b'The Old West of the rider on horseback was gone forever; the big rolling land was now the settlers\' West.had premonitions, that they faced certain death on the night before Little Big Horn (Katherine Fougera Gibson, With Custer\'s Cavalry, pp. 275-277). Or that those like the men under Crook stayed loyal and cheerful even when Crook pushed them on in the "starvation march" where men, ailing with hunger chose to shoot their beloved mounts to keep from starving to death.These men of the frontier Army may have laughed when during the Red River War of 1874, Captain A.R. Chaffed; a Civil War cavalry veteran (who would later command American troops during the Boxer Rebellion)"turned to his men and shouted - "Forward! If any man is killed I will make him a corporal" (Nevin, The Soldiers, p.109)! But the men followed him.TAPS:As the Indian wars died down, as the tribes sadly settled into reservation life, the forts began to shut their gates for the last time, their buildings beginning to crumble, and the horse soldier soon found that his steady, reliable, beloved mount was both antiquated and expendable as the gas engine, the airplane, and the tank changed warfare forever.But the Old Army didn\'t go quietly into the night as there were two more dramatic events in which the Old Army was called upon to put down.The late Dee Brown, the famed historian of the Native American and the Old West may have summed it up best in the concluding section of his final epic, The American West: "In 1898, however, with the beginning of the Spanish-American War, the dormant Western Cavalry came to life again. But the show was stolen from the regulars by a regiment of volunteers - the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, known as the Rough Riders. Organized by Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders regiment was made up of one thousand "good shots and good riders" - cowboys, Army scouts, and former Indian fighters predominating. Roosevelt armed his men with six-shooters instead of sabers, trained them hard in San Antonio, and then led them to glory at San Juan Hill in Cuba. A few months later he was president, the first cowboy to reach the White House.The last organized threat to peace and order in the West at this time came out of Mexico when Pancho Villa and his wild-riding revolutionists crossed the border and raided Columbus, New Mexico, just before dawn. Several hundred Villistas wearing their high-crowned sombreros galloped into Columbus under cover of darkness, firing carbines and shouting "Viva Mexico!" and "Viva Villa!" Two hundred and fifty American cavalrymen96.3 PLAYS stationed in the town rolled out of their blankets and began firing back, but the only targets were sudden flashes of carbine fire. "The raiders burned up thousands of rounds of ammunition," a cavalry lieutenant said afterward. "Then a hotel was set afire, and this litBETTER MUSICup the terrain so effectively that we were able to see our targets very plainly." At dawn, the raiders beat a hasty retreat, but they had killed seven American soldiers and eight civilians and left the town burning behind them.Villa\'s purpose in raiding Columbus was to provoke an American cavalry pursuit into Mexico, an action he hoped would cause the fall of the Mexican government and give the Villistas a chance to seize power. The first part of the plan worked perfectly. A troop of cavalry was mounted and hot on the trail of the raiders before they could recross the border. Under General John J. Pershing, three cavalry columns - including the famed Seventh Regiment - marched four hundred miles into Mexico in pursuit of Villa. They marched over the same type of rugged cactus-studded desert country where an earlier generation of Western cavalrymen pursued the Apache chiefs Geronimo, Cochise, and Victorio. They failed to capture Pancho Villa, but they dispersed his armies, broke his power and prestige, and restored law and order in the southwestern border country.As the cavalry marched southward, eight thunderbird airplanes strange to Western skies flew above the dust-clouded columns, their fragile wings and struts bending and stretching, their chattering little motors breaking the silences of the hot desert land. These eight machines comprised the entire fighting air force of the United States, the 1st Aero Squadron, Signal Corps. By the end of the Punitive Expedition, all the planes had crashed but one and it was so badly damaged it had to be condemned. But the thunderbirds had made their mark on history over those unfriendly deserts of the West. General Pershing commented laconically: "One airplane is equal to a regiment of cavalry."And there, in the Apache country - where many a blue-clad soldier had fought hard to win this Western land for settlement - was ended forever the old cavalry. No more would the bugle sound stable call or the charge. No more would the sergeants order "mount" or "dismount." No more would the columns go swinging away to the strains of "Garryowen" and the "Girl I Left Behind Me." The thunderbirds had erased time and space, the mysterious unknown that lay beyond the horseman\'s horizon. The Old West of the rider on horseback was gone forever; the big rolling land was now the settlers\' West" (Dee Brown, The American West, Charles Scribner and Sons, New York, 1994, pp. 407-409).963RealCountry.comArizonaRealCountry.com May 2020 47'