Kearny’s Dragoons Out West: The Birth of the U.S. Cavalry

Gen. Kearny proclaiming
 New Mexico part of the U.S.,
 in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

(True West) In literature, film and television, the role of the U.S. cavalry in the history of the American West has been as romanticized as any major element of Western popular culture. Similarly, historians have published countless articles, monographs and syntheses on the military history of the West, but very few have written the definitive chronicle of the cavalry’s origins and the role of horse soldiers in the creation of the 1st Dragoons from 1833 to 1848. Kearny’s Dragoons Out West: The Birth of the U.S. Cavalry (University of Oklahoma Press, $34.95) by Will Gorenfeld and John Gorenfeld is the first major history of its kind for nearly a century. Continued