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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

The Horse Soldiers

1959 American film by John Ford

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 25, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

The Horse Soldiers is a 1959 American adventure war film set during the American Civil War directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, William Holden, and Constance Towers. The screenplay by John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin was loosely based on the Harold Sinclair (1907-1966) 1956 novel of historical fiction of the same name, a fictionalized version of the famous Grierson's Raid by federal cavalry in April–May 1863 riding southward through Mississippi and around the Mississippi River fortress of Vicksburg during the Vicksburg campaign to split the southern Confederacy by Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant.

Editorial summary

“The Horse Soldiers” enters the record as 1959 American film by John Ford. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Horse, Soldiers and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1959, 1907, 1966, 1956—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Horse, Soldiers and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“The Horse Soldiers” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Horse, Soldiers and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1907, 1966 and 1956.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Horse Soldiers”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Horse Soldiers primary sources, The Horse Soldiers archive and Horse research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Horse Soldiers”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “The Horse Soldiers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.