Moses Harris

A gallant Union cavalryman who routed foes at Smithfield.

Moses Harris was born in Andover, New Hampshire, on October 8, 1837. In 1857, at 19, he enlisted as a private in the Regular Army and spent the next seven years learning his trade in the saddle. By the spring of 1864, he had risen through the enlisted ranks to become First Sergeant of the 4th U.S. Cavalry. His steadiness in the field earned him a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the 1st U.S. Cavalry in May 1864, just as the Army of the Potomac was fighting its way through Virginia during the Overland Campaign.

Joining the Reserve Brigade of the Cavalry Corps, Harris saw hard riding and heavy fighting almost immediately. At the Battle of Trevilian Station in June 1864, his conduct earned him a recommendation for a brevet promotion to Captain, and he was promoted to First Lieutenant that August. Later that month, on August 28, 1864, near Smithfield, Virginia, the 1st U.S. Cavalry was pressed by a much larger Confederate force and ordered to charge across an open plowed field. During the assault, Lieutenant Joseph Hoyer was shot through the body and mortally wounded while leading his squadron. Harris immediately took over command of the squadron. He led the charge with such conspicuous bravery that his troopers rallied and drove the Confederates from the field in a complete rout. He remained with the regiment through the constant skirmishing along the Opequon, the Siege of Petersburg, and the final pursuit to Appomattox, later recounting the brigade's campaigns in a four-part series for the Journal of the United States Cavalry Association.

When the Civil War ended, Harris stayed in the Regular Army with the 1st U.S. Cavalry. After a stint on recruiting duty in Boston in 1872, Captain Harris went west to command Troop M and the frontier garrison at Fort Colville in the Washington Territory from 1875 to 1878, where his cavalrymen monitored regional unrest and took the field at the outbreak of the Bannock War in May 1878. By 1886, he and Troop M were stationed at Fort Custer in the Montana Territory. That August, after Congress refused to fund the ineffective civilian administration of Yellowstone National Park, General Philip Sheridan ordered Harris and fifty troopers into the park to save it from ruin.

Harris arrived at Mammoth Hot Springs on August 17, 1886, and became Yellowstone's first military acting superintendent three days later. He found forest fires burning unchecked, commercial hunters slaughtering elk and bison for the market, and tourists chipping away at the geysers and hot springs. Known as an austere and unyielding officer, Harris put his cavalrymen to work fighting the fires and drafted strict rules against timber cutting, vandalism, and poaching. Because regular soldiers didn't know how to track game in deep mountain snows, he hired experienced mountaineers to teach his men to travel on long wooden skis and run winter patrols into the backcountry. Although federal law gave him no authority to fine or jail criminals, Harris arrested poachers, confiscated their gear, and marched them out of the park, while also tearing down ramshackle squatter hotels and fighting off commercial schemes to shrink the park's northern boundary.

On June 1, 1889, Harris turned the Yellowstone command over to his brother-in-law, Captain Frazier A. Boutelle. Harris had married Abba Eliza Boutelle, and the couple raised two daughters, Eleanor and Margaret. After coordinating troop transportation in Milwaukee during the Pine Ridge campaign in December 1890, Harris was promoted to Major in the 8th U.S. Cavalry in July 1892 and retired from active service on March 7, 1893, after thirty-six years in uniform. On November 23, 1896, the War Department formally presented him with the Medal of Honor for his charge at Smithfield thirty-two years earlier. A companion of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Harris spent his retirement in Rochester, New York, where he died on June 27, 1927, at age 89, and was laid to rest at the United States Military Academy Post Cemetery at West Point.