I found a great photo recently of Comanche, celebrated survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. The photo was taken in 1887, 11 years after the massacre, but it has been superimposed over a battlefield photo with the bodies of dead 7th Cavalry mounts strewn across the background.

What caught my interest was the image of Comanche, who looks as if you could throw a saddle on his back and go work cattle. Deep chest, short back, strong loins, short cannons, low hocks – and, if his weight had been set on his right rear foot (his leg is slightly cocked), I am sure we would see a deep hip. Considering that he had not been ridden since the battle, he is in remarkable shape.

Comanche was about six years old, when Captain Miles Keogh, a decorated Union Army officer during the Civil War, purchased him as his personal mount. Foaled in the early 1860s, of mustang and Morgan descent (cattle outfits sometimes used Morgan stallions to improve their remudas by crossing them on mustang mares), the colt had been captured in a  roundup, gelded, and sold to the U.S. Cavalry in 1868. He acquired the name “Comanche” in 1868, when he was wounded in the hindquarters by a Comanche arrow, during a skirmish in Kansas.

Keogh, along with the rest of General George Armstrong Custer’s detachment, was killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in eastern Montana. Although badly wounded, Comanche survived and was sent to Fort Lincoln, North Dakota, to convalesce under the care of Gustave Korn, a private in Keogh’s company, who was with another group of men on the day of the famous battle.

After Comanche recuperated, the Cavalry issued an order that no one should ever ride him again. Korn was killed in 1890, during the Battle at Wounded Knee, and Comanche died a year later, at Fort Riley, Kansas, at the age of 29. His body was mounted and on display at the famous Chicago Exposition of 1893, and can still be seen at the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, Lawrence, Kansas.