Episode Details

Traveller was foaled in 1857 in Greenbrier County, Virginia, sired by the racehorse Grey Eagle out of a mare named Flora, and first named Jeff Davis. Trained by an enslaved boy named Frank Winfield Page, the iron gray American Saddlebred grew to 16 hands and about 1,100 pounds and won ribbons at the Lewisburg fair. Captain Joseph M. Brown bought him for $175 and renamed him Greenbrier, and in February 1862 Robert E. Lee bought him for $200. This episode explains why his smooth four-beat gait suited a commander who spent long days in the saddle.

At Second Bull Run, Traveller spooked while Lee held his bridle on foot, and Lee fell and broke both hands. After the war the horse lived with Lee at Washington College in Lexington, where visitors plucked his tail hairs as souvenirs. He walked behind Lee's casket in 1870, then died of tetanus in 1871 after stepping on a nail. The episode follows his remains through exhumation, a skeleton exhibited in Rochester, New York, a university basement where students carved initials into the bones, a 1971 burial in concrete, and a new headstone in 2023.

• Lee's other mounts included Lucy Long, who lived to 34, Richmond, Brown Roan, and Ajax.
• Lee wrote to his daughter Mildred that the souvenir hunters were making Traveller look like a plucked chicken.
• Journalist Joseph Bryan paid in 1907 to bring the skeleton back to Lexington.
• When President Thomas Burish closed the stable doors kept open for Traveller's spirit, he had them painted a shade called Traveller Green.
• Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, published the novel Traveller in 1988, narrated by the horse.