Comanche

He was bought by the US Army at St Louis in 1868, a claybank dun of about fifteen hands with mustang blood, and assigned to Captain Myles Keogh of the 7th Cavalry. He took an arrow in the hindquarters in a fight with Comanche warriors that year and carried on until the action was over, which is where the name came from, and he was wounded at least twice more in the years that followed. On 25 June 1876 he carried Keogh at the Little Bighorn. Two days later a burial party working over the field found him standing, badly wounded — seven wounds by most counts, several of them serious — near where Keogh's body lay. He was the only living thing they recovered from the five companies under Custer's immediate command. He was ferried down the Yellowstone and nursed for over a year. In April 1878 the regimental commander issued a general order: Comanche would never be ridden again, would do no work of any kind, and would be paraded, saddled and draped in black with the boots reversed in the stirrups, at every regimental ceremony. He was, until he died at Fort Riley in 1891, aged about twenty-nine. He was preserved and is still on display at the University of Kansas.

Loved by · Myles Keogh

Honours

• 1876Found alive on the Little Bighorn with seven wounds — the only survivor recovered from Custer's command
• 1878Retired by regimental order: never to be ridden, never to work, and paraded draped in black
• · One of only two horses in US history given a military funeral with full honours
• 1891Mounted and preserved; still displayed at the University of Kansas

Their kind

Descended from Spanish stock turned loose on the plains, shaped by four centuries without a farrier — hard-footed, wary and long-winded.

A life in seasons