The Training Ground by Martin Dugard Page A

frontier, and performed admirably as leader of the Fourth Infantry in Corpus Christi. The son of a Revolutionary War soldier, he was a besotted living bridge between America’s past and its future.
    Taylor and his staff began the march with Whistler’s column. When the last man was safely away, the general galloped ahead to catch up with the forward elements. Taylor trusted Whistler to bring up the rear.
    The enlisted were on foot, while the officers would travel the two weeks from Corpus Christi to the Rio Grande by horse. It would be a dry, dusty trip across a barren salt plain, sure to blister the heels and crack the tongues of the foot soldiers. Many officers, foreseeing those hardships, had compassionately purchased a cheap six-dollar mustang for their personal servants. But Sam Grant — ironically enough, the Fourth’s undisputed top horseman — was prepared to walk.
    There were two reasons for this. The first had to do with fairness: if his men were going to slog twenty miles a day across the Texas wasteland, so would he. The second was more practical: Grant no longer possessed a horse. A week earlier he had owned three mustangs, but a careless groom let them run off. Grant was a proud man. He was bad at managing money but was not in the habit of begging or borrowing when funds ran short. “I determined not to get another, but to make the journey on foot,” the young lieutenant promised himself.
    Yet news of Grant’s missing horses had gotten around. It was only natural that a group of officers who already knew one another through their common educational background and various army postings, and who had endured a hard winter in Corpus Christi together, would gossip like a sewing circle. These officers knew that Grant was so gifted on horseback that he had been commanded to give a special equestrian jumping demonstration at his West Point graduation and that he’d broken a supposedly unrideable wild mustang while in Corpus Christi, saddling the horse and galloping across the plains for hours until it stopped trying to buck him off and calmly consented to his commands. If Grant were less likable, his fellow officers might have reveled at seeing him walk all the way down to Mexico, looking as blistered and sunburned as some Irish immigrant private. But Grant was the sort of undersized, hardworking, self-effacing individual that other men felt compelled to take care of. And so they did.
    A few days earlier, Grant’s company commander had pulled Grant aside to discuss the march. Captain George Archibald McCall was a forty-four-year-old Philadelphian. Rangy, with a handsome face and neatly trimmed beard, McCall was widely respected as a great soldier and a gentleman — and like Grant, a consummate horseman. (He sold one of his favorite buggy horses to Zachary Taylor, who then rechristened the animal Old Whitey and made it synonymous with his oversize personality.) McCall preferred traveling by horse over any other mode of transportation, including trains or steamboats. Not surprisingly, the idea of Grant’s traveling on foot made McCall anxious. The march would be daunting, to say the least. Grant’s ability to lead men into battle might be impaired if he were exhausted and footsore. Casually, in the manner of an inquiry rather than an order, McCall asked if Grant planned on buying a new steed. “No,” Grant replied, adding that he belonged to a foot regiment and it was natural for him to walk.
    “I did not understand the object of his solicitude,” a puzzled Grant later wrote of the encounter. McCall pretended to let the matter drop. It was not as if he had an extra horse. Of the captain’s two expensive steeds, it was clear to Grant that McCall would ride one and his servant the other.
    So when Brevet Second Lieutenant Sam Grant lined up alongside his men on the morning of March 11, he was sure that he was about to march two hundred miles to the Rio Grande on foot, without fanfare or sympathy.
    Captain