Wild About Horses

by Lawrence Scanlan

  Meanwhile, over in the New World, the horse still represented the paragon of military might. Until the advent of the repeating rifle and the revolver, Indian warriors on horseback completely outmatched the pioneers. It took a minute in the early days to measure and pour powder, ram the ball down the barrel, prime the tube, adjust the cap or flint and then fire. In that time, the Indian warrior could advance three hundred yards and let fly with up to twenty arrows.

  Some historians believe the Comanche were the finest horsemen of the West. To “ride like a Comanche” became a western proverb. If horses were the mark of wealth among Plains Indians, the Comanche were the wealthiest of all. Each warrior might own fifty to two hundred head, and one chief, A Great Fall by Tripping, was said to own fifteen hundred. The numbers of horses owned by tribes defies the imagination: the great camp of Sioux and Cheyenne gathered along the Little Big Horn in 1876 was said to include from twenty thousand to forty thousand horses.

  With astonishing speed (the horse came to them only after 1700), the Comanche exploited the horse in a military way. Boys of five were soon capable of saddling their own ponies and riding off with bow and arrow. Colonel Richard Dodge, an American cavalry officer, called the Plains Indian boy of twelve to fifteen years of age “the best rough rider and natural horseman in the world.”

  An American army captain once offered a large sum of money for the favorite horse of Sanaco, a Comanche chief. He declined to sell his buffalo horse lest his people suffer. Besides, Sanaco said, stopping to pat the pony on the neck, “I love him very much.”

  Proud warriors painted their horses as well as themselves. War horses had their tails braided with bright ribbons and feathers, their manes adorned with scalps. The horses wore necklaces of bear claws, with human hands or horse tracks painted on their flanks to indicate scalps taken or horses stolen.

  There is no consensus on which tribe became the finest horse people. The Crow, the Sioux, the Comanche, the Blackfoot might all claim the honor, but the claim is beyond verification. Because they were among the first to see and use the horse, the Apache also warrant consideration. The Apache chief Geronimo (whose rifle I have seen in Monty Roberts’s house, its stock notched in a kind of inverted Braille to spell men, each dot a recorded kill), rode a “blaze-faced, white-stockinged dun horse,” according to his biographer. In close combat, a warrior was sometimes forced to leave his horse and escape on foot. Geronimo had trained his horse to come when called, and this the chief would do when he had found a safe place.

  By the time of the American Civil War, the horse was employed more to move guns than to move men. Still, at least in the beginning, more horses and mules were killed than soldiers and the life expectancy of a horse at the front was six months. Some died of starvation, wounds or disease; some went mad from the noise and carnage and had to be shot.

  Cavalry had a role to play in the First World War, but much less of one in the Second World War. Remembered because rare, the cavalry charge had by this time become a romantic gesture. Russian cavalrymen on tough little Siberian ponies did, however, successfully attack German tanks immobilized by frigid cold. And a bold plan to drop — by glider — almost twelve hundred mules and 250 horses into Japanese-held Burma turned out a great success for the Allies. The maneuver kept supply lines open for beleaguered battalions.

  Horses were also used in the 1950s in Kenya against Mau Mau rebels. And during the Korean War a mare named Reckless was given the rank of sergeant for her valor in hauling ammunition.

  In certain parts of America, the cavalry tradition lives on, with mounted RCMP officers patrolling the parking lots of malls. RCMP, in this case, stands for Royal Courtesy Mounted Patrol. It was launched in 1988 by a young horseman named Frank Keller, whose company, Alpha and Omega Services, now has riders patrolling malls in half a dozen states. As Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence found in her field research, muggers and car thieves are extremely wary of horses, and the clip-clop of hooves actually makes people in neighborhoods feel warm and secure.

  Keller’s first hurdle in launching the RCMP was to establish a set of standard operating procedures that would satisfy his insurance company. He found what he needed by consulting old U.S. Cavalry field manuals in the Library of Congress. The horses must pass extraordinary stress tests that include exposure to firecrackers, squirt guns, smoke, helicopters and the wail of fire trucks. The troopers, who wear blue uniforms with gold trim and sit astride elegantly groomed horses, are unarmed. The horse is deterrent enough. One mall saw its crime rate fall from thirty-five incidents in one December to twelve the next.

  The genuine RCMP, ironically, rarely use horses today: the famous “musical ride” and ceremonial occasions mark the only time a mountie sits in the saddle. The RCMP dress uniform — scarlet tunic and brown ranger hat — has become a Canadian icon recognized around the world. But as their name implies, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rode to fame on the back of a horse.

  The government formed the force in 1873 to bring order to the vast Canadian West, which was likely more lawless (and the American West more lawful) than legend would have it. The massacre that year of at least thirty Assiniboine Indians, victims of Montana wolf hunters on the trail of horse thieves, hurried the move. The so-called Cypress Hills Massacre in what is now Saskatchewan marked a turning point in the taming of the West. The task of the North-West Mounted Police, as they were then called, was extraordinary: three hundred men on horses were to patrol an area of three hundred thousand square miles. That they pulled it off speaks of their boldness and, on more than one occasion, their good fortune.

  Imagine this scene from 1877. Sitting Bull and five hundred of his warriors, fleeing U.S. Cavalry in the wake of the Little Big Horn, are gathered at Wood Mountain in what is now southern Saskatchewan, where Sioux numbers have swollen to four thousand. The NWMP’s task is to keep a lid on the unruly Sioux, who love to steal horses — even police horses. An NWMP officer, with a small escort, rides into Sitting Bull’s camp and demands the return of the police horses. The chief — himself on a fine horse — almost laughs at him.

  “I would take even the horse you are riding if I thought it stolen,” says the officer.

  “It is,” replies Sitting Bull, drawing a line in the sand with his words.

  What happens next seems cinematic (the Mountie legend did, after all, inspire some 250 films), but it’s true. The officer edges his horse close by the Sioux chief’s, yanks him out of the saddle and takes the horse by the bridle. Other officers close ranks around their commanding officer, then all gallop off to the nearby fort. For whatever reason, no retaliation ensues.

  Other stories contributed to the Mounties’ reputation for always getting their man (that motto, by the way, is pure Hollywood invention). At the turn of the century, Sergeant J. C. W. Biggs trailed a horse thief from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, into Montana in a marathon pursuit that spanned twenty-seven hundred miles and 135 days.

  The sleek black mounts ridden today by the RCMP in their mesmerizing cavalry drills look nothing like the scruffy ponies initially used in the territory. Mountie history is replete with stories of unbroken horses throwing their first riders to the ground, but come January and the blizzards, those same horses, if their riders trusted them, brought them safely home.

  I admire the instinct to honor the war horse, though not always the honor itself. I am puzzled, for example, by the strange custom of military men who pay tribute to great war horses by stuffing them or mounting their bones in glass cases.

  To be fair, it is not just men in uniform who cannot bear to bury the equine dead. Roy Rogers, the film and TV cowboy from the 1950s, rode his palomino, Trigger, until the inevitable day came and the stallion stopped rearing forever. Or so it seemed. Roy “just couldn’t put the old fellow in the ground with the worms and everything,” so he put him to work, instead — with the tourists. Trigger deserved better than what he got: being stuffed in the Roy Rogers Museum in California, frozen in his famous hooves-pawing-the-air p
ose.

  No ashes to ashes, dust to dust for Arkle, the brilliant Irish steeplechaser, either. His bones are on display in a museum at Kildare. As for Phar Lap, the legendary speed horse who died mysteriously in America in 1932, his heart and skin went to Australia, where he raced to fame, and his skeleton to New Zealand, where he was born. Even the rodeo world has gotten into the act: the rodeo bronc War Paint lives on, taxidermically, in Pendleton, Oregon.

  But soldiers do beat all when it comes to twisting horse remains into horse monuments. General Philip H. Sheridan rode a horse called Winchester in the Civil War. So grateful for his services was the general that when Winchester died Sheridan had him done up like a big-game trophy and presented to a war museum. He (the horse, not the general) is still on display — at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

  Another American general, Robert E. Lee, fought for the South and rode a storied gray called Traveller. The mere sight of the general on that horse was enough to inspire Confederate troops. “As he rode majestically in front of my line of battle, with uncovered head and mounted on Old Traveller,” wrote a fellow general, “Lee looked a very god of war.” The horse would outlive his master and join his funeral procession. In 1871, Traveller himself was buried, but not for long.

  In 1907, the army disinterred his skeleton and parked it in a museum, where Traveller remained on duty until 1962, when he was finally put in the ground just outside the chapel at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Kentucky. Since Lee was buried in the chapel, horse and rider remain, you could say, close.

  Little Sorrel, Stonewall Jackson’s charger in the Civil War, also warranted a decent burial but instead ended up on display in the Soldier’s Home in Richmond, Virginia. Stuffed horses, however, fell out of fashion, and in 1997, Little Sorrel’s bones were cremated and his ashes sprinkled under Jackson’s statue at the Virginia Military Institute. Tossed into the grave, as well, was earth from fourteen battlefields where the horse had served, along with a few carrots and some horseshoes.

  Stuffing a horse seems strange to us now. But a century ago it was a token of an officer’s affection for a trusted mount who may have saved his life many times over. In the land of the stuffed horse, one ranks above the rest. He is Comanche, that celebrated survivor (on the U.S. Cavalry side) of Custer’s Last Stand, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in what was then called the Montana Territory. We know a great deal about Comanche, thanks in large part to Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence. Her book on Comanche, His Very Silence Speaks, goes far beyond biography and amounts to a thoughtful treatise on the horse as both warrior and living symbol.

  Comanche was a good-looking dark buckskin horse ridden by an Irish-born officer in the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, Myles W. Keogh. The horse’s original name is unknown, but Captain Keogh called him Comanche, either because the horse was once wounded by the Comanche in 1868 or because the horse let out “a Comanche yell” when he took that arrow in the hip. Comanche dutifully brought Keogh back to camp, where the horse patiently and stoically allowed a farrier to pull out the arrow and dress the wound.

  There would be many more arrows and bullets for Comanche, the foolhardy George Armstrong Custer and the horse soldiers and horses under his command. For the Sioux and Cheyenne warriors massed and waiting for Custer and his troops, the battle that June 25, 1876, was a resounding victory, the last of its kind. For the American people, it was a shattering defeat. When troops arrived in the Valley of the Little Big Horn two days later, they found every one of the 276 soldiers dead. Their horses were slain or gone; the few left bore awful wounds. Among the gore stood Comanche.

  Little Soldier, a seventeen-year-old Sioux who fought at the Little Big Horn, later explained why that horse was left. Captain Keogh, it seems, had ordered his men to shoot their horses and use their bodies as cover. He himself had not yet done so and maybe could not bear to. Keogh had a reputation as a loner, a romantic and a melancholy sort. He was also a gifted rider. A cavalryman who served under him during the Civil War said he “rode a horse like a Centaur.”

  But the centaur was surrounded. He was kneeling between Comanche’s legs and shooting at his attackers when he finally died of bullet wounds. Keogh still held Comanche’s reins tightly in his hand, and the Sioux looking on believed it was dangerous to disturb such a potent connection between rider and horse, between the living and the dead. “No Indian,” said Little Soldier, “would take that horse when a dead man was holding the rein.”

  Every trooper at the Little Big Horn was stripped, scalped and mutilated — some beyond recognition — except for Captain Keogh, who was left intact and in uniform. Like Keogh, General Custer apparently also died with the reins of his horse, a fine sorrel, attached to one wrist. A Santee Indian named Walks-Under-the-Ground later said he ignored superstition and took the horse that belonged to “Long Hair.”

  By the time the cavalry reached Comanche days later, his six bullet wounds had exacted a near mortal toll and one soldier was tempted to end the horse’s misery by cutting his throat. But two other men put water in their hats and urged Comanche to drink. Slowly he recovered and was eventually nursed back to health.

  No one ever rode him again. Colonel Samuel D. Sturgis of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry, who lost a son at the Little Big Horn, issued special orders concerning Comanche that Lawrence calls unique in the annals of military history. General Orders No. 7, which included a phrase that gave Lawrence the title of her book, read: “The horse known as ‘Comanche’ being the only living representative of the bloody tragedy of the Little Big Horn, Montana, June 25, 1876, his kind treatment and comfort should be a matter of special pride and solicitude on the part of the 7th Cavalry, to the end that his life may be prolonged to the utmost limit. Though wounded and scarred, his very silence speaks more eloquently than words of the desperate struggle against overwhelming odds, of the hopeless conflict, and heroic manner in which all went down that day.”

  5.4 Comanche: he survived Custer’s Last Stand to become an outpost pet and later a museum attraction. (photo credit 5.4)

  From that point, Comanche led the life of a military hero. He was never again put to work, and it became a court-martial offense to strike him or to ride him. Only on special occasions would he be saddled and bridled and led by a mounted trooper. He was housed in a handsome stall and given several attendants, including a blacksmith named Gustave Korn, whom he adored. Comanche had become a living legend, and what Comanche wanted, Comanche got.

  He acquired a taste for the finer things. During his long recovery, he was fed a whiskey bran mash every second day, and he would often wander over to the canteen, where the men offered him, and he willingly drank, buckets of beer. Much the outpost pet, he also solicited sugar from the men. Comanche would turn over garbage while foraging and sometimes would be seen with coffee grounds on his mouth — like a kid with a milk mustache.

  No area was off-limits for this horse. His stall door always remained open so he could roll at will in the nearby mud wallow and graze by the bandstand during regimental concerts. He also helped himself to lawns and gardens, where he developed a fondness for the sunflowers painstakingly grown by officers’ wives. Comanche would follow Korn around like a faithful puppy, and when the blacksmith went to a house to visit a lady friend, the jealous horse would neigh outside until Korn finally came out to lead him home. Comanche’s caretakers claimed that when Korn passed away, the horse — by then a very old horse in any case — “lost interest in life” and died.

  In 1891, they stuffed him. Many years passed before they put him in a glass case, and by that time thousands of visitors had come to the museum at the University of Kansas in Lawrence just to see the horse and touch him for good luck. Some could not resist taking a souvenir hair from Comanche’s tail. One report has it that so many tail hairs were plucked the museum caretaker secretly replaced the tail seven times.

  War horses often knew instinctively who was friend, who was foe. In a previous battle, after his men had slaughtered many
unarmed Cheyenne, Custer ordered the killing of eight hundred captured Indian ponies. This effectively destroyed the Indians’ valued possessions, but was it not also a waste of good horseflesh? No, because Indian ponies clearly saw (or, more precisely, smelled) whites as the enemy and typically would not let soldiers even get close to them. Indian women, who could approach the horses easily, were forced to round up the doomed ponies. In the same way, U.S. Cavalry horses were just as afraid of Indians. Each side could, if desired, ride the other side’s horses, but the rider needed both time and patience.

  Countless anecdotes from military history point to the horse’s heightened sensitivity to the presence of the enemy. A Canadian officer tells the story of a polo pony mare at a front-line veterinary hospital who could detect — long before soldiers could — the approach of aircraft during the Second World War. That alone is not unusual. But this mare could apparently distinguish between Allied and enemy bombers. If the planes were German, she would stop eating, throw up her head and, with ears erect, stand perfectly still. She would listen, then stamp, paw and show signs of excitement. But if the planes were friendly, she calmly continued eating.

  Another Canadian soldier described a rather cunning mule — a gun-pack animal — who would find a hollow in the ground and lie low when she and her train came under fire from German machine guns. There she stayed until the firing ceased. But savvy alone does not explain the bond between soldier and horse, or why some war horses were held in such high esteem.

  General Jack Seely (later Lord Mottistone) led Canadian mounted troops in the First World War and wrote a book, My Horse, Warrior, about the fierce love he felt for his war horse. A line drawing at the front of the book faithfully captures, says Seely, Warrior’s “white star and his fearless eye.” The horse had presence: when Seely rode among the men he did not hear “Here Comes the General” but “Here’s Old Warrior.”