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Building the Old West
Brief Historical Interlude
I have about a dozen books on the US Cavalry covering everything from the origins during the American Revolution to the last mounted cavalry charge in the Philippines against the Japanese. Even after being dismounted, the cavalry units continued to serve in combat operations in the Pacific theater. During the occupation of Japan, the lead unit of the US occupation was the 7th Cavalry.
But the post Civil War era, referred to as either the Plains Wars or Indian Wars, is the subject of this entry. One of the most interesting things about the US Army of this period is it’s doing a lot of experimenting with uniforms and equipment while performing lots of building of civilian infrastructure such as erecting telegraph lines, building roads and delivering the US mail in addition to the Indian Wars.
This book is nicely illustrated but is better for providing a basic history of the cavalry organization and both its peace time and combat operations. 
This book is volume 2 of 4 and if course I have all four. This is a great reference source for the uniforms with lots of black and white illustrations and an immense amount of primary source documentation plus a good number of color plates. I’ll be painting up these troopers in the uniforms of approximately 1876. This was the year of the Battle of the Little Big Horn which the Indians referred to as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. The uniforms were a mix of Civil War leftovers, new gear issued in 1872 and 1874 plus civilian clothes as most troopers found the issued uniforms unsuitable in warm weather.
I’m not sure if they’re still an active unit but I remember that the US Air Force had a mounted cavalry as part of Security Forces in the Phillipines for patrol duty.
They did and after Mt Pinatubo blew up, Clark AB was closed. The mounted patrol then went to Howard AFB in Panama and I saw them occasionally while I was stationed there. When Howard closed the unit was disbanded. Now the only mounted units are in the 1st Cavalry Division and are ceremonial/public relations only. 3rd Infantry has a few horses for ceremonial duties but I’m not aware of any other operational use of horses.