by Clay Risen
Another officer might have seen his wealth and fancy accoutrements as an obstacle to making a connection with his men—or, even, an excuse not to. But Roosevelt basked in the Western manhood around him, as if he were back in the Dakotas of his ranching days. One day an Oklahoma cowboy named Billy McGinty showed him how to shoe a horse by tying its legs together above the knees, then tipping it over, so that its feet stuck out helpless. “Bully!” Roosevelt cried.44 He reveled in their nicknames—Shoot ’em Up Bill, Smoky Moore, Happy Jack—and gave them new ones of his own devising. “The life histories of some of the men who joined our regiment would make many volumes of thrilling adventure,” he wrote in his memoir of the war. He took quickly, especially, to Hamilton Fish and Buckey O’Neill, whom he overheard talking with James Church, the surgeon, about “Aryan word roots together, and then sliding off into a review of the novels of Balzac.” Together, the regiment, in its manliness, its unruliness, and its determination, represented everything Roosevelt had wanted in life, for himself and for his country.45
These feelings were not, immediately, mutual. The men had all read about Roosevelt in the papers, and knew his reputation. So when the stout, bespectacled man stood before them, speaking in his loud, high voice, many were less than impressed. He struck them as a dude who liked to play cowboy but would never quite be one. But as they listened to what he said, and heard stories about his past exploits—it helped immensely that Fred Herrig was on hand to tell about Roosevelt’s “bronco busting” adventure in the Dakotas—they began to change their minds. It wasn’t his skill in the saddle and with a rifle that impressed them; it was his utter lack of pretension. The owners of the Menger Hotel offered Roosevelt a free room but he refused, preferring to sleep on the ground with his men. That first afternoon, to prove himself, Roosevelt picked up a lariat, threw it around a horse, then saddled the steed without help and took off. A trooper approached him later and said: “Well, colonel, I want to shake hands and say we’re with you. We didn’t know how we would like you fellars at first; but you’re all right, and you know your business, and you mean business, and you can count on us every time!”46
Roosevelt and Wood settled into a division of labor that accorded with general military protocol but also their respective personalities. Roosevelt was to oversee drilling and practice, and to act as the regimental judge when a dispute or infraction arose. Wood was the planner and the point of contact to Washington. But the arrangement also reinforced the regiment’s first impressions of the two—the men took to Roosevelt as a leader, but they regarded Wood with arm’s-length respect, more as an administrator than an inspiration. Their camp was called Camp Wood, after the regiment’s colonel, but the men—and the rest of the country—called the regiment “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.”
A few days after he arrived Roosevelt assembled the men after breakfast mess for their first drill. He stood ramrod straight, lifted his chin, and shouted a command. Nothing happened. Roosevelt tried again. The men scrambled in confusion, eager to please but at a loss to understand. Major Brodie, standing beside him, tapped Roosevelt on the shoulder and whispered that his command was, while impressive, physically impossible to execute (the actual command went unrecorded). Roosevelt was taken aback; for a split second, he looked at a loss. But he recovered, and turned over the drill to Brodie. “As you were,” the major said to the troops.47
It was the sort of mistake Roosevelt would not make twice. After a few late nights studying the slim “Drill Regulations for Cavalry, United States Army, 1896,” he had the basics down, and within a few days had the men falling into the routine Wood had prescribed for them. Emil Cassi, a bugler, blew reveille at 6 a.m., followed by twenty minutes of working in the stables to rub and feed the horses. Then the men got breakfast themselves, followed by an hour and a half of mounted drills. After midday dinner, they had target practice and then a long march. The cowboys, so nimble in their mounts, found marching in step a challenge. Billy McGinty complained that he was having a hard time keeping pace on foot, but he was pretty sure he could keep in step on horseback. Still, wrote Arthur Cosby, “It was a thrilling sight to see these men marching their mounts in formation or launching in thundering gallops—all at quick response to the nasal, high-pitched commands of Colonel Roosevelt. I thought it was a miracle in a way—to see all these different kinds of men working so well together.”48
Then it was back to the stables at four to wash and water the horses; the men cleaned themselves up the best they could, and gathered on the fairground for fifty minutes of dress parade. Supper came at seven, after which the enlisted men were free to relax while the officers gathered for “night school,” where Wood and some of the seasoned veterans, like Brodie, walked them through the basics of military tactics and command. Cassi played taps at nine, after which the men were expected to stay in their tents—but often slipped through the fence and headed to town. If the creak of a swinging fence board reached their ears, Wood and Roosevelt said nothing. “Neither Wood nor Roosevelt had the least touch of that horrible freak known as the military martinet,” recalled a trooper named Frank P. Hayes.49
Though it was still spring, the flatlands around San Antonio were boiling during the day. And just as the temperature dipped a bit in the evening, the mosquitoes emerged—“something terrible and wonderful,” wrote Tom Hall, the regiment’s adjutant. “The New Jersey mosquito is an amateur compared with his Texas cousin.” The men grumbled, but they rarely complained out loud, because Roosevelt was always right with them—if they marched, he marched. “The men always do their best when he is out,” wrote one Rough Rider, Kenneth Robinson, who was a cousin by marriage to Roosevelt’s sister Corinne. “He would be amused indeed if he heard some of the adjectives and terms applied to him, meant to be most complimentary but hardly fit for the public.”50
One afternoon, after an especially grueling march, Roosevelt brought his men past one of the saloons that had popped up outside the camp. He told the men they could drink all they wanted, and he would pay for it—but, he added, clenching his fist, “if any man drinks more beer than is good for him, I will cinch him.”51
That evening Wood invited the officers of the regiment to dinner. While they ate, he gave them a long talk about drinking with the enlisted men—without naming Roosevelt, his entire speech was aimed directly at him. As Wood told the historian Hermann Hagedorn years later, he “ended up by saying that of course an officer who would go out with a large batch of men and drink with them was quite unfit to hold a commission.” Soon after, Wood left for his tent. Roosevelt entered a few minutes later. “I would like to speak with the colonel,” he said, staring ahead.
Wood looked at him silently.
“I want to talk with you, sir,” Roosevelt went on. “I agree with every word you said. You are quite right, quite proper. I wish to tell you sir, that I took the squadron, without thinking about this question of officers drinking with their men, and I gave them all a schooner of beer. I wish to say, sir, that I agree with what you said. I consider myself the damnedest ass within ten miles of this camp. Good night.” Then he left. A few days later, the beer hall owner, in a sign of gratitude, sent the regiment a few barrels of beer. When George Curry asked Roosevelt if they could drink it, the lieutenant colonel said, “Nothing doing,” and threw his hands in the air. “Beer is a subject I do not want to hear about.”52
• • •
Roosevelt and Wood continued to worry that all their efforts would come to nothing, and the war would end before they could leave San Antonio. Their concerns were misplaced: The war plans, inasmuch as they were plans at all, were taking on a life of their own, and growing grander by the day. Some 5,000 men were arriving daily in Tampa, the designated embarkation point for any invasion of Cuba, far more than the president intended to utilize (still more were gathering at Chickamauga, Georgia, and other camps along the Eastern Seaboard). Secretary Long, having shed his antiwar instincts, wanted to throw 50,000 men at Havana, immediately. In early Ma
y a convoy of American ships, including the Army-chartered sidewheeler steamer Gussie, set out from Tampa, intending to deliver weapons and supplies to the rebels; instead, the landing party, put ashore two miles from a Spanish fort, came under intense fire and had to retreat, their mission unaccomplished. Clearly a more substantial effort was needed. On May 8, General Miles, the head of the Army, was ordered to send 70,000 men to attack the Cuban capital directly—an unimaginable operation, even by Secretary of War Alger’s unrealistic standards. Miles, who wanted to wait until after the end of the summer rain season before launching the campaign, fought back, to a standstill: no to Havana, yes to a major assault, as soon as possible. The lack of a firm plan in the face of immense pressure to do something against Cuba may have demonstrated the War Department’s inability to control events. But it was welcome news to Roosevelt, Wood, and their men—it meant that they might have a shot at seeing action after all.53
On May 22, Wood gathered the men in the parade ground behind his tent to read them the Articles of War, which served to formally enlist them as volunteers in the fight against Spain. It was Sunday, and after reading the Articles he led the regiment in singing a hymn, “How Firm a Foundation.” Some of the men wept. Wood wanted to say something else, too. At first, he told them, it had been rough; the men had no equipment or shelter, and they were undisciplined. But they had transformed into soldiers, thanks in no small part to Roosevelt, who he said was “working like a beaver from morning till night.” Equipment and discipline had both arrived, as if by magic, after the first week. Somehow, through luck and effort, they had turned a disparate group of men gathered from around the country, most with no definable military skills, into something resembling a regiment in the United States Army.54
Wood said as much that evening, in a letter to the president. “I hope some time you may be able to see the men of this regiment,” he wrote to McKinley, “as I am sure you will find them a most exceptionally fine body of men; they certainly far exceed my expectations; they are all intelligent, honest and full of enthusiasm. . . . Our men represent every phase of American life, presenting in their ranks ultra-fashionables from New York, men from the North, South, East and West, ranchmen, cowboys, miners, every profession, half-breeds from the Indian territory; in fact, pretty much every variety of American manhood.”55
• • •
As May came to a close, and with most of the men wrapping up almost a month of training, there was still no official word on when the Rough Riders were to leave, or where they were to go—or, even, what they were to do if they should end up shipping off to Cuba. Some speculated that they were to act as a sort of special forces, contacting and organizing Cuban rebels in advance of the Regular Army. Others suspected they would be mounted scouts. But many, Roosevelt included, worried that they would be held in reserve, as the B team, should they even make it to the island.56
Wood ordered an increase in drilling, and set the morning exercise to begin an hour before dawn. Cavalry drills alone were to run six hours a day. The days were getting hotter, and it was an especially hot spring in Texas—punishing conditions for the men but excellent training for the near-tropical Cuban climate. “Troopers have fallen from their saddles and sentries have fainted while patrolling their posts or standing in line, from heat prostration,” recalled one Arizona trooper, “but there is no grumbling and the man who would openly give expression to the wish that he had stayed home would speedily become the laughing stock of the regiment.”57
Finally, on May 27, Wood received orders to move out. They were headed not for Galveston, as they had expected, but Tampa, several days away by train. When Wood read the telegram out loud, Roosevelt danced a jig. Two nights later, during the daily dress parade, Roosevelt addressed the men:
Boys, as you know, we are breaking camp tonight and will start on our trip to Cuba; we are going to get close to the enemy, which means that a great many of us will be wounded, followed by much suffering and some of us will make the supreme sacrifice. I don’t think we have, and we don’t want, anyone to whine or complain as a result of these hardships, so now, if any one of you has a mother, wife or sweetheart that you feel you cannot afford to leave and take the chance of being lost to these dear ones, I want you to step forward, now, and you will be released, otherwise, I ask you to forever keep your peace.58
No one moved. They had experienced less than a month of training. The men were eager to leave for the war. Whether they were ready to fight was another matter.
CHAPTER 6
“A PERFECT WELTER OF CONFUSION”
The Rough Riders broke camp early in the morning on May 29. They burned their garbage, packed their bags, and left behind anything that couldn’t fit in a blanket roll. Wood had determined that the three squadrons should ride on three sets of trains and stagger their departures, so that when one set stopped to feed and water its horses the squadron behind it didn’t get stuck waiting on the tracks. The first squadron, under Major Brodie, left camp at 8:30 in the morning, intending to be ready to board the train, with their horses unsaddled and their baggage piled alongside the track, by 10 a.m.1
The ride on horseback from Camp Wood to the San Antonio stockyards took a leisurely hour. But when they arrived, there was no train. In what would become a pattern of mismanagement, the Quartermaster’s Department had told the rail company not to send one until that afternoon. And so the men in the first squadron waited, which meant that the men in the second squadron also had to wait, and the third behind them. After a while many of the men drifted off to “the vile drinking booths around the stock-yards,” in Roosevelt’s words. Finally, the first trains left at 3:45 p.m.—six day coaches, nine baggage cars, one boxcar, six Pullmans, and twenty cars for the horses. Hundreds of San Antonians showed up to see them off.2
That was just the first squadron. The rest of the men wouldn’t leave until well past midnight. As the men bedded down to nap under a light rain, Roosevelt threw off his pack and fell asleep beside them. Their trains arrived just before 1 a.m., and the second squadron departed; the last squadron did not leave until the next afternoon. In all the Rough Riders rode in seven trains, with Roosevelt in the last in case anyone fell out of line along the way.3
Each train was self-contained, carrying entire troops and all their horses and equipment. The horses rode in stock cars, while their riders crammed into luggage cars and day coaches, often sitting several men to a bench seat or sprawling across a hill of baggage. They slept in the aisles and on the floor and used feedbags as pillows. The taller men would ride with their legs sticking out the open windows, which also helped circulate air, but they had to close them whenever hot ash from the engine flew in. The water coolers on the train didn’t hold enough for all the men, so they had to quench their thirst with lukewarm coffee that the officers had sent back in regular intervals. Roosevelt stretched out in his berth and tried to make himself comfortable, reading A Quoi Tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons?, a book by a Frenchman, Edmond Demolins, that purported to explain why the American and English education systems were better than the French. He later gave up his berth to a sick trooper, and bunked with the enlisted men. “I doubt if anyone who was on the trip will soon forget it,” Roosevelt wrote.4
Going to Houston took the Rough Riders down out of the dry hills around San Antonio, into the lush country of southeastern Texas, past cane plantations and sugar refineries—“the country here is most beautiful, being prairie and forest,” wrote one trooper, Guy Le Stourgeon, on May 31. The first trains passed through Houston without a problem, but the last few, with Roosevelt, sat at the stockyard for hours. Eventually, he lost his temper at the conductor. “Have this train, all trains, proceed at once, understand me,” he yelled. “These are my orders, this delay is owning to your stupid inefficiency, and I don’t propose to have my regiment suffer for other’s sake!” The conductor, a burly, sunburnt man, got into Roosevelt’s face and screamed: “This train don’t go, damn you, until I get good and ready! I a
m running this caboose, not you, and you mind your own business, damn you, these are my orders! Who in the hell are you anyway?” Out of nowhere came Hamilton Fish and his fist; it crashed into the man’s jaw and sent him reeling. “Do you know who you’re talking to?” Fish screamed. The trains were moving a half hour later.5
Soon they were puttering along at twenty miles an hour through the cotton and cane fields of East Texas, and then into the thick forests and bayous of southern Louisiana. Every few hours they would stop to water and feed the horses, and each time a crowd would gather to ogle them. “All along the people have been most enthusiastic. They have given us flags, flowers, tobacco, cigarettes, liquor, cakes, vegetables,” Le Stourgeon wrote from Lake Charles, Louisiana. “The girls have treated us fine and some have even offered to be our wives when we return.” Within a few days every man wore a flower in each buttonhole or tucked into his hatband. Sometimes people in the crowd would call out for Rough Riders by name, especially the renowned athletes from the Eastern contingent, having read about them in the newspapers. “We would just point to any soldier standing on a train platform as the famous man the crowd sought,” wrote Arthur Cosby.6
These were towns led by men who, in their younger days, had fought and killed federal soldiers. Now, over three decades later, those veterans were out with their wives, and children, and children’s children to greet men from that same army. “The blood of the older men stirred to the distant breath of battle; the blood of the younger men leaped hot with eager desire to accompany us,” Roosevelt wrote. “The older women, who remember the dreadful misery of war—the misery that presses its iron weight most heavily on the wives and the little ones—looked sadly at us. . . . We were told, half-laughingly, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had never dreamed in the by-gone days of bitterness to greet the old flag as they now were greeting it.” Among the war’s many ulterior aims and ultimate achievements was reconciliation between the South and the North after the Civil War. “The cost of this war is amply repaid by seeing the old flag as one sees it today in the south,” Wood wrote to his wife. “We are indeed once more a united country.”7