The Wilderness Warrior

by Douglas Brinkley

  Roosevelt became so distracted by the prospect of war that for the first time since the founding of the Boone and Crockett Club, he missed its annual dinner that January. The concept of American imperial ambitions consumed Roosevelt to the point of monomania. Pestering everybody he knew who was in a position to help, Roosevelt kept pleading, “Send me.” Picking up the old slogan “Remember the Alamo” from the Mexican War, Roosevelt was one of the progenitors of “Remember the Maine.” Obviously, hunting and bird-watching took a back seat to war that spring. Between trying to take care of Edith, who had undergone surgery to remove abscesses from her hips, and trying to persuade President McKinley to declare war on Spain, he had lost all sense of proportion. “I really think he is going mad,” Winthrop Chanler of the Boone and Crockett Club noted on April 29. “The President has asked him twice as a personal favor to stay in the Navy Department, but Theodore is wild to fight and hack and hew. It really is sad. Of course this ends his political career for good.”14

  When Secretary of War Russell Alger called for volunteer regiments “to be composed exclusively of frontiersmen possessing special qualifications as horsemen and marksmen,”15 Roosevelt leaped at the opportunity. At the very least, his years as deputy sheriff of Billings County, North Dakota, and his stint in the National Guard of New York provided him with legitimate “frontier” credentials. Eventually, Roosevelt was made second in command of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, behind his friend Colonel Leonard Wood, a former Indian fighter who had won the Medal of Honor for pursuing Geronimo and became McKinley’s chief army medical adviser. Because of Roosevelt’s highly publicized enlistment, more than 23,000 applicants flooded into the War Department offices. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to serve with Roosevelt at his side, including some of his Harvard classmates.16

  With the newspapers cheering Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt on, more than 1,250 men were eventually selected to form a top-notch regiment. They were first called “Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas” and went through three or four other names until “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” stuck. The Rough Riders were assigned to San Antonio for their mobilization. The regiment’s encampment was erected on the dusty International Fair Grounds (later renamed Roosevelt Park). The diverse Rough Riders comprised twelve troops—five from New Mexico Territory, three from Arizona Territory, one from Indian Territory (the southeastern part of present-day Oklahoma), one from Oklahoma Territory, and a smattering of upper-crust men from the East Coast, particularly men who had played Ivy League football and soccer. A recruiting table was set up on the outdoor patio of the Menger Hotel where men could register; some gave pseudonyms so not to be held accountable for past crimes. Horses and equipment were supplied from Fort Sam Houston’s quartermaster depot. Livestock men in Stetsons milled about El Mercado Square gossiping with Mexicans about the glorious war. Slouch hats, blue flannel shirts, and bandannas were handed out to Rough Riders as uniforms, giving the regiment a distinctive cowboy look.17 Eventually they were all also issued brown canvas stable fatigues for field service and given machetes to help them whack through the tropical foliage of Cuba.

  Among Roosevelt’s favorite haunts in San Antonio was the Buckhorn Saloon. Opened for business in 1881 by Albert Friedrich—whose father made high-quality horn furniture—from day one the bar had a standing offer: “Bring in your deer antlers and you can trade them for a shot of whiskey or a beer.” Before long the Buckhorn had the finest collection of horns and trophy mounts in the world. Men would actually collect antlers shed in the Texas Hill Country and then ride into San Antonio for their free drinks. In 1882, in fact, for $100 Friedrich acquired a record-making “78 Point Buck” it was placed behind the bar, where it still remains. Business was so good that Friedrich moved his operation to larger quarters at Houston and Soledad streets, a few blocks from the Alamo. Expanding on the tradition of free alcohol for deer racks, the Buckhorn, by the time Colonel Roosevelt discovered it, was also giving away shots for rattlesnake rattles. (Later, mounted fish from the Seven Seas were included in the freebie deal.) Even though Roosevelt wasn’t much of a drinker, he would wander in with fellow Rough Riders, order a beer, nurse it, and listen to an old guitar-picker sing about being a cowhand along the Brazos River.18

  San Antonio was a fillip to Roosevelt. He liked being dependent on his own horse and seeing sagebrush. No doctor or pharmacist could have uplifted him better than the opportunity to lead lineal descendents of Andrew Jackson’s fighting force in the Battle of New Orleans. Whether a volunteer was a Fort Worth bronco buster, a Newport polo swell, or a Tucson shopkeeper, each of the Rough Riders shared traits with the others: they all shot straight, were in good physical condition, hated Spain, and were willing to mobilize quickly. “I suppose about 95 per cent of the men are of native birth,” Roosevelt wrote. “But we have a few from everywhere including a score of Indians, and about as many of Mexican origin from New Mexico.”19

  Many fine firsthand accounts have been written of Roosevelt’s arrival in San Antonio, colorful portrayals of him pacing around like a bantam rooster in a new fawn uniform with canary-yellow trim, sweat constantly beading on his forehead from the Texas heat. The regiment’s chant soon became, “Rough, tough, we’re the stuff. We want to fight and we can’t get enough.”20 Throughout San Antonio signs were hung welcoming each state and territory and offering hospitality.21 The Menger Hotel—built twenty-three years after the fall of the Alamo—housed a replica of the pub inside Great Britain’s House of Lords; bartenders used to give out free shots of whiskey, in solidarity with the men. (The hotel later renamed the room the Roosevelt Bar.) However, Colonel Wood upbraided the much younger Roosevelt for purchasing beer kegs for volunteers. “Sir,” Roosevelt apologized when reprimanded, “I consider myself the damndest ass within ten miles of this camp.”22

  Before Roosevelt headed down to San Antonio for the training, he gave away his Elkhorn Ranch to Sylvane Ferris and sold his last head of cattle. (He had visited the ranch only infrequently in 1893, 1894, and 1896.23) Roosevelt nevertheless differentiated himself in San Antonio from the other Ivy Leaguers in the Rough Riders. Without falsity, he presented himself as both a Knickerbocker and a wilderness hunter to the rank and file training along the San Antonio River. As Owen Wister put it, Roosevelt embodied both the East (as a socialite) and the West (as a cowboy). Regularly, Roosevelt jogged and rode horseback for miles in the lean May sunshine with his regiment, not far from the Alamo. Many of the Rough Riders had fought against the Comanche and Apache, and had won. Roosevelt knew that in cow country, along the wild borderlands with Mexico, men gave each other nicknames like Red Jim, Bear Jones, or Dutchey; he was honored to be called “the Colonel” by everybody.24

  II

  The Rough Riders eventually boarded a slow-moving train to Tampa Bay on May 30, with Arizona providing the regimental colors. Before the departure from San Antonio Roosevelt worried that the warhorses, ears pricked, snorting, and rattling the boards in the railcar stalls, were being bullied and whipped as they were loaded onto the railcars by supposed horse masters. The harassing shouts of “Yahah!” bothered him. Taking charge of the situation, Roosevelt waved the others away and loaded the ponies properly into their compartments for the journey to Florida.25 Back in 1894 Owen Wister had written a short story, “Balaam and Pedro,” in Harper’s Monthly about the abuse of a horse he encountered on a western trek; the Wyoming character who stopped the inhumane treatment became the hero of The Virginian. (Wister, in fact, praised Henry Bergh’s movement to prevent cruelty to animals in his 1905 novel.26) Now Roosevelt, like the protagonist of Wister’s tale, was protecting horses under his command.

  Colonel Theodore Roosevelt in his Rough Riders uniform.

  T.R. in Rough Riders uniform. (Courtesy of Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library)

  Once the train reached Galveston the dry heat was replaced by muggy humidity. Nobody, however, really seemed to mind. The railway cars were roofless, giving the procession the aura of a parade, with Ro
ugh Riders waving at villagers as the train passed slowly by. At every stop in Louisiana and Mississippi folks poured out of the countryside to have a quick look at Colonel Roosevelt and his cowboy-garbed regiment. Moms with baked goods and girls with pitchers of fresh milk greeted them at depots. Watermelon wagons appeared regularly, providing snacks for the soldiers. Roosevelt basked in the limelight at each depot, offering a running commentary on American exceptionalism. Before the fighting in Cuba even began, there was going to be a showbiz side to the Rough Riders, but they would soon also touch the heartstrings of America. And, from the start, Colonel Roosevelt was the willing leader.

  These Rough Riders were the pride of Roosevelt’s heart, and his inextinguishable enthusiasm kept their morale high. Good-heartedly Roosevelt gave up his private berth to a trooper with measles, taking a coach seat with his men. He was determined not to treat his privates like indentured household servants. To kill time, some of the men, while waving away hatching flies, wrote a jingle about going down the “dusty pike” with Colonel Roosevelt, ready to “throttle the sons of Spain.”27 Roosevelt was reading Edmond Demoulins’s Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons (1897), a foray into social Darwinism. Demoulins wrote that France, his native country, lacked the “independence and ability to fight life’s battles fearlessly,” qualities that the Anglo-Saxons possessed in spades.28 He also believed that education—at which the British excelled—was the key to developing a great country. All this was music to Roosevelt’s ears. As the train rumbled eastward Roosevelt consoled himself with Demoulins’s notions of natural selection in the human arena.

  Once he finished the book, Roosevelt, flaunting his authority, called his men together at a depot stop near the Sabine River. He lectured them on Darwinism, describing how natural selection explained everything, from the size of their noses to the wings on the mosquitoes they were swatting. Many of the Rough Riders had taken to calling the Spaniards “greasers” or “dagoes,” and Roosevelt promised to explain shortly why the epithet wasn’t entirely unfair.29 Seizing Darwin’s image of a “tangled bank,” which ended On the Origin of Species, Roosevelt now made it his own. “Through all nature,” Roosevelt intoned, “it is a case of the survival of the fittest. Look at the magnificent trees along the river. The ones that started crooked were crowded out and died. The strong and the straight saplings appropriated all the food.”30

  That wasn’t the extent of Roosevelt’s lecture on Darwinism. Inspired by Demoulins, he took a leap forward, bringing humans and mammals into the mix. “It is the same with wild animals,” he continued. “The cripples and the inefficients that cannot support themselves are killed off.” Humans, Roosevelt maintained, were just highly developed animals. So just as the Chinese purged themselves of the criminal class and the wicked, the United States, if it wanted to achieve greatness, needed to sanitize its society by getting rid of criminals. (To be fair, he did, however, add the important point that the blind or crippled or chronically infirm of sound mind needed to be cared for by society at large.)

  Roosevelt then segued into the unfitness of Spaniards, the weak link in European affairs. Most, he said, were shiftless and of weak moral fiber. As Americans, his men had a newfound responsibility to liberate Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, because the Spanish had proved themselves tyrannical. Obviously Roosevelt was trying to arouse his fighting forces. Verbally attacking the enemy in training was a practice older than Rome. Taking the jingoist notion one step farther, Roosevelt, as if reeling off a paragraph of Kipling, boasted that the Rough Riders had a sacred obligation to revenge the Maine. “The old vigilantes in Montana did not have a single law,” he reminded them, “but they did have a simple, wholesome code which everyone knew. Life and property are secure as a consequence.” 31

  Notions of natural selection had long ago been stamped into Roosevelt. On the Origin of Species had taught him that evolution had some important implications for human societies. Still, the lecture was overblown and felt wrong. While Roosevelt was not a strict evolutionist in human affairs, he nevertheless was in the clutches of the general Spencerian notion “root, hog, or die.” To Roosevelt it was a slogan akin to gospel.32 As he articulated in his 1895 essay “Kidd’s Social Evolution,” published in North American Review (a scholarly analysis of Benjamin Kidd’s just-published reflection on natural selection), Roosevelt believed humans had two sides—one inspired by Darwin (“the rivalry of natural selection”) and the other being moral character (essentially the Ten Commandments). There were laws, he wrote, which governed mankind’s reproduction in every generation “precisely as they govern the reproduction of the lower animals.”33 But Roosevelt also understood that the rivalry of natural selection was just one way—not all-encompassing—in which Homo sapiens judged progress:

  Other things being equal, the species where this rivalry is keenest will make most progress; but then “other things” never are equal. In actual life those species make most progress which are farthest removed from the point where the limits of selection are very wide, the selection itself very rigid, and the rivalry very keen. Of course the selection is most rigid where the fecundity of the animal is greatest; but it is precisely the forms which have most fecundity that have made least progress. Some time in the remote past the guinea pig and the dog had a common ancestor. The fecundity of the guinea pig is much greater than that of the dog. Of a given number of guinea pigs born, a much smaller proportion are able to survive in the keen rivalry, so that the limits of selection are wider, and the selection itself more rigid; nevertheless the progress made by the progenitors of the dog since eocene days has been much more marked and rapid than the progress made by the progenitors of the guinea pig in the same time.34

  Probably the best way to understand Roosevelt’s thinking on social Darwinism—besides reading “Social Evolution,” which was reprinted as a chapter of his 1897 book American Ideals*—is to study a lecture given by John Burroughs in the 1890s, “The Biological Origin of the Ruling Class.” Fulsomely embracing Darwin as a naturalist, Burroughs believed that the law of the strong overcoming the weak offered a valuable viewing of “the drama of human politics and business.”35 To Burroughs, the fittest usually rose to the top in American life. Undoubtedly evil charlatans sometimes tried to rig the reality. Scum often rose in life’s pond—but on the whole, every generation of Americans produced its heroic natural elite. These winners rode herd on human affairs, directing their course, helping civilizations and societies to survive cataclysms. Whenever truly bad leaders, imposters, reached a pinnacle of power, eventually they would be destroyed by the natural elite. Competition of all kinds, Burroughs went on in his lecture (which was a set piece), should be supported so that the best-and-the-brightest could earn their rightful positions of societal power. As for the poor and disabled, Burroughs believed the natural elite had a moral responsibility to take care of them.36

  III

  After four days on the train, the Rough Riders arrived in Florida. The unit was assigned to the U.S. transport Yucatan, but the departure date from Tampa Bay kept changing. Roosevelt worried that if the boat didn’t leave soon, his men’s livers weren’t going to withstand all the hiatus booze. The first day was incredibly humid, with a hot, glassy atmosphere and scant wind. Luckily, Edith came down from Oyster Bay for a few days’ reunion at the Hotel Tampa. Anxious for war, Theodore was unperturbed by the omnipresent swarms of chiggers and sand flies. To kill time he studied Florida’s botanical wonderland. At a glance, he could distinguish holy trees from blue beech and ironwood. Yet, Roosevelt found waiting deeply frustrating—ceaseless delays, widespread discomfort, missing cargo, confusion in command. One afternoon a jolt of excitement hit the camp: there was a rumor that Spanish warships were patrolling the Straits of Florida. But, alas, it was just a rumor.37

  While waiting to be shipped out, Roosevelt studied the waterfowl along the wharf front and marshy inlets—ibis, herons, and double-crested cormorants, among scores of others. These were the species his Uncle Rob h
ad written about so ably in Florida and Game Water Birds. Beneath Roosevelt’s army boots on the Tampa beaches were sunrise tellin and wide-mouthed purpura and ground coral, bay mud, tiny pebbles mixed with barnacles and periwinkles. Writing to his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, Roosevelt turned quasi-geobiologist, delineating Florida’s semitropical sun, palm trees, sharks swimming in the shallows, and sandy beaches much like those on the French Riviera.38 The Gulf of Mexico, the ninth-largest body of water in the world, interested Roosevelt no end. Its barrier islands from Texas to Florida were home to myriad songbirds and shelled mollusks. Captain Mayne Reid had written about the region as a place of high adventure, where swells were 150 feet long, the throw of the surf was unpredictable, and pirate bands camped on isolated coral islands, eating clams and octopuses, fugitives from all governments.

  Spending these days in Tampa Bay, various U.S. Fish and Wildlife historians believe, later influenced Roosevelt’s creation of federal bird sanctuaries along both of Florida’s coasts. What Roosevelt understood from being stationed on the Gulf Coast was that the market hunters were having a bad effect on Florida’s ecosystem, including the Everglades, Indian River, Lake Okeechobee, and the Ten Thousand Islands. The previous year, Roosevelt’s New York–based ornithologist friend Frank M. Chapman had warned him once again that tricolor herons and snowy egrets were being slaughtered for their feathers. Now, huge mounds could be seen around the port of Tampa, bird carcasses piled twenty or thirty yards high and rotting in the sun. If the slaughter wasn’t stopped, the bird roosts of Florida would vanish, species going the extant way of the passenger pigeon, the ivory-billed woodpecker, and the Labrador duck.39*