The Horse Soldiers

In 1959 John Ford and John Wayne, in the last of their “cavalry collaborations”, made the Horse Soldiers, a film based on Harold Sinclair’s novel of the same name, which is a wonderful fictionalized account of Grierson’s Raid April 17-May 2 1863 during Grant’s Vicksburg campaign where 1700 Union troopers, under Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a music teacher and band leader from Jacksonville, Illinois turned soldier, rode 600 miles through Confederate territory from southern Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, providing a diversion as Grant moved on Vicksburg. The video above shows an interview done of Harold Sinclair during the making of the film.  Go here to read a note by Sinclair at the beginning of the novel in which he describes the liberties taken in the novel from the historical events.

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