In the 1860s, it was one of the most humiliating, brutal and feared forms of punishment at Fort Bridger. More than 160 years later, it’s the most popular attraction at the Fort Bridger State Historic Site.
It seems nobody can escape the Fort Bridger “punishment horse.”
The punishment horse is a military punishment that goes back thousands of years. Also called the “wooden horse” or “Spanish donkey,” it was used as an instrument of torture and a tool to mete out military discipline.
Many times, the wooden horse had an edge to it and those “riding” it would be forced to hold heavy objects, with their weight pressing continually down onto the rail, causing increasing levels of agony.
What made Fort Bridger’s punishment horse unique was that it resembled an actual horse.
“It’s an old military tradition, and forts across the United States had them, but we’ve got a really interesting case at Fort Bridger,” Joshua Camp, superintendent at the Fort Bridger State Historic Site, told Cowboy State Daily. “They actually gave it a head, a tail and everything else. Rather than just being a log between two posts, they made it look like a horse.”
The story of the Fort Bridger punishment horse is full of contrasts, from being a serious form of discipline to humorous anecdotes and a photo-op that brought it back to life in the present day.
Nobody wanted to sit on it then, but everybody wants to sit on it now.
Loopholes On Either Side
When Fort Bridger was rebuilt as a U.S. military fort in the 1850s, it was divided into two sides by Groshan Creek. The small creek was an important boundary, and any soldier stationed there was expected to recognize it.
“There was a side for the infantry and a side for the cavalry and officers,” Camp said. “Common soldiers were expected to stay on their side of the creek, and you could be punished for being found on the wrong side.”
Soldiers caught on the wrong side of the creek were expected to have a note saying what they were doing there, who ordered them to do it, and what time they were expected to do it.
Any discrepancies in that note, or not having a note at all, resulted in a court-martial and a day in one of the fort’s confinement cells.
A lonely day in a cell doesn’t sound enjoyable, but Camp said soldiers soon started purposely crossing the creek to get caught and court-martialed. It was an oft-used loophole to get a day or two of leisure in the cool comfort of the cells.
“These soldiers started realizing that if they had fatigue duty tomorrow, where they’d be chopping trees down in the hot sun in their wool coats, maybe a day in jail doesn't sound so bad. Lounging in the punishment cell was essentially a day off,” he said.
A day of hard manual labor in Wyoming’s summer sun or lying down in a shady, cool cell? You don’t need to be a military genius to see which would be preferable to the rank-and-file soldiers.
“It’s human nature to find loopholes in everything,” Camp said.
Mills’ Mount
The Fort Bridger court-martial loophole became standard practice when Capt. Anson Mills assumed command in November 1866.
Mills was at the beginning of a stellar career in the U.S. Army, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general and improving on the regulation cartridge belt with a new design, woven in one piece, that made him a small fortune.
Camp described Mills as “quite a character” during his time at Fort Bridger. He was the mastermind behind the tradition with a twist that became the Fort Bridger punishment horse.
A typical punishment horse in a U.S. Army camp was a log placed on two poles. “Riding the rail” was a common and entertaining form of discipline in Union and Confederate camps during the Civil War.
Mills, in his inventive fashion, decided the punishment for crossing the creek should reflect the “crime.” He wrote about the implementation of the punishment horse in his autobiography, “My Story.”
“Instead of punishing the men by confining them in the guard house for trial, I had the post carpenter construct a very unprepossessing wooden house and an oversized wooden sword, with its business end painted a bloody red,” he wrote.
“Mills had them make a punishment horse that looked more like a horse than any other I've ever seen, very much to inflict his idea of the punishment,” Camp said. “He thought, ‘Well, if you guys want to be a cavalryman so bad, we'll make you a cavalryman for the day.’”
The Fort Bridger punishment horse had a head and a tail, to Mills’s specifications, but also came with an essential accessory: a 7-foot-long wooden saber. Soldiers court-martialed for crossing the creek had to spend a whole day mounted, saber at the ready, on the punishment horse.
“You can see Mills’s inventiveness with the idea,” Camp said. “Instead of spending your day in the jail cell, the soldier would show up at sunrise, mount the punishment horse, and stay on until the sun set. If they wanted to be a cavalryman so bad, Mills made sure they got to be one for the whole day.”
Saber Salute
The punishment horse’s 7-foot saber was more than an accessory. Camp said the painted end of the saber was a crucial point of the day-long ordeal.
“The idea of it was that if that red tip ever went below your head level, you got another day on the punishment horse,” he said.
Most soldiers quickly learned that keeping the saber on their shoulder was a good way to ensure the tip stayed over their heads. That was a tried-and-true loophole — until an officer showed up.
“Because you were ‘an honorary cavalryman’ for the day, you would have to give a specific cavalryman salute. With your sword drawn, you would put it to your face and then point it out, keeping it held in an upright position in front of you.”
Maintaining that position with a regular saber would be draining, let alone with a 7-foot hunk of wood. But Camp said officers would have known how to make the most of this quirky punishment, and often did.
“As long as an officer was standing in front of you, you were required to give him the proper respect and hold that salute,” he said. “There's only so long you can hold it before you're worn out and your arm drops, whether you want to or not. And if it ducks below your head, that’s another day on the punishment horse.”
Camp said the punishment horse and the saber gave the officers “a very powerful tool” for enforcing discipline at Fort Bridger. Spending a day uncomfortably sitting on a log in the hot sun was humiliating enough, but the saber etiquette made it an unenviable punishment.
Sitting on a hard log was brutal enough, but adding the heavy sword and the protocol involved made the punishment horse agonizing as well as humiliating.
Yeah, It Gets Worse
As if a day on the punishment horse wasn’t enough, Camp said there are records of more creative embellishments added to make it even more humiliating for the subject and a hilarious spectacle for everyone else. Since it looked like a horse, Mills and other officers thought it should be treated and kept as one, too.
“Any man reported for any disorderly conduct had to ride this horse for a certain period, dismounting occasionally to curry and water it with currycomb and water bucket.”
Camp said the soldier would have to take a pail down to Groshon Creek, fill it with water, and hold it up to the horse’s head so it could get a sufficient drink of water.
“Only officers were intelligent enough to know when that horse had had enough water,” he said. “If you were lucky, you would get to hydrate yourself with that same water after the horse was done with it.”
Camp said there are a few recorded instances of punished soldiers also being told to feed the horse.
“Some officers made them go get a bucket of feed, just like they would for a real horse,” he said. “One guy had to pile up grass high enough until it touched the horse's snout.”
There was also at least one instance where an officer ordered a soldier to brush out and groom the punishment horse’s tail. Mills might have considered that when he had the horse built with a tail, but he would have undoubtedly been delighted with this unique task.
If that wasn’t enough, Camp said Fort Bridger was effectively “the center of town” during the late 1800s. Anybody who was passing by would get a great view of the punished mounted and armed on the punishment horse.
“Fort Bridger had a fairly large population at the time, so there was a huge social implication to the punishment horse,” he said. “It was already uncomfortable, hot, and miserable, and keeping up the sword is going to cause a lot of pain. But it also would have been set up so everyone passing by, soldier and civilian, would see you sitting on that thing.”
To make matters worse, Fort Bridger was an important supply depot for the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. Anyone traveling westward along these established routes would be greeted with a sultry salute from the soldier aback the punishment horse.
“It already wasn’t a fun thing to be doing, and there was a plethora of different options that the officers could and did take from that punishment,” Camp said.
Getting And Losing The Point
If Mills wanted his punishment horse to make an impact, it did.
“This method of punishment proved most efficient,” Mills wrote, “as the men soon came to dread ‘riding the horse’ a great deal more than they did spending a month in the guard house.”
The punishment horse became a fixture at Fort Bridger. Court-martials for crossing Groshon Creek precipitously dropped once it was built.
“It actually worked pretty well,” Camp said. “Because of the punishment horse and the plethora of extras that could be added to it, the problem went away almost immediately.
Eventually, the punishment horse disappeared from Fort Bridger. Camp isn’t sure what happened to it, but he has a strong suspicion that it was butchered for parts.
“We don’t have any actual knowledge of what happened to the punishment horse, but my best guess is that it became firewood after the punishment went away,” he said.
Thankfully, history didn’t have to rely solely on Mills’s recollections of the punishment horse. A famous photograph of the Fort Bridger punishment horse was taken in 1866, complete with a soldier on it holding the 7-foot saber.
That photo is now the most replicated photo at the Fort Bridger site.
Pleasure From Punishment
Using the 1866 photograph as a reference, a recreation of the Fort Bridger punishment horse and saber was installed at the Fort Bridger Historic Site in 2019. While 19th-century soldiers avoided any time atop the punishment horse, 21st-century tourists are eager to mount it.
“It was meant to be a visual when we built it, but we couldn’t keep people off of it,” he said. “We ended up having to build some support bases underneath it and a stair structure up to it so that people could mount and dismount safely. I would say it’s our most popular attraction, at this point.”
Camp said everyone at the Fort Bridger Historic Site has embraced the punishment horse. While punishment horses were common enough at the time, Fort Bridger’s stands out for its unique design.
“I've seen photos of other sites where punishment horses were used, but they were just two simple posts with a log stretched in between them,” he said. “Ours is really unique and individual for being, shall we say, artistically done.”
Camp credits Mills for the unique artistry employed in the creation of the Fort Bridger punishment horse. He was already a colorful character, and his horse remains a testament to his creative contributions to the U.S. military and his tenure as the commanding officer of Fort Bridger.
“I think it has a lot to do with the sarcastic nature of the commanding officer at the time,” he said. “It's been one of those things that's taken off on us and gone a lot further than what we thought it would. I can't tell you how many people are stopping to get their picture taken on the punishment horse. It’s been immortalized.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
