The Plains Indian Wars Have Begun!

[dominic]

Thanks for that brief Orbat.
And where do the Gatlings and guns come in?  Were they organic or attached?

[matakishi]

They were taken as part of the collumn for the Little Bighorn but never used. Probably under a separate Atillery command but I'm not sure without looking it up and everything's in storage

[dominic]

I need to dig up my Son of the Morning Star book.
According to the mini-series, Gen Terry offered Custer the gatlings, but he refused to take them saying they would slow him down.

BTW - thanks for the tip about the trouser stripe.  Damn Osprey only showed NCOs and officers in their illustrations.  The only Private shown had a carbine blocking the trouser stripe area!! (My fault for not reading the book before starting to paint!)

[Malamute]

Matakishi - an exellent collection - I recently sold my Britannia collection too . I also have Son of The Morning Star on video too

[dominic]

Matakishi - where can I get nice US cavalry flags?

[matakishi]

I don't know

Each company should have a company guidon, by this time they were the stars and stripes design. Some people show the company letter in the centre of the circle of stars but there's no evidence of this as far as I know.

I prefer the earlier and easier to read red and white guidons from the Civil War. I made mine with a red pencil and some finely textured cartridge paper. I added some Britannia stars and stripes ones to the first companies in each squadron so that there was a stars and stripes presence in the column. The Britannia ones are not great however.

Custer's personal flag I made myself and I was going to add a general ACW Cavalry standard to the figure next to that but never got round to it. I got that from Warflag who might have guidons too...

http://www.warflag.com/flags/acw/ustext.shtml

Redoubt also do them:
http://www.redoubtenterprises.com/shop/?page=shop/browse&category_id=8e4dff4aee17744a9dddfe2d990cf873

No photos but the flags are really nice (I haven't seen the actual guidons but I have used many others from this range.)

You can see their flags in operation here:
http://www.displacedminiatures.com/Matakishi/images.html?galleryId=102&from=ACW+figures

The first set of Zouaves use Warflag flags, the rest are from Redoubt.
When I re-do my 7th Cavalry I'll use the Redoubt ones

[dominic]

Thanks
I was thinking of making my own, then decided to look around on the web to see if there were nice ready made ones.

But there are very few 7th Cav flags out there.  The only specific ones I could find were from Cotton Jim and Signifer.  Unfortunately there were no pics.

[Malamute]

Dominic - make your own guidons and go with the red and white version. Its more Hollywood

[dominic]

Dismount!  Form skirmish line!

[matakishi]

Excellent, really nice painting.

[Malamute]

Excellent painting. If you want  a it of variety. some of the fgures wearing just shirts and not scak jackets could be painted wearing grey flannel shirts or civialian ones, red or white.
I painted mine up wearing a mishmash of different coloured hats and shirts.  

[dominic]

A bit more this weekend.
Home-made guidons

[matakishi]

Very nice! Much better than bought ones.

But, OMG, their spurs! Cavalry spurs are brass! Always brass  
I swear, the youf of today have mo respeck for 'istory  ::

[dominic]

Brass spurs you say? :freak:
Damn!!  I wish the Ospreys were clearer with their illustrations!!

[matakishi]

Well, I wouldn't worry about it really, what's important is whether you're pleased with them (and you should be).

I've been thinking about 'uniform accuracy' a lot recently and I've basically decided that it's not important at all. Once you get past a general look for the figures, in this case dark blue coat, light blue trousers and black hat (with variations), than everything else really doesn't matter. Sources disagree on everything so you'll probably never be right anyway. Since there are already arguments about what people wore and carried in Vietnam there are certainly many innaccuracies in every uniform book about earlier times.

I am now happy to paint figures to an accepted colour scheme and with enough 'correct' detail to satisfy myself. Anything further I make up. It saves a whole lot of bother.