The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  Marshall was likewise prepared to fight. He had procured smokeless revolver shells in Tampa, what he called “man stoppers,” and he was intent on using them. Before he could, a Spanish bullet hit him in the back. The shot pierced his spine, and Marshall lay there in the grass, hoping someone would find him. Davis, after his shooting spree, had pulled back from the front line, where he found Stephen Crane, and the two of them soon found Marshall. “What can I do for you?” Crane asked.

  “Well, you might file my dispatches,” replied Marshall, as nonchalantly as he could manage, given the circumstances. “I don’t mean file them ahead of your own, old man—but just file ’em if you find it handy.”37

  Crane figured Marshall was going to die—“No man could be so sublime in detail concerning the trade of journalism and not die,” he wrote later—so he agreed to Marshall’s request.38

  But Marshall did not die. A while later a Rough Rider came by and moved him into the shade, where he waited over an hour for someone to help him get back to Siboney. It took three soldiers, each holding a corner of a dog tent, to carry him to the field hospital. Church “told me I was about to die,” Marshall wrote. “The news was not pleasant, but it did not interest me particularly.” He lay all afternoon in the sun; it was not until the evening that he could be moved back to Siboney.39

  • • •

  With the regiment’s right wing solidified, Roosevelt took one of his troops back toward the center, where the fighting was still heavy. He had left his sword tied around his waist, and it threatened to trip him up each time he moved faster than a quick step. He found the main line of Rough Riders, with Wood still pacing behind them. “How Wood escaped being hit, I do not see, and still less how his horse escaped,” Roosevelt said. Soon after Roosevelt arrived, Major Brodie, who was in charge of the men on the left side of the line, was shot in the wrist, and had to fall out; Wood ordered Roosevelt to take his place. As he did, he saw Theodore Miller and his cousin, Dade Goodrich, tramping through the tall grass, keeping space between each other to avoid being hit by the same fire. Roosevelt ordered the men in the left wing to follow him further left, into the thick of the woods. They lost contact with Wood and the men in the center of the line, just as the Spanish fire was quickening again.40

  Though it was still morning, the heat was overwhelming. The men had long since dropped their rolls and bags and other equipment; now they stripped off their blouses and undershirts, leaving just their canteens and cartridge belts to adorn their canvas pants. After an hour of constant shooting, the Spanish fire had slackened, and the Spanish line had pulled back, and the American line began to advance. They went slowly, moving through the thick grass a few feet at a time, “no more than a man covers in sliding for a base,” wrote Davis, who was yet again near the front, having left Crane behind. They couldn’t see the Spanish, their view blocked by the trees and grass, but they could hear them, or rather their rifles, the cracks reaching their ears simultaneously with the PHEWWW of the Mauser bullets. The Spanish fire tailed off, just a few shots a minute. Then, suddenly, it returned, hotter and faster and more concentrated than before. The Spanish had likely retreated, and regrouped. John Winter and William Erwin, two soldiers from San Antonio, were shuffling forward when a slash of blood hit Winter in the face. Erwin had been hit. “The breath left my body for the moment,” he wrote in a letter to the San Antonio Daily Light, “as the whole top of his head flew up in the air, his skull blown to atoms by an explosive bullet.”41

  Roosevelt, at the head of a few dozen soldiers off to the left and now separated from Wood and the main body of Rough Riders, saw a pair of red-tiled buildings about 500 yards away. He decided the Spanish fire was now coming from there. He grabbed a rifle from a wounded man and fired back. As he did, from behind and to his right, he heard a cheering roar. In what the men would later call “Wood’s Bluff,” the colonel had called up his reserve troops and, with no backup, ordered a charge at the last of the Spanish. Almost 400 Rough Riders stood up and ran at full speed toward the clutch of buildings. They got within 200 yards before the firing from the opposite line halted; the last of the Spanish, it seemed, had fled. “When we arrived at the buildings, panting and out of breath,” Roosevelt wrote, “they contained nothing but heaps of empty cartridge shells and two dead Spaniards, shot through the head.”42

  Roosevelt and the men around him began to cheer. But in the midst of their reverie, shocking news arrived: Wood had been shot during his charge at the Spanish line, most likely fatally. Roosevelt went silent, but just for a moment—then he began barking orders. He was now in charge of the Rough Riders.

  The village of Las Guasimas was just a clutch of a half dozen buildings, including the distillery, at the intersection of several dirt roads. All around stood thick forest, interspersed with more abandoned farms. Roosevelt sent several of his men out in different directions, as guards. At the distillery a few other men found a pack mule loaded down with bags of beans; nearby they found an enormous barrel full of unaged rum, which the officers destroyed before their men could get ahold of it. Roosevelt sent others to fill canteens, and ordered the remainder to take cover, and rest, along a nearby sunken road. The wounded and heat-struck he ordered into one of the buildings. Roosevelt then went off in search of the rest of the men.

  To his delight, he found Wood standing there among them, not even scratched, save for his broken cuff links.43

  • • •

  Las Guasimas was not a battle; it was little more than a skirmish, pitting rapidly advancing American forces against the rear guard of a retreating Spanish army (a fact later revealed by captured Spanish officers). Of the 964 Americans from the three regiments (the Rough Riders plus the units in the main column), 16 were killed and 52 wounded. Official American reports stated that 42 Spanish were killed (Roosevelt, in his memoir, argues that such a number was far too high). General Wheeler had expected the Spanish to make a stand at the crossroads. If they had, the American advance might have been halted, or even pushed back to the beach. Instead, the Spanish decided to pull back to Santiago, and cede the territory between them to the Americans. Like their failure to attack Shafter’s convoy, or the American landing at Daiquiri, the failure to put up a bigger fight at Las Guasimas was another in a string of inexplicable decisions by the Spanish that made the American campaign significantly easier than it should have been.44

  News of the engagement at Las Guasimas reached the United States by that night. The first dispatches worked off early, erroneous reports that the regiments had been ambushed and that scores were dead, including Colonel Wood. Even Davis, at first, reported that the Americans had walked into a Spanish trap. Later accounts corrected the most egregious errors, but the notion that the regiment had been ambushed persisted. “That the Spaniards were thoroughly posted as to the route to be taken by the Americans in their movement toward Sevilla was evident,” the New York Sun wrote on June 27. In Washington, Representative John Hull, of Iowa, called for Roosevelt and Wood to be court-martialed—“Colonels Wood and Roosevelt needlessly led their men into the ambush. . . . It looks like a case of thoughtless, reckless, and impetuous disregard of orders,” though it is not clear what Hull imagined those orders to be. Neither Wood nor Roosevelt planned the engagement or decided their plan of attack. For that, Hull would have to go after General Wheeler, who had overseen the attack on Las Guasimas. But Wheeler was also Hull’s former colleague in Congress. Hull dropped the matter.45

  Still, the question of whether Las Guasimas was an ambush dogged Roosevelt for years, especially during the 1904 presidential campaign. One could argue it was indeed a trap—the Spanish were ready and waiting, arrayed in a V-shape around the Americans’ expected approach. On the other hand, the Americans had a strong sense of where the Spanish would be, and it was a Rough Rider, Tom Isbell, who fired the first shot. This was, in any case, the conclusion of the Dodge Commission, which was convened to examine the conduct of the war a year later. “The attack was opened by our own fo
rces; there was no surprise, no ambuscade, no lack of definiteness as to plan, and no uncertainty as to purpose,” it read. It helped, too, that Richard Harding Davis soon changed his mind and came to the Rough Riders’ defense, first in his later newspaper dispatches and then in detailed, lengthy articles for Scribner’s. This was no ambush, he declared: “There is a vast difference between blundering into an ambuscade and setting out with a full knowledge that you will find the enemy in ambush, and finding him there, and then driving him out of his ambush and before you for a mile and a half in full retreat.”46

  Not everyone appreciated Davis’s reporting, or his access to Roosevelt and the regiment. Roosevelt’s cultivation of the war correspondent continued: After the fight, he offered to make Davis an honorary officer in the regiment. Not surprisingly, as the campaign rolled on, Davis’s dispatches focused more, and more glowingly, on Roosevelt and his men. “He had in his possession a very powerful pair of field-glasses,” the reporter Burr McIntosh wrote, “which in no way could be adjudged neutral. Most people had to be looked at through these; consequently, when he gazed at General Shafter he looked through one end, and when he regarded Colonel Roosevelt, he looked through the other. The deeds of both were minimized or magnified accordingly.” Back home, another satirist declared Davis to be Roosevelt’s “brave and fluent body guard.”47

  The fact remains that the Rough Riders—despite losing over two dozen wounded and eight men killed, including Capron and Fish, two of their best soldiers—had shown that they could fire and maneuver as a unit, that they wouldn’t break and run or shoot wildly under pressure. And they did so when most of the men in the regiment had never fired a weapon in anger before that day, let alone at unseen enemies. Add to that the triple-digit temperatures, the strange surroundings, and the seemingly invisible enemy, and their feat becomes even more impressive. More than that, observers wrote, the Rough Riders had shown that American gumption and guts could compensate greatly for a lack of formal military training. “Las Guasimas may have been only a skirmish,” admitted Caspar Whitney, “but it cleared the road to Santiago and thoroughly tested the courage, determination, and marksmanship of the present generation of Americans from the lowest to the highest born, from the wage worker to the gentleman of fortune, and not one of them was found deficient on any count.” In Washington, early criticism was replaced with talk of promoting Roosevelt to brigadier general; in New York, they talked of making him governor.48

  The fight was not a victory for the Rough Riders alone. It was a victory for the entire cavalry division, including the two regiments that had fought down in the valley; they had reached the Spanish line about the same time as Wood and Roosevelt’s men. In fact, were it not for the black soldiers in the segregated 10th Cavalry Regiment holding up the left wing of General Young’s force, the Spanish might have managed to flank the Rough Riders on the right, where Roosevelt was in command. But no one could know that from the press coverage. The only thing any reporter wanted to talk about was the Rough Riders. “The Spaniards were no match for the Roosevelt fighters,” wrote the San Francisco Call. “The western cowboys and Eastern dandies hammered the enemy from their path.” (To his credit, Roosevelt titled the chapter in his memoir on Las Guasimas “General Young’s Fight.”)49

  Though it was a minor engagement in a rural corner of a war-torn island, the Battle of Las Guasimas made banner headlines around the world—proof, for everyone to see, that America’s way of warfare worked. “The Stuff That Americans Are Made Of,” declared the Daily Astorian, in Oregon. “For the credit and the interests of the country, few things could have happened better at this juncture than just such a display of American ability at short notice to transform the quiet citizen into an effective self-reliant soldier, able to cope with the regular troops of an enemy, even at the disadvantage which marked the first engagement of Wood and Roosevelt’s men,” the Washington Times wrote. “It will exercise an immediate and marked effect upon European opinion of our ability to put a large army in the field at any time it may be required, and one not to be despised for its military qualities. The nation that can produce such troops in six weeks, from the cattle ranch, the university, the plow, bank parlor and club, and can scare up more than ten million of them, at a pinch, is to be respected and counted with in all the world problems of the future.” And the Rough Riders, already famous, became celebrities. “The Rough Riders, the romantic figures in the American army, had aroused popular interest to a high pitch,” wrote the Los Angeles Herald on June 26.50

  Chauncey Depew, a lawyer for the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt who would be elected senator from New York that fall, told of a trip he was taking aboard a German passenger liner, the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, when news of Las Guasimas arrived. Immediately, the tone of conversation among the French and German passengers at his table turned to incredulity. “There had been a general belief that our ships were no good and our army, while being composed of good men, was gathered from the fields and had no experience or training,” he wrote. “In place of what was expected it was discovered that our vessels were of the soundest construction, up to the most modern type of warship, with an armament unexcelled and manned and officered by skilled seamen and tacticians, while the army had displayed all the qualities of veteran troops.”51

  The reaction at home and abroad was put best by a Spanish prisoner captured at Las Guasimas and interviewed the next day by the reporter Stephen Bonsal. Speaking through a Cuban translator, he said, “When war was declared, we who knew the material wealth and prosperity of the Americans used to console ourselves by saying, ‘Los Americans tienen canones, pero no corazones’ ”—the Americans have guns, but no hearts. “But after what we saw at La Guasimas, we changed our tune to saying, ‘Los Americans no tienen canones, pero, por Dios! Tienen corazones.’ ”52

  • • •

  The battle over, Roosevelt dispatched Fred Herrig, the tracker he had first encountered at Joe Ferris’s general store in Medora, to find the mules that had run off with the machine gun. Around dusk, Herrig found two sets of mule tracks in a ravine, but it was too dark to follow. He bunked down under a tree, caught a few hours of sleep, and was awake at 3 a.m. By sunup he was marching back into camp, the mules and the guns in tow. Roosevelt slapped his knee and said to Wood, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you, Wood? Fred would find those guns?”53

  The Rough Riders spent the rest of the day on June 24 looking for wounded men—and dead men—in the forest and tall grass. Near the Spanish position, the spent casings were thick on the ground, so thick that the men, in their search, made a tinkling sound as they walked. Caspar Whitney, moving about the battlefield, tried to re-create the fight by looking for collections of shell casings, as a sign of where men had stopped to fire—nickel casings from the Americans, brass from the Spanish. Around him, soldiers gathered the fallen Spanish soldiers as well. They placed them into a long shallow trench, with little ceremony. Some of the men, at least, were struck by the small size and youthful faces of their enemy. Their Mauser rifles “looked about eight times too big for them,” Whitney said.54

  By the afternoon the Rough Riders had recovered eight American bodies, including those of Capron and Fish, and laid them out by the side of a road near the distillery. As the regiment regrouped, soldiers filed by to see them, as much out of respect for the dead as to prove to themselves that what they had just been through was real. Burr McIntosh, the reporter who had shared the purloined wine with Fish the evening they landed, happened to have a camera with him, and he took a picture of his fallen drinking buddy. “It seemed hard, very hard, to see the boy lying there in that far-off land, while the news of his death was speeding away to break the hearts of those to whom he was all the world,” he wrote.55

  Standing beside Roosevelt, looking down at the fallen men, Buckey O’Neill, the hyper-literate gambler from Prescott, said, “Colonel, isn’t it Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes of princes and tear the flesh of
kings’?” Roosevelt shook his head and said he couldn’t recall. This being Roosevelt, the question gnawed at him, until over a year later, when he was doing corrections on a later edition of his memoir The Rough Riders, he wrote: “It has been suggested to me that when Buckey O’Neill spoke of the vultures tearing our dead, he was thinking of no modern poet, but of the words of the prophet Ezekiel: ‘Speak unto every feathered fowl . . . ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth.’ ”56

  Capron’s body was taken down to Siboney, so that his father, a captain in the artillery who was still helping unload the ships, might recover it; the rest lay there overnight, covered loosely with blankets, their comrades sleeping nearby. Or trying to sleep. Sherrard Coleman, a second lieutenant, lay near Fish’s enormous body, which stuck out at the lower end, still wearing the boots he had dug out of the pile at San Antonio. “His feet were very large and they haunted me all night,” Coleman told the historian Hermann Hagedorn. That night Wood ordered Troop L to be known, from then on, as “Capron’s Troop.”57