Throughout his career Remington championed the U.S. cavalryman and his role in what Theodore Roosevelt referred to as “The Winning of the West.” In late 1908 he began his twenty-first bronze subject, Trooper of the Plains, as an homage to the mounted soldier of the 1860s. The soldier’s uniform, including the black felt cap and the Jefferson boots, was made to conform to the military fashion of the Civil War years. Typically for Remington, the soldier’s pose is intended to be historically accurate. According to historians, during a cavalry attack it was standard army procedure for soldiers to ride hard toward the Indians’ horse and livestock herds, firing their guns in the air in an attempt to stampede them away from the enemy’s camp. Remington completed the clay model in November 1908, and by the second week of the month the plaster version had been completed in the artist’s studio and sent to the Roman Bronze Works foundry. On November 11, Remington noted in his diary: “Went over to Greenpoint and worked all day completing Trooper. [A] very fine figure.” The bronze retailed for $325; one or two castings might have been made prior to the artist’s death in December 1909, but the foundry records reveal that all the sales of this bronze—fifteen casts in all—took place after that.

One of Remington’s most interesting artistic achievements was the use of photography and his own astute observation to create a more accurate way of depicting the motion of a galloping horse. In this bronze the horse is shown with its legs tucked under its belly with all four hooves off the ground in a naturalistic way. Remington spent hours observing horses, and he had seen this; however, he was quick to assert that an artist could see more than the camera. “I’ve taken lots of photographs of horses myself, and they never give you the feeling of motion,” he once wrote. “The camera paints what it sees and not what our eyes see. We want what we see.”