The 101st cavalry.

In the modern US army units are numbered without much regard to their description which follows the number. Thus the fictional 4077th MASH unit in M.A.S.H. does not imply there were at least 4077 MASH units in the army during the Korean War. So there would not necessarily be a 4076th Mash Unit or a 4075th Mash Unit.

The first unit of any particular type, such as a "Junk" unit, could be called the 721st Junk Unit, or the 1057th Junk Unit, etc. And if there were other Junk units they might be the 2863rd Junk Unit and the 3528th Junk Unit and the 4739th Junk Unit and so on.

But in the 19th century military units were numbered by type. From 1866 to about 1900 there were ten cavalry regiments in the United States Army (the regular army) known as the First US Cavalry, the Second US Cavalry, the Third US cavalry,...up to the Tenth US Cavalry.

Then, after the Indian Wars were over, the Eleventh Cavalry through the Fifteenth cavalry were formed.

Each cavalry regiment consisted of twelve companies or troops, with a legal strength of about a hundred men in each company,in the period 1866 to 1900. The companies were known by letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. I, K, L, and M. There was no J company because it looked too much like I. Company Q was slang for a punishment detail.

With a legal strength of about 100 men per company, there would be about 12,000 US cavalrymen in all, but the recruiters could never find enough recruits and a lot of men were always on work details keeping their forts habitable, in the guardhouse, sick, deserting, etc. so a cavalry company usually had about forty to sixty men available for duty.

At any time from 1865 to 1900 most of the cavalry units and a lot of the infantry units were stationed in western forts in Indian country -- often about a hundred camps, forts, cantonments, posts etc. in all, which thus had small garrisons of about one or two companies of cavalry and/or infantry on average.

But what was the situation in the wild west of movies and television shows?

Most fictional cavalry units were never identified. The one which were identified usually had the numbers of cavalry regiments which existed in the period, even if those units were stations hundreds of miles away for the location of the story at that time.

In the opening of Fort Massacre a message is addressed to the commanding officer of the First Regiment of the Sixth Cavalry, which implies that the Sixth Cavalry was imagined to be a cavalry brigade or even division. And yet with all the vast numbers of cavalrymen which that implies, the movie featured an off screen disaster in which three hundred cavalrymen were wiped out by hostile Apaches.

In Last of the Comanches there was a scene at the end showing a cavalry hat stuck on top of a crude cross marking a soldier's grave. That had crossed saber insignia and the Number 14 above and the letter G below. So the soldier was a member of company G of the 14th Cavalry.

In one low budget western whose title I don't remember an officer's door had a sign saying Headquarters 114th Cavalry.

And in The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin the heroes are members of Company B of the 101st cavalry. The opening credits show a company guidon of the post 1887 pattern, fork talled, and bi colored, with the regimental number 101 above and the company letter B below. The guidon was either refused fromsome previous production, which would determine the designation of the 101st cavalry in the show, or else was made for the series because of the 101st Cavalry being chosen for some other reason.

Actually it would not have required an enormous number of cavalrymen to have had a 101st or 114th Cavalry. There did not have to be 12 companies in each cavalry unit. There could have been the six regiments with 12 companies each already existing in 1866 and then fifty two-company independent cavalry squadrons and fifty four-company independent cavalry battalions, for example. That would have made 372 cavalry companies in 106 regiments, squadrons,and battalions, or only 3.10 times as many companies and cavalrymen as in actual history. The squadrons and battalions could have been stationed in small forts and the regiments could have been stationed in large forts as reserves to fight big Indian campaigns.

Better still would have been to add six or twelve more regiments so that each territorial department in the that could have a reserve brigade of two or three regiments for big campaigns. Some of these units, such as most of the cavalry squadrons and battalions, could have been designated as temporary units due to be disbanded once the Indian Wars of the 1860s and 1870s ended.

Each military department could have been commanded by a major general with a brigadier general in command of the small forts and their units and another brigadier general in charge of the reserve cavalry brigade. Instead of increasing the number of generals in the regular army those commands could be given to generals of of US volunteers from the civil war who could have been allowed to keep the volunteer commissions. But when the supply of generals of volunteers from the civil war ran out they would not be replaced by regular army generals because by then the Indian wars would be over.

I doubt if the creators of the show were thinking much of alternative forms of military organization, however. Probably one of them had served in B Company of the 101st something-or-other unit in World War Two.

01/16/11 I recently found out that there is a real 101st Cavalry, so possibly one of the creators of the series did serve in it some time. It is a New York National Guard unit.

According to an online copy of this book:

Armor-Cavalry Regiments: Army National Guard Lineage
By Jeffrey Lynn Pope, Leonid E. Kondratiuk

The 101st cavalry has a very complicated genealogy, with units being re designated, merging, splitting, and so on. A diagram would probably look very complicated. The designation of 101st cavalry seems to go back to 1921, but some of the units which were combined, split, recombined, etc. to form the present 101st Cavalry fought as early as World war I, the Spanish-American War, and the Civil War.