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Post by jpipes on Feb 7, 2010 3:42:35 GMT -5
Didn't light units wear a distinctive longer blue jacket?
I wasn't aware of the gray pants alongside the white and blue...
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Post by stuart on Feb 7, 2010 6:42:54 GMT -5
No, you may have been misled by the plates in the old Osprey book on the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, which included a figure of a light infantryman in a levita or French style frock coat. These coats were prescribed for fatigues but there's no visual evidence of their actually being worn except by officers before the 1840s.
As I said earlier the only cazadores serving in Texas were the preference companies of the ordinary infantry battalions - in fact the 1st Light Infantry wasn't raised until 1840.
As to the trousers, its not something to get hung up on. They were supposed to have blue trousers for winter and white for summer; its just that as Phil says, these could easily turn grey or blue within a very short space of time, according to dye batch and other local factors.
A useful parallel would be the Louisiana Tigers 30 years later. For a long time they were illustrated with brown jackets before it was realised that the original jackets were cheaply dyed blue ones which had turned brown on exposure to sunlight
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Post by tmdreb on Feb 7, 2010 14:59:57 GMT -5
Hefter stuck in a really confusing bit in his book regarding light infantry in 1835. He doesn't explain much about the creation or activities of these alleged units, but describes a uniform, and then illustrates it as a frock.
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Post by stuart on Feb 7, 2010 15:36:56 GMT -5
Classic case of errors compounded; Hefter's illustrations made it into Company of Military Historians plates and were in turn shamelessly - or rather blindly - copied for the old Osprey; which is why we have that guy identified as a mounted gastadore rather than an elite company trooper; a light cavalry in blue - no such unit in Texas - and the post 1840 light infantry in what's supposed to be a levita.
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