quarry. Since his mother would not allow him to use a gun until his fifteenth birthday, he hunted with a bow and arrow he had made for himself, with which he accounted himself “extremely skilful.” Besides handling a gun, his passion for hunting helped him develop other “arts of the field” such as swimming, handling a boat, and riding a horse.30
Like the rest of his class, Scott admitted to being “mad for the cavalry.” Capping off his arguments in favor of his preference for a commission in the Tenth Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, Scott noted that cavalry officers were paid a hundred dollars more a year than infantry. They also got keep for two horses.31 His greatest regret about leaving West Point was having to bid farewell to “his” horse. Cadets drew lots to determine an order for picking a mount for riding drill. Two weeks before graduation, Scott wrote regretfully to his mother that he had only two more rides left with his West Point horse. “I’m going to miss my horse very much—& he will me I guess. Whenever I come out he is looking for me & rubs his nose on my cheek & it is soft as velvet too. If I don’t get out his sugar right away he pushes me till I do. I’m awfully sorry to leave him.”32 By all accounts, Scott was an excellent horseman. He was more sentimental about horses than he was about most people. He could remember and relate details of the appearance and temperament of horses he had owned or ridden half a century earlier. In the frontier army, Scott also became adept at handling mule teams, which were essential for transport, communication, and the provisioning of troops in the field.
Scott graduated from West Point on June 14, 1876. General William Tecumseh Sherman presented the diplomas to his class. At graduation Scott stood thirty-sixth in a class of forty-eight. He was assigned to the Ninth Cavalry, the other Buffalo Soldier regiment. He paid little attention to the commencement orations of the day, little suspecting that he would return many times to take part in commencement exercises in later years as a speaker himself, includ ing during his tenure as superintendent of the academy from 1906 to 1910. Instead, newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Scott was intent on getting home to Princeton to make the most of the leave granted to him before reporting to the Arizona border when his orders came.33
Besides visiting friends and family in Princeton, Scott had been looking forward to attending the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. With his brother William, then a student at Princeton, Scott traveled to the nation’s first capital to witness the celebration of its first hundred years of independence. Out of a population of some forty-two million, an estimated eight million attended the Exposition between May and October of 1876.
The exposition covered 285 acres of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. It boasted five massive exhibition buildings as well as a number of state and foreign buildings, many restaurants, beer gardens, cigar pavilions, and a thirty-six-foot-tall ice water fountain erected by the Grand Division of Sons of Temperance of the State of Pennsylvania, which dispensed free ice water from twenty-seven self-acting spigots. The predominating theme of the exposition was Progress and the leading role of the United States in driving the innovations and achievements of the age. The president of the Centennial Exposition voiced the hope that people would come to the exposition “to study the evidence of our resources, to measure the progress of a hundred years, and to examine to our profit the wonderful products of other lands.”34 A visit to Machinery Hall, bragged one contemporary account, “must convince all that the world contains no fingers more cunning, no minds more inventive, nor tastes more refined, than are found on our shores.35
In the Government Building, exhibitions were intended to “illustrate the functions and administrative facilities of the Government in times of peace and its resources as a war power.” Accordingly, the War Department awed fairgoers with a dynamic display of some of its most powerful and modern weaponry. All the machinery and skilled operatives needed to demonstrate the manufacture of the Springfield breech-loading rifle were assembled in the Government Building; fascinated fairgoers watched as “handsome weapons of death” were fashioned out of round bars of steel and blocks of black walnut before their eyes. The process of grinding a bayonet on a steam-powered grindstone as well as the manufacture of bullets and cartridges were also on view, as well as an array of cannons, Gatling guns, and mountain howitzers with carriages and ammunition, positioned realistically on pack saddles, just as they would be carried into battle on the backs of mules.36
Weapons also made up a significant portion of the American Indian artifacts exhibited in the same building, but these were presented in an entirely different way. Stone axes, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, and knives were piled together in museum cases or “huddled under tables.” Without interpretation, these “savage weapons” were displayed as relics, thus supporting the prevalent idea about the backwardness of the men who had made them. As the author of an article describing the weapons concluded: “The Centennial Exhibition was mainly of the means and results of modern industry and art, and the primitive objects were comparatively but strays and occasionals.”37
The principal organizer of the Indian exhibit, Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian, intended the display of Indian objects to educate Americans on the way of life of American Indians as well as to illustrate “the change from a savage state to one of comparative civilization,” but the overall impression created by the jumble of artifacts tended instead to reinforce common stereotypes of Indians as primitives, whose culture and way of life represented the antithesis of progress.38
Baird had also wanted to include living Indians in the Centennial Exposition. Working with the Indian Office, which shared responsibility for representing Indians at the exposition, plans to bring thirty to forty Indian families to the exhibition were well developed, but ultimately abandoned due to lack of congressional support. The idea was to install members of selected tribes (those already subdued by the government) in a five-acre reservation on the exposition grounds where they could demonstrate their skills at crafts such as weaving blankets, making pottery, and dressing buffalo skins. Unfortunately for Baird, Congress refused to fund the proposal, even when it was pointed out that such an excursion would have the added benefit of providing an object lesson in the power of the United States.39 Instead of living Indians, visitors to the Indian exhibit in the Government Building encountered life-sized effigies, made of papier-mâché modeled on notable Indians who had been photographed on diplomatic visits to Washington. One of the men whose image was rendered in effigy was the Oglala chief Red Cloud, who had led his people’s resistance to incursions into Lakota and Shoshone territories along the Bozeman Trail; by the time of the centennial, Red Cloud had long since accommodated himself to the inevitable and acceded to the government’s insistence that he settle near an agency on the Great Sioux Reservation. Although Red Cloud had been at peace with the United States since 1868, the manikin representing him was dressed to appear warlike, presenting a “repulsive looking image with raised tomahawk and a belt of human scalps.”40 Two years after touring the Indian exhibit under Red Cloud’s scowling likeness, Scott would spend several days as an interpreter and guest in Red Cloud’s lodge, where he found him to be “the picture of hospitality.”
Ethnographic limitations notwithstanding, for the recent West Point graduate the exposition was enjoyable for the spectacle it provided and also for the chance to meet friends. Scott spent some of his time at the exposition in the encampment of West Point cadets. He also enjoyed the hospitality of the Seventh New York Regiment, also camped out within the fairgrounds. “Any soldier who got into one of the company streets of the Seventh Regiment was in for a strenuous time,” Scott recalled years later. “Each tent floor had a small cellar under it, filled with ice, champagne, roast chicken, and other delicacies, and a passer-by would be hauled into those tents, one after another, and, with the cellar door opened wide, he would not be allowed to leave until some duty called his hospitable hosts elsewhere.”
Scott was still in Philadelphia for the gala events to mark Independence Day 1876. These began with a torchlight parade to Independence Hall on the evening of July 3. At the stroke of midnight, Philadelphia’s new Liberty Bell pealed thirteen times to thunderous applause. An orchestra was on hand to play “The Star Spangled Banner,”
