I hope you enjoy this article: The May 31, 1918, Philipsburg Mail, announced Fort Keogh, was to be made into “one of two National Calvary Training Depots. The Fort is currently a remount station near Miles City where range horses are broken and sent to Eastern stations for finishing.” The article continued on to say several hundred bronco busters have been employed on the Fort Keogh reservation.
Next, in the June 28, edition of the Philipsburg Mail, was the headline, “Montana Cowboys training horses for the army at Camp Lewis: let her buck”. The article described the actions at the remount as one continuous Wild West show. “The muster rolls of the companies of busters read like a program of one of Guy Wedick’s stampedes, and all the old champions are there, except Fanny Sperry, who is barred from being a horse soldier by reason of her sex, but who could do the work as well as any man in the service. Tom Three Persons, the Canadian half-breed champion of the world is there, and among the other busters are many who won fame at Calgary, Pendleton, Cheyenne, Missoula, Billings and Havre in the Wild West shows and rodeos.”
The life of the horse is described in the following: “…Here the horses that go to supply the thousands of cavalrymen who are called into the service are trained for the hard duties that are before them on Flanders’ Fields. Immediately after the arrival of the horse at the remount station, he is inoculated against glanders. After that nothing but a German bullet can stop him. As the life of the average horse in action at the front is only 21 fighting days, it will be seen that our equine friends are doing their part in the war. And in the great struggle he serves two purposes. Alive, he smells the battle from afar off, like the war horses of old Israel, and rides into the thick of the fray with his head up and snorting defiance. Dead, if death comes to him quickly from shrapnel or rifle bullet, and the salvage butchers of the French commissary department get to his quivering carcass in time to make good meat of what is left, he goes into the pot and cheers and sustains our allies of beloved France.”
The description of cowboys attempting to be foot soldiers is very colorful: “Most of the cowboys came into Camp Lewis in the draft and were transferred to the remount depot after having done some training service in the infantry. They couldn’t all be transferred immediately, of course, and those obliged to drill afoot for a time were in a hard way….You see, a cowboy is not built for purposes of pedestrianism. Years of riding get his legs properly squeegeed to fit the curves of the horses back; but the slant is wrong for walking. During the unfortunate moments of his life when it is necessary for him to walk, he teeters around precariously in boots with heels high enough to satisfy a broadway flapper on parade. The result is that in his maturity, while he has more legs and feet than a whale, they’re not much more use to him if you peel him away from a horse and call upon him to circulate around on his own. So a cowboy in the infantry has this in common with a fish in the Sahara desert: he’s manifestly out of place…They drilled around in flat heels for a few days, and the first free hour they got they stampeded for the remount and begged Captain Jackson for transfer to the remount depot.
“Cap’n, I’d rather be shot at sunrise than walk on these feet o’ mine another day” one temporarily dismounted unfortunate declared tearfully. “If I knowed they’d shoot me for sitting, I’d do something to deserve it; but I’m afraid they’d make me stand up; and it’s too much for my brain to think of, standing on my feet and getting shot at the same time. They gimme shoes ‘thout no heels to ‘em, that set a man back on his spine so’s every time you step your back bone rattles like a box full of dice, an’ then they make me walk. That’s all. Just walk. Not goin’ no place. Just walkin’! Cap’n. there ain’t any place as far away as I’ve walked this week. No, sir. I walked my legs off clean down to the knees, an’ I’m working on the thigh bones now. I’m willing to die for my country, captain, but I jus’ naturally can’t walk for it. Please, you get me transferred up here where I can pour myself into a saddle and be human again!
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