By Eric Niderost
Robert Morris Peck was strolling the streets of Cincinnati one brisk November day when a yellow poster outside a boarding house caught his eye. After the bold headline “wanted,” he read: able-bodied, unmarried men between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to enlist as soldiers in the First Regiment, U.S. Cavalry. It was 1856, and the 17-year-old printer’s apprentice had a restless, peripatetic nature and an innate thirst for adventure.
Peck had always been interested in the West, eagerly devouring all the books he could find on the subject. His favorites were James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking Tales,” and he thrilled to stories of wild Indians and courageous mountain men. But factual accounts, such as the exploits of “pathfinder” John Charles Fremont, were not to his taste.
The young apprentice also chafed at the mindless drudgery of the printer’s trade, and was certain that such an indoor, confined existence was making inroads into his health. The West, with its wide open spaces under an azure sky, promised health as well as adventure. Peck considered his options. As he explained years later, “Newport Barracks was the permanent recruiting station, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and separated from Covington, Kentucky, my home, by the Licking River.”
But on reflection he realized that Newport Barracks was a place where you might be sent to any part of the service that needed men—infantry, artillery, or cavalry. He might linger at the Barracks for a long time awaiting assignment. But here was a recruiting center exclusively for the First Cavalry, and horse soldiers retained a strong element of glamor and romance.
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