A Horse's Tale: A novel by Mark Twain written partially in the voice of Soldier Boy, who is Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. 7th Cavalry

A Horse's Tale

By Mark Twain

1907




A Horse's Tale is a novel by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), written partially in the voice of Soldier Boy, who is Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, at a fictional frontier outpost with the U. S. 7th Cavalry. BackgroundHarper's Magazine originally published the story in two installments in August and September 1906. Clemens wrote the story after receiving a request from actress Minnie Maddern Fiske to assist in her drive against bullfighting. Harper's published the story as a 153-page book in October 1907. Clemens's daughter Susy Clemens, who died in 1896 at age 24 of spinal meningitis, is understood to be the inspiration for lead character Cathy Alison. When Clemens provided the story to Harper's, he included a photograph of Susy for the illustrator to use for Cathy. I am Buffalo Bill's horse. I have spent my life under his saddle-with him in it, too, and he is good for two hundred pounds, without his clothes and there is no telling how much he does weigh when he is out on the war-path and has his batteries belted on. He is over six feet, is young, hasn't an ounce of waste flesh, is straight, graceful, springy in his motions, quick as a cat, and has a handsome face, and black hair dangling down on his shoulders, and is beautiful to look at and nobody is braver than he is, and nobody is stronger, except myself. Yes, a person that doubts that he is fine to see should see him in his beaded buck-skins, on my back and his rifle peeping above his shoulder, chasing a hostile trail, with me going like the wind and his hair streaming out behind from the shelter of his broad slouch. Yes, he is a sight to look at then- and I'm part of it myself. I am his favorite horse, out of dozens. Big as he is, I have carried him eightyone miles between nightfall and sunrise on the scout and I am good for fifty, day in and day out, and all the time. I am not large, but I am built on a business basis. I have carried him thousands and thousands of miles on scout duty for the army, and there's not a gorge, nor a pass, nor a valley, nor a fort, nor a trading post, nor a buffalo-range in the whole sweep of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains that we don't know as well as we know the bugle-calls. He is Chief of Scouts to the Army of the Frontier, and it makes us very important. In such a position as I hold in the military service one needs to be of good family and possess an education much above the common to be worthy of the place. I am the best-educated horse outside of the hippodrome, everybody says, and the best-mannered. It may be so, it is not for me to say modesty is the best policy, I think. Buffalo Bill taught me the most of what I know, my mother taught me much, and I taught myself the rest. Lay a row of moccasins before me-Pawnee, Sioux, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, and as many other tribes as you please-and I can name the tribe every moccasin belongs to by the make of it. Name it in horse-talk, and could do it in American if I had speech.