Robert E. Lee on Traveller

Lee bought the grey four-year-old in early 1862 for $200 in Confederate currency, renamed him Traveller, and rode him for the rest of the war. He was an American Saddlebred cross out of western Virginia, about sixteen hands, iron grey with a black mane, and by every account he had an exceptionally fast, jarring walk that exhausted every staff officer who tried to keep up with him.

Lee described him in a letter with the kind of precision he usually reserved for terrain — muscle, eye, foot, short back, deep chest, and a courage he said no artist could paint. The horse was famous enough in the ranks that soldiers reached out to pull hairs from his tail for keepsakes, and the animal got noticeably bad-tempered about crowds.

He was at Appomattox, and afterwards he went to Lexington with Lee and was ridden most afternoons around the college. He walked behind the hearse at the funeral in 1870 and outlived his owner by less than a year, dying of tetanus from a nail. His skeleton was displayed for decades before he was finally buried beside the chapel, a few feet from Lee.