Between 1914 and 1918 Britain bought 672,303 horses and mules from the United States, and one animal that met the army's specification could be worth a season of any other work.

In 1918 a horse was not livestock. It was ordnance, and there were several armies bidding.

What a Remount Was

A remount was a replacement — for an animal killed, crippled, or worked to death at the front — and it was a category before it was a horse. The armies graded by the job. Lighter animals went to the cavalry, heavier ones pulled field guns, and the heaviest pulled the big guns.

That grading is what made the trade unlike anything else a ranching family sold. Beef meant reading a market that moved against you. A remount meant a specification: the animal either met it or it did not, and if it met it, the price was already set.

The demand was bottomless because the consumption was. Trucks could not cross ground that shellfire had turned to porridge; guns still had to be dragged into position and dragged out again, and the animals doing it died of exhaustion, disease and shrapnel at a rate no breeding programme on earth could match. Every one of them had to be replaced, which is what the word remount means.

Two Prices

There were two price ladders, and the distance between them is the whole business.

At the ranch end, in the Wyoming trade, a cavalry horse brought about $125 or less, a light-artillery horse around $150, and a heavy-artillery horse as much as $165.

At the other end, by April 1916, the British Remount Commission had agreed prices with American dealers: $185 for a cavalry horse, $200 for field artillery, $220 for heavy artillery.

The gap between those ladders belonged to the man with the notebook. It is also why he kept coming back.

The Buyers Came Early

The demand did not begin when America entered the war in 1917. British and French money was moving through the West from the start, and the scale of it is easy to underestimate.

Between 16 April and 29 July 1915, Moncreiffe and company of Wyoming sold more than 3,400 horses to the British and French for at least $612,935. One outfit, one state, fifteen weeks. Floyd Bard, who watched it happen, said that "nearly every one in the country and in the town were getting Moncreiffe money."

The Million That Isn't

There is a figure that circulates — that the United States sent more than a million horses overseas — and it compresses two different things into one sentence.

Britain bought 672,303 horses and mules from the United States, plus about 31,402 from Canada: 703,705 from North America. France took roughly 485,000, most of them American. Count every buyer and the number of American animals that served does pass a million — around 1,325,000.

The American Expeditionary Force is a separate number entirely. Over twenty months the AEF procured 243,360animals, and only 28 percent of them — 68,141 — came from U.S. remount depots. Fifty-five percent were bought in France. It was cheaper and faster to buy a horse near the front than to carry one across an ocean.

So the West did supply the war on an enormous scale. Mostly on someone else's account, and mostly before America was in it.

And it was still not enough. On 25 June 1918 the AEF was short 125,934 animals against its own requirement. At the Armistice, after four years of the largest horse purchase in history, the American army in France was still short 163,382.

The Other War

Europe was not the only army buying, and for anyone standing in southern Arizona it was not the nearest one.

Mexico's revolution was still running in 1918, and it was fought from the saddle. Federal troops, Carranza's Constitutionalists and Villa's columns all needed mounts, continuously, and all of them lost horses faster than they could breed them. The border was a trade corridor rather than a wall. Horses were broken on Chihuahua ranches and sold north; American operators met buyers at Arizona railheads — Benson among them — and the more candid of them were willing to supply every side at once.

That is the market a fifteen-year-old could actually stand in, and it paid in American dollars when the peso had gone to paper. Twenty-five dollars a head to break a horse was real money to a family living out of a wagon.

Bee Adkins was fifteen in 1918, breaking horses on a ranch in Chihuahua and wiring money home to Arizona. Path of the Peacemaker is his life, and that year is in it.

Sources

• Brooke USA / U.S. World War I Centennial Commission, Horse Heroes: By the Numbers
• WyoHistory.org, Horses for War: A Market for Wyoming Stockmen
• U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, The Remount Service Past and Present
• Bee Dee Adkins, Between Now & Then (Lulu Press, 2009); Vina Bee Adkins Keeling, A Breed Apart: A Biographical Scrapbook of Bee Adkins 1903–1954 (2003)