Produced by Don Kostuch
[Transcriber's note]
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly
braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred
in the original book.
Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" spelling
is left unchanged. Apparently conflicting spelling is not resolved,
as in "Gouraud" and "Gourand".
[End Transcriber's note]
[Illustration: LEONARD WOOD (portrait)]
THE CAREER OF LEONARD WOOD
BY
JOSEPH HAMBLEN SEARS
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK
LONDON
1920
Copyright 1919 by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
TO GENERAL LEONARD WOOD
By Corinne Roosevelt Robinson
Your vision keen, unerring when the blind,
Who could not see, turned, groping, from the light.
Your sentient knowledge of the wise and right
Have won to-day the freedom of mankind.
Honor to whom the honor be assigned!
Mightier in exile than the men whose might
Is of the sword alone, and not of sight.
You march beside the victor host aligned.
Had not your spirit soared, our ardent youth
Had faltered leaderless; their eager feet
Attuned to effort for the valiant truth
Through your command rushed swiftly to compete
To hold on high the torch of Liberty--
Great-visioned Soul, yours is the victory!
November 11, 1918
_From "Service and Sacrifice: Poems"_
Copyright. 1915. 1916. 1917. 1918. 1919. by
Charles Scribner's Sons.
By permission of the publishers.
CONTENTS
I. The Subject 11
II. The Indian Fighter 25
III. The Official 51
IV. The Soldier 77
V. The Organizer 101
VI. The Administrator 129
VII. The Statesman 159
VIII. The Patriot 201
IX. The Great War 225
X. The Result 257
THE SUBJECT
{11}
I
THE SUBJECT
In these days immediately following the Great War it is well upon
beginning anything--even a modest biographical sketch--to consider a
few elementals and distinguish them from the changing unessentials, to
keep a sound basis of sense and not be led into hysteria, to look
carefully again at the beams of our house and not be deceived into
thinking that the plaster and the wall paper are the supports of the
building.
Let us consider a few of these elementals that apply to the subject in
hand as well as to the rest of the universe--elemental truths which do
not change, which no Great War can alter in the least, which serve as
guides at all times and will help at every doubtful point. They range
themselves somewhat as follows:
The human being is entitled to the pursuit of happiness--happiness in
the very broadest sense of the word. No one can approach this object
{12} unless he is in some way subordinated to something and unless he
is responsible for something. No man can get satisfaction out of life
unless he is responsible for what he does to some authority higher
than himself and unless there is some one or something that looks to
him for guidance. Perhaps the existence of religion has much to do
with this. Perhaps prayer and all that it means to us belongs in the
category of the first of these elementals. Certainly the family is an
example of the second.
The family is the unit of civilization--always has been and always
will be. The father and the mother have their collective existence,
and their children looking to them for guidance, support and growth,
both physical and moral. The moment the family begins to exist it
becomes a responsibility for its head, and around it centers a large
part of the life and happiness of the human being.
In like manner the state is the unit to which we are subordinated.
These constitute two examples of responsibility and subordination
which are necessary to the {13} acquirement of civilization, of
happiness and of the rewards of life.
Wherever the state has presumed to enter too far into the conduct of
the family it has overstepped its bounds and that particular
civilization has degenerated. Wherever the family has presumed to give
up its subordination to the state and gather unto itself the
responsibility through special privilege, that particular state has
begun to die.
In modern civilization it is as impossible to conceive of a state
without the unit of the family, as it is to consider groups of
families without something that we call a state. It is ludicrous to
think of a strong and virile nation composed of one hundred million
bachelors. We must go back to the feudal days of the middle ages to
get a picture of the family without a state.
In other words, a man, to approach happiness, must have his family in
support of which it is his privilege to take off his coat and work,
and--if fate so decree--live; and he must have his country's flag in
honor of which it is his privilege to take off his hat, and--if need
be--die.
{14}
Love and patriotism--these are the names of two of the sturdy beams of
the house of civilization.
These old familiar laws have been brought forward again by the
outbreak of the Great War. There is a letter in existence written by a
young soldier who volunteered at the start, a letter which he wrote to
his unborn son as he sat in a front line trench in France. It tells
the whole great truth in a line. It says: "My little son, I do not
fully realize just why I am fighting here, but I know that one reason
is to make sure that _you_ will not have to do it by and by." That lad
was responsible for a new family, and was the servant of his
state--and he began his approach to the great happiness when he
thought of writing that letter.
It will be well for us to remember these simple laws as we proceed.
Fifty-eight years ago these laws and several more like them were just
as true as they are now. Fifty-eight years hence they will still be
true, as they will be five thousand eight hundred years hence.
Fifty-eight years ago--to be exact, {15} October 9, 1860--there was
born up in New Hampshire a man child named Leonard Wood, in the town
of Winchester, whence he was transferred at the age of three months to
Massachusetts and finally at the age of eight years to Pocasset on
Cape Cod. This man child is still alive at the time of writing, and
during his fifty-eight years he has stood for these elemental truths
in and out of boyhood, youth and manhood in such a fashion that his
story--always interesting--becomes valuable at a time when, the Great
War being over, many nations, to say nothing of many individuals, are
forgetting, in their admiration of the new plaster and the wall paper,
that the beams of the house of civilization are what hold it strong
and sturdy as the ages proceed.
This place, Cape Cod, where the formative years of Leonard Wood's life
were passed, is a sand bank left by some melting glacier sticking out
into the Atlantic in the shape of a doubled-up arm with a clenched
fist as if it were ready at any moment to strike out and defend New
England against any attack that might come from the eastward. Those
who call it their native place have acquired {16} something of its
spirit. They have ever been ready to oppose any aggression from the
eastward or any other direction, and they have ever been ready to
stand firmly upon the conviction that the integrity of the family and
of the state must be maintained. And young Wood from them and from his
Mayflower Pilgrim ancestors absorbed and was born with a common sense
and a directness of vision that have appeared throughout his life
under whatever conditions he found himself.
There seems to have been nothing remarkable about him either in his
boyhood or in his youth. He achieved nothing out of the ordinary
through that whole period. But there has always been in him somewhere,
the solid basis of sense and reason which kept him to whatever purpose
he set himself to achieve along the lines of the great elemental
truths of life and far away from visionary hallucinations of any sort.
If it was Indian fighting, he worked away at the basis of the question
and got ready and then carried out. If it was war, the same. If it was
administration, he {17} studied the essentials, prepared for them, and
then carried them out.
Like all great achievements, it is simplicity itself and can be told
in words of one syllable. In all lines of his extraordinarily varied
career extending over all the corners of the globe he respected and
built up authority of government and protected and encouraged the
development of the family unit. One might say "Why not? Of course."
The answer is "Who in this country in the last thirty years has done
it to anything like the same extent?"
Many minds during this time have advanced new ideas; many men have
invented amazing things; many able people have opened up new avenues
of thought and vision to the imagination of the world, sometimes to
good and lasting purpose, sometimes otherwise. But who has taken
whatever problem was presented to him and invariably, no matter what
quality was required, brought that problem to a successful conclusion
without upheaval, or chaos, or even much excitement for any one
outside the immediately interested group?
It is not genius; it is organization. It is not {18} the flare of
inventive ability; it is the high vision of one whose code rested
always on elemental, sound and enduring principles and who has not
swerved from these to admire the plaster and the paper on the wall. It
is finally the great quality that makes a man keep his feet on the
ground and his heart amongst the bright stars.
Of such stuff are the men of this world made whom people lean on, whom
people naturally look to in emergency, who guide instinctively and
unerringly, carrying always the faith of those about them because they
deal with sound things, elemental truths and sane methods--because
they give mankind what Leonard Wood's greatest friend called "a square
deal."
It is difficult to treat much of his youth because he is still living
and the family life of any man is his own and not the public's
business. But there is a certain interest attaching to his life-work
for his country in knowing that his great-great-grandfather commanded
a regiment in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill and that his
father was a doctor who served in the Union army during the Civil War.
Out of such heredity has {19} come a doctor who is a Major General in
the United States Army.
At the same time his own life on Cape Cod outside of school at the
Middleboro Academy was marked by what might distinguish any youngster
of that day and place--a strong liking for small boating, for games
out of doors, for riding, shooting and fishing. These came from a fine
healthy body which to this day at his present age is amazing in its
capacity to carry him through physical work. He can to-day ride a
hundred miles at a stretch and walk thirty miles in any twenty-four
hours.
Later in life this was one of the many points of common interest that
drew him and Theodore Roosevelt so closely together. It has no
particular significance other than to make it possible for him in many
lands at many different limes to do that one great thing which makes
men leaders--to show his men the way, to do himself whatever he asked
others to do, never to give an order whether to a military, sanitary,
medical or administrative force that he could not and did not do
himself in so far as one man could do it.
{20}
There was little or no money in the Wood family and the young man had
to plan early to look out for himself. He wanted to go to
sea--probably because he lived on Cape Cod and came from a long line
of New Englanders. He wanted to go into the Navy. He even planned to
join an Arctic expedition at the age of twenty and began to collect
material for his outfit. But finally, following his father's lead, he
settled upon the study of medicine.
This led to the Harvard University Medical School and to his
graduation in 1884. There then followed the regular internship of a
young physician and the beginning of practice in Boston.
Then came the change that separated Wood from the usual lot of well
educated, well prepared doctors who come out of a fine medical school
and begin their lifework of following their profession and building up
a practice, a record, a family and the history which is the highest
ideal man can have and the collective result of which is a sound
nation.
Wood wanted action. He wanted to do {21} something. He had a strong
inclination to the out-of-doors. And it is probably this, together
with his inheritance and the chances of the moment, that led him to
enter the army as a surgeon. As there was no immediate vacancy in the
medical corps he took the job of contract surgeon at a salary of $100
a month and was first ordered to duty at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor
where he stayed only a few days. His request for "action" was granted
in June, 1885, and he wais ordered to Arizona to report to General
Crook on the Mexican border near Fort Huachuca.
And here begins the career of Leonard Wood.
{22}
{23}
THE INDIAN FIGHTER
{24}
{25}
II
THE INDIAN FIGHTER
The problem was what turned out to be the last of the Indian fighting,
involving a long-drawn-out campaign. For over a hundred years, as
every one knows, the unequal struggle of two races for this continent
had been in progress and the history of it is the ever tragic story of
the survival of the fittest. No one can read it without regret at the
destruction, the extermination, of a race. No one, however, can for a
moment hesitate in his judgment of the inevitableness of it, since it
is and always will be the truth that the man or the race or the nation
which cannot keep up with the times must go under--and should go
under. Education, brains, genius, organization, ability, imagination,
vision--whatever it may be called or by how many names--will forever
destroy and push out ignorance, incompetence, stupidity.
The Indians were not able--tragic as the truth {26} is--to move
onward, and so they had to move out and give place to the more worthy
tenant.
The end of this century of struggle was the campaign against the
Apaches in the Southwest along the Mexican border, where they made
their last stand under their able leader Geronimo.
The young doctor was detailed at once for duty on a broiling fourth of
July under Captain--afterwards General--Henry W. Lawton, and the next
day he rode a horse over thirty-five miles. That incident to the
initiated is noteworthy, but even more so is the fact that shortly
afterwards in a hard drive of five succeeding days he averaged
eighteen hours a day either in the saddle or on foot, leading the
horses. It was a stiff test. To make it worse he was given the one
unassigned horse--that is to say, a horse that was known as an
"outlaw"--whose jerky gait made each saddle-sore complain at every
step. The sun beat down fiercely; but, burned and blistered fore and
aft, Leonard Wood could still smile and ask for more action.
The stoicism of the tenderfoot who had come to play their game was not
lost on the troopers {27} with whom he was to spend the next two years
fighting Indians. He "healed in the saddle" at once and a few weeks
later was out-riding and out-marching the best of Captain Lawton's
command, all of whom were old and experienced Indian fighters.
This was not to be the last time that Leonard Wood was to find himself
faced at the outset by tacit suspicion and lack of confidence on the
part of the men he was to command. Years later in the Philippines he
was put up against a similar hostility, with responsibilities a
thousandfold more grave, and in the same dogged way he won
confidence--unquestioning loyalty--by proving that he was better than
the best. "Do it and don't talk about it," was his formula for
success. It was this quality in him that made it possible for Captain
Lawton to write to General Nelson A. Miles, who had then succeeded
General Crook, after the successful Geronimo campaign: "... I can only
repeat that I have before reported officially and what I have said to
you: that his services during the trying campaign were of the highest
order. I speak particularly of services {28} other than those
devolving upon him as a medical officer; services as a combatant or
line officer voluntarily performed. He sought the most difficult work,
and by his determination and courage rendered a successful issue of
the campaign possible."
General Crook, who commanded the troops along the border,
characterized the Apaches as "tigers of the human race." Tigers they
were, led by Geronimo, the man whose name became a by-word for
savagery and cruelty. For a time these Indians had remained subdued
and quiet upon a reservation, and there can be no question but what
the subsequent outbreaks that led to the long campaign in which Wood
took part were due largely to the lack of judgment displayed by the
officials in whose charge they were placed. Both the American settlers
and the Mexicans opposed the location of the Indians on the San Carlos
reservation and lost no opportunity to show their hostility. When
General Crook took command of that district he found he had to deal
with a mean, sullen and treacherous band of savages.
The American forces were constantly embroiled with the Chiricahuas.
Treaties and agreements {29} were made only to be broken whenever
blood lust or "tiswin"--a strong drink made from corn--moved the
tribe to the warpath and fresh depredations. Due to General Crook's
tireless efforts there were several occasions when the Indians
remained quietly on their reservation, but it was only a matter of
months at the best before one of the tribes, usually the Chiricahuas,
would break forth again. Not until the treaty of 1882 with Mexico was
it possible for our troops to pursue them into the Mexican mountains
where they took refuge after each uprising. In 1883 General Crook made
an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the
Chiricahuas and the Warm Springs tribes under Geronimo and Natchez to
the Apache reservation.
Two years of comparative quiet followed. The Indians followed
agricultural pursuits and the settlers, who had come to establish
themselves on ranches along the border, went out to their plowing and
fence building unarmed. In May, 1886, the Indians indulged in an
extensive and prolonged "tiswin" drunk. The savagery that lurked in
their hearts broke loose and they escaped from {30} their reservation
in small bands, leaving smoking trails of murder, arson and pillage
behind them. Acts of ugly violence followed. General Crook threatened
to kill the last one of them, if it took fifty years, and at one
moment it seemed as though he had them under control. "Tiswin" once
again set them loose and they stampeded.
Their daring and illusiveness kept the American and Mexican troops
constantly in action. One band of eleven Indians crossed into the
United States, raided an Apache reservation, killed Indians as well as
thirty-eight whites, captured two hundred head of stock and returned
to Mexico after having traveled four weeks and covered over 1,200
miles.
It was into such warfare that Wood was plunged. No sooner had he
arrived and begun his work than he put in a request for line duty in
addition to his duties as a medical officer. This was granted
immediately, because the need of men who could do something was too
great to admit of much punctiliousness in the matter of military
custom. Before the arrival of his commission as Assistant Surgeon,
January, 1886, he {31} had served as commanding officer of infantry in
a desperately hard pursuit in the Sierra Madres, ending in an attack
on an Indian camp. He was repeatedly assigned to the most strenuous,
fatiguing duty. After having marched on foot one day twenty-five miles
with Indian scouts he rode seventy-three miles with a message at
night, coming back at dawn the next day, just in time to break camp
and march thirty-four miles to a new camp. He was given at his own
request command of infantry under Captain Lawton, and this assignment
to line duty was sanctioned by General Miles, who had recently taken
over the command of the troops along the border.
General Miles was one of the greatest Indian fighters the country has
ever known. He was peculiarly fitted to assume this new job of
suppressing the Apache. He judged and selected the men who were to be
a part of this campaign by his own well-established standards. As its
leader he selected Captain Lawton, then serving with the Fourth United
States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, primarily because Captain Lawton
believed that these Indians could be subjugated. {32} He had met their
skill and cunning and physical strength through years of such warfare
under General Crook, and possessed the necessary qualifications to
meet the demands of the trying campaign that faced him. After speaking
of Captain Lawton, General Miles says in his published recollections:
"I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type of American
manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army.
He was a young officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a
graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great
intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and resolute spirit. He was
also perhaps as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as
could easily be found."
"... His services and observations and example were most commendable
and valuable, and added much to the physical success of the
enterprise."
General Field Orders No. 7, issued April 20, 1886, by General Miles
for the guidance of the troops in his command, tell clearly and
concisely the character and demands of the time.
{33}
"The chief object of the troops will be to capture or destroy any band
of hostile Apache Indians found in this section of the country, and to
this end the most vigorous and persistent efforts will be required of
all officers and soldiers until this object is accomplished.
"... The cavalry will be used in light scouting parties with a
sufficient force held in readiness at all times to make the most
persistent and effective pursuit.
"To avoid any advantage the Indians may have by a relay of horses,
where a troop or squadron commander is near the hostile Indians, he
will be justified in dismounting one half of his command and selecting
the lightest and best riders to make pursuit by the most vigorous
forced marches until the strength of all the animals of his command
shall have been exhausted.
"In this way a command should, under a judicious leader, capture a
band of Indians or drive them from 160 to 200 miles in forty-eight
hours through a country favorable for cavalry movements; and the
horses of the troops will be trained for this purpose."
{34}
To get a picture of young Wood at this time it is necessary to look at
the situation through the eyes of that day and through the eyes of
youth as well.
A young man of twenty-four had been brought up by the sea in what we
will call for the sake of politeness conservative New England. He had
all the sound and sane basis of character that comes from what in this
country was an old and established civilization. He had been educated
in his profession at the most academic and conservative institution in
the United States; a profession which while not an exact science is
nevertheless a science requiring sane methods and the elimination of
risks. He had begun the regular work of this profession. He possessed
also what every young man with a healthy body of that day possessed--
and still possesses--a passion for romance, for the road, for the
great adventure which at that time in this country still centered
around the pistol shooting, broncho riding, Indian fighting cowboy.
We who are old have forgotten the paper covered stories we used to
read surreptitiously {35} about the "Broncho Buster's Revenge," or
"The Three-Fingered Might of the West." But we did read them and long
for the great life of the plains. Even Jesse James was a hero to many
of us.
But for a New Englander educated at Harvard to the practice of
medicine to pick up his deeply driven stakes and actually go into this
realm of romance was unusual in the extreme; and to be so well trained
and in such good condition, with such high courage as to make good at
once amongst those men who looked down on an Eastern tender-foot was
sufficiently rare to promise much for the future.
The young man had the love of romance that all young lives have, but
he had the unusual stimulus to it that led him to make it for the
moment his actual life. And those who study his whole life will find
again and again that when the parting of the ways came he invariably
took the road of adventure, provided that it was always in the service
of his country. Such then was the makeup and the condition of this
young man when in the spring of 1886 Captain Lawton, having {36}
received orders to assume command of the expedition into Mexico
against the hostile Apache, included Wood as one of his four officers.
The force consisted of forty-five troopers, twenty Indian scouts,
thirty infantrymen and two pack trains. And thus began the
two-thousand-mile chase into the fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua
which ended with the surrender of Geronimo.
General Miles' campaign methods differed from those of General Crook
in many ways. He always assumed the aggressive. His motto was, "Follow
the Indian wherever he goes and strike him whenever you can. No matter
how bad the country, go on." Under these instructions the troops went
over the border and down into the depths of the Sonora, jumping the
Indian whenever an opportunity offered, never giving him any rest.
Wherever he went the troops followed. If he struck the border, a well
arranged system of heliostat stations passed the word along to a body
of waiting or passing scouts. General Miles' methods differed from
those of General Crook also in the matter of the use of the heliostat,
a system of signaling based on flashes of the sun's rays from {37}
mirrors. He had used them experimentally while stationed in the
Department of the Columbia, and now determined to make them of
practical use at his new station. Over the vast tracts of rough,
unpopulated land of Arizona and Mexico the signals flashed, keeping
different detachments in touch with their immediate commands, and the
campaign headquarters in touch with its base.
Even before Captain Lawton's command could be made ready the Indians
themselves precipitated the fight. Instead of remaining in the Sierra
Madres, where they were reasonably safe from assault, they commenced a
campaign of violence south of the boundary. This gave both the
American troops and the Mexicans who were operating in conjunction
with them exact knowledge of their whereabouts. On the 27th of April
they came northward, invading the United States. Innumerable outrages
were committed by them which are now part of the history of that
heart-breaking campaign. One, for example, typical of the rest was the
case of the Peck family. Their ranch was surrounded, the family
captured and a number of the ranch hands killed. The husband {38} was
tied and compelled to witness the tortures to which his wife was
submitted. His daughter, thirteen years old, was abducted by the band
and carried nearly three hundred miles. In the meantime Captain
Lawton's command with Wood in charge of the Apache scouts was pursuing
them hotly. A short engagement between the Mexican troops and the
Indians followed. On the heels of this the American troops came up and
the little Peck girl was recaptured. Nightfall, however, prevented any
decisive engagement, and before daybreak the Indians had, slipped
away.
The Indians found it better to divide into two bands, one under
Natchez, which turned to the north, and the other under Geronimo,
which went to the west. The first band was intercepted by Lieutenant
Brett of the Second Cavalry after a heartbreaking pursuit. At one time
the pursuing party was on the trail for twenty-six hours without a
halt, and eighteen hours without water. The men suffered so intensely
from thirst that many of them opened their veins to moisten their lips
with their own blood. But the Indians suffered far more. In Geronimo's
story of those {39} days, published many years later, he wrote: "We
killed cattle to eat whenever we were in need of food, but we
frequently suffered greatly for need of water. At one time we had no
water for two days and nights, and our horses almost died of thirst."
Finally on the evening of June 6th the cavalry came into contact with
Geronimo's band and the Indians were scattered.
For four months Captain Lawton and Leonard Wood pursued the savages
over mountain ranges and through the canyons. During this time the
troops marched 1,396 miles. The conditions under which they worked
were cruel. The intense heat, the lack of water, and the desperately
rough country covered with mountains and cactus hindered the command,
but the men had the consolation of knowing that the Indians were in
worse plight. Furthermore, the trustworthiness of the Indian scouts, a
tattered, picturesque band of renegades, was coming under suspicion.
Perhaps it was because of their unreliability that an attack made upon
the 18th of July was not an entire success. The Indians escaped, but
their most valued {40} possessions, food and horses, fell into the
hands of our troopers.
It was the beginning of the end. A month later they received word that
the Indians were working towards Santa Teresa, and Captain Lawton
moved forward to head them off. Leonard Wood's personal account of
this engagement follows:
"On the 13th of July we effected the surprise of the camp of Geronimo
and Natchez which eventually led to their surrender and resulted in
the immediate capture of everything in their camps except themselves
and the clothes they wore. It was our practice to keep two scouts two
or three days in advance of the command, and between them and the main
body four or five other scouts. The Indian scouts in advance would
locate the camp of the hostiles and send back word to the next party,
who in their turn would notify the main command; then a forced march
would be made in order to surround and surprise the camp. On the day
mentioned, following this method of procedure, we located the Indians
on the Yaqui River in a section of the country almost impassable for
man or beast and {41} in a position which the Indians evidently felt
to be perfectly secure. The small tableland on which the camp was
located bordered on the Yaqui River and was surrounded on all sides by
high cliffs with practically only two points of entrance, one up the
river and the other down. The officers were able to creep up and look
down on the Indian camp which was about two thousand feet below their
point of observation. All the fires were burning, the horses were
grazing and the Indians were in the river swimming with evidently not
the slightest apprehension of attack. Our plan was to send scouts to
close the upper opening and then to send the infantry, of which I had
the command, to attack the camp from below.
"Both the Indians and the infantry were in position and advanced on
the hostile camp, which, situated as it was on this tableland covered
with canebrake and boulders, formed an ideal position for Indian
defense. As the infantry moved forward the firing of the scouts was
heard, which led us to believe that the fight was on, and great,
accordingly, was our disgust to find, on our arrival, that the firing
was accounted for by the fact that {42} the scouts were killing the
stock, the Apaches themselves having escaped through the northern exit
just a few minutes before their arrival. It was a very narrow escape
for the Indians, and was due to mere accident. One of their number,
who had been out hunting, discovered the red headband of one of our
scouts as he was crawling around into position. He immediately dropped
his game and notified the Apaches, and they were able to get away just
before the scouts closed up the exit. Some of these Indians were
suffering from old wounds. Natchez himself was among this number, and
their sufferings through the pursuit which followed led to their
discouragement and, finally, to their surrender."
The persistent action of our troops was beginning to have its effect,
and when the Indians ceased to commit depredations it was good
evidence to those who knew Indians and Indian nature that they were
beginning to think of surrender.
One night the troops ran into a Mexican pack-train, which brought the
first reports that Indians were near Fronteras, a little village in
Sonora. Two of their women had come into town to find the {43} wife of
an old Mexican who was with the Americans as a guide, hoping, through
her, to open up communications looking to a surrender. As soon as the
report was received Captain Lawton sent Lieutenant Gatewood of the
Sixth Cavalry, who had joined the command, with two friendly Apaches
of the same tribe as those who were out on the warpath, to go ahead
and send his men into the hostile camp and demand their surrender.
This he eventually succeeded in doing, but the Indians refused to
surrender, saying that they would talk only with Lawton, or, as they
expressed it, "the officer who had followed them all summer." This
eventually led to communication being opened and one morning at
daybreak Geronimo, Natchez and twelve other Indians appeared, in camp.
Their inclinations seemed at least to be peaceful enough to allow the
entire body of Indians to come down and camp within two miles of the
Americans. It was agreed that they should meet General Miles and
formally surrender to him and that the Indians and the troops should
move further north to a more convenient meeting place. To give
confidence to the Indians in this new state {44} of affairs, Captain
Lawton, Leonard Wood and two other officers agreed to travel with
them. Due to a mistake in orders, the American troopers started off in
the wrong direction, and Captain Lawton was obliged to leave in search
of them. This left the three remaining officers practically as
hostages in the Indian camp. Speaking of this incident. General Wood
says:
"Instead of taking advantage of our position, they assured us that
while we were in their camp it was our camp, and that as we had never
lied to them they were going to keep faith with us. They gave us the
best they had to eat and treated us as well as we could wish in every
way. Just before giving us these assurances, Geronimo came to me and
asked to see my rifle. It was a Hotchkiss and he had never seen its
mechanism. When he asked me for the gun and some ammunition, I must
confess I felt a little nervous, for I thought it might be a device to
get hold of one of our weapons. I made no objection, however, but let
him have it, showed him how to use it, and he fired at a mark, just
missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a great joke, rolling
on the {45} ground, laughing heartily and saying 'good gun.'
"Late the next afternoon we came up with our command, and we then
proceeded toward the boundary line. The Indians were very watchful,
and when we came near any of our troops we found the Indians were
always aware of their presence before we knew of it ourselves."
For eleven days Captain Lawton's command moved north, with Geronimo's
and Natchez's camps moving in a parallel course. During these last
days of Geronimo's leadership his greatest concern was for the welfare
of his people. The most urgent request that he had to make of Captain
Lawton was to ask repeatedly for the assurance that his people would
not be murdered.
Captain Lawton in his official report says of Wood's work in the
campaign:
"No officer of infantry having been sent with the detachment ...
Assistant Surgeon Wood was, at his own request, given command of the
infantry. The work during June having been done by the cavalry, they
were too much exhausted to be used again without rest, and they were
left in camp at Oposura to recuperate.
{46}
"During this short campaign, the suffering was intense. The country
was indescribably rough and the weather swelteringly hot, with heavy
rains for day or night. The endurance of the men was tried to the
utmost limit. Disabilities resulting from excessive fatigue reduced
the infantry to fourteen men, and as they were worn out and without
shoes when the new supplies reached me July 29th, they were returned
to the supply camp for rest, and the cavalry under Lieutenant A. L.
Smith, who had just joined his troop, continued the campaign. Heavy
rains having set in, the trail of the hostiles, who were all on foot,
was entirely obliterated.
"I desire particularly to invite the attention of the Department
Commander to Assistant Surgeon Leonard Wood, the only officer who has
been with me through the whole campaign. His courage, energy and loyal
support during the whole time; his encouraging example to the command
when work was the hardest and prospects darkest; his thorough
confidence and belief in the final successes of the expedition, and
his untiring efforts to make {47} it so, have placed me under
obligations so great that I cannot even express them."
Through the formal language of a military report crops out the respect
of a commanding officer who knew whereof he spoke, the acknowledgment
that here was a young subordinate who never despaired, never gave up,
who always did his part and more than his part, and who placed his
commanding officer under obligations which he was unable "even to
express." That was a great deal for any young man to secure. To-day,
after the Great War, there are many such extracts from official
reports and all are unquestionably deserved. But they are the result
of a nation awakened to patriotism when all went in together. In 1886,
when the nation was at peace, when commercial pursuits were calling
all young men to make their fortune, young Leonard Wood answered a
much less universal call to do his work in a fight that had none of
the flare or glory of the front line trench in Flanders.
Out of it all came to him at a very early age practice in handling men
in rough country in rough times--men who were not puppets even {48}
though they were regular army privates. They had to be handled at
times with an iron hand, at times with the softest of gloves; and an
officer to gain their confidence and respect had to show them that he
could beat them at their own game and be one of them--and still
command.
The Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him years later for this
Indian work is a fair return of what he accomplished, for this Medal
of Honor, the then only prize for personal bravery and high fighting
qualities which his country could give him, has always been the rare
and much coveted award of army men.
It was in Wood's case the mark of conspicuous fighting qualities,
conspicuous bravery and marked attention to duty--a sign of success of
a high order for a New England doctor of twenty-five.
{49}
THE OFFICIAL
{50}
{51}
III
THE OFFICIAL
Chance no doubt at times plays an important part in the making of a
man. Yet perhaps Cassias' remark, through the medium of Shakespeare,
that "The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are
underlings," has the truer ring. Chance no doubt comes to all of us
again and again, but it is the brain that takes the chance which
deserves the credit and not the accidental event, opportunity or
occasion offering.
It was not chance that sent Leonard Wood to Arizona to fight Indians.
It was the result of long hours of meditation in Boston when, as a
young doctor, he decided finally to leave the usual routine of a
physician's career and strike out in another and less main-traveled
road. There was nothing of luck or chance in this decision, the
carrying out of which taught him something that he used later to the
advantage of himself and his country.
Out of the Indian experiences came to him in {62} the most vigorous
possible way through actual observation the necessity for bodily
health. No man could ride or walk day in and day out across waterless
deserts and keep his courage and determination, to say nothing of his
good common sense, without being in the best of physical condition. No
man could get up in the morning after a terrific night's march, and
collect his men and cheer and encourage them unless he was absolutely
fit and in better condition than they.
He learned, too, that all matters of outfit, care of person, of
equipment, of horses required the most constant attention day by day,
hour by hour. He had to deal with an enemy who belonged to this
country, who knew and was accustomed to its climatic conditions as
well as its topography, and he had to beat him at his own game, or
fail.
He learned that preparation, while it should never delay action, can
never be overdone. This must have been drilled into the young man by
the hardest and most grueling experiences, because it has been one of
the gospels of his creed {53} since that time and is to this day his
text upon all occasions.
He learned, too, something deeper than even these basic essentials of
the fighting creed. He developed what has always been a part of
himself--the conviction that authority is to be respected, that
allegiance to superior officers and government is the first essential
of success, that organization is the basis of smoothly running
machinery of any kind, and that any weakening of these principles is
the sign of decay, of failure, and of disintegration.
He learned that a few men, well trained, thoroughly organized, fit and
ready, can beat a host of individualists though each of the latter may
excel in ability any of the former, and there is in this connection a
curiously interesting significance in the man's passionate fondness
throughout his whole life for the game of football. At Middleboro, in
California, in service in the South and in Washington, he was at every
opportunity playing football, because in addition to its physical
qualities, this game above all others depends for {54} its success
upon organization, preparation and what is called "team play."
Through these early days it is to be noted, therefore, as a help in
understanding his great work for his country which came later that his
sense of the value of organization grew constantly stronger and
stronger along with a solid belief in the necessity for subordination
to his superior officers and through them to his state and his flag.
The respect which he acquired for the agile Indians went hand in hand
with the knowledge that in the end they could not fail to be captured
and defeated, because they had neither the sense of organization, nor
the intelligence to accept and respect authority which not only would
have given them success, but would in reality have made the whole
campaign unnecessary, had the Indian mind been able to conceive them
in their true light and the Indian character been willing to observe
their never-changing laws.
The result, however, was that the spirit of the Indians was broken by
the white man's relentless determination.
The hostile Apaches were finally disposed of by {55} sending them out
of the territory. They were treated as prisoners of war and the
guarantees that General Miles had given them as conditions of
surrender were respected by the Government, although there was a great
feeing in favor of making them pay the full penalty for their
outrages. President Grover Cleveland expressed himself as hoping that
"nothing will be done with Geronimo which will prevent our treating
him as a prisoner of war, if we cannot hang him, which I would much
prefer."
At the end of the campaign General Miles set about reorganizing his
command. For several months Wood was engaged in practice maneuvers.
The General wished to expand his heliographic system of signaling, and
to that end commenced an extensive survey of the vast unpopulated
tracts of Arizona, which his troops might have to cover in time of
action. Wood was one of the General's chief assistants in this survey,
and in 1889, when he was ordered away, he probably knew as much of
Arizona and the southwestern life as any man ever stationed there.
The orders which took him from the border {56} country made him one of
the staff surgeons at Headquarters in Los Angeles. This post promised
to be inactive and uninteresting but Captain Wood managed to
distinguish himself in two respects, first as a surgeon and second as
an athlete. This period of his life varied from month to month in some
instances, but in the main it was the usual existence of an army
official in the capacity of military surgeon. It extended over a
period of eleven years, from 1887 to 1898. These were the eleven years
between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven--very critical years
in the existence of a man. It was during these years that he met Miss
Louise A. Condit Smith, a niece of Chief Justice Field, who afterwards
became his wife and began with him a singularly simple and homelike
family life that is the second of his vital interests in this world.
He has never allowed his family life to interfere with his service to
his country. And, paradoxical as it may seem, he has never allowed his
lifework for his state to interfere with the happy and even tenor of
his home existence. Children came in due course and the family unit
became complete--that quiet, straightforward {57} existence of the
family which is the characteristic of American life to-day, as it is
of any other well-organized civilized nation.
In the practice of his profession he was able to do a lasting service
to his commanding officer. General Miles suffered a grave accident to
his leg when a horse fell upon it. It was the opinion of the surgeon
who attended him that amputation would be necessary. But the General
was of no mind to beat a one-legged retreat in the midst of a highly
interesting and successful career. Captain Wood had inspired
confidence in him as an Indian fighter--a confidence so strong that he
thought it might not be misplaced if it became confidence in him as a
doctor--and so Wood was summoned.
"They say they will have to cut off this leg, but they are not going
to do it," said the General. "I am going to leave it up to you. You'll
have to save it."
A few weeks later General Miles was up and about, and under his young
surgeon's care the wound healed and the leg was saved.
While stationed at Los Angeles headquarters {68} Wood found himself
with enough time for much hard sport. It was a satisfying kind of life
after the strenuous months of border service.
In 1888 he was ordered back to the border where he served with the
10th Cavalry in the Apache Kid outbreak. After a few months of active
service, he was ordered to Fort McDowell and then, in 1889, to
California again.
From California he was ordered to Fort McPherson, near Atlanta,
Georgia, where he again distinguished himself at football. He trained
the first team in the Georgia Institute of Technology, became its
Captain and during the two years of his Captaincy lost but one game
and defeated the champion team of the University of Georgia.
An incident has been told by his fellow players at Fort McPherson
which shows exceedingly well a certain Spartan side to Wood's nature.
One afternoon at a football game he received a deep cut over one eye.
He returned to his office after the game and, after coolly sterilizing
his instrument and washing the wound, stood before a mirror and calmly
took four stitches in his eyelid.
Such were the characteristics, such the {59} experience, of the young
man when in 1896 he was ordered to Washington--that morgue of the
government official--to become Assistant Attending Surgeon. The holder
of this position often shares with the Navy Surgeons the
responsibility of medical attention to the President, and in addition
he acts as medical adviser to army officers and their families and is
the official physician to the Secretary of War.