Theodore Roosevelt Read Online Free PDF Page B

shoot. The secretary of war offered TR a colonelcy and the command of one of these regiments, but he deemed his military qualifications inadequate. They consisted of three years in the National Guard in which he obtained a captaincy, and “not to speak of,” as he put it, his having acted as “sheriff in the cow country.” Of course, he could ride and shoot, but he thought it better to accept the rank of lieutenant colonel and serve under his friend, Colonel Leonard Wood, an army surgeon, but one who had a combat record and had been awarded the Medal of Honor in the campaign against the Apaches.
    TR’s new regiment, the First United States Cavalry, soon to be christened by the public as the “Rough Riders,” was made up largely of men from New Mexico, Arizona, and Indian Territory, but it also included a goodly number of “dudes,” socialite friends of TR from New York and Boston, passionate volunteers who had been adept at such sports as polo, fox hunting, and yachting. TR, however, was familiar with both sorts, and he knew how to unite them in a common goal and a common enthusiasm. Their training camp was in San Antonio, Texas.
    TR was in primary charge of the field training while Colonel Wood took care of the difficult problems of requisition and supply. Edmund Morris has described the extent of Roosevelt’s formidable task:
    It would have taxed the powers of a Genghis Khan to place a thousand individualistic riders, accustomed to the freedom of polo, hunting, and the open range, upon a thousand half-broken horses, and then get them to advance, wheel, fan out, and divide in formation. Roosevelt’s high-pitched orders led to bucking, biting, striking, and kicking. His first success was rewarded by an anonymous salute of six-shooter fire, causing a stampede into the San Antonio River.
    And after all that, when the regiment arrived in Cuba, sailing from Tampa, Florida, for the attack on Santiago, it was to discover that they had no use for their horses, as the campaign was to be on foot! The Rough Riders, as one wag put it, had been converted into “Wood’s Weary Walkers.” Roosevelt, however, kept two horses, as he would have to move quickly from one position to another in leading and directing an advance. But his steed on San Juan Hill, if it made him more visible to his men, also made him more visible to the enemy, and he would cajole terrified men to follow him on the famous charge with the rasping cry: “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?”
    None of the rough training in San Antonio was wasted in toughening and disciplining the men, and the regiment that landed in Cuba was forged into a cohesive and warlike unit that would help to win the war in a couple of months.
    Those months, however, were not to be easy ones. On their initial march through the jungle toward Santiago they encountered the enemy, drawn up on a ridge, at Las Guasimas. In the scrimmage that followed and lasted for two hours they found it hard to spot their foe, who was using smokeless powder while they had to make do with black powder whose smoke revealed their position. The Rough Riders had sixteen dead and fifty-two wounded, but they routed the enemy in the end and were able to continue their advance. TR distinguished himself by driving back the foremost flanks of the enemy and exposing the troops holding the ridge to the crossfire of the entire line of Rough Riders.
    A reporter, Edward Marshall, observing TR in this action, wrote the following:
    Perhaps a dozen of Roosevelt’s men had passed into the thicket before he did. Then he stepped across the wire himself, and from that instant became the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it, he left behind in the bridle path all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly