Rough Riders

Mark Lee Gardner

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062312105
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

THE AWARD-WINNING, NEWDEFINITIVE HISTORY OF TEDDY ROOSEVELT AND THEROUGH RIDERS

"Thrilling.... A CLASSIC." — True West

WINNER: Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award;New Mexico-Arizona Book Award; andColorado Book Award

The now-legendary Rough Riders were a volunteer regiment recruited in 1898 to help drive the Spaniards out of Cuba. Drawn from America's southwestern territories and led by the irrepressible Theodore Roosevelt, these men included not only cowboys and other Westerners, but also several Ivy Leaguers and clubmen, many of them friends of "TR." Roosevelt and his men quickly came to symbolize American ruggedness, daring, and individualism. He led them to victory in the famed Battle of San Juan Hill, which made TR a national hero and cemented the Rough Riders' iconic place in history.

Now Mark Lee Gardner synthesizes previously unknown primary accounts—private letters, diaries, and period newspaper reports from public and private archives across the country—to breathe fresh life into the Rough Riders and pay tribute to their daring feats and indomitable leader.

Chapter One

Some Turn of Fortune

I think I smell war in the air.

FREDERIC REMINGTON

Frank Brito rode through the darkness, his cow pony’s shod hooves making a slow, steady clopping on the hard dirt. Occasionally there would be a sudden scraping sound when its hooves struck a rocky outcropping, or a jolt to the rider when the pony stepped into a small ditch or arroyo.

Brito was riding through the rough country between Silver City, New Mexico Territory, and the mining town of Pinos Altos (“tall pines”), where his parents lived. It was now nearly midnight, and he was dog tired: he had been in the saddle for hours. But he was almost home, just a few more miles.

The twenty-one-year-old Brito had been born at Pinos Altos. His parents, natives of Mexico, were of Yaqui Indian heritage. His father, Santiago, had worked various gold claims at Pinos Altos since long before Frank’s birth. As a young man, Frank had set type in the small office of the weekly Pinos Altos Miner, and he had grown up to be a handsome fellow, standing five feet eight inches tall with a dark complexion like his parents, coal black hair, and striking blue eyes.

That spring of 1898, Frank had been pulling in a dollar a day as a cowpuncher for southwestern New Mexico’s Circle Bar outfit. But he had received a message from his father to come back to Pinos Altos immediately. His father knew Frank was a ten-hour horseback ride from home, so Frank knew he wouldn’t have sent for him unless it was something important. Finally, as Frank’s pony neared the old place, he could see that the house was all lit up, oil lamps glowing in every room. Frank’s first thought was not a good one: surely someone must have died.

Santiago Brito had been waiting anxiously for his son. When he heard Frank’s pony approach the house, he came out onto the porch. Before Frank could slide out of the saddle, Santiago told him that the United States had declared war against Spain. He had gotten the news from nearby Fort Bayard, so there was no doubt about it. More important, Santiago had learned that the government had authorized a volunteer regiment to be composed of cowboys and crack shots from the western territories. Santiago told his son that first thing in the morning, he and his older brother, Joe, were going to ride to Silver City and enlist.

“In those days,” Frank would recall decades later, “you didn’t talk back to your father, so we did it.”

This war with Spain was no surprise to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. For months, he had been doing everything in his power—not always with the direct knowledge or approval of the secretary—to make the navy ready for the great conflict he was certain was coming. And he also let it be known that he had no intention of observing the war from afar. Crazy as it sounded—and more than a few did think Roosevelt was crazy—this lightning-rod bureaucrat intended to go where the bullets were flying. He had been waiting for a war, any war, his entire adult life, and now that it was here, nothing was going to keep him from the battlefield.

Many would blame Roosevelt’s outsized martial spirit on the family’s supposed stain of his father not taking up arms in the Civil War. Theodore Senior was a staunch Lincoln Republican married to a staunch southern patriot from Georgia, and rather than deepen the divide within his family by becoming a Yankee soldier, he had paid a substitute to serve in his place (an option many well-off men in the North took advantage of ). Theodore Junior would later write, “I had always felt that if there were a serious war I wished to be in a position to explain to my children why I did take part in it, and not why I did not take part in it.”

But Roosevelt’s war fever was actually due to America’s fever for war, or at least its long glorification of all things military. The Civil War had erupted just three years after Roosevelt’s birth in a New York City brownstone, and that terrible conflict had exerted a strong influence on a most impressionable boy. Two of his uncles on his mother’s side served in the Confederate navy, and little Theodore witnessed his mother, aunt, and grandmother pack small boxes of necessities destined for the wrong side of federal lines (surreptitiously, of course, while Theodore Senior was away).

Nearly everything about the Civil War seemed glorious to a boy far removed from the actual fighting. The best and most popular songs of the day were martial songs, from the rousing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and the poignant “Just Before the Battle, Mother” to the tragic “The Vacant Chair.” The oversized pages of Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper were chock-full of spectacularly detailed engravings of saber-wielding cavalrymen at full gallop, smoke-belching cannons, and corpse-strewn battlefields. And there were the dignified portraits of the war’s many heroes, both North and South: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Lee, Jackson, Stuart, and the like.

After the Civil War, veterans were showered with adulation for the rest of their lives. The erecting of commemorative monuments and markers on numerous battlefields became a minor industry. And there were the Fourth of July parades, the reunions, and, for many, high political office. In the United States, the quickest way to fame and votes at election time had always been the winning of laurels on the battlefield.

No wonder young men born too late for the great Civil War hoped they would be given their own chance to prove themselves, in their own war, on their own fields of valor. Theodore Roosevelt clearly was one of these.

In 1882, as if his job as New York State’s youngest assemblyman wasn’t enough of a responsibility, he joined the New York National Guard, eventually rising to the rank of captain. But the Guard mostly set up camps and drilled, which was a lot like playing soldier. No enemy. No thrill of battle. No glory.

Then, in the summer of 1886, Roosevelt sniffed an opportunity to get into a real fight. At the time, he was cattle ranching in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. Roosevelt was one of a number of well-to-do young easterners who were drawn to the Wild West for its business opportunities—and adventure. As a passionate hunter, the Little Missouri River country was appealing to him with its last small herds of buffalo, as well as deer, elk, and even bighorn sheep. “It was a land of vast silent spaces,” he wrote, “of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman.”

And it was an escape. Roosevelt had lost his first wife, Alice, and his mother on the same cold February day in 1884, his wife to Bright’s disease after giving birth to their daughter, his mother to typhoid fever. Roosevelt had met and fallen in love with Alice while a student at Harvard; they had been married less than three years. The page in Roosevelt’s diary for February 14, the date of those two tragic losses, contains only a black “X” and the words, “The light has gone out of my life.” For Roosevelt, the long days on a working cattle ranch and his numerous hunting excursions helped him push away the sadness and reinvigorate himself.

But during his brief career as a rancher, Roosevelt never completely cut his ties to the East or its politics, and his blood rose when he read the newspaper reports of growing tension between the United States and Mexico over the false imprisonment of an American newspaper editor in El Paso del Norte, Mexico. The United States was demanding his release, and Mexico was refusing. Texans called for war, and rumors swirled of troops mobilizing on both sides of the border.

Roosevelt dashed off a letter to Secretary of War William Endicott on August 10, 1886, “offering to raise some companies of horse riflemen out here in the event of trouble with Mexico.” He confided to friend Henry Cabot Lodge, “I haven’t the least idea there will be any trouble; but as my chance of doing anything in the future worth doing seems to grow considerably smaller, I intend to grasp at every opportunity that turns up.” Alas, diplomacy prevailed, and Mexico released its prisoner after a three-day trial. “If a war had come off,” Roosevelt fantasized to Lodge, “I would surely have had behind me as utterly reckless a set of desperadoes, as ever sat in the saddle.”

Roosevelt had always had this something “worth doing” close in his mind. But nine more years would pass before he saw another opportunity to do anything about it. That moment came in 1895 as Spain was fighting a new insurrection in Cuba. On March 8, a Spanish gunboat spotted the American mail ship Alliança as it steamed past Cuba’s east coast and fired upon it repeatedly. Spain knew the Cuban rebels were receiving supplies from vessels sailing from Florida, but the Alliança was six miles out to sea, and it was traveling north, away from Cuba. Fortunately, the Alliança was the faster ship and quickly outran the gunboat. The United States demanded an apology; Spain wasn’t forthcoming with one.

By this time, the thirty-six-year-old Roosevelt was back in the government in Washington and serving in Grover Cleveland’s administration as a U.S. Civil Service commissioner. He turned not to the secretary of war, however, but to New York governor Levi P. Morton. In a March 19 letter to the governor, Roosevelt jotted this postscript, which he marked “Private”:

In the very improbable event of a war with Spain I am going to beg you with all my power to do me the greatest favor possible; get me a position in New York’s quota of the force sent out. Remember, I make application now. I was three years captain in the 8th Regiment N. Y. State militia, and I must have a commission in the force that goes to Cuba! But of course there won’t be any war.

Roosevelt was right. There wouldn’t be any war, not now, but Americans had become sympathetic with Cuba’s struggle for independence, fueled in part by the yellow press’s graphic accounts of “cruel wrongs” and “barbarities” committed against the Cubans by the Spanish government. Spain was the last Old World country with colonies in the New World and, as such, was a “weak and decadent” relic, according to Roosevelt.

“I am a quietly rampant ‘Cuba Libre’ man,” he wrote his sister Anna Roosevelt Cowles on January 2, 1897:

I doubt whether the Cubans would do very well in the line of self-government; but anything would be better than continuance of Spanish rule. I believe that [President] Cleveland ought now to recognize Cuba’s independence and interfere; sending our fleet promptly to Havana. There would not in my opinion be very serious fighting; and what loss we encountered would be thrice over repaid by the ultimate results of our action.

Three months after sharing his not-so-quiet views with his sister, Roosevelt accepted the appointment of assistant secretary of the navy in the new administration of President William McKinley. It was an ideal position for the author of The Naval War of 1812, which was published in 1882 and was the first of his many books. But more important, the secretaryship made him an insider, privy to the administration’s every move—or lack thereof, much to his vexation—in its increasingly strained relations with Spain.

Roosevelt’s new status in the nation’s capital added to his already impressive circle of prominent friends and acquaintances: navy and army men, journalists, more politicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, and so on. Some he found stimulating, others not; some of like mind, others not. One he found both remarkably stimulating and of like mind was thirty-six-year-old army surgeon Captain Leonard Wood, who served as personal physician for McKinley (and his seizure-suffering wife) and for the secretary of war and his family.

Roosevelt and Wood first met at a Washington dinner party in June 1897 and quickly became fast friends. It didn’t hurt that Wood was a fellow Harvard man and an excellent football player, but Roosevelt was most impressed by Wood’s experiences chasing the Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo eleven years earlier.

Wood had asked for and received the command of an infantry detachment that was lacking an officer and led it for several weeks in pursuit of Geronimo and his followers. One night, he volunteered to ride alone through seventy miles of Apache land to deliver important dispatches. By the end of the campaign, Wood had covered thousands of miles of mountain and desert country in northern Mexico and southern Arizona, much of it on foot and in temperatures at times exceeding one hundred degrees. His courage and gallantry during the campaign would earn him the Medal of Honor.

Not surprisingly, the blue-eyed medico was an outstanding specimen of manhood, standing five feet ten inches tall (an inch taller than Roosevelt) with a “superb chest.” His long, serious face matched his disposition. Roosevelt chum Owen Wister observed that the captain “was inclined to be silent, inclined to be grave.” In this way, he was the opposite of Roosevelt. Nevertheless, Wood and the assistant secretary were each highly competitive, and they shared a near-sadistic passion for testing the limits of the human body.

Roosevelt had been a puny, sickly child plagued by terrifying asthma attacks. One day, when he was about eleven, Roosevelt’s father said, “Theodore, you have the mind but you have not the body, and without the help of the body the mind cannot go as far as it should. You must make your body. It is hard drudgery to make one’s body, but I know you will do it.”

Demonstrating the indomitable spirit that would be his trademark as an adult, the young Roosevelt spent hours upon hours pulling himself up between horizontal bars in the home’s open-air gym, fully equipped and paid for by his father. Roosevelt’s sister Corinne would never forget seeing her brother hanging from the bars, “widening his chest by regular, monotonous motion.” After two years of this “drudgery,” the young man took up boxing. The subsequent transformation in Roosevelt’s body and health was nothing short of phenomenal.

Roosevelt’s “real tastes were for the rougher and hardier forms of exercise,” remembered Wood. He “always loved to gather a party of men who felt equal to a bit of hard work and give them a thorough try-out, which generally resulted in using them up pretty badly. . . . His excellent endurance, his aptness in rough, hard climbing, and especially his ability to take his followers and generally outlast them on hard walks and runs ending in a dash up a fissure in a ledge where one had to be able to chin the edge and swing up or confess defeat by going around, all these demonstrated that he had built up a condition of unusual physical fitness.”

Most afternoons Roosevelt and Wood could be f...