The Sixth U.S. Cavalry had its birth at the outbreak of the Civil War with its first action at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1862. They fought in the Army of the Potomac under General Sheridan throughout the war. From 1865 to 1871 the regiment was stationed in Austin and Fort Richardson, Texas, acting as both a federal policing unit in the Reconstruction military government and as protectors against the Comanches along the frontier. After 1871 they moved into Kansas and the Indian Territory and in 1874 were under the command of Col. Nelson A. Miles in his operations against the Comanches, Cheyennes, and Kiowas. The regiment was then stationed in Arizona and New Mexico and spent the next ten years in operations against the Apache. Their last action against the Indians was at Wounded Knee in 1890. Fighting did not come again until the short-lived Spanish-American war in 1898 where the unit was prominent in the battle of Santiago. The author was a 2nd Lieutenant when he joined the Sixth Cavalry in 1874 and remained on their rolls for his entire career. In 1900 he wrote this history of the unit and had it privately published in Baltimore. Unfortunately, a large part of the edition was destroyed by fire, make the original book one of the scarcest and most expensive histories of a major military unit.