TattooMilitary Music, Peacekeeping, and the American Cavalry Experience

George Briggs, the main male character of Glendon Swarthout's 1988 novel The Homesman, is presented as a rough-and-tumble character. When Mary Bee Cuddy, the protagonist, first encounters George in the antebellum Nebraska Territory, he is about to be lynched for claim jumping. Crude, uncouth, and uncivilized, he reluctantly accompanies Mary Bee back east only for the prospect of a cash reward. George routinely rebuffs her attempts to establish any kind of lasting connection, sometimes deliberately provoking her discomfort. Once, camp made for the night, he tells her a story of his time in the army, out in Kansas. Escorting several hundred horses on the Santa Fe Trail, Kiowa Indians attempted to steal the horses. But the cavalry got the jump on the Indians: "'Come night we had most of our horses an' mules an' killed more'n thirty Kiowas an' busted their camp t'hell.' He grinned at her in triumph. 'Pretty fair job of work, huh? Comp'ny C, First U.S. Dragoons!'"¹

Company C spent most of the period between the Mexican-American and Civil Wars in Oregon, but no matter. Nor that Briggs's story fits popular conceptions of the Indian Wars better than the actual antebellum work of peacekeeping and patrolling both Indian and white people west of the Mississippi River. Fortunately, historians continue to produce new work on the U.S. cavalry that rounds out our knowledge of that institution, its troopers, and its service. New books by Bruce P. Gleason, and Will and John Gorenfeld, help move our conceptions of the cavalry beyond combat with indigenous peoples. As narrative and institutional histories, however, they will seem limited to many contemporary scholars. Social and cultural approaches to the mounted arm will offer a more complete understanding of the world in which these troopers lived, and sometimes fought and died.

Bruce Gleason's Sound the Trumpet, Beat the Drums: Horse-Mounted Bands of the U.S. Army, 1820–1940 is largely a narrative history of military mounted bands. Gleason opens by discussing the use of trumpets and drums in European armies through the eighteenth century. Despite the direct links between European and colonial American military cultures, few American mounted units had associated military bands before the Civil War. For one, there were few mounted units (dragoons, mounted riflemen, or cavalry) in the United States Army, period. They came and went during the Revolution, the Northwest Indian War, and the War of 1812. The first permanent mounted regiment in the U.S. Army dated only from 1833, with a mere four more added before 1861. Also, "bands have typically had some kind of connection with the general populace," a difficult connection to make when mounted regiments were deployed west of the line of white settlement (p. 26). A number of state militia units, on the other hand, established regimental bands.

The heyday of American mounted bands came in the forty years or so between the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. The Congress specifically authorized Civil War volunteer regiments to have bands. The large numbers of such bands, and their members being drawn from civil society at-large, gave them a presence that musicians in prewar regular army regiments would have envied. To be sure, bands still played typical military functions: parades, drills, reviews, and so forth. But occasionally bands played while on expeditions, and even as soldiers entered combat! Bands also had more frequent opportunities to play for civilians during the Civil War.

After the war, the Congress cut the number of musicians in the army. Many units deployed in the Indian Wars dispensed with having musicians perform any non-military functions. The Ninth...