Amazing Elastic Uniforms

When Lily joins the caravan her costume is considered unfit for travel in the wilderness so she is told that the bugler will donate his uniform to her, and later she wears a uniform which fits her very well.

One might logically expect to have seen a cheerful and good humored teenage bugler about Lilly's size in a few previous scenes and later glimpse him looking sullen and embarrassed riding in his underwear with a bugle hanging from a cord around his shoulder. I don't remember such scenes, so perhaps the bugler had a spare uniform in his pack.

The bugler could have been in for more humiliation. Suppose that they gave a dance, in which Lily would be the only woman present. To provide reasonable substitutes for women, the younger, smaller, and better-looking soldiers could be ordered to be honorary women for the dance and dance partners for the other soldiers.

If the bugler's uniform fit Lily very well, I guess the bugler could have been ordered to wear for the dance any spare dress which Lily could have brought along. Of course I imagine Indians attacking during the dance, when the mean and the temporary women are lined up to choose partners and the bugler in Lilly's spare dress happens to be standing next to her. Lily could jerk the bugler out of the way of an arrow which would hit something next to him and he would thank her and she would yell at him to not get any of his blood on her dress. Then an Indian would jump them and the bugler would knock him down with his bugle and start beating him to death with it, yelling "I'm not going to be killed wearing a dress!" and Lily would yell at him "Stop that! Don't get his blood on my dress!".

It is almost a joke for the bugler's uniform to fit a beautiful woman so well, so if they included that in the script they might as well have milked it for all it was worth.

Actually a cavalry command might have more than one bugler. Each company was allowed two buglers, so a company sized command, which in those days usually had forty to sixty men, could have two buglers. And I guess the command in Southwest Passage looked like it could have forty to sixty men.

In a battle with the hostiles I saw a beefy-looking soldier lying down and shooting who had a bugle insignia on his uniform sleeve and thus should have been a bugler. A real cavalry command that size might have had two buglers, but Lily was offered a uniform from "the bugler", which makes it sound like they had only one.

Thus the bugler was not chosen to donate a spare uniform to Lily because he was a boy near her size but for some other reason.

I guess that the expedition was not only testing the use of camels, but also testing new experimental super elastic one-size-fits-all uniforms, and the bugler was chose to donate a uniform because he was much bigger than Lily and they wanted to see if one of his uniforms would fit her well.

Judging by how well it fit Lily, the experimental super elastic uniforms were successful, but they were probably too expensive to be adopted for general use.