The Crowded Hour
Page 11
The Rough Riders were a cavalry regiment, so the unit used cavalry terminology: Wood arranged them in three “squadrons” of four “troops” each, with each troop composed of about eighty enlisted men. Each troop had different-colored horses: Troop A rode on bays, B had sorrels, C had browns, D had grays, and so on. For officers, Wood had himself and Roosevelt at the top of the organization chart, and under them three majors. He placed a lieutenant as adjutant—i.e., in charge of administration—and another as quartermaster, who oversaw supplies. There was a surgeon, two assistants, and three hospital stewards; a chaplain, two sergeants, a chief musician, a chief trumpeter, and two saddlers. But this was a bare-bones organization: there were no clerks, and no one to cook or handle the mess duties. For that, the men were on their own.23
• • •
The men who gathered in San Antonio were not, as the papers described them, all cowboys and ruffians. That was the romanticism of the West talking. Rather, they comprised a broad slice of America—white male America, at least—at the end of the nineteenth century, representatives of the emergent white-collar middle class in small but booming towns like Prescott and Las Vegas, New Mexico. James McClintock was a journalist. Thomas C. Grindell taught college in Tempe, Arizona. And while some of the men were indeed laborers in the nomadic animal trades, others were, as the regiment’s first adjutant, Tom Hall, wrote, “Rich man, poor man, Indian chief, doctor, lawyer, not one thief. Merchant, sheriff, artist, clerk, clubman, quite unused to work, miner, ocean gondolier”—whatever that is—“broker, banker, engineer, cowboy, copper, actor, mayor, college athletes, men of prayer, champions of amateur sports, to boot.” Decades later, whenever a reporter for their local paper came to interview them, the surviving Rough Riders would wax lyrically about the dangerous and uncivilized men who composed the bulk of their troop, but their stories read more like ex–fraternity brothers looking back with embellishment on their youth. It was an artifice some of the more perceptive reporters picked up on immediately. “The members of this so-called ‘cowboy’ regiment seem to have been recruited from the sort of cowboys that ranges up and down Washington Street, Phoenix,” wrote an Arizona newspaper. “Many of them are not horsemen in the mildest construction, and as crack marksmen have yet to distinguish themselves.”24
Yet the regiment did not lack for characters. By the time thirty-eight-year-old William O’Neill quit his job as the mayor of Prescott to join, he had already led enough life for two men: Born in Washington, D.C., and trained as a lawyer, in 1882 he had come out West seeking adventure. At various times, often at the same time, he had been a court reporter, a short story writer, a militia captain, a deputy marshal, and a judge; an adherent of the economic philosopher Henry George, he ran twice for Congress on the Populist ticket, losing both times. He was also an inveterate gambler, and earned the nickname “Buckey” for his tendency to “buck the tiger”—or go against the odds—in faro and other card games. His best friend, Tom Horn, had been an interpreter for the Army during Leonard Wood’s hunt for Geronimo; he was later hanged for murder.25
One of the regiment’s most popular enlisted men was Hamilton Fish Jr. He was the grandson of President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of state, also named Hamilton Fish, and the scion of the New York establishment, whose family had been in Manhattan for centuries. An enormous man, Fish rowed crew for Columbia, but dropped out after three years and moved west, where he worked as a railroad brakeman. He returned to New York after he jammed an index finger into the coupling mechanism between two cars and had to have it removed. Fish was an ardent alcoholic, and several men reported him drunk for most of his time in San Antonio. He was also intensely loyal and, in his own way, kind. He loved to fight, but he also loved animals. One day he was walking through camp when he saw a crowd of men watching two dogs attack each other. He pushed his way through and pulled the two animals apart; cradling the smaller dog in his arms, he took it back to his tent, where he bandaged and nursed it. “Ham Fish was a curious combination of an aristocrat and a cruiser,” one of his friends in the regiment told the historian Hermann Hagedorn. “A kind of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; for all his wildness and brutality, at bottom a puritan and a reformer.” Unsurprisingly, he became one of Roosevelt’s favorites.26
• • •
Wood’s assessment of the regiment on that first day with the Arizonans was to prove, at first, naive; the enlisted men were undisciplined, even unruly. Within a few days of arriving, they had located a set of loose boards in the fence around the camp, and that night a dozen or so men sneaked out and went to town. It happened again the next night, and soon members of the regiment were familiar faces in San Antonio’s nightlife. Horse-drawn cabs waited a few hundred yards beyond camp to take them the five miles to the bars and gambling dens downtown. “It took but a few hours to empty pocketbooks, after which there was the long five mile walk over the railroad ties to camp,” recalled Royal Prentice. They arrived home after midnight, slipping through the fence. Not all of them made it back: One enlisted man, from Arizona, was arrested and fined $100 after he chased people off a streetcar with a knife; when the police pursued him, he tried to overturn a buggy with two women in it. Another evening a band of Rough Riders and locals got into a fight in a bar on East Nueva Street, smashing bottles and firing their guns in the air.27
Apart from their nightly excursions, the men would also go into town during the day for sightseeing. For those who came from small towns and farms in New Mexico and Arizona, this was by far the largest and oldest city they had ever seen. By 1898, the Alamo was a national landmark, and they took note of the site where a previous generation of volunteers had fought in the name of liberty against a foreign adversary. Others took a swim at Scholz’s natatorium—a swimming pool—in between stops at one of the town’s general stores to buy Durham tobacco, paper, pencils, socks, and other items they expected to need in larger quantities than the Army was likely to provide. Benjamin Colbert went to a music store and asked to listen to a recording of “The Stars and Stripes Forever” by John Philip Sousa’s Concert Band.28
Wood was wise enough not to enforce too much discipline too quickly; he was liberal with passes to town. Getting the regiment into some semblance of a fighting unit was his priority. The men were there for their skills as marksmen and outdoorsmen; Wood reckoned that their willingness to accept military regimentation would come later. One evening Wood was making his rounds and came across a man supposedly on sentry duty, but in fact on the ground itching at bug bites and swatting mosquitoes. The man saw Wood, paused, and resumed scratching and swatting. Wood remained, silent. Eventually the man stopped, looked up at him, and said, “Ain’t they bad?”29
Those first few weeks especially, the camp was less like a military training facility and more like a slightly boozy Boy Scout ranch; several men played banjo, while others formed rival glee clubs. In their spare time, they organized baseball and football teams. For lack of tents and blankets, they slept in the exhibition hall. The food was bad and there was a lot of drudge work, but at least at first, a visitor could be forgiven for thinking the men were on a rustic retreat.30
Very quickly, San Antonio gave itself over to Rough Rider fever. Reporters from the two local papers hung around camp and reported on daily life, down to mundane details about drill routines: “The Rough Riders had a fatiguing time yesterday morning and a dull time in the afternoon,” began a typical article in the Daily Express. When George Curry, a late solo arrival, came to town, he saw a man tacking a canvas sign onto a streetcar: “Take this car for the exposition Grounds where Roosevelt’s famous Rough Riders are camped.” And, in fact, each day hundreds of onlookers—often led by Mayor Bryan Callaghan Jr.—took the streetcars out to the fairgrounds to see the Rough Riders in action. They came with cakes and meats and iced tea; young women took away brass buttons as souvenirs. A local band under the direction of “Professor” Carl Beck, a German immigrant, made regular visits, filling the afternoon air with bouncy waltzes.
Every day they played what became the unofficial theme song of the regiment, and indeed the war, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”31
Beck was at the center of the most infamous and widely reported incident involving the Rough Riders in San Antonio. On the evening of May 24, not long before they departed, he held a public concert in their honor. One of the pieces that night, a composition by Beck called “Cavalry Charge,” required several pistols to fire off blanks. Beck had asked a few Rough Riders to oblige him. But when the time came, more than a few did—and, reportedly, they weren’t firing blanks. Either by coincidence or errant bullet, the lights went out. “Men yelled, women screamed, and a frightened waiter dropped several glasses of beer,” Hall wrote. Beck, who reportedly fought for the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, said he had been as scared that night as he had ever been in battle.32
Events like the Beck concert were reported nationwide, with not a little hyperbole. Most of the troopers later denied that anyone had fired a weapon, and said that it had all been a misunderstanding. But the general idea—that the Rough Riders were a little rough—was more or less accurate. Wood forbade alcohol in camp, so bars popped up, mushroom-like, around its edges, claptrap structures that poured beer for 5 cents a pint—a steal for men accustomed to paying three times that in Arizona. The groundskeeper of the fairground opened a small diner adjacent to the camp, which the men nicknamed the Waldorf-Astoria. Troopers would stumble, bleary-eyed, to their morning formations, and spend nearly as much time thinking about how to slip out of camp as they did about how to prepare for battle. With the men still half equipped and half prepared, and with locals treating the camp less like a military facility and more like the fairground it otherwise was, Cuba, and the possibility that they might yet fight and die in it, seemed a long way off.33
• • •
Roosevelt’s Easterners began to arrive on May 9. The local papers made them out to be caricatures of the rich city rube, spoiled and effete. “Ninety percent of them carry a large wad in their side pockets with which to play a little game of draw and large bank accounts behind them,” wrote the Daily Express. “Some of them have their ‘men’ with them to care for their uniforms and top boots at a salary of $60 a month, also to cook at $100 a month.” None of this was true. In fact, the Easterners were, in a way, disappointing. The Westerners were expecting dudes—inexperienced, arrogant city boys out for a bit of adventure before going back to their pampered lives. Rich they were, no doubt: Many took their last meals as civilians at the Menger Hotel, far beyond what the typical cowhand could afford, and several arrived at camp with valises full of suits and ties. But these the men gladly discarded when they realized they would not need them, and they quickly fell to work. They were all strong and well-disciplined, having been selected for their prowess in campus and amateur sports. Even more impressive, most of them could ride—Craig Wadsworth was one of the country’s best steeplechase riders, and the other men were no slouches in a mount either, having grown up riding in the New York and Massachusetts countryside.34
The Easterners took to their new lifestyle immediately. That first night, after a dinner of boiled potatoes and coffee, they rolled out their blankets on the floor of the exhibition hall and were soon fast asleep alongside their new comrades. The next morning Woodbury Kane, a close friend of Roosevelt’s from Harvard and a renowned yachtsman, was assigned to dig a ditch; he did it gladly. Wadsworth, who had also played varsity football at Harvard, was sent to collect firewood. Whatever skepticism the Westerners felt melted away. “I never will forget the time young [William] Tiffany, of New York, and myself . . . washed our clothes out and waited around exchanging little experiences we have passed through,” recalled David L. Hughes of Tucson. The respect was mutual. “They are a splendid set of men, these Southwesterners—tall and sinewy, with resolute, weather beaten faces and eyes that look a man straight in the face without flinching,” wrote J. Ogden Wells. Only Tiffany, a grand-nephew of Oliver Hazard Perry, complained—there was no hot water, he said, and the food was “nauseating.” Tiffany came around in one respect, though; he and Kane used their own money to buy a pair of Colt machine guns for the regiment, which they set up behind Roosevelt’s tent. The guns could fire 500 bullets a minute, and were effective to 2,000 yards.35
• • •
Despite their two famous commanders, the Rough Riders suffered from a lack of even basic military equipment—not as badly as many volunteer units, some of whom would never even receive rifles, but worse than the regulars, and at a level of want that cast a shadow over the military’s ability to actually stand up a sufficient fighting force. They had arrived with little more than the clothes they wore, assuming, fairly, that uniforms, bedding, and other supplies would be provided. The men camped in the fairground’s vast exhibition hall because they didn’t have tents; many didn’t even have blankets. For the first several days, they drilled with broomsticks in place of rifles. “The blunder and delay of the Ordnance Bureau defies belief,” Roosevelt fumed in his diary. “They expense us stuff we don’t need, and send us the rifles by slow freight!”36
Roosevelt and Wood had foreseen this risk, and ordered uniforms and other supplies ahead of time, even picking a less-common tan fabric, different from the dark blue of the regulars, because they thought the lower demand meant they’d receive it faster. What they hadn’t counted on was the combined forces of the snarled American rail system and the even more gnarled military Quartermaster’s Department, which was overwhelmed with demands for matériel, after decades of doing almost nothing. Though the uniforms for the enlisted men arrived eventually, the officers who had not already done so had to buy their own in San Antonio, or buy the fabric and have an outfit made for them. Decorations of rank were typically handmade, by the officers themselves. “I am rather certain that Colonel Roosevelt himself wore more or less of this untailor-made roughness and was rather proud of it,” Tom Hall recalled.37
In the meantime, they drew on the stores at Fort Sam Houston, where the Fifth Cavalry, the primary regiment garrisoned there, opened its doors. By coincidence, the fort had a large supply of everyday items that were set to be destroyed, either out of too much use or because no one wanted them: utensils, cups, plates, bedrolls, all the many things that few civilians think about when they contemplate war but that hungry, tired soldiers cannot do without. Even then, many men had to share a single plate, or drink from the same chipped cup, waiting for their own provisions to arrive by what was said to be an expedited supply train, but was in fact criminally slow.38
The uniforms finally arrived on May 13—in assorted lots, with no semblance of order or sense of the men who would be wearing them. Distribution was haphazard and slow. “The men would be issued a spoon and a pair of gloves one day, a coat and a mess pan the next, a tin cup and a cartridge belt the next,” Hall wrote. Clothing was handed out with only rough appreciation for the man on the receiving end, and for the next few hours a new line would form, of men returning coats that couldn’t meet in the middle to bottom or pants too big even to be belted around their waist. Hamilton Fish, one of the biggest men in the regiment, walked up and down a great line of shoes, looking in vain for a pair big enough to fit his outsize feet. Eventually, he gave up and settled for a still-huge pair that pinched his toes.39
• • •
Soon after reveille on Sunday, May 15, Leonard Wood emerged from his tent in a newly pressed brown suit with yellow trim, a new campaign hat, and freshly shined shoes—the first time anyone had seen him in uniform. He then ordered James Brown, the trumpeter for Troop D, to bring around a phaeton, a type of two-horse carriage, and drive the two of them to town. They stopped at the Western Union telegraph office and picked up the officers’ messages and mail. Then, it was on to the Menger Hotel. “We had no more than stopped when a heavy set man with the broadest smile and wearing glasses came out of the hotel,” Brown recalled. The man was dressed exactly like Wood, in a new khaki uniform. “They immediately
embraced and both talking at the same time.” Brown, a Kansas native, was “embarrassed” by the sight of two men hugging, “as that was not done where I came from.” When he realized the stranger was Theodore Roosevelt, he relaxed a little—after all, he told himself, this must be how men did things back East.40
The entire regiment was waiting for the three when they returned. Roosevelt walked through the sally port with a wide grin on his face, like he was a boy headed off to camp. Right away, Major Brodie and Buckey O’Neill hurried over to shake his hand, but soon the lieutenant colonel was surrounded by greenhorn soldiers, who peppered him with questions about the war and their chances of getting into it. Roosevelt was sanguine: “The other fellows have reputations to make, but we seem to have one to sustain. It had been thrust upon us.” A pair of men brought over a wooden box, and Roosevelt climbed atop it. “Men, in a few days we will be at the front and I promise you I shall spend your lives the same as I would spend my own,” he shouted. Every man straightened up. “Up to that time it had been a lark for nearly all of us,” one of them recalled. “But from that time on we all entered into the spirit of the adventure.”41
Roosevelt spent the rest of the afternoon meeting with Wood, the other officers, and a retinue of local officials and onlookers who wanted a glimpse of the famous lieutenant colonel. That day, a Sunday, the San Antonio Express estimated that 15,000 people visited the camp, a sizable portion of the city’s population. Eventually, it all became too much for Wood. He closed off the camp to visitors a few days later.42
Like several other men of means in the regiment, Roosevelt bought his own horses. One morning after breakfast, not long after he had arrived, he went into San Antonio, where he met Johnnie Moore, a friend with whom he had once hunted javelina in the Texas Hill Country. Moore had brought several horses, and Roosevelt rode them up and down St. Mary’s Street, testing them out. Roosevelt picked two: one, a pony, he named Little Texas, the other, a larger steed, Rain-in-the-Face. He bought a new Stetson hat and had two pairs of glasses sewn into it. And he proudly displayed, attached to his belt, two weapons given to him before he left Washington: a revolver recovered from the Maine, a present from William Cowles, a Navy captain who was married to his sister Anna; and a German-made officer’s saber with a sharkskin hilt, given to him by the staff back at the Department of the Navy.43