During the year preceding the outbreak of the Spanish War I was
Assistant Secretary of the Navy. While my party was in opposition, I
had preached, with all the fervor and zeal I possessed, our duty to
intervene in Cuba, and to take this opportunity of driving the
Spaniard from the Western World. Now that my party had come to power,
I felt it incumbent on me, by word and deed, to do all I could to
secure the carrying out of the policy in which I so heartily believed;
and from the beginning I had determined that, if a war came, somehow
or other, I was going to the front.
Meanwhile, there was any amount of work at hand in getting ready the
navy, and to this I devoted myself.
Naturally, when one is intensely interested in a certain cause, the
tendency is to associate particularly with those who take the same
view. A large number of my friends felt very differently from the way
I felt, and looked upon the possibility of war with sincere horror.
But I found plenty of sympathizers, especially in the navy, the army,
and the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. Commodore Dewey, Captain
Evans, Captain Brownson, Captain Davis--with these and the various
other naval officers on duty at Washington I used to hold long
consultations, during which we went over and over, not only every
question of naval administration, but specifically everything
necessary to do in order to put the navy in trim to strike quick and
hard if, as we believed would be the case, we went to war with Spain.
Sending an ample quantity of ammunition to the Asiatic squadron and
providing it with coal; getting the battle-ships and the armored
cruisers on the Atlantic into one squadron, both to train them in
manoeuvring together, and to have them ready to sail against either
the Cuban or the Spanish coasts; gathering the torpedo-boats into a
flotilla for practice; securing ample target exercise, so conducted as
to raise the standard of our marksmanship; gathering in the small
ships from European and South American waters; settling on the number
and kind of craft needed as auxiliary cruisers--every one of these
points was threshed over in conversations with officers who were
present in Washington, or in correspondence with officers who, like
Captain Mahan, were absent.
As for the Senators, of course Senator Lodge and I felt precisely
alike; for to fight in such a cause and with such an enemy was merely
to carry out the doctrines we had both of us preached for many years.
Senator Davis, Senator Proctor, Senator Foraker, Senator Chandler,
Senator Morgan, Senator Frye, and a number of others also took just
the right ground; and I saw a great deal of them, as well as of many
members of the House, particularly those from the West, where the
feeling for war was strongest.
Naval officers came and went, and Senators were only in the city while
the Senate was in session; but there was one friend who was steadily
in Washington. This was an army surgeon, Dr. Leonard Wood. I only met
him after I entered the navy department, but we soon found that we had
kindred tastes and kindred principles. He had served in General
Miles's inconceivably harassing campaigns against the Apaches, where
he had displayed such courage that he won that most coveted of
distinctions--the Medal of Honor; such extraordinary physical strength
and endurance that he grew to be recognized as one of the two or three
white men who could stand fatigue and hardship as well as an Apache;
and such judgment that toward the close of the campaigns he was given,
though a surgeon, the actual command of more than one expedition
against the bands of renegade Indians. Like so many of the gallant
fighters with whom it was later my good fortune to serve, he combined,
in a very high degree, the qualities of entire manliness with entire
uprightness and cleanliness of character. It was a pleasure to deal
with a man of high ideals, who scorned everything mean and base, and
who also possessed those robust and hardy qualities of body and mind,
for the lack of which no merely negative virtue can ever atone. He was
by nature a soldier of the highest type, and, like most natural
soldiers, he was, of course, born with a keen longing for adventure;
and, though an excellent doctor, what he really desired was the chance
to lead men in some kind of hazard. To every possibility of such
adventure he paid quick attention. For instance, he had a great desire
to get me to go with him on an expedition into the Klondike in
mid-winter, at the time when it was thought that a relief party would
have to be sent there to help the starving miners.
In the summer he and I took long walks together through the beautiful
broken country surrounding Washington. In winter we sometimes varied
these walks by kicking a foot-ball in an empty lot, or, on the rare
occasions when there was enough snow, by trying a couple of sets of
skis or snow-skates, which had been sent me from Canada.
But always on our way out to and back from these walks and sport,
there was one topic to which, in our talking, we returned, and that
was the possible war with Spain. We both felt very strongly that such
a war would be as righteous as it would be advantageous to the honor
and the interests of the nation; and after the blowing up of the
Maine, we felt that it was inevitable. We then at once began to try to
see that we had our share in it. The President and my own chief,
Secretary Long, were very firm against my going, but they said that if
I was bent upon going they would help me. Wood was the medical adviser
of both the President and the Secretary of War, and could count upon
their friendship. So we started with the odds in our favor.
At first we had great difficulty in knowing exactly what to try for.
We could go on the staff of any one of several Generals, but we much
preferred to go in the line. Wood hoped he might get a commission in
his native State of Massachusetts; but in Massachusetts, as in every
other State, it proved there were ten men who wanted to go to the war
for every chance to go. Then we thought we might get positions as
field-officers under an old friend of mine, Colonel--now General
--Francis V. Greene, of New York, the Colonel of the Seventy-first;
but again there were no vacancies.
Our doubts were resolved when Congress authorized the raising of three
cavalry regiments from among the wild riders and riflemen of the
Rockies and the Great Plains. During Wood's service in the Southwest
he had commanded not only regulars and Indian scouts, but also white
frontiersmen. In the Northwest I had spent much of my time, for many
years, either on my ranch or in long hunting trips, and had lived and
worked for months together with the cowboy and the mountain hunter,
faring in every way precisely as they did.
Secretary Alger offered me the command of one of these regiments. If I
had taken it, being entirely inexperienced in military work, I should
not have known how to get it equipped most rapidly, for I should have
spent valuable weeks in learning its needs, with the result that I
should have missed the Santiago campaign, and might not even have had
the consolation prize of going to Porto Rico. Fortunately, I was wise
enough to tell the Secretary that while I believed I could learn to
command the regiment in a month, that it was just this very month
which I could not afford to spare, and that therefore I would be quite
content to go as Lieutenant-Colonel, if he would make Wood Colonel.
This was entirely satisfactory to both the President and Secretary,
and, accordingly, Wood and I were speedily commissioned as Colonel and
Lieutenant-Colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry. This
was the official title of the regiment, but for some reason or other
the public promptly christened us the "Rough Riders." At first we
fought against the use of the term, but to no purpose; and when
finally the Generals of Division and Brigade began to write in formal
communications about our regiment as the "Rough Riders," we adopted
the term ourselves.
The mustering-places for the regiment were appointed in New Mexico,
Arizona, Oklahoma, and Indian Territory. The difficulty in organizing
was not in selecting, but in rejecting men. Within a day or two after
it was announced that we were to raise the regiment, we were literally
deluged with applications from every quarter of the Union. Without the
slightest trouble, so far as men went, we could have raised a brigade
or even a division. The difficulty lay in arming, equipping, mounting,
and disciplining the men we selected. Hundreds of regiments were being
called into existence by the National Government, and each regiment
was sure to have innumerable wants to be satisfied. To a man who knew
the ground as Wood did, and who was entirely aware of our national
unpreparedness, it was evident that the ordnance and quartermaster's
bureaus could not meet, for some time to come, one-tenth of the
demands that would be made upon them; and it was all-important to get
in first with our demands. Thanks to his knowledge of the situation
and promptness, we immediately put in our requisitions for the
articles indispensable for the equipment of the regiment; and then, by
ceaseless worrying of excellent bureaucrats, who had no idea how to do
things quickly or how to meet an emergency, we succeeded in getting
our rifles, cartridges, revolvers, clothing, shelter-tents, and horse
gear just in time to enable us to go on the Santiago expedition. Some
of the State troops, who were already organized as National Guards,
were, of course, ready, after a fashion, when the war broke out; but
no other regiment which had our work to do was able to do it in
anything like as quick time, and therefore no other volunteer regiment
saw anything like the fighting which we did.
Wood thoroughly realized what the Ordnance Department failed to
realize, namely, the inestimable advantage of smokeless powder; and,
moreover, he was bent upon our having the weapons of the regulars, for
this meant that we would be brigaded with them, and it was evident
that they would do the bulk of the fighting if the war were short.
Accordingly, by acting with the utmost vigor and promptness, he
succeeded in getting our regiment armed with the Krag-Jorgensen
carbine used by the regular cavalry.
It was impossible to take any of the numerous companies which were
proffered to us from the various States. The only organized bodies we
were at liberty to accept were those from the four Territories. But
owing to the fact that the number of men originally allotted to us,
780, was speedily raised to 1,000, we were given a chance to accept
quite a number of eager volunteers who did not come from the
Territories, but who possessed precisely the same temper that
distinguished our Southwestern recruits, and whose presence materially
benefited the regiment.
We drew recruits from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many another
college; from clubs like the Somerset, of Boston, and Knickerbocker,
of New York; and from among the men who belonged neither to club nor
to college, but in whose veins the blood stirred with the same impulse
which once sent the Vikings over sea. Four of the policemen who had
served under me, while I was President of the New York Police Board,
insisted on coming--two of them to die, the other two to return unhurt
after honorable and dangerous service. It seemed to me that almost
every friend I had in every State had some one acquaintance who was
bound to go with the Rough Riders, and for whom I had to make a place.
Thomas Nelson Page, General Fitzhugh Lee, Congressman Odell, of New
York, Senator Morgan; for each of these, and for many others, I
eventually consented to accept some one or two recruits, of course
only after a most rigid examination into their physical capacity, and
after they had shown that they knew how to ride and shoot. I may add
that in no case was I disappointed in the men thus taken.
Harvard being my own college, I had such a swarm of applications from
it that I could not take one in ten. What particularly pleased me, not
only in the Harvard but the Yale and Princeton men, and, indeed, in
these recruits from the older States generally, was that they did not
ask for commissions. With hardly an exception they entered upon their
duties as troopers in the spirit which they held to the end, merely
endeavoring to show that no work could be too hard, too disagreeable,
or too dangerous for them to perform, and neither asking nor receiving
any reward in the way of promotion or consideration. The Harvard
contingent was practically raised by Guy Murchie, of Maine. He saw all
the fighting and did his duty with the utmost gallantry, and then left
the service as he had entered it, a trooper, entirely satisfied to
have done his duty--and no man did it better. So it was with Dudley
Dean, perhaps the best quarterback who ever played on a Harvard
Eleven; and so with Bob Wrenn, a quarterback whose feats rivalled
those of Dean's, and who, in addition, was the champion tennis player
of America, and had, on two different years, saved this championship
from going to an Englishman. So it was with Yale men like Waller, the
high jumper, and Garrison and Girard; and with Princeton men like
Devereux and Channing, the foot-ball players; with Larned, the tennis
player; with Craig Wadsworth, the steeple-chase rider; with Joe
Stevens, the crack polo player; with Hamilton Fish, the ex-captain of
the Columbia crew, and with scores of others whose names are quite as
worthy of mention as any of those I have given. Indeed, they all
sought entry into the ranks of the Rough Riders as eagerly as if it
meant something widely different from hard work, rough fare, and the
possibility of death; and the reason why they turned out to be such
good soldiers lay largely in the fact that they were men who had
thoroughly counted the cost before entering, and who went into the
regiment because they believed that this offered their best chance for
seeing hard and dangerous service. Mason Mitchell, of New York, who
had been a chief of scouts in the Riel Rebellion, travelled all the
way to San Antonio to enlist; and others came there from distances as
great.
Some of them made appeals to me which I could not possibly resist.
Woodbury Kane had been a close friend of mine at Harvard. During the
eighteen years that had passed since my graduation I had seen very
little of him, though, being always interested in sport, I
occasionally met him on the hunting field, had seen him on the deck of
the Defender when she vanquished the Valkyrie, and knew the part he
had played on the Navajoe, when, in her most important race, that
otherwise unlucky yacht vanquished her opponent, the Prince of Wales's
Britannia. When the war was on, Kane felt it his duty to fight for his
country. He did not seek any position of distinction. All he desired
was the chance to do whatever work he was put to do well, and to get
to the front; and he enlisted as a trooper. When I went down to the
camp at San Antonio he was on kitchen duty, and was cooking and
washing dishes for one of the New Mexican troops; and he was doing it
so well that I had no further doubt as to how he would get on.
My friend of many hunts and ranch partner, Robert Munro Ferguson, of
Scotland, who had been on Lord Aberdeen's staff as a Lieutenant but a
year before, likewise could not keep out of the regiment. He, too,
appealed to me in terms which I could not withstand, and came in like
Kane to do his full duty as a trooper, and like Kane to win his
commission by the way he thus did his duty.
I felt many qualms at first in allowing men of this stamp to come in,
for I could not be certain that they had counted the cost, and was
afraid they would find it very hard to serve--not for a few days, but
for months--in the ranks, while I, their former intimate associate,
was a field-officer; but they insisted that they knew their minds, and
the events showed that they did. We enlisted about fifty of them from
Virginia, Maryland, and the Northeastern States, at Washington. Before
allowing them to be sworn in, I gathered them together and explained
that if they went in they must be prepared not merely to fight, but to
perform the weary, monotonous labor incident to the ordinary routine
of a soldier's life; that they must be ready to face fever exactly as
they were to face bullets; that they were to obey unquestioningly, and
to do their duty as readily if called upon to garrison a fort as if
sent to the front. I warned them that work that was merely irksome and
disagreeable must be faced as readily as work that was dangerous, and
that no complaint of any kind must be made; and I told them that they
were entirely at liberty not to go, but that after they had once
signed there could then be no backing out.
Not a man of them backed out; not one of them failed to do his whole
duty.
These men formed but a small fraction of the whole. They went down to
San Antonio, where the regiment was to gather and where Wood preceded
me, while I spent a week in Washington hurrying up the different
bureaus and telegraphing my various railroad friends, so as to insure
our getting the carbines, saddles, and uniforms that we needed from
the various armories and storehouses. Then I went down to San Antonio
myself, where I found the men from New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma
already gathered, while those from Indian Territory came in soon after
my arrival.
These were the men who made up the bulk of the regiment, and gave it
its peculiar character. They came from the Four Territories which yet
remained within the boundaries of the United States; that is, from the
lands that have been most recently won over to white civilization, and
in which the conditions of life are nearest those that obtained on the
frontier when there still was a frontier. They were a splendid set of
men, these Southwesterners--tall and sinewy, with resolute,
weather-beaten faces, and eyes that looked a man straight in the face
without flinching. They included in their ranks men of every
occupation; but the three types were those of the cowboy, the hunter,
and the mining prospector--the man who wandered hither and thither,
killing game for a living, and spending his life in the quest for
metal wealth.
In all the world there could be no better material for soldiers than
that afforded by these grim hunters of the mountains, these wild rough
riders of the plains. They were accustomed to handling wild and savage
horses; they were accustomed to following the chase with the rifle,
both for sport and as a means of livelihood. Varied though their
occupations had been, almost all had, at one time or another, herded
cattle and hunted big game. They were hardened to life in the open,
and to shifting for themselves under adverse circumstances. They were
used, for all their lawless freedom, to the rough discipline of the
round-up and the mining company. Some of them came from the small
frontier towns; but most were from the wilderness, having left their
lonely hunters' cabins and shifting cow-camps to seek new and more
stirring adventures beyond the sea.
They had their natural leaders--the men who had shown they could
master other men, and could more than hold their own in the eager
driving life of the new settlements.
The Captains and Lieutenants were sometimes men who had campaigned in
the regular army against Apache, Ute, and Cheyenne, and who, on
completing their term of service, had shown their energy by settling
in the new communities and growing up to be men of mark. In other
cases they were sheriffs, marshals, deputy-sheriffs, and
deputy-marshals--men who had fought Indians, and still more often had
waged relentless war upon the bands of white desperadoes. There was
Bucky O'Neill, of Arizona, Captain of Troop A, the Mayor of Prescott,
a famous sheriff throughout the West for his feats of victorious
warfare against the Apache, no less than against the white road-agents
and man-killers. His father had fought in Meagher's Brigade in the
Civil War; and he was himself a born soldier, a born leader of men. He
was a wild, reckless fellow, soft spoken, and of dauntless courage and
boundless ambition; he was staunchly loyal to his friends, and cared
for his men in every way. There was Captain Llewellen, of New Mexico,
a good citizen, a political leader, and one of the most noted
peace-officers of the country; he had been shot four times in pitched
fights with red marauders and white outlaws. There was Lieutenant
Ballard, who had broken up the Black Jack gang of ill-omened
notoriety, and his Captain, Curry, another New Mexican sheriff of
fame. The officers from the Indian Territory had almost all served as
marshals and deputy-marshals; and in the Indian Territory, service as
a deputy-marshal meant capacity to fight stand-up battles with the
gangs of outlaws.
Three of our higher officers had been in the regular army. One was
Major Alexander Brodie, from Arizona, afterward Lieutenant-Colonel,
who had lived for twenty years in the Territory, and had become a
thorough Westerner without sinking the West Pointer--a soldier by
taste as well as training, whose men worshipped him and would follow
him anywhere, as they would Bucky O'Neill or any other of their
favorites. Brodie was running a big mining business; but when the
Maine was blown up, he abandoned everything and telegraphed right
and left to bid his friends get ready for the fight he saw impending.
Then there was Micah Jenkins, the captain of Troop K, a gentle and
courteous South Carolinian, on whom danger acted like wine. In action
he was a perfect game-cock, and he won his majority for gallantry in
battle.
Finally, there was Allyn Capron, who was, on the whole, the best
soldier in the regiment. In fact, I think he was the ideal of what an
American regular army officer should be. He was the fifth in descent
from father to son who had served in the army of the United States,
and in body and mind alike he was fitted to play his part to
perfection. Tall and lithe, a remarkable boxer and walker, a
first-class rider and shot, with yellow hair and piercing blue eyes,
he looked what he was, the archetype of the fighting man. He had under
him one of the two companies from the Indian Territory; and he so soon
impressed himself upon the wild spirit of his followers, that he got
them ahead in discipline faster than any other troop in the regiment,
while at the same time taking care of their bodily wants. His
ceaseless effort was so to train them, care for them, and inspire them
as to bring their fighting efficiency to the highest possible pitch.
He required instant obedience, and tolerated not the slightest evasion
of duty; but his mastery of his art was so thorough and his
performance of his own duty so rigid that he won at once not merely
their admiration, but that soldierly affection so readily given by the
man in the ranks to the superior who cares for his men and leads them
fearlessly in battle.
All--Easterners and Westerners, Northerners and Southerners, officers
and men, cowboys and college graduates, wherever they came from, and
whatever their social position--possessed in common the traits of
hardihood and a thirst for adventure. They were to a man born
adventurers, in the old sense of the word.
The men in the ranks were mostly young; yet some were past their first
youth. These had taken part in the killing of the great buffalo herds,
and had fought Indians when the tribes were still on the war-path. The
younger ones, too, had led rough lives; and the lines in their faces
told of many a hardship endured, and many a danger silently faced with
grim, unconscious philosophy. Some were originally from the East, and
had seen strange adventures in different kinds of life, from sailing
round the Horn to mining in Alaska. Others had been born and bred in
the West, and had never seen a larger town than Santa Fe or a bigger
body of water than the Pecos in flood. Some of them went by their own
name; some had changed their names; and yet others possessed but half
a name, colored by some adjective, like Cherokee Bill, Happy Jack of
Arizona, Smoky Moore, the bronco-buster, so named because cowboys
often call vicious horses "smoky" horses, and Rattlesnake Pete, who
had lived among the Moquis and taken part in the snake-dances. Some
were professional gamblers, and, on the other hand, no less than four
were or had been Baptist or Methodist clergymen--and proved
first-class fighters, too, by the way. Some were men whose lives in
the past had not been free from the taint of those fierce kinds of
crime into which the lawless spirits who dwell on the border-land
between civilization and savagery so readily drift. A far larger
number had served at different times in those bodies of armed men with
which the growing civilization of the border finally puts down its
savagery.
There was one characteristic and distinctive contingent which could
have appeared only in such a regiment as ours. From the Indian
Territory there came a number of Indians--Cherokees, Chickasaws,
Choctaws, and Creeks. Only a few were of pure blood. The others shaded
off until they were absolutely indistinguishable from their white
comrades; with whom, it may be mentioned, they all lived on terms of
complete equality.
Not all of the Indians were from the Indian Territory. One of the
gamest fighters and best soldiers in the regiment was Pollock, a
full-blooded Pawnee. He had been educated, like most of the other
Indians, at one of those admirable Indian schools which have added so
much to the total of the small credit account with which the White
race balances the very unpleasant debit account of its dealings with
the Red. Pollock was a silent, solitary fellow--an excellent penman,
much given to drawing pictures. When we got down to Santiago he
developed into the regimental clerk. I never suspected him of having a
sense of humor until one day, at the end of our stay in Cuba, as he
was sitting in the Adjutant's tent working over the returns, there
turned up a trooper of the First who had been acting as barber. Eyeing
him with immovable face Pollock asked, in a guttural voice: "Do you
cut hair?" The man answered "Yes"; and Pollock continued, "Then you'd
better cut mine," muttering, in an explanatory soliloquy: "Don't want
to wear my hair long like a wild Indian when I'm in civilized
warfare."
Another Indian came from Texas. He was a brakeman on the Southern
Pacific, and wrote telling me he was an American Indian, and that he
wanted to enlist. His name was Colbert, which at once attracted my
attention; for I was familiar with the history of the Cherokees and
Chickasaws during the eighteenth century, when they lived east of the
Mississippi. Early in that century various traders, chiefly Scotchmen,
settled among them, and the half-breed descendants of one named
Colbert became the most noted chiefs of the Chickasaws. I summoned the
applicant before me, and found that he was an excellent man, and, as I
had supposed, a descendant of the old Chickasaw chiefs.
He brought into the regiment, by the way, his "partner," a white man.
The two had been inseparable companions for some years, and continued
so in the regiment. Every man who has lived in the West knows that,
vindictive though the hatred between the white man and the Indian is
when they stand against one another in what may be called their tribal
relations, yet that men of Indian blood, when adopted into white
communities, are usually treated precisely like anyone else.
Colbert was not the only Indian whose name I recognized. There was a
Cherokee named Adair, who, upon inquiry, I found to be descended from
the man who, a century and a half ago, wrote a ponderous folio, to
this day of great interest, about the Cherokees, with whom he had
spent the best years of his life as a trader and agent.
I don't know that I ever came across a man with a really sweeter
nature than another Cherokee named Holderman. He was an excellent
soldier, and for a long time acted as cook for the head-quarters mess.
He was a half-breed, and came of a soldier stock on both sides and
through both races. He explained to me once why he had come to the
war; that it was because his people always had fought when there was a
war, and he could not feel happy to stay at home when the flag was
going into battle.
Two of the young Cherokee recruits came to me with a most kindly
letter from one of the ladies who had been teaching in the academy
from which they were about to graduate. She and I had known one
another in connection with Governmental and philanthropic work on the
reservations, and she wrote to commend the two boys to my attention.
One was on the Academy foot-ball team and the other in the glee-club.
Both were fine young fellows. The foot-ball player now lies buried
with the other dead who fell in the fight at San Juan. The singer was
brought to death's door by fever, but recovered and came back to his
home.
There were other Indians of much wilder type, but their wildness was
precisely like that of the cowboys with whom they were associated.
One or two of them needed rough discipline; and they got it, too. Like
the rest of the regiment, they were splendid riders. I remember one
man, whose character left much to be desired in some respects, but
whose horsemanship was unexceptionable. He was mounted on an
exceedingly bad bronco, which would bolt out of the ranks at drill. He
broke it of this habit by the simple expedient of giving it two
tremendous twists, first to one side and then to the other, as it
bolted, with the result that, invariably, at the second bound its legs
crossed and over it went with a smash, the rider taking the somersault
with unmoved equanimity.
The life histories of some of the men who joined our regiment would
make many volumes of thrilling adventure.
We drew a great many recruits from Texas; and from nowhere did we get
a higher average, for many of them had served in that famous body of
frontier fighters, the Texas Rangers. Of course, these rangers needed
no teaching. They were already trained to obey and to take
responsibility. They were splendid shots, horsemen, and trailers. They
were accustomed to living in the open, to enduring great fatigue and
hardship, and to encountering all kinds of danger.
Many of the Arizona and New Mexico men had taken part in warfare with
the Apaches, those terrible Indians of the waterless Southwestern
mountains--the most bloodthirsty and the wildest of all the red men of
America, and the most formidable in their own dreadful style of
warfare. Of course, a man who had kept his nerve and held his own,
year after year, while living where each day and night contained the
threat of hidden death from a foe whose goings and comings were
unseen, was not apt to lose courage when confronted with any other
enemy. An experience in following in the trail of an enemy who might
flee at one stretch through fifty miles of death-like desert was a
good school out of which to come with profound indifference for the
ordinary hardships of campaigning.
As a rule, the men were more apt, however, to have had experience in
warring against white desperadoes and law-breakers than against
Indians. Some of our best recruits came from Colorado. One, a very
large, hawk-eyed man, Benjamin Franklin Daniels, had been Marshal of
Dodge City when that pleasing town was probably the toughest abode of
civilized man to be found anywhere on the continent. In the course of
the exercise of his rather lurid functions as peace-officer he had
lost half of one ear--"bitten off," it was explained to me. Naturally,
he viewed the dangers of battle with philosophic calm. Such a man was,
in reality, a veteran even in his first fight, and was a tower of
strength to the recruits in his part of the line. With him there came
into the regiment a deputy-marshal from Cripple Creek named Sherman
Bell. Bell had a hernia, but he was so excellent a man that we decided
to take him. I do not think I ever saw greater resolution than Bell
displayed throughout the campaign. In Cuba the great exertions which
he was forced to make, again and again opened the hernia, and the
surgeons insisted that he must return to the United States; but he
simply would not go.
Then there was little McGinty, the bronco-buster from Oklahoma, who
never had walked a hundred yards if by any possibility he could ride.
When McGinty was reproved for his absolute inability to keep step on
the drill-ground, he responded that he was pretty sure he could keep
step on horseback. McGinty's short legs caused him much trouble on the
marches, but we had no braver or better man in the fights.
One old friend of mine had come from far northern Idaho to join the
regiment at San Antonio. He was a hunter, named Fred Herrig, an
Alsatian by birth. A dozen years before he and I had hunted mountain
sheep and deer when laying in the winter stock of meat for my ranch on
the Little Missouri, sometimes in the bright fall weather, sometimes
in the Arctic bitterness of the early Northern winter. He was the most
loyal and simple-hearted of men, and he had come to join his old
"boss" and comrade in the bigger hunting which we were to carry on
through the tropic midsummer.
The temptation is great to go on enumerating man after man who stood
pre-eminent, whether as a killer of game, a tamer of horses, or a
queller of disorder among his people, or who, mayhap, stood out with a
more evil prominence as himself a dangerous man--one given to the
taking of life on small provocation, or one who was ready to earn his
living outside the law if the occasion demanded it. There was tall
Proffit, the sharp-shooter, from North Carolina--sinewy, saturnine,
fearless; Smith, the bear-hunter from Wyoming, and McCann, the Arizona
book-keeper, who had begun life as a buffalo-hunter. There was
Crockett, the Georgian, who had been an Internal Revenue officer, and
had waged perilous war on the rifle-bearing "moonshiners." There were
Darnell and Wood, of New Mexico, who could literally ride any horses
alive. There were Goodwin, and Buck Taylor, and Armstrong the ranger,
crack shots with rifle or revolver. There was many a skilled packer
who had led and guarded his trains of laden mules through the
Indian-haunted country surrounding some out-post of civilization.
There were men who had won fame as Rocky Mountain stage-drivers, or
who had spent endless days in guiding the slow wagon-trains across the
grassy plains. There were miners who knew every camp from the Yukon to
Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose memories were stored the brands
carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assiniboia. There were men who
had roped wild steers in the mesquite brush of the Nueces, and who,
year in and year out, had driven the trail herds northward over
desolate wastes and across the fords of shrunken rivers to the
fattening grounds of the Powder and the Yellowstone. They were
hardened to the scorching heat and bitter cold of the dry plains and
pine-clad mountains. They were accustomed to sleep in the open, while
the picketed horses grazed beside them near some shallow, reedy pool.
They had wandered hither and thither across the vast desolation of the
wilderness, alone or with comrades. They had cowered in the shelter of
cut banks from the icy blast of the norther, and far out on the
midsummer prairies they had known the luxury of lying in the shade of
the wagon during the noonday rest. They had lived in brush lean-tos
for weeks at a time, or with only the wagon-sheet as an occasional
house. They had fared hard when exploring the unknown; they had fared
well on the round-up; and they had known the plenty of the log
ranch-houses, where the tables were spread with smoked venison and
calf-ribs and milk and bread, and vegetables from the garden-patch.
Such were the men we had as recruits: soldiers ready made, as far as
concerned their capacity as individual fighters. What was necessary
was to teach them to act together, and to obey orders. Our special
task was to make them ready for action in the shortest possible time.
We were bound to see fighting, and therefore to be with the first
expedition that left the United States; for we could not tell how long
the war would last.
I had been quite prepared for trouble when it came to enforcing
discipline, but I was agreeably disappointed. There were plenty of
hard characters who might by themselves have given trouble, and with
one or two of whom we did have to take rough measures; but the bulk of
the men thoroughly understood that without discipline they would be
merely a valueless mob, and they set themselves hard at work to learn
the new duties. Of course, such a regiment, in spite of, or indeed I
might almost say because of, the characteristics which made the
individual men so exceptionally formidable as soldiers, could very
readily have been spoiled. Any weakness in the commander would have
ruined it. On the other hand, to treat it from the stand-point of the
martinet and military pedant would have been almost equally fatal.
From the beginning we started out to secure the essentials of
discipline, while laying just as little stress as possible on the
non-essentials. The men were singularly quick to respond to any appeal
to their intelligence and patriotism. The faults they committed were
those of ignorance merely. When Holderman, in announcing dinner to the
Colonel and the three Majors, genially remarked, "If you fellars don't
come soon, everything'll get cold," he had no thought of other than a
kindly and respectful regard for their welfare, and was glad to modify
his form of address on being told that it was not what could be
described as conventionally military. When one of our sentinels, who
had with much labor learned the manual of arms, saluted with great
pride as I passed, and added, with a friendly nod, "Good-evening,
Colonel," this variation in the accepted formula on such occasions was
meant, and was accepted, as mere friendly interest. In both cases the
needed instruction was given and received in the same kindly spirit.
One of the new Indian Territory recruits, after twenty-four hours'
stay in camp, during which he had held himself distinctly aloof from
the general interests, called on the Colonel in his tent, and
remarked, "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!"
That same night, which was hot, mosquitoes were very annoying; and
shortly after midnight both the Colonel and I came to the doors of our
respective tents, which adjoined one another. The sentinel in front
was also fighting mosquitoes. As we came out we saw him pitch his gun
about ten feet off, and sit down to attack some of the pests that had
swarmed up his trousers' legs. Happening to glance in our direction,
he nodded pleasantly and, with unabashed and friendly feeling,
remarked, "Ain't they bad?"
It was astonishing how soon the men got over these little
peculiarities. They speedily grew to recognize the fact that the
observance of certain forms was essential to the maintenance of proper
discipline. They became scrupulously careful in touching their hats,
and always came to attention when spoken to. They saw that we did not
insist upon the observance of these forms to humiliate them; that we
were as anxious to learn our own duties as we were to have them learn
theirs, and as scrupulous in paying respect to our superiors as we
were in exacting the acknowledgment due our rank from those below us;
moreover, what was very important, they saw that we were careful to
look after their interests in every way, and were doing all that was
possible to hurry up the equipment and drill of the regiment, so as to
get into the war.
Rigid guard duty was established at once, and everyone was impressed
with the necessity for vigilance and watchfulness. The policing of the
camp was likewise attended to with the utmost rigor. As always with
new troops, they were at first indifferent to the necessity for
cleanliness in camp arrangements; but on this point Colonel Wood
brooked no laxity, and in a very little while the hygienic conditions
of the camp were as good as those of any regular regiment. Meanwhile
the men were being drilled, on foot at first, with the utmost
assiduity. Every night we had officers' school, the non-commissioned
officers of each troop being given similar schooling by the Captain or
one of the Lieutenants of the troop; and every day we practised hard,
by squad, by troop, by squadron and battalion. The earnestness and
intelligence with which the men went to work rendered the task of
instruction much less difficult than would be supposed. It soon grew
easy to handle the regiment in all the simpler forms of close and open
order. When they had grown so that they could be handled with ease in
marching, and in the ordinary manoeuvres of the drill-ground, we began
to train them in open-order work, skirmishing and firing. Here their
woodcraft and plainscraft, their knowledge of the rifle, helped us
very much. Skirmishing they took to naturally, which was fortunate, as
practically all our fighting was done in open order.
Meanwhile we were purchasing horses. Judging from what I saw I do not
think that we got heavy enough animals, and of those purchased
certainly a half were nearly unbroken. It was no easy matter to handle
them on the picket-lines, and to provide for feeding and watering; and
the efforts to shoe and ride them were at first productive of much
vigorous excitement. Of course, those that were wild from the range
had to be thrown and tied down before they could be shod. Half the
horses of the regiment bucked, or possessed some other of the amiable
weaknesses incident to horse life on the great ranches; but we had
abundance of men who were utterly unmoved by any antic a horse might
commit. Every animal was speedily mastered, though a large number
remained to the end mounts upon which an ordinary rider would have
felt very uncomfortable.
My own horses were purchased for me by a Texas friend, John Moore,
with whom I had once hunted peccaries on the Nueces. I only paid fifty
dollars apiece, and the animals were not showy; but they were tough
and hardy, and answered my purpose well.
Mounted drill with such horses and men bade fair to offer
opportunities for excitement; yet it usually went off smoothly enough.
Before drilling the men on horseback they had all been drilled on
foot, and having gone at their work with hearty zest, they knew well
the simple movements to form any kind of line or column. Wood was busy
from morning till night in hurrying the final details of the
equipment, and he turned the drill of the men over to me. To drill
perfectly needs long practice, but to drill roughly is a thing very
easy to learn indeed. We were not always right about our intervals,
our lines were somewhat irregular, and our more difficult movements
were executed at times in rather a haphazard way; but the essential
commands and the essential movements we learned without any
difficulty, and the men performed them with great dash. When we put
them on horseback, there was, of course, trouble with the horses; but
the horsemanship of the riders was consummate. In fact, the men were
immensely interested in making their horses perform each evolution
with the utmost speed and accuracy, and in forcing each unquiet,
vicious brute to get into line and stay in line, whether he would or
not. The guidon-bearers held their plunging steeds true to the line,
no matter what they tried to do; and each wild rider brought his wild
horse into his proper place with a dash and ease which showed the
natural cavalryman.
In short, from the very beginning the horseback drills were good fun,
and everyone enjoyed them. We marched out through the adjoining
country to drill wherever we found open ground, practising all the
different column formations as we went. On the open ground we threw
out the line to one side or the other, and in one position and the
other, sometimes at the trot, sometimes at the gallop. As the men grew
accustomed to the simple evolutions, we tried them more and more in
skirmish drills, practising them so that they might get accustomed to
advance in open order and to skirmish in any country, while the horses
were held in the rear.
Our arms were the regular cavalry carbine, the "Krag," a splendid
weapon, and the revolver. A few carried their favorite Winchesters,
using, of course, the new model, which took the Government cartridge.
We felt very strongly that it would be worse than a waste of time to
try to train our men to use the sabre--a weapon utterly alien to them;
but with the rifle and revolver they were already thoroughly familiar.
Many of my cavalry friends in the past had insisted to me that the
revolver was a better weapon than the sword--among them Basil Duke, the
noted Confederate cavalry leader, and Captain Frank Edwards, whom I
had met when elk-hunting on the head-waters of the Yellowstone and the
Snake. Personally, I knew too little to decide as to the comparative
merits of the two arms; but I did know that it was a great deal better
to use the arm with which our men were already proficient. They were
therefore armed with what might be called their natural weapon, the
revolver.
As it turned out, we were not used mounted at all, so that our
preparations on this point came to nothing. In a way, I have always
regretted this. We thought we should at least be employed as cavalry
in the great campaign against Havana in the fall; and from the
beginning I began to train my men in shock tactics for use against
hostile cavalry. My belief was that the horse was really the weapon
with which to strike the first blow. I felt that if my men could be
trained to hit their adversaries with their horses, it was a matter of
small amount whether, at the moment when the onset occurred, sabres,
lances, or revolvers were used; while in the subsequent melee I
believed the revolver would outclass cold steel as a weapon. But this
is all guesswork, for we never had occasion to try the experiment.
It was astonishing what a difference was made by two or three weeks'
training. The mere thorough performance of guard and police duties
helped the men very rapidly to become soldiers. The officers studied
hard, and both officers and men worked hard in the drill-field. It
was, of course, rough and ready drill; but it was very efficient, and
it was suited to the men who made up the regiment. Their uniform also
suited them. In their slouch hats, blue flannel shirts, brown
trousers, leggings and boots, with handkerchiefs knotted loosely
around their necks, they looked exactly as a body of cowboy cavalry
should look. The officers speedily grew to realize that they must not
be over-familiar with their men, and yet that they must care for them
in every way. The men, in return, began to acquire those habits of
attention to soldierly detail which mean so much in making a regiment.
Above all, every man felt, and had constantly instilled into him, a
keen pride of the regiment, and a resolute purpose to do his whole
duty uncomplainingly, and, above all, to win glory by the way he
handled himself in battle.