Customer Reviews

The U.S. Cavalry Horse

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W.H. Carter was one of the most important of American army senior staff officers in the years before WWI. He was a close advisor to Secretary of War Elihu Root. This book is a great survey of both American army ideas about horsemanship and the state of horsemanship and tack from other armies around the turn of the century. Carter was an accomplished cavalryman (serving on the frontier with the 6th Cavalry) and an important and clear writer (author of the history of the 6th Cavalry as well as a biography on General Adna Chaffee). Well illustrated with black and white drawing and photos of both American and international horses and tack. This book is essential reading for anyone who is interested in serious military horsemanship.

In the late nineteenth century William Harding Carter was a well known member of the US Cavalry. He was part of a group of forward-looking officers who sought to improve the Army's development of horsemanship and breeding horses for the Army. This is an extracted edition of his classic.
These officers looked to the British army and French cavalry school at Saumer for inspiration.
One of their major concerns was the improvement of individual equipment and horse equipment, a trend which culminated in the unfortunate design of the Model of 1912 Cavalry Equipment which, put to the test during the Punitive Expedition of 1916, proved to be too flimsy for the hard service in Mexico.
Fortunately, the Artillery did not adopt the 1912 system nor did the Quartermaster Department which still depended on a system based on the Mexican pack saddle and hired civilian packers. (See Daly, Manual of Pack Transportation., reprinted.)
Prior to the establishment of the Remount Depot at Front Royal, Virginia. (now a Smithsonian-National Zoo facility) the Army had bought horses from civilians at roundups and thus took what they could get.

Being a saddle maker and historian buff, I have found this book to be very informative and valuable to my trade.