Those boots are made for riding.

The song may say "These boots are made for walking..." but it is a fact that some boots are made for riding.

And what 19th century job involved wearing boots made for riding? Being a cavalrymen.

Thus the boots that Colonel Marlowe wore in The Horse Soldiers (1959) should have been riding boots. In the last battle scene Marlowe is wounded in the leg and operated on to get the bullet out. This involves cutting his right boot to get it off the leg. Marlowe complains those are $ 20.00 boots, a lot of money in those days.

They shouldn't have to cut the boots off. Marlowe would normally put them on in the morning and take them off at night when in camp, and possibly also on the raid. They should have been fairly easy to take off. Maybe they thought the blood on his pants and boots would make the boots stick to him. Maybe it was standard procedure to cut articles of clothing to make them easier to remove and avoid causing any pain to the patient.

Or maybe the Doctor and his assistants enjoyed cutting off and destroying clothing the way some Union soldiers enjoyed destroying Rebel property and so automatically cut off the boots and clothing of men they operated on, whether necessary or not.

I did think that the boots worn by John Wayne looked very tight fitting. And thus they would be harder to take off than looser fitting boots. Would real cavalrymen wear boots that looked that tight fitting?

I don't know. But real Civil War generals rode horses, and so they wore riding boots.

General George Crook commanded the US forces at the Battle of Cloyd's Mountain, May 9, 1864. Crook dismounted and accompanied the brigade of Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes as they charged the Rebels. They crossed a waist high stream and Crook's tall riding boots filled up with water, bogging him down. Soldiers had to pull him out of the stream. The brigade charged up the hill on the other side. But Crook's boots were still full of water, and when they reached the top he fainted from exhaustion.

Obviously even a strong young general might get exhausted if he had to carry an extra hundred pounds of weight on his back while climbing up a hill. And extra weights on one's feet and legs are more exhausting than the same weights carried on the back, because those weights will be moved back and forth and up and down as one walks. So I suppose that Crook had a total of maybe ten extra pounds of water inside his boots as he climbed up the hill.

Five pounds of water in each boot would equal 0.08 cubic feet, or 138.24 cubic inches. Thus General Crook's boots were probably loose fitting boots, and probably a cavalry colonel would also wear loose fitting boots. Loose fitting boots that would be easy to pull off without having to cut.