Great American Horse Stories

by Sharon B. Smith

  “There was Sergeant John McCafferty and Capt’n Donahue,

  They made us march and toe the mark in gallant Company Q.

  Oh, the drums did roll, upon me soul, and this is the way we go:

  Forty miles a day on beans and hay, in the regular army, O!”

  You can’t long keep soldiers or sailors in a somber mood, even though death lies behind them, before them, or all about them! They say there was joking in the ranks even when the six hundred of the Light Brigade—“all that was left of them”—rode out of the death-trap at Balaclava! Dewey’s men went skylarking to breakfast in the lull of Manila’s fight, and Hobson’s comrades put up a bit of “funning” as they rowed into the Spanish clutches at Santiago.

  But the trumpeter said to Jack, “It makes me sick, Jack, so it does, to hear those freshies from St. Paul—why, they joined the command after you did, Jack—giving their opinion over the general’s tactics, and what he ought to have done! A battle had to come, didn’t it? That’s what we’re here for. If the general hadn’t come here, but had struck south to find Crook, or had waited for Terry, why, the Indians wouldn’t have hung around till he picked out the time to lick ’em. They’d have just up and got. That’s their way. If they’d done so, who’d have got the blame? Custer. He came here; he found ’em; he sailed in to whip ’em. He struck the whole Sioux nation, and got the worst of it. Well, what of it? Isn’t it better to stand up and take your medicine like a man, even if it does kill you, than hold back and be afraid to stick your nose out for fear some one’ll pull it? General Custer died like a hero; and so did his men; and this country’ll never forget ’em, you mark my words.”

  From all of which Jack Huntingdon was led to infer that the trumpeter thought more of Custer’s dash than of Reno’s timidity—although no names were mentioned, for the trumpeter was too good a soldier to go against the rules of discipline. And still the never-answered questions stayed with both of them: “Why did not Benteen go with those packs? Why didn’t Reno go, too?”

  Next day the work of clearing and temporarily marking the battlefield that was a burying ground was concluded, and at once preparations began for a speedy withdrawal. For General Terry, who was, like Reno, no seasoned Indian fighter, felt himself on dangerous and uncertain ground, and decided to fall back at once to the supply camp on the Yellowstone. He had no inclination to go off “playing tag” with the whole Sioux nation, and wisely deemed discretion the better part of valor. His column, as well as that of General Crook, had been defeated by the well-generalled and warlike Sioux. He wanted reinforcements before he advanced.

  So preparations for withdrawal were made. But in the afternoon of the day before departure Jack accompanied a detail sent to make one last survey of the two hundred and sixty graves on and about Custer’s Hill. And as they waited there Jack sought once more the twin graves under the cottonwoods, and said a boyish adieu to the good Mi-mi, who had made him the corn-dumplings, and the odd squaw man who had been his friend in time of need. The rent flag still fluttered above the renegade’s last resting-place, and Jack with a sigh turned away, going, as he knew, to that civilization which this poor exile longed for, yet would not seek because of his faithfulness to her who had been faithful to him. As he left, Jack somehow found himself saying over and over a scrap that he had heard somewhere, but which he could neither place nor patch out—“in their deaths they were not divided.”

  “It suits them, anyhow,” he declared, “whoever said it.”

  The dusk was closing in upon the bleak and bluff-like cliffs, the scarred and scarped heights that rampart the fair and now fertile valley of the Little Big Horn, as the detail rode campward across the valley. They were to ascend by the ravine-like coulee up which Reno’s men had scrambled in their panic-like flight; but, from their trail, the sharp ridges of the bluffs, touched with the twilight, stood dim and ghostly in the dusk.

  As Jack looked his last upon the ridge along which Custer’s men had galloped to their death, and where he had taken the long leap that gave him life, he caught every now and then a glimpse of a moving form outlined on the edge of the bluff. At last he pointed it out to his friend the trumpeter.

  “It looks like a riderless horse,” he said. “But, of course, it can’t be.”

  “The ghost of Custer’s troop, I reckon,” the trumpeter said, half in fun and half in fear. For superstition touches more people in this world than we are ready to admit. “Looks that way, don’t it, Jack? though, of course, that’s all foolishness. Hark! hear that! By George! it is a horse—or the ghost of the troop.”

  They all started as, down from the bluff, came the quavering notes of a neigh.

  “The last call of the outpost!” the trumpeter declared, and the whole detail breathed a bit easier as they toiled up the ascent and at last dismounted beside the newly lighted bivouac fire.

  But, even as they flung themselves down at mess, once again that quavering neigh of the ghostly troop horse fell upon their ears, and in the distance sounded the approaching tramp of a warhorse. More than one man started to his feet, while the detail that had seen the phantom charger on the bluffs looked at each other in query.

  “It’s the ghost of the troop horse, Jack,” the trumpeter declared. “I wonder is it a warning—or what?”

  The trampling sounded nearer; another neigh, quavering, pitiful, almost appealing in its tones, as if begging companionship or welcome, came to their ears, and then, past the challenging outposts and the startled sentries, the ghost of the troop horse came within the lines, and stood trembling before the bivouac fire.

  “It’s one of ours!” cried Captain McDougall, who stood by. “Stir up that fire, Jack, won’t you? Let’s see if we know it.”

  The flare shot up, and in its light the newcomer stood revealed. Bleeding from severe wounds, weak and weary, and with a desire for pity and comfort that was deeply pathetic shining in his eyes, the scarred but beautiful sorrel laid its head against the captain’s shoulder as if to claim protection.

  Jack sprang forward. “Why! it’s Comanche!” he said.

  “You’re right, Jack. By Jove! it is,” cried the captain, flinging his arms about the neck of the sorrel. “Poor Myles Keogh! It’s his Comanche. And I believe, boys, he’s the only living thing we shall ever see from our side of that battlefield. Let’s give him a rousing welcome, boys. Come! three cheers for Comanche!”

  And about the bivouac fire the cheers of welcome rang out so lustily that, from all the camp, came officers and men anxious to know the cause and to join again in a salvo of welcome to the noble charger Comanche, sole survivor of the fight, gallant Captain Keogh’s splendid Kentucky sorrel.

  Next day the shattered command took the backward way, retiring to the supply-camp on the Yellowstone. There Terry was heavily reinforced. Men were hurried also to the strengthening of Crook at the south; and the two commands, uniting in August, 1876, entered upon the protracted search for the Sioux that ended, not in capture, as hoped, but only when Crazy Horse disappeared in the fastnesses of the Dakota Mountains, and Sitting Bull had escaped across the border into British possessions. Once again had the Master of the Strong Hearts proved himself a match for the Long-Swords, against whom he still made bad medicine.

  In the end, however, the white man of course triumphed. It was not, in the nature of things, possible for the starving and divided hostiles long to resist the marshaled forces of the United States.

  Colonel Miles and Colonel Merritt, both of whom, as general of the army and commander of the Manila expedition, were later to win renown in the war with Spain, pursued the Sioux with energy and determination; the union of the separated Indian bands was prevented and when Lame Deer, the Minniconjou chief, with the last of the resisting hostiles, was surprised and routed on the Rosebud in May, 1877, Crazy Horse, the valiant Ogallala, driven to surrender himself, ran “amuck” on his way to the guard-house at Camp Robinson, and die
d as a true hostile wished to die—defying the white man.

  Three years later, in July, 1881, Sitting Bull himself, pining for his loved home land, crossed the border and, at Standing Rock, surrendered with all his following.

  The greatest of all the Sioux wars was over. The prowess of the Long-Swords had overcome the skill, as it had broken the spirit, of the medicine chief, and Custer was avenged.

  As for Jack, long before the ending of that summer campaign of 1876, he was speeding to the eastward toward civilization and home. His own “campaign” had not been a success; and yet, in its way, it had been a more surprising success than even his wildest fancy imagined. For he had taken part in the most famous of Indian campaigns, and had a share in the most notable tragedy of all our Indian warfare.

  In reality, Comanche was not the only equine survivor of Last Stand Hill. Several grievously wounded horses were found on the battlefield, still living but too badly injured to save. Other Seventh Cavalry mounts were captured and ended their lives as Indian ponies. But Comanche was the ultimate survivor, living a life of ease and honor at Ft. Riley, Kansas, until his death. He was believed to be twenty-nine years old at the time of his death in 1891.

  13

  A Horse’s Tale

  by Mark Twain

  The great American humorist and novelist Samuel Clemens, who used the pen name Mark Twain, was a campaigner against cruelty to animals, particularly during the last few years of his life. His greatest weapon was his pen, and his 1904 book A Dog’s Tale told a popular and sentimental story that made the point to a wide audience. In 1907 he followed that book with A Horse’s Tale, which was supposed to do the same thing for horses.

  It was less successful than the dog book, possibly because of an excess of narrators and possibly because of an equal excess of melodrama. But Mark Twain’s brilliant prose and innate humor meant that even a minor book of his was far superior to books written by almost anyone else. The story of Soldier Boy, an army mount, was truly moving, in spite of its sentimentality. Here are the chapters narrated by Soldier Boy and other horses.

  Soldier Boy—Privately to Himself

  I am Buffalo Bill’s horse. I have spent my life under his saddle—with him in it, too, and he is good for two hundred pounds, without his clothes; and there is no telling how much he does weigh when he is out on the warpath and has his batteries belted on. He is over six feet, is young, hasn’t an ounce of waste flesh, is straight, graceful, springy in his motions, quick as a cat, and has a handsome face, and black hair dangling down on his shoulders, and is beautiful to look at; and nobody is braver than he is, and nobody is stronger, except myself. Yes, a person that doubts that he is fine to see should see him in his beaded buckskins, on my back and his rifle peeping above his shoulder, chasing a hostile trail, with me going like the wind and his hair streaming out behind from the shelter of his broad slouch. Yes, he is a sight to look at then—and I’m part of it myself.

  I am his favorite horse, out of dozens. Big as he is, I have carried him eighty-one miles between nightfall and sunrise on the scout; and I am good for fifty, day in and day out, and all the time. I am not large, but I am built on a business basis. I have carried him thousands and thousands of miles on scout duty for the army, and there’s not a gorge, nor a pass, nor a valley, nor a fort, nor a trading post, nor a buffalo range in the whole sweep of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that we don’t know as well as we know the bugle calls.

  He is Chief of Scouts to the Army of the Frontier, and it makes us very important. In such a position as I hold in the military service one needs to be of good family and possess an education much above the common to be worthy of the place. I am the best-educated horse outside of the hippodrome, everybody says, and the best mannered. It may be so, it is not for me to say; modesty is the best policy, I think. Buffalo Bill taught me the most of what I know, my mother taught me much, and I taught myself the rest. Lay a row of moccasins before me—Pawnee, Sioux, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and as many other tribes as you please—and I can name the tribe every moccasin belongs to by the make of it. Name it in horse-talk, and could do it in American if I had speech.

  I know some of the Indian signs—the signs they make with their hands, and by signal fires at night and columns of smoke by day. Buffalo Bill taught me how to drag wounded soldiers out of the line of fire with my teeth; and I’ve done it, too; at least I’ve dragged him out of the battle when he was wounded. And not just once, but twice. Yes, I know a lot of things. I remember forms, and gaits, and faces; and you can’t disguise a person that’s done me a kindness so that I won’t know him thereafter wherever I find him. I know the art of searching for a trail, and I know the stale track from the fresh. I can keep a trail all by myself, with Buffalo Bill asleep in the saddle; ask him—he will tell you so. Many a time, when he has ridden all night, he has said to me at dawn, “Take the watch, Boy; if the trail freshens, call me.” Then he goes to sleep. He knows he can trust me, because I have a reputation. A scout horse that has a reputation does not play with it.

  My mother was all American—no alkali-spider about her, I can tell you; she was of the best blood of Kentucky, the bluest Blue-grass aristocracy, very proud and acrimonious—or maybe it is ceremonious. I don’t know which it is. But it is no matter; size is the main thing about a word, and that one’s up to standard. She spent her military life as colonel of the Tenth Dragoons, and saw a deal of rough service—distinguished service it was, too. I mean, she carried the Colonel; but it’s all the same. Where would he be without his horse? He wouldn’t arrive. It takes two to make a colonel of dragoons. She was a fine dragoon horse, but never got above that. She was strong enough for the scout service, and had the endurance, too, but she couldn’t quite come up to the speed required; a scout horse has to have steel in his muscle and lightning in his blood.

  My father was a bronco. Nothing as to lineage—that is, nothing as to recent lineage—but plenty good enough when you go a good way back. When Professor Marsh was out here hunting bones for the chapel of Yale University he found skeletons of horses no bigger than a fox, bedded in the rocks, and he said they were ancestors of my father. My mother heard him say it; and he said those skeletons were two million years old, which astonished her and made her Kentucky pretensions look small and pretty antiphonal, not to say oblique. Let me see. . . . I used to know the meaning of those words, but . . . well, it was years ago, and ’tisn’t as vivid now as it was when they were fresh. That sort of words doesn’t keep, in the kind of climate we have out here. Professor Marsh said those skeletons were fossils. So that makes me part blue grass and part fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon. I am satisfied with it. And am a happy horse, too, though born out of wedlock.

  And now we are back at Fort Paxton once more, after a forty-day scout, away up as far as the Big Horn. Everything quiet. Crows and Blackfeet squabbling—as usual—but no outbreaks, and settlers feeling fairly easy.

  The Seventh Cavalry still in garrison here; also the Ninth Dragoons, two artillery companies, and some infantry. All glad to see me, including General Alison, commandant. The officers’ ladies and children well, and called upon me—with sugar. Colonel Drake, Seventh Cavalry, said some pleasant things; Mrs. Drake was very complimentary; also Captain and Mrs. Marsh, Company B, Seventh Cavalry; also the Chaplain, who is always kind and pleasant to me, because I kicked the lungs out of a trader once. It was Tommy Drake and Fanny Marsh that furnished the sugar—nice children, the nicest at the post, I think.

  That poor orphan child is on her way from France—everybody is full of the subject. Her father was General Alison’s brother; married a beautiful young Spanish lady ten years ago, and has never been in America since. They lived in Spain a year or two, then went to France. Both died some months ago. This little girl that is coming is the only child. General Alison is glad to have her. He has never seen her
. He is a very nice old bachelor, but is an old bachelor just the same and isn’t more than about a year this side of retirement by age limit; and so what does he know about taking care of a little maid nine years old? If I could have her it would be another matter, for I know all about children, and they adore me. Buffalo Bill will tell you so himself.

  I have some of this news from overhearing the garrison gossip, the rest of it I got from Potter, the General’s dog. Potter is the Great Dane. He is privileged, all over the post, like Shekels, the Seventh Cavalry’s dog, and visits everybody’s quarters and picks up everything that is going in the way of news. Potter has no imagination, and no great deal of culture, perhaps, but he has a historical mind and a good memory, and so he is the person I depend upon mainly to post me up when I get back from a scout. That is, if Shekels is out on depredation and I can’t get hold of him.

  Little Cathy Alison, the general’s niece, soon arrives and becomes a favorite of Buffalo Bill and the rest of the garrison. Soldier Boy becomes both her teacher and her companion. Cathy becomes a skilled rider on his back and is made an honorary officer. Soldier Boy’s status increases among the animals of the garrison and his reputation spreads outside its walls, a fact he discovers when a new horse arrives. Soldier Boy speaks first in chapter 6.

  Soldier Boy and the Mexican Plug