Forty Miles a Day on Beans and Hay

This is really an excellent history of the life of the rank and file volunteer enlisted man on the western frontier covering the period of the Indian wars from just after the Civil War until the 1890s. This is not a history of the wars (although a chapter does cover it) but a detailed examination of what the average soldier’s life was like. The author follows the soldier from his enlistment until his leaving the service (by discharge, retirement or death). Chapters are devoted to the newly enlisted man, what life was life on the post (what the food was like, what they did for recreation, camp routine, discipline, etc.), and what they would encounter on campaign and in combat. The author did interviews with veterans and uses letters show more and other direct quotes from the soldiers themselves to help tell their story. A fascinating story well told. show less

Picked up at Fort Union National Historic Site, this is an account of service in the Regular Army during the Indian Wars – from around 1866 to 1890. It isn’t a history of the campaigns; although the principle battles are mentioned you won’t find detailed accounts. Instead author Don Rickey, Jr. discusses life for the ordinary soldier – barracks routine, off-duty pursuits, relations with the brass, and what happened when you actually had to fight Indians.


The focus is on enlisted men; Rickey points out that the US Regular Army had a caste system separating officers and men as rigid as any army in the world. Officers almost never spoke directly to privates or troopers, instead relaying orders through the company First Sergeant. show more (There’s an interesting exception: post baseball teams mixed officers and men. These also integrated Colored (the official designation at the time) and white troops, demonstrating that if you really needed a shortstop it didn’t matter what his rank or race was). The enlistees came from all walks of life; in the early part of the time covered there were a lot of ex-Confederates, and the Regular Army was always a refuge for the poor and for middle class men who had somehow disgraced themselves – bankruptcy, for example. Since there were no fingerprints or other means of identification, you could join the Army under an assumed name, adventure against the Indians, and come back to civilian life five years later with a new identity. The Regular Army didn’t seem to be a place for the ambitious; enlistments were for five years (latter in the time period you could leave after three years or buy your way out after one year). You had to serve 30 years to get a pension, and Rickey suggests it was quite difficult to hold out that long against the rigors of military life. Pay was $13 a month (Rickey notes that when this was reduced from $18/mo, fully one third of the Regular Army enlisted men deserted). Promotions to officer from the ranks were rare; you had to get your commanding officer’s permission even to apply for a promotion.


The unit of maneuver was the company, although there were nominally battalions and regiments they almost never operated that way in the field. Companies of the same regiment were often widely separated, with one company in the Dakotas and another in Arizona and another in Oregon and another in Texas. There were many protests when two companies (“L” and “M”) were eliminated and the troops distributed to other units during one of the perennial Army reorganizations; literate soldiers wrote letters to Washington asking to be kept together with their messmates. Didn’t work, of course.


You got food and housing as well as your $13/mo, of course, but this was pretty miserable even by the standards of the age. Soldiers often living in barracks they had built themselves, from adobe or local timber; bedding was sacks stuffed with straw and laid on a slat bed. Despite the title, the Army didn’t issue beans as rations until the 1880s. Prior to that it was coffee, salt pork, and hardtack for breakfast, salt pork, hardtack and coffee for lunch, and hardtack, coffee and salt pork for dinner. The coffee was issued as raw beans so they had to be roasted and ground (usually by putting them in a bag and smashing with a rifle butt). Enlisted men were encouraged to grow vegetable gardens in barracks, but scurvy was a problem on long field campaigns. Eventually the Army began issuing canned tomatoes as an antiscorbutic; Rickey erroneously says it was the “acid” in tomatoes that prevented scurvy. I suppose Vitamin C is technically an “acid” but that’s not the implication. The presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes brought some reorganization; Hayes’ first lady was a temperance advocate, nicknamed “Lemonade Lucy”. Post sutlers were stopped from selling hard liquor, but as a compromise post “canteens” were set up and allowed to serve beer and wine in moderation, plus providing reading material, billiard tables, and other recreation. The veterans Rickey interviewed generally agreed this was successful.


Training was perfunctory for enlistees; they were often given only a few weeks of drill at a depot before being shipped off for active duty. This was especially prevalent in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, when recruits were shipped west without ever having handled a rifle or ridden a horse. Initially training in the barracks was similarly perfunctory, mostly emphasizing Civil War era mass tactics; however the Army eventually caught on to marksmanship and by the 1870s the US Army excelled at long-range shooting. (Rickey notes that with the exception of the Nez Pearce, none of the Indian tribes ever learned to shoot at long range). Much of the ‘training” of recruits was conducted by “hazing” by their messmates; one custom was telling the recruit that all the unit’s pork came from a local “hog ranch” and sending him there to pick up an allotment. “Hog ranch” was Army slang for brothel.


Rickey makes an interesting observation; a critical factor in defeating the Indians – at least the northern Indians – was the US Army’s ability to campaign in the winter. Issue winter clothing included knee-length buffalo robe overcoats, overshoes, and hats with neck and ear flaps. Connected with this is another observation I’ve read elsewhere – specifically in accounts of the Napoleonic Wars: over long distances infantry outmarches cavalry. An infantry soldier has to take care of himself at the end of a day’s march, but a cavalry trooper has to forage for himself and his mount and whatever spare horses are along. Rickey’s argument these infantry winter campaigns broke Indian resistance by wearing down their horses and using up their food, even though there were seldom pitched battles. They were pretty hard on the Army as well as the Indians, with lots of frostbite cases.


Rickey wrote in 1963; I don’t expect there’s much new information that has been uncovered since and there were still living veterans of the Indian Wars he was able to interview. His attitude toward the Indians is probably rather advanced for the time, as he acknowledges there was much injustice in treatment of Native Americans (although he still calls them “Indians”, of course). He also admits that both sides were guilty of massacres, while noting that now and then US troops would care for wounded captives rather than killing them outright on the battlefield.


A quick and easy read. Illustrated by contemporary photographs. Only a few large scale maps showing locations of forts, posts, etc.; but this isn’t a book about details of battles and campaigns. Numerous footnotes and a long bibliography with both primary and secondary sources. show less

Very entertaining. It is about the life of the common soldier. It tells the soldiers side but it doesn't trash the Indian. It has sympathy for there situation.

Good review of the horrible conditions of life for the average soldier in the old west. Shows Custer's true colors (not so good).