He entered the Army as a West Point graduate in 1875 and was commissioned as an infantry officer. That was the year, of course, before Custer lead his troops into Little Big Horn on tired mounts with no good reconnaissance of the Sioux camp found there. After serving as an infantryman Mann made a rare branch transfer into the cavalry and entered Custer's old unit, the 7th Cavalry.
As a cavalryman and infantryman he served in the campaigns against the Sioux on the Northern Plains in the 1880s and 1890s. He was back in the infantry during the Spanish American War where he fought in the Battle of El Caney and the Siege of Santiago for which he was later decorated for heroism. In 1916 he served as the commander of the 2nd Cavalry Bde in Mexico during the Punitive Expedition, by which time he was 62 years of age, hold enough that in the modern U.S. Army he would have been required to retire two years prior. Following that he was promoted to Major General and was in charge of the militia bureau, which oversaw the National Guard. From there, in 1917, he went on to be appointed the commanding general of the 42nd Division, a unit made up of all National Guardsmen.
He deployed to France with the "Rainbow Division" in 1917 but by that point his age and health were catching up with him and he failed a physical. We'll deal with a very controversial example of this later, when it coincides with the centennial of the event, but this does show that the Army did in fact remove men from command who were too physically infirm to command them in combat in spite of their senior rank. Mann was then returned to stateside duty in the United States and retired soon thereafter, as he was by that time at the required retirement age.
In spite of ill health, he lived to age 80 and died in 1934.
A long career in the Army, spanning the height of the Indian Wars to the dawn of global mechanized warfare.
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