"When did dragoons become proper cavalry" Topic

and which armies were 1st to do so?

cheers
Ian

They never really were "proper" cavalry.
If you called them "horse" or "cavalry", you would have to pay them more.
Dragoons fell in the pay scale between lowly infantry and cavalry.

perhaps I should say when did they cease to be used as mounted infantry?

The US still deployed troops called Dragoons during the Mexican-American War 1846-48. However, none were to be found after 1861. Almost all cavalry was just cavalry. That said, there were several regiments of mounted rifles serving during the war such as Wilder's Lightning Brigade. Europe is a completely different story.

ACW "cavalry" routinely acted like dragoons in their tactics. Even though they weren't called dragoons. And they were decidedly different than mounted infantry in both tactics and equipment.

Toward the end of the Nap wars most dragoon regiments stopped dismounting and doing other non-cavalry-like things. Most wanted(hoped) to be considered as "proper" cavalry.

When did they cease to be used as mounted infantry?
In Britain , when they swapped their donkeys for tanks.

Yeah dragoons were not paid as good as Kürassiers. But they were used as heavy battle cavalry, and occasionly defeated Kürassiers in combat !

The French made extensive use of dismounted dragoons at Blenheim (1704) but this went out of fashion after the War of Spanish Succession, so that by 1740s dragoons could truly be considered "horse" or cavalry in all but name.

@cae5ar;

I'd disagree. French Napoleonic dragoons were still trained and equipped to fight on foot, and frequently did. Mind, that was usually after their horse had died!

French Napoleonic dragoons seemed to have been the exception to the rule that by that time dragoons were simply heavy cavalry. American dragoons of the war of 1812 weren't even issued carbines. For the British the concept of infantry on horseback had to be reinvented in the small colonial wars of the 19th centaury as "mounted infantry".

the French fielded a brigade of dismounted dragoons in the line at Hastenbeck 1757..

Maybe in some countries 'dragoons' were 'cheap' cavalry from the start -less stringent requirements regarding the quality and size of men and horses, no 'noble' tradition &c… The British Dragoon Guards were 'Horse' given another name to save on expenditures

Yet in most countries dragoons appeared indeed as mounted infantry (musket intermediate between the infantry pattern and the cavalry carbine, bayonet, buckled or laced bottines instead of heavy cavalry boots, drums instead of trumpets, guidon instead of standard, grenadiers companies…). And, as happens generally with mounted infantry, progressively turned to cavalry.
The process was progressive, and because of the weight of tradition some 'mounted infantry' features such as drums were kept for some time after they had turn to 'medium' cavalry.
The process started at different times and progressed at a different rate according to country. A suggestive evidence in every individual case is the date of *substitution of the bottines with 'true' cavalry boots* (of course the actual changing of function having happened sometimes before this official acknowledgement of the new role). IIRC it happened at a far earlier date in Prussia than in France, for instance.

In France dragons were still supposed to act as mounted infantry (and army pioneers) at the end of the SYW. And later, while treated as 'battle' cavalry (heavy boots, trumpets, rectangular flag) they were always the first to be dismounted -for lack of horses, or were they were supposed to get them later (planned landing in England from Boulogne) or whatever reason. In 1939 the mechanized infantrymen of French 'cavalry' armored divisions (DLM) were Dragons portés while in the 'infantry' armored divisions (DCR) they were Chasseurs portés (belonging to the Chasseurs ŕ pied).

French used dismounted dragoons at Blenheim mainly because they had just suffered a glanders epidemic. Many horses had died.

The Swedish dragoons of the GNW went to war equipped with the same boots as the cavalry, the diffrences in equipment was that the dragoons never had the buff coat or breastplate of the cavalry and the dragoons were armed with a standard infantry musket rather than the wheellock or flintlock carbine of the cavalry.

On the battlefield the dragoons used the same tactics as the cavalry while at least the pre-war cavalry units had training in dismounted service if the need arose during the "small war".