A quick and easy collection of the various articles posted here, concerning the development of the first McClellan pattern military saddle. It’s a complex history, and this will help in following the process: Horse Equipment Trials of the 1850s – how did all this confusion come about? The failure of the Grimsley horse equipment pattern led…
The complex and convoluted history of the development of the first McClellan military saddle has been covered in a previous article, so we now look a detailed look at the first widely issued example of that process, the 1857 Trial Model McClellan. After the approval was received for the McClellan pattern submission in the last…
In 1863, the Ordnance department of the US Army was making numerous positive actions to improve the horse equipment acquisition process. One of these efforts was concentrated on quality control of saddle trees – a product notoriously difficult to produce to specification on a mass scale. All saddle trees were made using hand tools, so…
Like so many details of American military horse equipment, these details can be traced to European influences – even to the small small brass decorative fittings. Pommel ornaments or ‘shields’ are a fixture of US military saddles going all the way back to the first Ringgold dragoons saddles (circa 1841-42). A natural solution for reinforcing…
