by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
“Colonel, sir,” Taggart said, “pay these mischief-makers no mind.”
I clutched the captain by the collar of his leather jersey, and dragged him across the mesquite.
“Who sent you here to belittle us?”
“The generals,” he said. “The generals—at Fort Sam.”
Bellows cautioned me to reflect before I ruined us all.
I bathed bare-assed in the river, then returned to my tent with its portable writing desk, put on my parade colors from Brooks Brothers, and went into San Antone in a regimental supply wagon, with Josephine on a leash. My driver considered me a maniac. We arrived on Alamo Square in the middle of a wedding procession, and the bride, who wore a blue veil, couldn’t take her eyes off our mascot.
“What’s his name, Excellency?”
“She’s a girl,” I told her.
“Well, that’s original,” she said and nuzzled Josephine, who licked her hand and then trooped with me into the Menger, the most rarefied bar in Texas. Senoritas did not dance on the zinc. The bar was all done in cherrywood, with lanterns and mirrors that lent very meager light. Deals were made at the Menger bar—it thrived in darkness. It was the watering hole of cattlemen and senior officers at Fort Sam. I’d intruded upon the privilege of their utter privacy with a mountain lion on a leash. I sat Josephine at my heels and fed her the local draft from my schooner. She did not growl once.
An aide of the provost marshal at Fort Sam tapped me on the shoulder. “TR, have you really brought a wild beast into the Menger?”
“Josephine ain’t wild,” I riposted. “She’s the regimental mascot. And I don’t like generals at Fort Sam sending scouts into Rough Rider country to rile us up. I don’t like it at all. Should it occur again, I’ll consider it an act of war.”
It was an act of war, but I didn’t expect Colonel Wood to read it that way. I was prepared to resign my commission.
“I will not fight if I cannot protect my own men.”
It was the first time I saw Leonard laugh in weeks.
“The staff officers resent us. We’re in the news, and they’re not. . . . But, damn you, Teddy, did you have to bring Josephine to the Menger Hotel?”
“That was better than an all-out attack on Fort Sam.”
Leonard laughed again. “Count your lucky stars that there weren’t any reporters snooping around. If Josephine had landed on the front page of the San Antonio Express, we’d have to disband the Rough Riders. And not a single one of us would ever get to Cuba.”
Our rifles arrived in an Army ambulance. We trained in the dunes with live ammunition that sputtered in the sky like defective firecrackers. Some of my bravos rode in the mesquite in flared leather flaps. Colonel Wood said that our cavaliers ought to have machetes in the Cuban chaparral rather than the sabers of traditional cavalrymen—sabers couldn’t cut into tangled, snakelike roots. But the quartermaster general wouldn’t listen, and our damn machetes never arrived. And then we got the call. The War Department said we had to pack up and leave for Tampa; took us twelve hours to assemble our gear. And we rode in cavalry formation, with our buglers and our guidons, to the railroad tracks. We must have looked like nothing but a mirage to the farmers and watermelon boys at the wayside, coming out of the dust as we did, near a thousand strong.
No ordinary depot could have handled such a load of horses, mules, fodder, and men. We had to rely on the Union Stock Yard, because our assemblage was more like a cattle run than a shipment of horse soldiers. There weren’t enough cars to carry all the Rough Rider mounts. We waited at the tracks for other Southern Pacific cars and engines to arrive. Whatever cars came still couldn’t support a regiment. And our boys were packed like cattle heading to some Chicago slaughterhouse, with the sting of manure in their nostrils. Colonel Wood and I were in an open-air caboose with Josephine, who nearly slipped on the gelatinous blood from earlier cattle runs. I carried buckets of water and tepid coffee to as many boys as I could, but my arms failed me after a couple of hours. And Sergeant Raddison, who was with H Troop now, grasped the buckets without a word and continued along the aisles; he moved with the same silent deliberation as the bicycle-riding cop who had started the flying squad.
We were mobbed at every station along the route. Folks welcomed us to their own little war parades. Half-mad women scribbled letters to Rough Riders they had never met and would never meet again. Some proposed outright marriage. A few of our bravos fancied a particular lady and disappeared from our caravan of seven trains. Leonard cursed their hides. But these bravos managed to find us at the next station, or the next after that. A horse died of heatstroke, but we didn’t lose a bravo, not one. People would shout from the tracks, “Teddy, Teddy, Teddy,” and I realized why the Army regulars hated us so. We had captured the imagination of blood and battle somehow—the Rough Riders represented the romance of war. We could have risen out of some biblical rapture. The Army couldn’t compete with cowboy cavaliers.
OUR CARAVAN FINALLY ENDED at some siding on the pine flats, in the middle of nowhere. The railroad men refused to deliver us to the Tampa depot. I couldn’t tell if it was out of spite, or on strict orders from the Fifth Army Corps—it might have been a bit of both. And so we had to muster in that lonely place, near a sinking pyramid of ashes, grab our belongings, and ride our mounts in the middle of the night to the Fifth Army campground, a tent city on a savannah of sand—it stretched for miles like some illusion, though the array of snoring and farting soldiers was real enough, like a battlefield where the dead jostled back to life. Still, there was no one to greet us, or point us to our own site. We had to find it ourselves, amid the panorama of tents. It was a pathetic space on a broad sand flat, a bald spot nestled within a scatter of pines, a mile from the Tampa Bay Hotel.
Tampa was beginning to lose its allure; it had become a tiny metropolis of cigar makers, retired jockeys, and panhandlers, who congregated on Twiggs Street; most of the tycoons absconded with their retinue of railroad cars to Palm Beach and avoided Tampa’s meager one-line track. The hotel had shut down for the summer, but had to open again to accommodate General Shafter and his Fifth Army Corps. That monstrosity with its minarets had become the headquarters of our invasion force. It was like a Moorish nightmare with a park of screaming peacocks, walkways that stretched a mile, a cavalcade of keyhole arches, and a myriad of silver domes. You could get lost wandering from room to room, and grow dizzy looking at treasures plucked from every European capital. I sat on one of Napoleon Bonaparte’s gilt chairs. It gave me little pleasure to do so.
I did have some pleasure in that castle with its priceless hall of mirrors. Officers, junior and senior alike, weren’t allowed to bring their wives to Tampa Bay. But Leonard declared an exception to the rule. He prescribed appropriate “medicine” for my wife—a rest cure at Tampa Bay, and not even the Fifth Army’s high command dared contradict the President’s physician.
I’d been in contact with Edith as much as my regimental duties allowed. Sister wrote me every day about my wife’s condition. I’d managed to talk to Edith on the telephone exchange at Fort Sam. And here she was in the lobby of the Tampa Bay Hotel, with its forest of palmettos and silver chandeliers.
“Sinbad,” she said, half her face hidden in a flouncy white hat, “you’ve grown thin as a rail. Don’t they feed lieutenant colonels in your part of the world?”
I let out a Rough Rider roar. Generals looked up from their field maps and newspapers. Journalists froze in the middle of a phrase.
Ya-ha-haw!
Edie looked right into my eyes like the twin beads of a shotgun. She wasn’t shy around that rotunda of generals. “I missed you more than any woman has the right to miss a man.”
I had to stifle a second war cry. “You’re the one military wife allowed in this damn hotel.”
“I’ll need more purchase than that.”
“You have a rival,” I said.
She seemed to startle herself out of her skull, under the flounce of her hat. And then Edith sm
iled. “Sinbad, is she friend—or foe?”
“She’s a cougar cub named Josephine.”
Edith didn’t pause a moment to parse her words. “Then I’ll duel her to the death.”
And we explored that lunatic asylum of a hotel, built on the sand flats, so that you stepped in sand on every floor. But the sand couldn’t be swept away. It clung to the carpets and the windowsills, blew across the rotunda whenever a door was opened. It clung to your teeth like gristle. Edith wrapped a silk scarf around herself like an Arabian princess. Still, she constantly had to shield her eyes. And I wondered if sand rather than Spanish snipers and yellow fever would destroy our invasion fleet.
Famished as we were, we had supper in the dining room with several boys from Troop H, while regular officers at the other tables looked at us askance, as if we were consorting with the enemy. There was no point in trying to explain the Rough Rider morale. We were cowboys, not cadets.
A lieutenant colonel in the First Volunteers couldn’t have much of a vacation with his own damn wife. I had to return to the Rough Riders at five a.m. for reveille. So I had a few lovely hours beside Edith in one of the castle’s mountainous beds, watching the curl of her lip as she slept. And the next morning she rode into camp in a regimental bucket. She watched us drill in the dunes, one Troop resisting the cavalry charge of another in all that extravagant sand.
And then there was that fated meeting with Josephine. She was trotting along on the savannah when she espied me with my wife. She growled deep within her throat, but that mountain lion was amazing. She must have sensed that defying Edith wouldn’t work. So she sauntered over, lay down in the sand with her paws in the air, and allowed Edith to rub her belly. There wasn’t much a man could do with these felines.
The regiment had a dance in Edith’s honor on that last night of her stay in Tampa town. We seized one of the ballrooms for ourselves and invited Generals Wheeler and Shafter of the Fifth Corps. Shafter was like a hippopotamus as Edith disappeared within the folds of his tunic. He wheezed and had to hop about on one foot, but the commander of the Fifth Corps didn’t decline to dance. And Wheeler did the Virginia reel with Edith like a runt in gold epaulettes. He was the wiser of the two generals. And I would have trusted his instincts in battle. He had decimated the Union Cavalry in the late war. But Chickamauga wasn’t the Cuban chaparral. . . .
I escaped reveille and accompanied Edith to the Tampa depot.
“The generals value you, Theodore,” she said, with a nervous lisp.
“But they do not value our regiment. And I worry that Shafter will leave us behind, sentence us to a second or third run to Cuba. And we will miss the show.”
“Ah, he might sentence you in his dreams. But he cannot fight a war without the Rough Riders,” she said with a wan smile. “You, dearest, are the show. And that is what I fear most—that you and your men will always be in the line of fire.”
I had trinkets for the bunnies—a saber for Alice, with a sharkskin hilt; a campaign hat for Ted; an old, disused pistol for Kermit; an Indian doll I had found for Ethel in the markets of San Antone; shell casings for Archie; and a rattle that Bellows had made with bits of wire, wood, and quilt for Baby Quent. And I’d strung together a necklace for Edith out of an old silver chain and Indian beads that were clear as crystal.
“My war trophy,” she whispered, as I clasped the chain of beads around her neck.
“Edie, we ain’t been to war. We’re congregating in the sand.”
I nuzzled her as hard and as long as I could. The coach started to move. And I had to hop off, in my campaign hat. It felt like a bad omen, that sudden leap. And the news hit like lightning bolts. The utter idea of a cavalry in Cuba had been abandoned by the Fifth Corps. There wasn’t enough room on the transports for thousands of horses. Only senior officers could have their ponies. And Shafter couldn’t fit all twelve of our Troops onto the first expedition force. We would have to leave four Troops behind. We were horsemen without horses, a makeshift infantry. I wondered if Shafter was doing this to punish the Rough Riders for our panache, for that wildness of spirit, for our ability to use a lariat and perform somersaults. I was prepared to march on headquarters.
“Don’t,” Leonard said. “TR, you’ll ruin whatever little cachet we have left to get ourselves onto that first invasion fleet.”
“Leonard, you’re wrong. We have no cachet, none at all.”
If we were pariahs among the military, we did have some pull with the journalists. Just before the invasion of Cuba that half-forgotten monstrosity in the sand had become the most famous hotel in the world. It was packed with journalists and foreign attachés. And I happened to be on familiar terms with William Winters-White, the deacon of war correspondents, who was still in his thirties and trotted wherever he could, with an umbrella, a sun hat, and a Colt. Will worked for the New York Herald, and readers were drawn to his poetic style. He talked about being “swallowed in sand at this perverse Alhambra by the sea.” He was no friend of the Fifth Corps; Winters-White said Shafter and his generals were idiotic. Tampa was the worst possible embarkation point, since it had only one railroad track. Shafter’s army of twenty thousand was “like a camel balancing on a pea pod. . . . It will arrive in Cuba in the midst of its own nightmare.”
Will hadn’t been much kinder to me when I was Police Commissioner. He excoriated the Department over the blue laws, said I had no right to deprive the workingman of his Sunday pail of beer. But he did admire ex-Sergeant Raddison of the flying squad. And now Will suddenly admired me. He rode on the train with us from Texas to Tampa, did articles on the Rough Riders and its Indian scouts, on the Pinks who served with us, on a reformed desperado like Red Finnegan—“Mr. Roosevelt will never deem a worthy man unworthy”—and all the Harvard football players and cowpunchers from the Badlands. He had lacquered us in solid gold, and turned every Rough Rider into a mythical creature, half man and half bull, like the Minotaur.
But he had his own astounding tale to tell. Winters-White was his nom de plume. His real moniker was Alfred McCann. He’d once been a tyke at the Newsboys’ Lodging-House. He became a printer’s devil at eleven, fashioned words in his own fist, broke down type and rebuilt it—hot lead had become his dictionary. He was a cub reporter by the time he was fifteen, and soon had his very own beat. He owed the life he now had to Papa, he once revealed after a drunken revel. Brave Heart had encouraged him, had sat with him during those long Sunday dinners at the lodging-house, and used his influence to find him that job as a printer’s devil. . . .
I caught Will while he was scribbling an ode to the First Volunteers’ mountain lion. Like the rest of us, he’d fallen under Josephine’s sway.
DESERT QUEEN
INCAUTIOUS CAT . . .
He sat on the hotel’s mile-long verandah in boots with spurs and an impeccable white coat. He had the wisp of a beard. Will was feline in his own way. He had long eyelashes. There was a lithe, yet lazy force under the regimental bandanna he liked to wear. He considered himself a Rough Rider. He didn’t have to brandish his Colt.
“TR, why so glum?”
“I think Shafter intends to strand us.”
“He wouldn’t dare.”
That’s all it took. He didn’t banter with me. Will wandered across the verandah, hobnobbed with the other war correspondents—that was the advantage of an ex-newsboy. He was much more brazen. And I was summoned posthaste into the commander’s office on the second floor of the castle. General Shafter’s aides fluttered around him with maps and charts of Cuba and ordnance reports. None of it made much sense. His aides had never been near the tropics, couldn’t have known how rapidly ordnance could rust. But their general could no longer fit into a chair. He sat on some kind of a love seat, nursing his sick toe and wetting his walrus mustache with a finger.
“Amateurs,” he said. “I’m surrounded by amateurs—like you. Roosevelt, did you have to complain to that serpent, Winters-White? I hear he’s a fraud. No matter. I told Wheeler we couldn�
�t trust you. ‘Roosevelt’s not a regular Army man. He’s not even a good sport.’ Didn’t I dance with your wife while I was suffering from the gout? Of course you and your cowboys will have tickets on the first invasion fleet. You’re the crown jewel of our arsenal, according to Winters-White. But this isn’t football, Roosevelt—it’s war.”
I had never trusted the commander. His promises fell a little flat in my ear, like a broken birdsong. Yet I had to mollify the son of a bitch. We’d never get near Cuba without a nod from this hippo with the walrus mustache.
“General, we’re soldiers now, loyal to the Fifth.”
“Yes, yes, my loyal buccaneers. But keep away from Winters-White. He’s common dirt, you know, born with ink on his thumbs. You’ll be among the first to board—I promise.”
I didn’t heed a word of his. I bade goodbye to the four Troops we had to leave behind in Tampa. “Boys, you’ll be on the second fleet.” But shame on us all! I was repeating one of Shafter’s damn lies. They would miss the show. Still, the other eight Troops had to pack their ponchos and blankets. And the journalists didn’t cease pestering us.
“Gentlemen,” I said, “we ain’t a bunch of Buffalo Bills.”
I’d brought twelve extra pairs of spectacles with me from San Antone—they all had steel rims and locked around my ears. I wouldn’t have been able to lead a charge across the chaparral if I was half blind. Bellows sewed several pairs into my campaign hat, my saddlebags, my boots, and my denim shirts.
“Watch out for snakes, Colonel,” he said. He kept another pair as a kind of insurance, and he trotted down the track to join the Buffalo Soldiers, who were already at the quay.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Rough Riders had assembled at a particular railroad siding, where a special train was supposed to pick us up. We parked ourselves under a gibbous moon, like men made of stone. We sat there until the sun rose, and realized that we’d remain there forever—forlorn soldiers abandoned by the Fifth. And finally a train did appear, a rusty wreck that must have been used to haul coal. We didn’t malinger.