy Journal, 15 [May 4, 1878], 628).

  12. Miles to Ruger, Dec. 7, 1890, Military Division of the Missouri Letters Sent 1890–91, National Archives. I have described this weapon and its fearful work at Wounded Knee in The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, chap. 12. See also S. E. Whitman, The Trooper: An Informal History of the Plains Cavalry (New York, 1962), pp. 186–87. A sheaf of reports from 1877 to 1880 filed as #1716, Office of the Chief of Ordnance Letters Received 1880, RG 156, National Archives, contains excellent data on the Hotchkiss gun, as well as an endorsement of May 6, 1880, by General Crook declaring artillery of any kind useless in Indian warfare.

  13. Miles to Sherman, July 8, 1876, Sherman Papers, vol. 44, LC. See also the account of Gatling performance in Miles’ Sioux operations of October 1876, Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Feb. 10, 1877), 431.

  14. Rickey, p. 219. Whitman, pp. 185–86.

  15. Hunt to Rep. Levi Maish, Feb. 11, 1878, House Misc. Docs., 45th Cong., 2d sess., No. 56, pp. 94–96.

  16. E. B. Williston, “Machine Guns in War,” Army and Navy Journal, 2) May 29, 1886), 890–91.

  17. This discussion rests importantly on Gordon Chappell, The Search for the Well-Dressed Soldier, 1865–1890 (Museum Monograph No. 5, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson, 1972); James S. Hutchins, “The Cavalry Campaign Outfit at the Little Big Horn,” Military Collector and Historian, 7 (1956), 91–101; and Hutchins’ introduction to a reprint of Ordnance Memoranda No. 29: Horse Equipment and Cavalry Accoutrements as Prescribed by G.O. 7}, A.G.O., 1885 (Pasadena, Calif., 1970). See also Donald E. Kloster, “Uniforms of the Army Prior and Subsequent to 1872,” Military Collector and Historian, 14 (1962), 103–12; M. I. Luddington, comp., Uniform of the Army of the United States from 1774–1889 (Washington, D.C., 1889); Rickey, Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay, chap. 11; and Whitman, The Trooper, chap. 13; Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: A History of the Corps, 1775–1939 (Washington, D.C., 1962), pp. 500–5.

  18. Sherman to Sheridan, March 11, 1873, Sherman-Sheridan Letters, Sheridan Papers, LC.

  19. Gordon Chappell, Brass Spikes and Horsehair Plumes: A Study of U.S. Army Dress Helmets, 1872–1903 (Museum Monograph No. 4, Arizona Pioneers Historical Society, Tucson, 1966).

  20. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Sept 2, 1876), 58.

  21. Quoted in James S. Hutchins, “The Army Campaign Hat of 1872,” Military Collector and Historian, 16 (1964), 65–73.

  22. Army and Navy Journal, 75 (Sept. 15, 1877), 90.

  23. Ibid., 14 (Aug. 12, 1876), 4.

  24. Chappell, The Search for the Well-Dressed Soldier, pp. 21–27. Anson Mills, My Story (Washington, D.C., 1918), pp. 314–31.

  25. Alice Blackwood Baldwin, Memoirs of the Late Frank D. Baldwin, Major General, U.S.A. (Los Angeles, 1929), p. 32. Evolution of winter clothing is described by Chappell, Search for the Well-Dressed Soldier, pp. 27–32. See also Risch, p. 503.

  26. Gordon Chappell, Summer Helmets of the U.S. Army, 1875–1910 (Wyoming State Museum Monograph No. 1, Cheyenne, 1967). Risch, pp. 503–5. SW, Annual Report (1888), p. 307.

  27. Archibald Forbes, “The United States Army,” North American Review, 135 (1882), 145.

  28. Army and Navy Journal, 14 (Aug. 12, 1876), 4.

  Army Life on the Border

  Young Min! I conghratulate yiz on bein assigned to moi thrupe, becos praviously to dis toime, I vinture to say that moi thrupe had had more villins, loyars, teeves, scoundhrils and, I moight say, dam murdhrers than enny udder thrupe in de United States Ormy. I want yiz to pay sthrict attintion to jooty—and not become dhrunken vagabonds, wandhrin all over the face of Gods Creashun, spindin ivry cint ov yur pay with low bum-mers. Avoide all timptashuns, loikewoise all discipashuns, so that in toime yiz kin become non-commissioned offizurs; yez’ll foind yer captin a very laynent man and very much given to laynency, fur oi niver duz toi no man up bee der tumbs unless he duz bee late for roll-call. Sarjint, dismiss de detachmint.1

  THUS DID CAPT. GERALD RUSSELL greet a contingent of re cruits to his troop of the Third Cavalry at Fort Selden, New Mexico, in 1869, and thus might any recruit have been welcomed to his new life on the frontier between 1866 and 1890. For the next five years he would live in dark, dirty, overcrowded, vermin-infested barracks, sharing a straw-filled mattress with a “bunkie.” He would eat bad food, badly prepared. He would labor long hours at menial tasks that neither required nor helped to inculcate military skills. He would endure strict discipline fortified by severe, often brutal penalties for transgressions. Occasionally he would go out on scout or patrol or even campaign. Probably he would never see combat. His comrades would come from almost every walk of life and stratum of society. Except for those formally clothed with rank and authority, the army wiped out such distinctions, and anyway one did not inquire into the origins of his fellows. He would find them profane, contentious, and addicted to gambling and whiskey. With them he would brave danger, discomfort, hardship, boredom, and loneliness. With them he would develop bonds, if not of friendship, at least of the solidarity formed of shared adventure.

  Officers fared better, of course. They enjoyed privileges, comforts, and social relationships that made life more bearable. They brought their families with them. They found relief in an occasional furlough. They could afford servants—detailed enlisted men, called “dog robbers,” or girls brought from the East and often promptly lost in marriage to a soldier. Even so, officers could only ameliorate, not escape, the conditions of army life on the border. Reporting at his first frontier station in 1871, Lt. Frederick E. Phelps could not have felt much more elation over the prospects of commiss
ioned life at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, than filled the recruit experiencing his first taste of enlisted life at Fort Selden two years earlier:

  The locality was all that could be desired; the Post everything undesirable. Huts of logs and round stones, with flat dirt roofs that in summer leaked and brought down rivulets of liquid mud: in winter the hiding place of the tarantula and the centipede, with ceilings of “condemned” canvas; windows of four and six panes, swinging, doorlike, on hinges (the walls were not high enough to allow them to slide upward): low, dark and uncomfortable. Six hundred miles from the railroad … with nothing to eat but the government rations—beef, bacon, coffee, sugar, rice, pepper, salt, and vinegar,—together with a few cans of vegetables divided pro rata, old Fort Bayard was the “final jumping off place” sure enough, I thought, as I rode into it in the summer of 1871.2

  Whether blessed with a tolerable climate and attractive surroundings, like Fort Bayard, or less favorably endowed, like Fort Selden, most forts resembled one another in the appearance they presented and the quality and style of life they sustained. The typical fort looked more like a village than a fort. Only a handful, thrust into hostile Indian country, displayed stockades or other defenses, such as Forts Phil Kearny and C. F. Smith on the Bozeman Trail, or Fort Cummings in New Mexico. Indians occasionally tried to run off a fort’s grazing stock or harried outlying facilities, but the chances of a direct attack, such as occurred at Fort Apache, Arizona, in 1881 were so remote that defensive works of any kind were rarely erected. A frontier post, therefore, was simply a distinctively grouped collection of buildings made of lumber, stone, or adobe, depending upon local building materials. Barracks faced officers’ quarters across a parade ground. At either end and elsewhere in the vicinity stood administrative offices, warehouses, workshops, corrals, the post trader’s store, and “suds row,” home of NCOs married to laundresses. An impressively structured flagpole lifted the national colors high above the parade ground.