I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,
I often live beyond my means,
I sport young ladies in their teens,
To cut a swell in the army.
I teach young ladies how to dance,
How to dance, how to dance,
I teach young ladies how to dance,
For I’m their pet in the army.
Chorus:
I’m Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines,
I give my horse good corn and beans,
Of course ’tis quite beyond my means,
Though a Captain in the army.
I joined my corps when twenty-one,
Of course, I thought it capital fun;
When the enemy came, then off I ran;
I wasn’t cut out for the army.
When I left home, Mamma she cried,
Mamma she cried, Mamma she cried,
When I left home, Mammy she cried,
“He ain’t cut out for the army.”
The first day I went out to drill,
The bugle-sound made me quite ill;
At the balance-step, my hat it fell,
And that won’t do for the army.
The officers they all did shout;
They all cried out, they all did shout;
The officers they all did shout,
“Oh! that’s the cure for the army.”
My tailor’s bills came in so fast,
Forced me one day to leave at last;
And ladies too no more did cast
Sheep’s eyes at me in the army.
My creditors at me did shout
At me did shout, at me did shout,
My creditors at me did shout,
“Why, kick him out of the army!”
(Click here for a PDF version of the music) * (Click here to hear the instrumental version)
Laura Ingalls Wilder seems to have been very taken with this song; she cites it three times (Little House in the Big Woods, chapter 7, supposedly dating from 1872; On the Banks of Plum Creek, on the next to last page, and By the Shores of Silver Lake, chapter 15, from 1879). If her recollection is accurate — and it should be recalled that she wrote sixty years after the event — the song became popular in her family very early in its existence, because the earliest dated sheet music, by J. L. Peters, was dated 1868. A roughly contemporary but undated sheet music publication by Lee & Walker credits it to T. Maclagan, but the history of the song is not really known.
Ethel Barrymore in 1901 in one of the famous dresses from ”Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It is by no means clear that Laura actually knew it in Minnesota. The song has gone into tradition, but it has not to my knowledge been collected in the Midwest. Vance Randolph, however, picked up two versions (one a playparty) in the Ozarks, near where Laura spent her later years. So the possibility must be admitted that she learned it there and retrojected it into her midwestern years.
Still, it was probably heard in Minnesota parlors at one time or another, so we might as well include it. The version here is based on the version printed on pp. 47-48 of Sigmund Spaeth’s Weep Some More, My Lady, with the punctuation modernized. Spaeth’s text also includes interjections that might be spoken between the verse and chorus, but I have omitted them; they’re pretty feeble.
It is interesting to note that Laura’s version does not quite match the sheet music version; she has “folk processed” it somewhat.
Spaeth notes that the song was used in a play of the same name, in which Ethel Barrymore made her debut.
The Minnesota Heritage Songbook 
Great information Bob! The melody for this song was indeed collected in Minnesota as a fiddle tune played by Iva Dingwall, a native of Elk River who was born in 1877 and learned a lot of her music from her father. There is info on Iva and a clip of her playing Captain Jinks on the Minnesota Fiddle blog site: http://minnesotafiddle.blogspot.com/2011/12/iva-dingwall.html
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Good catch, Brian. Iva played it as a dance tune; the original tune is based on a traditional Irish tune called John Kelly’s Slide, so it is also possible that it was played by the Irish who moved to Minnesota. It is also important to note that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books are considered historical fiction, and this is one good reason why. When she put the music in her stories. her publisher had to clear them, so they put in the tunes that they had permission to use. She commented later in a letter to her daughter that the versions in her books weren’t always the ones that she had remembered, but those originals were long gone. (See The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anderson – Harper – 2016.
10/10/2023. Las Cruces, New Mexico. My father had a partially raw song book from the WWII Army. A version of Captain Jinx was in it. I can only recall: I’m Captain Jinx of the Horse Marines. I feed my horse on corn and beans. I court the ladies in their teens for I’m Captain Jinx of the Horse Marines. After all, I last saw that book in 1950 when I loaned it to Mrs. Rees, my third teacher who died and I never got the book back.
I was taught that song as part of our sixth grade music lessons in South San Antonio in 1954. It is a fun catchy tune but the part about the teenaged girls is a little weird now.
Agreed, but two thoughts (apart from the fact of social mores being different then): First, Captain Jinks THINKS he’s the model of… something or other, but he probably isn’t really. Second, remember that in the nineteenth century, the soldiers themselves were recruited younger. In peacetime, to be sure, it took a long time to get promoted to captain — decades, often. But during the Mexican War, or the Civil War, it was quite possible for a seventeen-year-old to be a captain by brevet. So Captain Jinks may have been a teenager himself.
That’s not to defend the song; it’s simply to point out that things were different then. The whole point of preserving folk songs, I would say, is to preserve the feeling of times past. Sometimes that feeling was something we want to preserve. Sometimes — as with the casual assumption of Black or Indian inferiority, it was despicable. In a time when our schools are being censored, perhaps we need the songs even more than ever!