The Crowded Hour
Page 13
It was good that so many people along the way were so generous, especially with food, since the Quartermaster’s Department had underestimated how long it would take to move the regiment to Tampa, and only packed two days’ worth of rations on board the trains. Even then, the Army’s travel rations consisted mostly of hardtack, the scourge of hungry soldiers and sailors for centuries: Simple biscuits made of flour, water, and salt, hardtack was baked until it was bone dry; it keeps forever, but is almost impossible to eat. “Hardtack belongs in the ceramic group and is the best substitute for a durable bathroom tile yet discovered,” joked one Army volunteer. At each stop several dozen men would hurry out to find better provisions; some almost got left behind when the feeding and watering finished up early. In other cases, men would hand out hardtack, stamped with “US” or “REMEMBER THE MAINE,” as souvenirs to the gathered crowd of locals, in exchange for cakes or fruit.8
At a stop in New Iberia, in the Louisiana bayou, one of the troopers, John Avery McIlhenny, found his mother waiting for him. Beside her sat two lunch baskets, five kegs of beer, and two demijohns of champagne—to share with his mates, of course. McIlhenny’s family lived on Avery Island, to the south, where they manufactured Tabasco sauce, which his father had developed using peppers from the family garden. When the war broke out J.A., as his family called him, had quit the company and tried to raise an infantry regiment in southern Louisiana; when he couldn’t find enough men, he traveled to San Antonio and persuaded Roosevelt to let him join the Rough Riders.9
A few hours later they reached Algiers, across the river from New Orleans. The train cars were loaded onto paddlewheel boats and ferried across the river. Many of the men had never seen a body of water as large as the Mississippi, and they stood in awe as the boats moved across the river’s half-mile, 200-foot-deep girth. On the other side a throng of people awaited. “There were cheers, music, beautiful women, many colored lights, etc., on all sides and coffee and tea were served us,” Le Stourgeon wrote. “Also bananas, cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, ham sandwiches, deviled crabs, fried fish—never did I see such an ovation. A merchant gave us each a huge palm leaf fan.” All of this was passed through the train windows, since for most of the layover only the officers were allowed off the trains. The enlisted men were locked inside, with guards posted at each end. Wood and Roosevelt trusted their men, but maybe a little less so in New Orleans.10
• • •
Theodore Miller, still in New York, was sure that he had missed the war. Bending to his father’s demands, he stood down during McKinley’s first call for troops, and focused, as much as he could, on his final exams. He was excelling at school, having been admitted to the New York Law School’s prestigious Dwight Law Club, an honors association, and he had secured a clerkship with a Wall Street law firm. But he had stood by in silence while the 71st New York Volunteers had bulked up its ranks with volunteers, and one of his roommates, from Vermont, had returned home to join his state militia. He remained silent when, on May 25, McKinley put out a second call for men. And he had watched as his friend and cousin David Goodrich, known as Dade, answered Roosevelt’s invitation for additional men to join the Rough Riders—as did two of Miller’s idols, Bob Wrenn and Bill Larned, two of the top-ranked tennis players in the country, who quit the professional circuit to join.11
The next day Miller met three of his college friends at Holland House, a fashionable hotel on Fifth Avenue, to commiserate over breakfast. One of them suggested that Miller at least see if Goodrich had advice. He thought that was a good idea, and that afternoon he sent his cousin a telegram, then headed to New Haven for “slap day,” when undergraduates were inducted into Skull and Bones and the college’s other secret societies. When he returned the next morning, there was a reply from Goodrich.12
The message said, simply, come along. Goodrich may have secured a spot for his cousin, or was simply hoping that Wood and Roosevelt would make room for him, should he make the journey to San Antonio. In either event, it was enough for Miller. That afternoon he went to Orange, New Jersey, to see his sister Mina Edison and her husband, Thomas; he returned the next morning and caught the 11 a.m. New York Central, bound for Texas. Though his train passed through northeast Ohio, Miller was so afraid of missing the Rough Riders that he didn’t stop in Akron to see his family. Instead, he met his father in Cleveland, and the two headed south together. In St. Louis, Miller took time between connections to have a lawyer draw up a will.13
At some point between St. Louis and San Antonio—Miller’s diary doesn’t say exactly where or when—he met a traveler with some bad news: The Rough Riders had already left camp, and were fast on their way east, toward Tampa. They had passed through Houston, and were making their way to New Orleans. Immediately, Miller changed his ticket; he got “a shave, a shampoo, and a general refreshing,” said goodbye to his father, and headed toward New Orleans on an overnight train. “My anxiety was at its height all night, as it was a chance for a prize I greatly coveted,” he wrote.14
Miller got to Algiers at nine the next morning, and took a ferry across the Mississippi. When he arrived on the riverbank he asked about the Rough Riders; a passerby pointed him toward a spot several blocks away, and he sped off in a cab. “I almost yelled for joy when I saw the yellow canvas suits and the orderly appearance of many men getting on and off cars, for I felt sure I had caught the Rough Riders,” he wrote. He poked through the scrums of soldiery until he found his cousin. Goodrich introduced Miller to Buckey O’Neill and his other new friends, then led him to Henry La Motte, the chief surgeon. With a clean bill of health, Miller was told that he would be mustered into the regiment when they reached Tampa. He settled into a bunk in the hospital car, the only space available. The train left at noon. Theodore Miller was a Rough Rider.15
• • •
The trains poked their way in a long black line across the Gulf Coast, through Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, on their way to Tallahassee. As they passed a pig farm in Alabama, one cowboy from Troop H threw a lariat around a large hog and hauled it on board—not to eat, but to enlist as a mascot, alongside the dog, mountain lion, and hawk that had already been added to the regiment’s menagerie. Miller quickly made friends with Larned and Wrenn, the tennis players, and at one stop in the Florida Panhandle the three snuck into a town to buy milk and tomatoes, then into a nearby farm to steal a chicken, which they cooked and ate beside the train.16 The regiment continued to find the crowds welcoming, even in the deepest of the Deep South, where the memories of the Civil War were at their rawest. “The mascots were the great attraction for the ladies and children, and they simply flocked about the car,” Miller wrote in his diary. In other towns, La Motte, the surgeon, noticed a cooler reception than the regiment had received further west. When they reached Tallahassee, he found out why: A few days before, another trainload of soldiers came through and declared themselves “the only genuine Rough Riders,” and had even warned residents of towns along the way that a group of impostors—circus performers pretending to be Roosevelt’s famous regiment—was likely right behind them. (In fact, he later learned, the true impostors were civilian contractors, mostly mule packers and drivers.)17
The first train arrived on the outskirts of Tampa in the late afternoon of June 2; because there was just one track leading into town, and it was occupied by an endless chain of supply cars, they had to ride their horses the last eight miles and did not get to their campground until after dark. Along the way the men could make out the sleeping army camped in the darkness—endless lines of white tents, by far the largest collection of American military men in thirty years.18
The rest of the trains straggled in over the course of the next day. One of the last was delayed, not far from Tampa, for eighteen hours in the middle of a forest. Two miles away was a stockyard with water. George Curry, a captain, asked the conductor and engineer to move the train there. The men replied that the railroad company’s orders forbid doing anything of the sort. Eager to g
et to Tampa, Curry placed the engineer and conductor under arrest, rounded up several soldiers who had worked on trains, put them in charge, and moved the train to the stockyard himself. They unloaded the saddles, left a guard on the train, mounted their horses, and rode to Tampa. The regimental adjutant, Tom Hall, livid at this breach of the law, wanted Curry punished, and told Roosevelt as much. Roosevelt approached Curry with a stern look, and Curry feared the worst. But then Roosevelt smiled. “Captain,” he said, “why did you wait eighteen hours?”19
The campground assigned to the Rough Riders was a sandy plain, sloping off into swamp and framed by stands of pine. Under Wood’s close direction, the men set up their tents in long rows, arranged by troops, with officers at each end. Along the ground, white strings coursed from stake to stake around the camp, delineating avenues and streets. In the following days, officers from the Regular Army would come around to see the famous Rough Riders and judge for themselves whether the motley crew was up to the task of a cavalry regiment. And, to be sure, in their mounted drills and military etiquette, the regiment was often found wanting. But no one could find a single thing to criticize about the camp. It was perfect.20
The Rough Riders’ camp offered a sharp contrast with the general scene in Tampa. The city was “a perfect welter of confusion,” Roosevelt said. First, there was Tampa itself. Located at the northern end of an oblong bay, the city straddled the Hillsborough River and consisted of street after sandy street of clapboard buildings. The entire city, Richard Harding Davis wrote in Scribner’s, was mostly “derelict wooden houses drifting in an ocean of sand”—a frontier town not dissimilar, in ways, from the Southwestern outposts many of the Rough Riders had left behind. Tampa boasted a large cigar industry; the thousands of Cuban Americans who worked in Ybor City, then an eastern suburb, were a fountain of funds for the Cuban rebels during the Ten Years’ War and then again since 1895. Western Florida was decades away from full-scale development, and cattle ranching and subsistence farming were still a big part of the local economy. Reached by a single rail line, the small city had little in the way of infrastructure to handle the influx of tens of thousands of troops, and even worse had no place to load such a large number onto ships to disembark. For that, they would have to ride the single rail line another nine miles down a peninsula to Port Tampa, where a narrow channel had been dug alongside a makeshift quay that could handle just two large ships at a time. And everywhere was sand, whipped up by the occasional strong wind, fast enough to lash a man’s face or steadily wear the whitewash off a building. “Thriving and prosperous Tampa may be, but attractive or pleasing it certainly is not,” wrote the correspondent George Kennan.21
There was no compelling military reason for collecting the army at Tampa. There were several natural, superior alternatives to Tampa as an embarkation point for an army of invasion: Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston were all large, active ports with expansive loading facilities and well-served by a network of rail lines. They were a bit further away from Cuba, but only by a day or two. Tampa had none of these qualities. (Though it did have one distant historical resonance to its advantage: In 1539, at the dawn of the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the conquistador Hernando de Soto landed in Tampa Bay.) Instead, the military made its decision because of politics. A railroad tycoon named Henry Plant, who had invested heavily in the area’s hotel real estate, lobbied the president to bring the Army to his city, largely as a way to elevate its reputation and give his holdings something to do in the summer months, after the tourist season ended. The Department of War, without considering the alternatives, agreed. By May 15, there were thousands of volunteers arriving daily, from all over the country. By the time the Rough Riders got there, the town of 15,000 was also the temporary home of a 30,000-man army.22
All of this should have been manageable by an able and efficient military. The problem was, the American Army was anything but efficient. To begin, it had two heads: The commanding general, who reported directly to the president, was in charge of the troops, while the secretary of war, who also reported to president, ran the Army’s system of bureaus—including the commissary, which handled food, and the quartermaster, who handled equipment and supplies. The secretaries of war were nominally above the commanding generals, but they also came and went with administrations, while there had only been five commanding generals since the Civil War, from Ulysses S. Grant to the current occupant of the office, General Nelson Miles. More by accident than design, the secretary and the general stood in tension, and usually disliked each other personally; William Tecumseh Sherman, the commanding general under President Grant, so hated Secretary of War William Belknap that he moved his headquarters to St. Louis from Washington for two years. The clash between the two offices kept the Army working even less efficiently than Congress intended and the public desired. In times of peace, few noticed, or cared. But when the Spanish-American War began, it meant potential disaster.23
The secretaries of war had typically let each bureau operate independently, without much internal communication. When the Army suddenly needed to move tens of thousands of uniforms or rifles to Tampa, the quartermaster felt no obligation to inform the other bureaus, or General Shafter’s staff. To make things worse, the war funding bill that McKinley won that spring forbade the Army from spending a penny until war was declared. Only then could it put in orders to arsenals for weapons or mills for clothing, which were quickly overwhelmed, and on back order for months. As a result, many of the volunteer regiments ended up fighting with old Springfield rifles with black-powder ammunition—if they were lucky. The 32nd Michigan arrived in Tampa with no weapons at all.24
Procuring supplies was one thing; delivering them to Tampa, and handling them once they arrived, was another. The Army lacked even a rudimentary system for logistics. Hundreds of train cars loaded with supplies sat in the yards at Tampa, but no one had thought to attach bills of lading to the outside, so it was impossible to know what was inside. “I frequently saw officers and men of the Quartermaster’s Department rushing frantically about, opening from fifty to one hundred cars, and parting open with crowbars the boxes that were in them, until they found the stores which were needed,” wrote the correspondent Stephen Bonsal. Officers spent ten days looking for a car full of gun carriages, before finding it sitting on a rail siding. Only two or three trains were being unloaded a day; at one point the backup reached all the way to Georgia. When soldiers did find the right cars, they were often full of useless or out-of-date stores: heavy woolen uniforms better fit for the High Plains than the Cuban tropics; canned meat that had last seen light a decade prior; and not nearly enough ammunition for a major invasion of a hostile nation. “I had to buy 72 dollars worth of rations owning to the fact that it was absolutely impossible to get at our ration car or get anything out of the railroad people,” Wood wrote in his diary in Tampa.25
• • •
Standing in contrast to all of this—the mobs of soldiers, the jumble of trains, the squalid, provisional character of the city itself—was the sprawling Tampa Bay Hotel, a place of immense luxury among the swamps of West Florida that in its strangeness was, oddly, the perfect setting for the headquarters of an equally strange, and equally massive, military undertaking. Henry Plant had opened the hotel in 1891 as a resort for tourists, who would then use his rail network to get to it. He was following a trend: Railroad and real estate developers were throwing up similarly enormous resorts in Key West, Miami, Jacksonville, and points in between. The Tampa Bay Hotel, at 511 rooms, was one of the largest.26
Plant spared no expense: The central rotunda was seventy feet square and twenty-three feet high, with mahogany doors opening and closing over carpets that Plant and his wife had bought in Europe. Designed by a New York architect, John A. Wood, and drawing on the same Moorish revival style that had influenced the exhibition hall in San Antonio, it boasted thirteen silver minarets with fluted domes, topped by crescent moons. Peacocks roamed the lawn. Richard Harding Davis, who arr
ived in Tampa in mid-May, was especially taken with the place. Writing in Scribner’s, he celebrated its screens of climbing vines and mammoth clusters of red and yellow flowers, its gardens of flowers and palmettos in every shade of green, its “great porches as wide and as long as a village street.” The Moorish architecture only added to its mystique, he wrote: “Someone said it was like a Turkish harem with the occupants left out.” It was an oddity, but a convenient one for an army barely able to provide for its own soldiers. A saying went around the building: “Only God knows why Plant built a hotel here, but thank God he did.”27
For the officers staying in the hotel, the weeks spent there were like a college reunion—indeed, many of the West Point graduates had not seen each other since receiving their commissions and heading to permanent posts out West. “One imaginative young officer compared it to the ball at Brussels on the night before Waterloo,” Davis wrote. Adding to the continental feel was a squad of foreign military attachés who, as representatives of noncombatant countries, had been allowed to follow and observe the American military and report back home, a standard practice at the time. They were a diverse, cosmopolitan crew, with names like Major Clément de Grandpré of France, Lieutenant Saneyuki Akiyama of the Japanese Imperial Navy, and Arthur Lee of the British Army. The Americans, few of whom had ever left their home state, let alone their home shores, listened to the foreigners’ stories like they were characters from a novel. “They were as familiar with the Kremlin as with the mosque of St. Sophia, with Kettner’s Restaurant as with the Walls of Silence,” Davis wrote. “They knew the love-story of every consul along the Malaysian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa.”28