by Clay Risen
Wood rose early and wasted no time getting to the fort; there was work to be done. It was a Thursday, and the first wave of volunteers for his regiment would arrive in two days, from Arizona. He had a long to-do list for the camp: establish sanitation protocol for nearly 1,000 men; write a daily schedule, from reveille to taps; find some way to get his men clothing and equipment; and figure out how to process them as they arrived, for they would be coming from all over the Southwest and beyond, often in large contingents, in other cases man by man.
But first came the horses. This was to be a cavalry regiment, so horses had to be purchased. Each man would need a mount; combined with several score of work horses, the regiment would require at least 1,200. Wood’s demands were specific. In an advertisement sent to local ranches, he insisted that they stand “fourteen three to fifteen two hands high,” be “four to eight years old,” and weigh between 850 and 1,050 pounds. Wood did not yet have a uniform, so he stood surrounded by dust-kicking horses in a blue suit and a beat-up campaign hat, barking orders to the soldiers and horse traders around him. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been tending to the first lady and hobnobbing with politicians and the sort of preening-peacock officers who strutted around the Executive Mansion. In Texas, amid the dust and the soldiers and the horses, he was back in his element. The next few weeks would show whether he could make something of it.2
• • •
Wood’s entire life had prepared him for this moment. The descendant of four passengers on the Mayflower, he was born in 1860, two years after Roosevelt, and grew up in Pocasset, Massachusetts, a whaling village at the armpit of Cape Cod. He sailed and swam and fished, his already fair hair sun-bleached to a snowy blond, which he kept closely trimmed above his wind-burned cheeks and gray-blue eyes. A reserved, even shy young man, Wood was a reader as well as an outdoorsman; one friend recalled him fishing with one hand and reading Plutarch’s Lives with the other, the pages held down with stones. He had planned to attend the Naval Academy in Annapolis, but the beleaguered military, even the Navy, was a poor career choice for an ambitious young man in the late 1870s. His father’s death in 1880, when Wood was twenty, sealed it: He would have to make enough money to support himself and his now widowed mother. He set aside his martial aspirations and went directly into Harvard Medical School (at the time, an undergraduate degree was optional).3
After a few unhappy years as a civilian doctor, in early 1885 Wood went to New York to take the exam for Army surgeons. He came in second out of fifty-nine, but passing the exam didn’t guarantee a job; in fact there were none. The only opening was as a civilian contractor in the Southwest, where a long-simmering conflict with an Apache leader named Geronimo had broken out into open warfare, and doctors were needed to treat the wounded and the sun-struck. Wood didn’t think twice. Two weeks later, he reported to Fort Whipple, an outpost near Prescott, Arizona.4
By the mid-1880s, the Indian Wars were all but over, with federal troops in command of vast expanses of land that less than a decade before, and for hundreds of years before that, had been the landscape of overlapping and shifting Indian nations. But Arizona, decades away from statehood, was still the frontier, where settlers and soldiers clashed with native tribes, and in particular the Chiricahua band of Apaches. In May 1885, two of their leaders, Natchez and Geronimo, assembled a group of warriors and their families and fled the San Carlos Reservation, where they had been restricted. A few weeks later, the Silver City Enterprise, in New Mexico, reported that thirty-three settlers had been killed by the war party. Geronimo and his band moved quietly, swiftly, crossing the border into Mexico and camping in the Sierra Madre, forbidding terrain they knew intimately. For almost a year, they eluded both Mexican forces and the United States Army.5
From Fort Whipple, Wood was forwarded to Fort Huachuca, deep in Indian Territory. He arrived just in time. The campaign against Geronimo had been taken over by General Nelson Miles, a decorated Civil War veteran—he was commandant of Fortress Monroe while Jefferson Davis was a prisoner there—who later made his reputation as a cruel and effective Indian fighter. Miles, in turn, gave day-to-day command to Captain Henry Lawton, another Civil War veteran; he was to set off immediately to find and capture if possible, and kill if necessary, Geronimo. Lawton told Wood to be ready to go the next morning, to act as his troop surgeon. Go where, he could not yet say.6
They did their best to track the raiders, but the Apaches on foot seemed to outpace—and outsmart—the soldiers on horseback. “A frightful country,” Wood wrote in his diary. “The whole mountains are on fire . . . evidently set by the Indians.” For weeks, they followed the Apaches less by their tracks than by where they struck—this settlement, that ranch, like vengeful ghosts they moved across the desert terrain. Wood went on foot, up ahead with the scouts most of the time.7
Eventually Lawton’s dogged pursuit, and the intercession of a young officer, Charles Gatewood, who spoke some Apache, persuaded Geronimo and his men to surrender. Geronimo’s campaign was one of the last great showings of Native American strength—they had not lost a single man to combat, though he and his party had killed hundreds. In a coincidence, Geronimo was taken to Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, and then sent to a series of prisons across the South before ending up in Oklahoma. In 1905 he pleaded with Theodore Roosevelt, by then in the White House, to be allowed to return to Arizona. The president refused. Geronimo died in Oklahoma in 1909, of pneumonia. Wood, for his effort in the fifteen-month campaign, received the Medal of Honor.8
The next several years took Wood around the country; prized for his combination of combat experience and medical knowledge, he went to the Presidio in San Francisco in 1889, then to Fort McPherson, outside Atlanta; finally, in 1895, Miles became the commanding general of the Army—the highest possible rank for a uniformed officer—and he arranged for Wood to come with him to Washington. In short order, he was caring for the president and his family as well as Miles. Two years later, he met Theodore Roosevelt.9
• • •
When the opportunity came to lead the Rough Riders, Wood wasted no time. Like Roosevelt, he understood what the war might actually involve—a lot of naval activity, with perhaps a brief show of force by the Army; Spain could very well surrender before troops even landed in Cuba. If they had any chance of seeing action, he and Roosevelt had to act fast. First, they needed men, and more importantly good officers to lead them. From his time out West, Wood knew a long list of veterans who could handle a regiment of green recruits. Within twenty-four hours of receiving his commission, he sent telegrams to several of them—Alexander Brodie (who had already volunteered to raise his own cowboy regiment), George Dunn, Allyn Capron—asking them to raise troops and join him in San Antonio.
Before leaving Washington, Wood stopped to see President McKinley. He understood that as the commander of a volunteer regiment, he would receive either the best equipment and treatment, or the worst—depending entirely on how many levers he managed to pull—and that the difference would decide whether they went to Cuba or languished in a dusty, hot staging camp somewhere stateside. He implored McKinley to make sure the Rough Riders received the best weaponry—Krag-Jorgensen .30-40 rifles, firing cartridges with smokeless powder, and the Model 1873 Colt Single Action Army revolver. These were the weapons the regular soldiers used; the state militias got old black-powder Springfields and Remingtons. His supplies secured, he hurried to San Antonio before the men arrived.10
Wood picked San Antonio for several reasons. It was close to Fort Sam Houston, across town and a good source of horses and supplies, should they need them (and it was good thinking, because they did). It was not far from the port of Galveston, from which they could easily embark for Cuba. And it was centrally located in the country, as good a place as any to receive and train hundreds of men arriving from all over to form themselves into a single fighting unit.
San Antonio was appropriate for symbolic and historic reasons as well, as it marked a high-water mark of Spain�
�s holdings in the Western Hemisphere. By the start of the eighteenth century, the Spanish were firmly in control of Mexico—which, at the time, extended north to Colorado—but the French were beginning to expand westward from their colonial holdings along the southern stretch of the Mississippi River. To block their advance, in 1718 the Spanish chose a sandy plain alongside a lazy river in the northeastern province of Tejas to build a presidio and a string of missions; it quickly grew to be the largest settlement above the Río Bravo (the Mexican name for the Rio Grande). To the east, the settlement allowed the Spanish to project power against the French; to the west, it served as a check against incursions by Indian tribes, in particular the Apache. But the French threat receded after the French and Indian War decimated their North American territory, and therefore so did Spanish interest. For years the settlement languished. But soon in the place of Spanish soldiers arrived waves of Anglo settlers, invited by the Spanish to serve as a buffer between the Mexican heartland and another threat, the aggressive Apache and Comanche tribes to the north and west. The Spanish got more than they’d desired: By the 1830s the Anglos far outnumbered the Spanish, Mexican, and native population, and were agitating for independence.11
In 1821 Mexico gained its independence from Spanish rule, and fourteen years later Texas revolted against Mexican rule—a short but bloody fight punctuated by the siege at the Alamo, in central San Antonio. Once Texas split from Mexico and joined the United States, a new wave of immigrants arrived, this time from Germany, so many that by the eve of the American Civil War German had superseded Spanish as San Antonio’s lingua franca (English being a distant third). Many of San Antonio’s significant post-Spanish buildings were designed by Germans, including the Menger Hotel, whose bar, modeled on the pub inside Britain’s House of Lords, was to become a favorite spot for the Rough Riders.12
San Antonio remained isolated until 1877 and the arrival of a rail connection from Houston; after that its population soared. By the time Wood arrived, it was not only the largest city in the entire Southwest, but a place whose history served as a perfect symbol for the war that he and his regiment were about to enter: from the rise and fall of Spain to the westward expansion of American civilization to the emergence, after the Civil War, of a multicultural nation struggling to find some semblance of unity as it assumed the mantle of global power.
• • •
Since Fort Sam Houston was already occupied by an infantry regiment, Wood chose to make camp at the city fairgrounds, 600 acres of open, dusty plain dotted with hackberry, pecan, cottonwood, and sycamore trees. In the center stood a massive, high-ceilinged exhibition hall, a Moorish fantasia peaked with garish onion domes. Just after dawn on May 7, Wood went to the small gate, or sally port, in the fencing that surrounded the fairgrounds. The first of his regiment, from Arizona, was about to arrive.13
The zeal with which Arizona rushed into war with Spain was typical of Western states and territories eager to prove themselves a part of the rapidly consolidating American republic. The territory’s governor, Myron McCord, had been pressuring McKinley and Alger for permission to form a “cowboy regiment” of his own for two months; he was certain he could raise 1,000 men from Arizona alone, and he probably wasn’t wrong. In the decade since Wood had tracked Geronimo in the territory’s western expanses, Arizona’s towns had begun to fill up and turn into small cities, full of men who had settled there after the fighting or were too young to have taken part. The Cuban Junta was active here as well; the week after the Maine disaster, two Cuban agents had visited Prescott, asking for support. Hundreds turned out to hear them.14
The War Department refused McCord’s offer; worse, it said he could only send 170 men. But it offered the governor a consolation prize: He could choose the senior regimental major, in effect the Rough Riders’ third in command. That was an easy call—McCord chose Alexander Brodie, the Army veteran whom Wood had already been eying. A New York–born West Point graduate who, like Wood, had fought the Apaches, Brodie had then left the Army and settled down in Prescott, where he tried his hand at private life as a supervisor at a water storage company, then as county recorder and a mine manager. But his wife died in childbirth, and so did his child, and Brodie was eager to leave behind his pain by venturing to Cuba.15
The Arizona men left Prescott on May 4, riding in four passenger coaches. To see them off, the Prescott Brass Band played and Governor McCord gave a long and windy address. Members of the Women’s Relief Corps of Phoenix and the women’s auxiliary of the state’s chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic gave them a huge, homemade American flag. Civil War veterans, the fire department, and scores of excited young boys swelled the crowd. The train cars were stocked with $500 in donated food fit for snacking along the ride—boiled ham, mutton, pig’s feet. They finally departed at 7:15 p.m., one trooper recalled, to a “perfect sea of handkerchiefs and parasols.”16
They came into San Antonio on the Southern Pacific, then transferred to the city’s streetcars to get to the camp grounds. The men weren’t the only creatures ambling into camp; the Arizonans brought a four-month-old mountain lion cub they dubbed Teddy; when they later learned it was female, they renamed her Josephine.17
Wood studied them as they went leaping off the cars, not waiting for them to stop. They were energetic and undisciplined; he thought they might be good for scouting duty, but not combat. That evening he sent fifteen of them to Fort Sam Houston to retrieve thirty half-broken horses. They went without saddles or bridles, just rope leads—not as a punishment, or a test; even though this was a cavalry regiment, their equipment had yet to arrive, and there were no saddles to be had. A while later, Wood watched with pleased surprise as all thirty horses arrived through the sally port; they bucked, but not a man was dismounted. He changed his mind. As serious cavalrymen, they might do.18
• • •
After the Arizona men arrived early on the 7th, new contingents rolled into camp almost every day. That afternoon a group from Oklahoma showed up; three days later, 340 men under Major Henry Hersey arrived from New Mexico—the only contingent wearing their own, matching attire. Like the Arizona men, they had left their territory to great fanfare: After their swearing in at the governor’s palace in Santa Fe, the New Mexicans had marched to the train station behind a carriage carrying a woman dressed as a “goddess of liberty,” the crowd three deep on each side. The train, decked in bunting and signs reading “Remember the Maine,” was loaded with flowers, candy, and cakes. That night in San Antonio more than 500 men camped out in the fairground’s vast exhibition hall, tired but excited. At one point a shoe flew out of the darkness and hit a New Mexican recruit named Royal Prentice. “Having no immediate use for the shoe, I threw it back to the owner,” he wrote years later, in an article for the New Mexico Historical Review. “But in the darkness aiming was bad, for it struck and aroused another sleeper and very soon the pavilion was a pandemonium of flying shoes, and everything else that could be thrown.”19
Not all the men arrived as part of state contingents; such was the Rough Riders’ instant celebrity that scores traveled individually to San Antonio for a chance to join, sometimes coming hundreds of miles. Arthur Cosby was a twenty-six-year-old lawyer with the Mutual Life Insurance Company in New York when he learned about the regiment. He wrote to Roosevelt, asking if there was still room. Roosevelt, who had followed Cosby’s athletic exploits as a Harvard undergraduate, replied, “If you will come here and pass the physical examination, we will enlist you.” Cosby quit his job the next morning. At 3 p.m. he was on a train to San Antonio.20
Another man, John Campbell Greenway, an engineering foreman at the Carnegie Steel Corporation in Duquesne, Pennsylvania, traveled all the way to San Antonio after hearing about the unit, without even bothering to seek out an introduction. He wasn’t just another stranger off the train, though: The son of a Confederate veteran from Alabama who became a doctor in Arkansas, young Greenway had been an outstanding football and baseball player at Yale, and
his senior year he was voted the most popular man on campus. Tall, lanky but muscular, Greenway was the sort of gentleman-athlete Roosevelt prized. He arrived and was made a second lieutenant on the spot.21
The men, whether individually or as part of the territorial contingents, came to San Antonio for different reasons. Some, like Frank Brito, a cowboy in New Mexico, went out of a patriotic duty—and because his father ordered him to. Others went for adventure, or to avenge the Maine. Many went out of a sense of duty to the Cubans. In 1894 a railroad signalman named Benjamin Colbert had even traveled to Guatemala, where he had heard a boatload of filibusterers was preparing to leave for Cuba. But the American consul found out, arrested him, and had him sent back to the United States. Colbert was living in the Oklahoma Territory when he heard about the Rough Riders, and set out immediately to join. Sympathy for Cuba was especially strong in the Southwest, where memories were long and parents still told their children stories about the evils of Spanish rule. By the late nineteenth century, any town with more than a few hundred people had a daily newspaper that picked up stories from the Associated Press, and through it townsfolk and cowboys and farmers kept up with the latest news from Cuba. On the day McKinley ordered the blockade of Cuba, the front page of the El Paso Daily Herald declared: “The Edict Has Gone Forth from the Greatest of All Nations Proclaiming Cuba Libre! And Release a Suffering People from Spanish Barbarity.”22