The Cavalry Club is not really a “club”, in the sense that there are  members, charge dues, have regular meetings, or any of that sort of thing. It is, instead, an old log lodge on a secluded stretch of the upper Manistee River in northern Michigan that was founded by an old horseman and outdoorsman. It’s where every summer and autumn some over-the-hill but like minded fly fishermen and grouse hunters meet to feed dry flies to Brown Trout and to chase Ruffed Grouse with old bird dogs that are more pets than hunters. Most of these fellows are horsemen. Some are cavalry collectors. A few are military historians. A couple are retired mounted police officers. Several are authors and some are well… other things. All are just plain old fly fishermen and upland game shotgunners. They enjoy sitting on the front porch after a day on the river or deep in the brush, drinking good, and sometimes not so good, bourbon while puffing on cheap cigars. The topics of discussion, besides fishing and bird hunting, are usually military horsemanship, cavalry history, and cavalry artifacts. There’s almost never any fist fights, nobody gets too drunk and nowadays, mostly everybody is sleeping by eleven, either in or out of our porch rockers.

         So why a website for a bunch of irreverent old scoundrels? Well, mostly because everyone else we know seems to have one and because we also found a young geek, nerd, whatever they're called, to set it up and do all that other technical stuff on it. He’s cheap too. Only costs us a fifth of whiskey every now and then, usually cheap stuff because, at fourteen, he’s still too young to appreciate good booze. But if anyone thinks that we’re taking advantage of the sprout, he gets a few cigars and some well tied flies once in while too. Oh yeah, and some No. 8/28s during grouse season. The only other reason that comes to mind for a website is that most of the boys up here have all kinds of horse experience and cavalry knowledge and have collected tons of old cavalry stuff over the years, some of it is pretty rare too, and since many of us are well past sixty, we thought that it would be neighborly to share some of that knowledge with other horsemen, collectors and historians. We might even learn something new in the process, all except for old uncle Alphonse who is already a genius and knows just about everything about everything, or so he tells us often enough. He says that if you don’t believe him, just ask him a question. Take it from us he can give you the longest darned answer to the shortest question of anyone you’ve ever met. But don't believe me on this. Go ahead and ask old uncle Alphonse a question about horsemanship, cavalry or cavalry artifacts. We sort of promise that if he's interested enough in your question you'll get his answer posted right here. If he's not that interested in the question, or if he's on the river, or in the brush, or sleeping on the porch, maybe one of the other old guys will answer for him.