MICHAEL P. WHALEN MEN WANTED FOR THE ARMY. Circa 1910

One in a series of evocative, pre-war recruiting posters that unintentionally depicted a military way of life that would all but disappear with the onset of the First World War. Meehan refers to this image as both "elegant" and "superb" and describes it as a cavalry recruitment poster featuring "a bugler sounding taps somewhere in the Southwestern territory [during the cavalry's heyday on the Great Plains]... It advertises a type of service that had already passed into history with the closing of the frontier in 1890. Cavalry patrols were impossible in WWI because German lines stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland" (Meehan cat. supl. 27). Rawls p. 54, Theofiles 1, p. 16, Borkan p. 13.