GENERAL GUY V. HENRY, SEVENTH UNITED STATES CAVALRY
Now to tell what the preparatory discipline is to the magnificent riding which can be seen any morning by spectators who are “game for a journey” to the fort by ten o’clock, I must say that General Guy V. Henry is a flaming fire of cavalry enthusiasm. He has one idea—a great broad expanse of principle—ever so simple in itself, but it is basic, and nothing can become so complicated that he cannot revert to his simple idea and by it regulate the whole. It is the individual training of the horse and rider. One bad rider or one unbroken horse can disarrange the whole troop movement, and “woe to him” who is not up to concert pitch! “Who is the scoundrel, the lummux, humph?” and the colonel, who is a brevet-brigadier-general, strides up and down, and fire comes from his nostrils. “Prefer charges against him, captain!” and the worst befalls. The unfortunate trooper has committed the highest crime which the commandant of Fort Meyer knows—he cannot ride.
A soldier becomes a rider by being bucketed about on a bareback horse, or he dies. The process is simple, the tanbark soft, and none have died up to date, but all have attained the other alternative. This is unimportant; but the horse—it is to his education that the oceans of patience and the mountains of intelligence are brought to bear. It is all in the books if any one cares to go into it. It is the gathering of the horse; it is the legs carried to the rear of the girths; it is the perfect hand and the instant compliance of the horse with the signs as indicated by the rider; it is the backing, the passaging, the leading with either foot, and the pivoting on the front legs; it is the throwing of horses, the acquisition of gaits, and the nice bitting; it is one hundred little struggles with the brute until he comes to understand and to know that he must do his duty. It all looks beautifully simple, but in practice we know that while it is not difficult to teach a horse, it is quite another matter to unteach him, so in these horses at least no mistakes have been made. After all this, one fine sunny Friday morning the people drove out from Washington in their traps and filed into the galleries and sat down—fair women and brave men; of the former we are sure, and of the latter we trust. The colonel blew a whistle—ye gods, what a sacrilege against all the traditions of this dear old United States army!—and in rode Captain Bomus’s troop of the First Plungers, which I cannot but love, since I am an honorary member of their officers’ mess, and fondly remember the fellows who are now sniffing alkali dust down in Arizona. They were riding with blankets and surcingles, and did their part of a drill, the sequence of which I have forgotten, since it was divided with the three other troops—Captain Bell’s, of the Seventh, Captain Hughes’s, of the Ninth, and Captain Fountain’s, of the Eighth. I felt a strong personal interest in some of these men, for memory took me back to a night’s ride in Dakota with a patrol of the Ninth, when they were all wrapped in buffalo-skin overcoats, with white frost on their lapels; the horses’ noses wore icicles, and the dry snow creaked under the tread of the hoofs as we rode over the starlit plain and through the black shadows of the coulees. I had pounded along also through the dust in the wake of this troop of the Eighth when it wasn’t so cold, but was equally uncomfortable.
RIDING SITTING ON LEGS
OVER THE HURDLE BACK TO BACK
The sharp commands of the captain soon put the troop in motion, and they trotted along with a cadenced tread, every man a part of his horse; they broke into fours and wheeled to the right about, then into line and wound themselves up in the “spiral,” and unwound again, and soon brought order out of a mess, and the regular canter was ever the same. Then low hurdles were strung across the hall, and by column of fours the troop went over, never breaking the formation; to the rear they turned and back again; finally they took the obstacle in line, and every horse rose as though impelled by the same mechanism. As if this was not enough, every second man was dismounted and put on double with a comrade, not with his breast to his comrade’s back, but back to back, and then in line the odd cavalcade charged the hurdles, and took them every one. It was not an individual bucketing of one horse after another, but all in line and all together. After this what could there be more to test the “glue” in these troopers’ seats? There was more, however, and in this wise: The saddles were put on, but without any girths, and all the movements were gone through with again, ending up with a charge down the hall, and bringing up against the wall of the spectators’ stand at a sharp “halt,” which would have unseated a monkey from a trick-mule.
The horses were all thrown by pulling their heads about, and one cavalryman amused himself by jumping over his prostrate mount. They rode “at will,” and stood upon their knees on their horses’ backs. One big animal resented carrying double, and did something which in Texas would be called “pitching,” but it was scarcely a genuine sample, since the grinning soldiers made little of it.