[dragoon500ly]

"There was Sergeant John McCaffery and Captain Donahue,They made us march and toe the mark, in gallant Company Q. Oh the drums would roll upon my soul, this is the style we'd go. Forty miles a day on beans and hay, in the Regular Army O."

Two New York vaudevillians sang this song in 1876, popularizing a song to which the Regulars themselves would add verses. But often public irreverence was a less pleasant affair. With the end of the Civil War, the beloved Boys in Blue had, once again, became hated mercenaries---an army that was dismissed by the New York Sun as "composed of bummers, loafers, and foreign paupers."

The Regular of 1876 was paid $13.00 a month in federal greenbacks that was often not accepted in the various frontier towns, to add insult to injury, the soldier would often have to "redeem" his paper money with coinage, and often had to pay a fee to do this. From his pay, the soldier would have deductions for such things as drawing too much clothing (especially if the issue boots wore out before they were due to be replaced) as well as the requirement to pay the company tailor at least once every three months, Charges for this service could range from $6.00 for altering a dress coat, $1.00 for alterations to the service blouse and $3.00 for letting out or taking in the seams of his pants. Ten dollars every three months was a high price when the soldier only earned $39.00 and many soldiers bitterly complained about why they had to pay the company tailor for work that the government had already paid the contractor for.

Typically, the soldier would receive very rudimentary training (little more than close-order drill) and his first issue of clothing at one of the recruit barracks and then was transferred to his post. Where he often shared a straw-filled mattress with his "bunkie". If he had enlisted in the infantry, he would serve three years, five years as a cavalryman, unless, of course, he deserted (about one third of those enlisted inbetween 1867 and 1891 deserted). If the trooper stayed, he faced isolation, wretched food, shoddy clothing and sometimes ferocious discipline. Enterainment might include bad whiskey and fornication with laundresses, Indian women or prostitutes.

The Regular's best hope of overcoming the Indian's superiority as a fighter lay in his steadiness and discipline. But his training in marksmanship, horsemanship and the other skills needed by a soldier was often neglected, mostly due to soldiers being kept busy as manual labor to build or sustain their posts.

The soldier might never see a hostile Indian, but when he did, he was always outnumbered. Congress limited the strength of the Army at 25,000 in 1874 and the Army usually numbered under 19,000. Much of this force was still serving on Resonstruction duty in the South. A German immigrant, a former Prussian military officer, had this to say about his fellow soldiers: "The handsome, finely organized cavalries of Europe know nothing of real hard cavalry work. For the work I have seen a squadron of United States Cavalry perform on the plains, German would send two regiment, and deem it hard service."

In spite of the fighting of the Indian Wars, Congress provided no moral support, in 1877, barely a year after the Little Big Horn, a appropriations dispute left the Army payless from June until November, even as soldiers died fighting in the Nez Perce War.

If the solder proved himself brave, he might receive the nation's only military decoration, the Medal of Honor (Thomas Custer, brother of George, was one of only a handful of men to win the Medal of Honor, twice). The only other acknowledgement of valor was the seldom adwarded Certificate of Merit. The Certificate was rarely adwarded because money was often tight and its recipients were paid an extra two dollars a month.

Hollywood often characterizes the soldier as little more than a brute, murdering and raping helpless Indians as part of the country's brutal drive westward. The reality was that the soldier often sympathized with the plight of the Indains and often married Indian women. If the trooper stayed in service after 1905, he could wear the Indian Campaigns Medal, forever marking him as a soldier on a vanished frontier.