Five Years A Cavalryman Or, Sketches Of Regular Army Life On The Texas Frontier, 1866-1871

by H.H. McConnell, William H. Leckie (Foreword)

First published in 1889, H. H. McConnell’s Five Years a Cavalryman remains one of the best accounts of what it was like to be an ordinary cavalryman on the post-Civil War frontier. Posted for five years (1866-1871) with the Sixth U.S. Cavalry at Fort Belknap and Fort Richardson, in West Texas, McConnell gives the unglorified inside story on his fellow enlisted men and the officers, reporting candidly on their heavy drinking, their general disorganization, their boredom, and their thievery.

Regarding the Texas Rangers, he admits that they might be tolerable Indian fighters, but in frontier towns, where they would engage in “shooting scrapes and rows” with its citizens and soldiers, they were more a threat to peace than keepers of the same. His tolerant attitude toward Native Americans is evident in his coverage of the arrest and trial of Satanta, Big Tree, and other Kiowas at Fort Sill, in which he grants that General William Sherman’s concurrent visit to the post negatively affected their trial.

In the foreword to this edition, William H. Leckie summarizes McConnell’s frontier career and discusses his attitude toward the Tenth Calvary “buffalo soldiers,” the Texas Rangers, and officers such as Colonel Ranald MacKenzie.

H. H. McConnell settled in Jacksboro, Texas (where Fort Richardson is located), and became a prominent citizen after his service in the U.S. cavalry. William H. Leckie, who wrote the Foreword, is the author of The Buffalo Soldiers, also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

311 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

Reviews

[Avis Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five Years a Cavalryman is part memoir and part travelogue, and it's an intelligently-written and sometimes wryly humorous account of the author's days in Texas. He provides plenty of color and detail, and gives the best description of army life on the frontier that I've ever come across. Just to cite one peculiarity among many, the Indians sold firewater to the enlisted men, not the other way around.

Available at Open Library:
https://openlibrary.org/works/OL29393...

[Fredrick Danysh · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author served three years during the American Civil War. After the war he enlisted in the United States cavalry and was transferred to the Texas frontier where he served five years. These are his memoirs of that frontier service.