EMPTY SADDLES: Desertion from the Dashing U.S. Cavalry

PEOPLE USUALLY LEARN about national history and family history in vastly different ways. Books, movies, and college lectures pass on the information by which Americans assemble their nation's story. In contrast, the stories we learn about our families are often heard while sitting at a grandparent's side or leafing through scrapbooks filled with faded photographs and yellowed letters. These family stories may lack the grandeur of national myths, but they too are a blend of fact and fantasy. In researching the military record of my great-grandfather Gustav H. Schultz, I learned that national and personal histories often work together, creating a shared myth about the nation's achievements and individuals' connections to them.

While much of what I knew about my family's history came from the usual sources, when it came to my great-grandfather Gustav, those sources yielded nothing. My own dad knew little about his paternal grandfather since his parents had divorced when he was still a child, an event that had severed his ties to his paternal relatives. Dad knew only that Gustav was born in Davenport, Iowa, and had served in the U.S. Cavalry in what is now South Dakota. One of Dad's cousins told him that Gustav had been a sergeant and that someone in the family owned a blue wool overcoat with sergeant's stripes to prove it, but Dad had never seen the coat. Since that was all Dad knew, that was all I knew. Gustav seemed more ghost than great-grandparent.

As my parents aged, their interest in family history grew. Together, we set out to fill in gaps in the family tree-birth dates, marriage dates, names of children, and so on. Since we had so little information about Gustav, I turned to the place where the raw material for our national history is stored-the National Archives and Records Administration. Fortunately for searchers like me, the U.S. Army was a well-established bureaucracy generating many types of records by the post-Civil War years. Starting with the knowledge that Gustav served in the cavalry, I searched roll upon roll of army enlistment records until I found an entry that matched his name and place of birth. The entry revealed that he had served as a private in Company C of the Seventh Cavalry.1

The words "Seventh Cavalry" were the spot where personal history rubbed against national epic. For anyone with even a passing interest in American history, mention of the Seventh Cavalry immediately calls forth images of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Through the transformative power of myth, General George Armstrong Custer's staggering defeat at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne fighters on June 25,1876, has been reshaped into a courageous "last stand." With this story firmly embedded in my psyche, the discovery that my great-grandfather served in the same regiment as Custer's captured my imagination. Even though he did not come onto the scene until seven years after Custer's defeat, Gustav was close enough to a famous event to convince me that he was worth investigating.

As I searched for more information, I wound reels of microfilm through microfilm readers until my elbow ached and my eyes blurred from deciphering the faded penmanship of long-dead army record-keepers. Gradually, by following the documentary trail of Gustav and the people with whom he came into contact, I sketched the outline of my great-grandfather's army career. Paradoxically, these facts undermined what little my lamily knew: not only had Gustav not earned an officer's stripes, he was a deserter who was eventually court-martialed and sent to prison.

Simultaneously, I learned that the legend of the Seventh Cavalry as "champion defenders of the West" clashed mightily with the troopers' individual stories. Gustav was not the regiment's only deserter. Far from fighting to the death, frontier soldiers routinely walked away from even mundane responsibilities. Only a few soldiers were caught, and once caught, they did not stay put, but abandoned their duties again and again. Being absent without leave (AWOL) or outright deserting happened so frequently that such cases filled the dockets of general courts-martial and kept many units below strength. An 1891 report estimated that one-third of the soldiers recruited since 1867-some 88,475 °f the 255,712 enlisted men-had deserted. On a yearly basis, desertion hit a high of 32.6 percent in 1871. By 1891 the desertion rate had fallen to a more respectable 6.2 percent. Clearly, many troopers lacked the respect for authority that forms the basis of military order.2

My investigation into Gustav's career revealed not only a family skeleton, but also commonalities in the experiences of nineteenth-century deserters. Certainly, the wide expanses of the West afforded soldiers many opportunities to disappear, but social factors, too, nurtured a culture of desertion. Alcohol use often attended the decision to desert by lowering inhibitions about breaking what little taboo was still attached to the offense. So tenuous was the army's hold on its soldiers that sometimes guards could be enticed to join an escape plot. Deserters often acted in groups, discussing, planning, and carrying out desertion schemes without fear of being reported. When faced with mass desertion, regiments often lacked the personnel to pursue the scofflaws, and soldiers could count on the sympathy of civilians willing to give them jobs rather than report them. All in all, soldiers who served in the West often were not around when their terms of service officially expired. The story of Gustav Schultz is but one of many tales.