The regiment's first mission cost it more men than any battle it ever fought, and it never fired a shot in anger. The dragoons were new, raised because foot soldiers were useless against the horse nations of the southern plains, and in the summer of 1834 they were sent out to reach the Comanche, the Kiowa and the Wichita — partly because those nations were pressing the Santa Fe trade, and partly to smooth the forced relocation of eastern tribes into territory that already belonged to somebody. They left Fort Gibson on 15 June under Brigadier General Henry Leavenworth, with Dodge commanding the First Dragoons. Then the heat and the fever got into the column. A third of the force was incapacitated. Men were dying at four or five a day; George Catlin, who had come along to paint the Plains nations and nearly died himself, reckoned as many as a hundred and fifty dead since June. Leavenworth was one of them, on 21 July, at which point Dodge took full command of what was left. About a hundred and eighty-three dragoons finished the march west. Between 14 and 25 July he got what he had been sent for: councils with the Comanche, the Wichita and the Kiowa, the release of captives, and an invitation to Washington that the nations accepted. It led directly to the first treaty between the United States and the Plains nations. They were back at Fort Gibson by mid-August. The southern plains stayed contested for another fifty years.

The figure explains itself once you know the march: a colonel in a fringed buckskin hunting coat with a long rifle and his hat in his hand, dressed for the country rather than for a parade. Thirty Native warriors rode with the column as guides, and two of the junior officers were Stephen W. Kearny and Jefferson Davis, both of whom the country would hear a great deal more about. The president who sent him was Andrew Jackson, whose policy the expedition was carrying out. Two years later the same frontier world produced its most famous casualty in David Crockett. And the mounted arm Dodge was founding here grew into the cavalry that George Armstrong Custer rode into the Little Bighorn forty-two years later, still arguing about the same country.

Model: 10197 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set