XIY 



OUR frontier cavalryman is the beau ideal of an irreg- 

 ular. The irregular horseman of all ages was recruited 

 from among roving, unintelligent classes, and had, except 

 in his own peculiar province, as plentiful a lack of good 

 as he had a superabundance of bad qualities. Our trooper 

 is intelligent, and trained in the hardest of schools. Few 

 civilians, who find it so easy to criticise the operations of 

 the army in the West, would make much of a success in 

 hunting a band of a few hundred Indians in a pathless or 

 a waterless desert bigger than New York and New Eng- 

 land combined. And yet, thus handicapped, what splen- 

 did work our cavalry has done ! While one civil depart- 

 ment of the Government has for years been busy sowing 

 the seeds of strife and furnishing the red man \vith arms 

 of precision, the best of cartridges and plenty of them, 

 how ably have our handful of blue-coats, under orders of 

 another, managed to quell the Indian uprisings ! A force 

 of fifty thousand men constantly on foot, said that eminent 

 soldier, William Tecumseh Sherman (and he early made his 

 mark in estimating the number needed for a bigger piece 

 of work), would have been none too great to do justice to 

 our Indian problem since the war; the actual force has 

 been less than a third of this number. Let whoso is 

 tempted to criticise the army make himself familiar with 

 some of the deeds of heroism of the past twenty years by 

 our soldiers on the plains. Criticism blanches before 

 their recital. But the soldier is no boaster: you must 

 seek his story from other lips than his. 



