by Clay Risen
The Rough Riders, once ashore but not yet dried out, moved to a dusty flat plain at the back of the beach, where they made camp beside a bakery that had been blown in half by an American shell. The men had brought what they could carry on their backs; they left the rest of their equipment on the Yucatan, which they could already see sailing back to the protective clutch of warships, five miles out. Roosevelt only had the clothes he was wearing, a Mackintosh, and a toothbrush. Scores of the men sat on the beach, still reeling from the seasickness and vertigo of the voyage. They did find a cool mountain stream that ran into the cove nearby, and by nightfall hundreds of men had taken a bath, their first in over a week. A few of them caught a chicken and, with a few peppers found growing nearby, made soup. Hamilton Fish, never shy about his love for potent potables, ransacked the village looking for whiskey. He found a bottle of rum too strong even for him, but also several demijohns of Spanish sweet wine. He and Burr McIntosh, a correspondent (and, when he wasn’t writing, a semifamous stage actor), drank a good part of the wine that night. By the end of the day 6,000 men had come ashore, and made camp with little regard to military protocol. For once, Wood didn’t mind. “Everyone tumbled into his blankets in the most comfortable place he could find and slept as only tired soldiers can sleep,” the colonel recalled.21
• • •
The next morning, the Yucatan returned, and a contingent of Rough Riders began hauling their equipment ashore. Cuban soldiers were teaching the rest how to make palm-frond lean-tos for shade. As the morning fog lifted, they could see the beach and much of the green valley that ran inland just west of Mount Losiltires, dotted with thousands of white tents. The bodies of Corporal Cobb and Private English, the two drowned soldiers from the 10th Cavalry, were found washed up on the beach, and given a hasty burial.22
There were no boats capable of ferrying horses and mules to shore. Instead, the crews used winches to pick them up and lower them into the water—or, lacking a winch, simply pushed them overboard—in the expectation that they would swim to shore. Many went the other way, until a trumpeter on the beach had the idea to play a few bars of drilling music, at which point the trained horses spun around and made a line for shore. One horse tried to swim back to the ship. “The transport had begun turning its screw to get steerage way,” recalled Charles Post, a volunteer with the 71st New York. “The horse was caught in the slipstream; it plunged and splashed in the wake, and was swept into the stream of the following transport and brushed alongside until it vanished in a bloody cascade astern.”23
Amazingly, only six animals were killed that day. One of them was Roosevelt’s pony Rain-in-the-Face, which the crew had tried lowering into the water. As he hovered above the water, a breaker leapt up and dashed the animal against the side of the ship and pulled him into the sea, where he drowned. Roosevelt, who had returned to the ship, “split the air with one blasphemy after another to the indescribable terror of the young crewmen,” recalled Albert E. Smith, a photographer with the Vitagraph Company. “Stop that goddamn animal torture!” the lieutenant colonel shouted. They took more care with Little Texas—too much care. For several minutes, the horse, held aloft by straps, was lowered haltingly overboard. “Before each pull at the hoist, pinions were exchanged and judgments rendered, until it seemed that if the animal did not collapse from the strain of sheer suspension it would sure die of starvation,” Smith wrote. The crew finally cut Little Texas loose, and he swam almost a mile to shore.24
At 1 p.m. the 6,000 men already onshore received orders to march to the coastal village of Siboney, about eight miles to the west. Siboney, with a quarter mile of beach, was a better landing place; no one understood why, nevertheless, Shafter had chosen Daiquirí. Within twenty minutes the Rough Riders had struck camp, rolling their tent pieces into their sacks and putting out their fires. Many of the regiment’s pack animals were still on the ships, and they only had eighteen to carry the heavier supplies. Wood rode up front, while Roosevelt took up the rear—mounted, at first, then on foot, like the enlisted men. Davis, who wore a tropical suit and a pith helmet, had long suffered from sciatica, and it flared up in the tropical heat. He had managed to procure a horse, and rode alongside the middle of the regiment, with Edward Marshall, the correspondent for the Journal, accompanying them.25
The path turned inland, slightly, weaving through war-torn, abandoned sugar estates that were already falling back into the arms of the encroaching forest, then back toward the coast, through a cathedral of embowering coconut palms, some of them 200 feet high. The men marched four across, but as the path narrowed around them, they shifted to two across, and eventually single file. “There is no country on the earth more beautiful than that through which we passed,” Marshall wrote. The land was indeed stunning, but the day was scorchingly hot, and after two miles the regiment, to a man, looked like it had been dunked underwater, so heavily did the men sweat. The cowboys among them, not used to long marches on foot, took it especially hard. They were not alone in their suffering: The Rough Riders had not been the first regiment to set out, and along the way they passed wool jackets, packs, cans of meat, underclothes, and tent rolls, discarded by overheating soldiers ahead of them. Later they encountered dozens of men lying prostrate from the heat, their blue woolen uniforms wide open across their sweat-drenched chests. Soon, several Rough Riders fell out as well. “Our march was like a pipe organ, having many stops,” quipped trooper J. Ogden Wells. They reached Siboney at dusk, after a five-hour march, with rain clouds looming to the west. Siboney was a proper town, though like Daiquirí it had been largely abandoned by soldiers and civilians. Nevertheless, the men were forbidden from bunking down inside the buildings, for fear of disease and vermin. Wood found his men a clear spot near the Siboney beach, lined them up in columns, and told them to camp where they stood. With rain imminent, they rushed to start fires to boil coffee and cook a meal—by then they had learned from the regulars how to fry bacon in a pan, then, keeping the drippings hot, drop in a few pieces of hardtack to soften them. Just as they finished cooking, the rains came.26
Theodore Miller had marched alongside his college friend Teddy Burke. They had met up in Tampa and been inseparable. But soon after landing, Burke grew ill, likely with malaria. Eventually Miller decided to leave him by the side of the path, figuring that eventually someone would take him back to a hospital ship. But about an hour after Miller arrived at Siboney, Burke came trudging into camp. He practically passed out where he fell, and slept even as the heavy rains pelted his body. Miller stretched out a rubber blanket over his friend, then went to look for water and a bit of wine, to revive Burke’s spirit.27
Throughout the night, men trudged in from Daiquirí, while others began arriving in landing craft from the fleet, which had likewise shifted west. Soldiers, stripped to the waist, trudged through the surf to carry supplies onshore, while several ships threw their searchlights onto the beach. As Davis described it,
It was one of the most weird and remarkable scenes of the war, probably of any war. An army was being landed on an enemy’s coast at the dead of night, but with somewhat more of cheers and shrieks and laughter that rise from the bathers in the surf at Coney Island on a hot Sunday. It was a pandemonium of noises. The men still to be landed from the “prison hulks,” as they called the transports, were singing in chorus, the men already on shore were dancing naked around the camp-fires on the beach, or shouting with delight as they plunged into the first bath that had been offered in seven days, and those in the launches as they were pitched headfirst at the soil of Cuba, signalized their arrival by howls of triumph.28
Siboney was located ten miles southeast of Santiago, though several lines of steep hills, bands of thick semitropical forest, and an unknown number of Spanish soldiers stood between the two. Around 11 p.m., in the middle of a drenching downpour, Wood went to meet with General Samuel B. M. Young, who commanded the Second Cavalry Brigade, and General Wheeler, who was in charge of the entire cavalry division. A Cuban detac
hment, led by General Demetrio Castillo Duany, had been marching north of Siboney earlier that day when it encountered several hundred Spanish troops, positioned about three miles inland at a crossroads known as Las Guasimas. The two sides fell into combat, and after several Cubans were shot, and one killed, they retreated. That evening, Young visited General Duany at his home in a nearby village, and the Cuban drew him a map of the Spanish line. Young returned and parleyed with Wheeler and the brigade and regimental commanders. There were about 1,500 Spanish located around Las Guasimas, Duany had told him. Because Shafter was still on the Seguranca, Wheeler was the ranking officer onshore, with clear but open-ended orders to secure the beachhead and prepare to march for Santiago. Concerned that the Spanish might be grouping for an assault on the American beachhead, Wheeler decided to attack the next morning.29
Roosevelt, not part of the divisional inner circle, sat back among the men, soaking in the rain. His eyes scanned the regiment and fell on Capron and Fish, two of his favorites, deep in conversation. No doubt he saw something of himself in them, or wanted to see something. Capron had been a boxer at the Presidio. Fish rowed varsity crew. Like Roosevelt, they had both spent time out West, Capron as an Indian fighter, Fish as a railway brakeman. There were differences, of course: Both were terrible drunks. Civilian life simply did not fit them. At war, though, they glowed, and Roosevelt basked in their image. “Their frames seemed steep, to withstand all fatigue; they were flushed with health; in their eyes shone high resolve and fiery desire,” Roosevelt later wrote.30
When Wood returned to the Rough Rider camp, he signaled Roosevelt to join him. They called over Capron and filled him in on the plan. They were to wake early the next morning, before dawn, and march up a limestone ridge toward the Spanish, while the main force under General Young took the Camino Real, which ran along a narrow valley toward Las Guasimas. Capron insisted that his troop, L, be allowed to take point. Wood consented. The regiment finally went to bed after midnight, for a few hours sleep.31
CHAPTER 9
“WE’RE LIABLE TO ALL BE KILLED TODAY”
Theodore Miller woke with a start. Nearby, a trumpeter was blowing reveille. It was not quite 4 a.m.
Mist hung over the beach as thousands of soldiers stirred from a night’s sleep on the coral-strewn shore. Some had slept in their white canvas dog tents; others, including the Rough Riders, spent the night in the open, and were still damp from the previous evening’s rain. Miller lay beside Teddy Burke, his sick friend, who was wet with sweat. Burke murmured about a polo match, how he’d been hurt but was ready to get back on his horse. Wood had ordered his captains not to tell their troops about the day’s engagement, but somehow, through his foggy consciousness, Burke seemed to guess that the Rough Riders were about to go into battle.1
The village of Las Guasimas, their destination that morning, was little more than a crossroads, with a few houses and a distillery for aguardiente (a sort of rough, unaged rum). But it was a strategic point, located a few miles north of Siboney, at a dip between two ridges. Las Guasimas was perhaps the only place where the American troops could squeeze through the surrounding heights and mountains on their way to Santiago, which lay about eight miles to the west. If the Spanish were going to put up resistance, having done nothing of the sort at the landing sites, it would be there. With well-dug trenches and cleared fire lanes, a few hundred Spanish soldiers could have plugged up an American advance for days, even weeks. And weeks might have been enough—with summer would come malaria and yellow fever, and the Americans might face the same fate as the British did over 200 years before.
General Wheeler understood the importance of Las Guasimas and the urgent press of time. After he heard the reports about the Spanish forces that had ambushed General Duany’s troops the day before, he decided not to risk the chance of an attack on the American beachhead, or give the Spanish time to solidify their hold on the ridges and passes that led from the beach to the eastern reaches of Santiago. His men were dog-tired and not yet recovered from the voyage, but he decided there was no choice. That morning, they had to take Las Guasimas.2
Miller was eager for his first firefight. But before he could go, he had to take care of his sick friend. He moved Burke, who was barely able to walk, into one of the empty houses (despite the ban on entering them), where he would be safe from the rain, and propped him on a bed. Burke whimpered with jealousy when Miller told him where he was going. Then Miller stepped outside and went to join his troop. There was no commissary or cook assigned to the Rough Riders, so each man was on his own to prepare breakfast from the meager rations the Army had provided. A few troops had pooled their food, and saved some items from the Yucatan—Troop L, which included Capron and Hamilton Fish, had collected several cans of tomatoes. Fish ordered them opened. “We’re liable to all be killed today and we may as well have enough to eat,” he said. Designated cooks, where they existed in other regiments, were standing around sputtering campfires, looking “like busy demons,” recalled the correspondent Edward Marshall. Positioned near the head of the trail along which the Rough Riders would soon head out, Colonel Wood looked at his pocket watch, snapped it shut, and said, “We leave in five minutes! Anyone who isn’t ready will be left behind!” It was 5:25 a.m.3
A contingent of about 470 men, drawn from the First Cavalry and the 10th Cavalry, a segregated regiment, had already left. They were to be the main column in the attack. They headed due north, along the relatively flat floor of a valley that led, gently upward, toward Las Guasimas. The Rough Riders were assigned to take a narrow path along a steep ridge that swung out to the west before going north toward Las Guasimas. If it all went as planned, the two lines would hit the Spanish forces at the same time. But for that to work, the Rough Riders had to move fast.4
To start, they climbed straight up a steeply graded path for almost half a mile, through thick woods and rising temperatures. Several reporters, including Davis, Marshall, and the reporter and short-story writer Stephen Crane, went along with them. Marshall recalled having to pull himself up along the path by grabbing bushes and boulders. Most of the march was single file, the route hemmed in by Spanish bayonet, a succulent plant with knifelike leaves. Looming around and over them were West Indian elm trees—or guácimas, the namesake of their destination—as well as ceibas, royal palms, and banyans, roped through with thick vines. Ahead, to the northwest, ran the Sierra Maestra, blanketed with dark green forests and topped by bare, rocky peaks. Roosevelt, ever the hunter, said the setting reminded him of deer country; Captain James McClintock, a former journalist who was born in Sacramento, said it reminded him of Southern California. Davis, riding on a mule because of his sciatica, wrote: “To those who did not have to walk, it was not unlike a hunting excursion in our west; the scenery was beautiful and the view down the valley one of luxuriant peace.” It was hard to believe that they were in hostile territory, that they were walking into what might be their first engagement of the war.5
Not that they lacked reminders. Within minutes, the Rough Riders were high enough to look back over the cove at Siboney and the thousands of white tents scattered on its beach, punctuated by a few morning fires sending up thin wisps of smoke. They could see the dozens of transports and warships just offshore, which even at that early hour had already begun unloading men and matériel. But the ugliness of Siboney had melted away: “The squalor of the Cuban town at our feet was gilded into glory by the morning sun,” Marshall wrote. They marched by abandoned plantation estates, places that not long ago had been teeming with activity but that were already “desolate and overgrown with scrub and creepers,” wrote Marshall, the victims of the “revolution.”6
After a few hundred yards, they began to pass regulars from the 22nd Infantry on picket, or guard, duty, assigned by General Lawton’s Second Division the night before. The pickets were surprised to see them: Lawton’s men had arrived in Siboney ahead of Wheeler and the cavalry division, but Wheeler had left his fellow general out of his plans for
that morning. One of the pickets, a captain named Nicholls, told Wood that he had heard crashing noises in the night, which he took to be Spanish defenders cutting down trees.7
After about twenty minutes, Wood ordered the sixty men in Allyn Capron’s L Troop to the front, and told the captain to pick four men to lead on point. Fish volunteered. Duany, the Cuban commander who had briefed General Young the night before, had assigned two of his men to go along with the Rough Riders, and Wood placed them at the very front of the column, as scouts. The standard Army procedure for a march like this would be to assign several men to walk a few dozen yards to the right and left of the main column, to guard its flanks. But that was impossible—the forest was too thick. The Rough Riders would have to hope that they reached Las Guasimas without running into a Spanish ambush. Wood rode behind Capron’s troop, with two men from Wheeler’s headquarter staff, a Cuban officer, and Roosevelt, at the head of the next three troops; Major Alexander Brodie, the regiment’s unofficial third in command, brought up the rear with his three troops.8