This cabinet card by Markey and Mytton of Fort Grant, Arizona, measures 4 ¼ by 6 ½ inches and has good clarity and tone. It shows a U.S. cavalry private posed in studio with a plain backdrop, but with rocks, straw and vegetation on the floor to give an impression of being out in the wild. He poses with one foot set upon a rock and holds his Springfield trapdoor carbine at full cock, as if on guard or on alert.

Our man wears cavalry gauntlets, a neat, drab campaign hat of the 1883 or 1889 pattern, a well-ironed five-button fatigue blouse, and an 1876 style prairie belt with a couple of cartridges visible in loops at left next to the frame buckle. He wears a pair of the tall 1884 pattern cavalry boots and has kept his spurs on to complete the impression of being in the field.

The area of Fort Grant had been occupied as a military post intermittently from 1860 to 1865, at which point the military again occupied it at “Camp Grant.” The post was moved and renamed “Fort Grant” in 1872. The post played a prominent role in the Apache wars of the 1880s and was finally abandoned by the army in 1905, taken over by the state in 1912 and is currently a prison complex. Its unfortunate history also includes the guardhouse escape of Billy the Kid, and the nearby 1871 massacre of some 144 Apaches, mostly women and children, camped near “Camp Grant” by a group of Anglo and Mexican Americans and Tohona O’odham native Americans, sparking a guerilla war that lasted into 1875.

This is in very good condition, with a fancy Markey & Mytton “Art Studio” backmark on the reverse that shows some foxing, but does not affect the face of the card.  [SR]

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