The Roughest Riders (14 page)

Herschel V. Cashin, the only reporter with Wheeler's and Young's forces, described the scene in his account of the war: “If it had not been for the Negro cavalry, the Rough Riders would have been exterminated…. The Negroes saved that fight and the day will come when General Shafter will give them credit for their bravery.”

His message was prescient. When Shafter later learned of what took place during the first real battle of the war, he wrote to an aide, “The First and Tenth (colored) regiments of regular cavalry (dismounted) deployed and charged up the hill in front, driving the enemy from their position, but not until we had sustained a severe loss in both killed and wounded…. The conduct of the troops, both white and colored, regular and volunteer, was most gallant and soldierly.”

Chaplain Steward penned his own version of what transpired at Las Guasimas, saying that “the colored regulars in three days practically revolutionized the sentiment of the country in regard to the colored soldier.” The poem “The Negro Soldier” by L. B. Channing reflected Steward's view: “We used to think the Negro didn't count for very much, but we've got to reconstruct our views on color more or less / Now we know about the Tenth at Las Guasimas.”

“I have it from men who were upon the field that had it not been for the boys in black, the recent victory at Las Guasimas would have been a second Custer massacre,” wrote John E. Lewis with the Tenth. But he lamented that the Rough Riders and other white troops got all the glory and the promotions. The press failed to report how the black cavalry and infantry soldiers took the lead and urged the
Rough Riders on. After overrunning the Spanish positions, Lewis said, the black troops sent them scampering in retreat.

Colonel Wood, however, lost no time in constructing his own revisionist history of the battle. “I don't want to boast,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, “but we had a brilliant fight. The Spaniards said they fought the entire American army for four hours. My men had the bulk of the enemy in front of them and the Regulars one-third.”

Wood was privately seething over the attention most of the reporters were paying to Roosevelt when the battle was over. The press loved the colorful politician with his thick mustache, round eyeglasses, and jaunty campaign hat. He made good copy, and they reveled in following him around. And Roosevelt was an expert at cultivating writers whom he knew to be partial to him, and he was more than willing to report his own self-aggrandizing views of his personal history. The future president had handpicked the reporters who accompanied the Rough Riders at Las Guasimas.

His favorite was Richard Harding Davis, a writer whom he originally disdained as “unpatriotic” and “flamboyant.” Roosevelt courted Davis without restraint, wined and dined him regally while feeding him stories not available to others, because he knew Davis's dispatches would land on the front pages of the
New York Herald.
John Dunning was useful because he wrote for the Associated Press, which had massive distribution, and Kennett Harris was totally loyal to Roosevelt and would report to the
Chicago Record
just about anything his larger-than-life source told him. Edward Marshall was a brilliant writer who could be counted on most of the time, and young Stephen Crane, only twenty-six at the time, was already too famous to be ignored, although Roosevelt had some reservations about his cranky temperament and independence. Casper Whitney of
Harper's
was a solid professional with a valuable reputation, and Frederic Remington, who had greater fame as an artist and sculptor than as a writer, was also in attendance, having been sent
by William Randolph Hearst as an observer who could provide illustrations of the war for the
New York Journal.
Cashin was the only reporter who followed Young and Wheeler into action; other reporters and observers joined the troops after Las Guasimas.

So it was inevitable that the Rough Riders would receive most of the credit for the early victory at Las Guasimas—credit that Roosevelt was not about to disavow. And it was certain that Roosevelt would receive the lion's share of credit for the Rough Riders' success, rather than his autocratic superior, Colonel Wood, whom the press stuck with the moniker “Old Icebox.”

What none of the soldiers at Las Guasimas knew, however—neither black nor white, volunteer nor regular—was that the blood-letting they were subjected to during the first battle in Cuba was merely a warm-up exercise for the hell that was soon to come.

It was all over by ten o'clock in the morning, roughly two and a half hours after Young's scouts had first spotted the enemy. General Chaffee looked around and observed the condition of the Rough Riders and knew they would have been decimated had his reinforcements not arrived on the scene when they did. The Cuban rebels, who were expected to be in the thick of the action, were the last troops to come sauntering up the slope, and Chaffee suspected that their leader, Castillo, had played a role in the ambush on the mountain trail. But he decided to keep his opinions to himself as he complimented Wood and Roosevelt for bearing up under the “disastrous attack” on their men.

The official count of dead and wounded Americans minimized the extent of the actual carnage. According to the tally released to the public, of the 534 men under Wood's command, 8 Rough Riders lost their lives and 34 were wounded. Wheeler and Young's
contingent of 464 men saw 8 killed and 18 wounded. Roosevelt reported the same figures in his own book and claimed that only one of the dead was black. But other reports differed substantially, including an account written by Richard Harding Davis, who stated in
Notes of a War Correspondent
that “every third Rough Rider was killed or wounded at Las Guasimas.” In other words, the true number was upwards of 150 dead or wounded on the Rough Riders' side alone. Assistant surgeon Bob Church, working under LaMotte, gave anecdotal evidence in support of Davis's figures, maintaining that he and his superior treated closer to 200 seriously wounded men at their makeshift battlefield hospital.

“Everybody was wounded. Everybody was dead,” wrote Stephen Crane in his inimitable style. “First there was nobody. Gradually there was somebody. There was the wounded, the important wounded. And the dead.”

The Spanish gave out their own version of events. One Spanish soldier had high praise for the black soldiers—“Smoked Yankees” the Spanish labeled them—who charged their barricades first. He reported to his officers that “when we fired a volley, instead of falling back they came forward. This is not the way to fight, to come closer at every volley. They tried to catch us with their hands.”

The Spanish press, however, engaged in its own form of propaganda. The newspaper
Espagna
, published in Santiago de Cuba, reported that “the column of General Rubin [
sic
] was attacked … with vigor, and they fought without being under cover. They were repulsed with heavy losses.” The official Spanish position was that 10,000 Americans attacked 4,000 Spanish soldiers on the hill, resulting in 265 casualties on the invaders' side. The actual numbers, broadly speaking, were closer to about 1,500 Spaniards defending their position against around 1,000 Americans. When General Shafter read the Spanish account afterward, he laughed. “Reports from Spanish sources from Santiago say we were beaten,”
he quipped, “but persisted in fighting, and they were obliged to fall back.”

General Arsenio Linares, who commanded the Spanish forces in the area, actually had more than thirty-six thousand troops stationed throughout the province, ten thousand of them guarding Santiago and its harbor a few miles to the west. Had he deployed more of his men to Las Guasimas, there is little question that they could have withstood the American assault on the hill. Wood himself admitted that the odds were slim for a smaller group of attackers to overpower a larger defensive force uphill in well-entrenched positions. But Linares feared that the American presence in Siboney was just a feinting maneuver, and that the real target was Santiago, with its strategic harbor. His reluctance to defend Las Guasimas with strength turned out to be a tactical blunder of his own—even as the real fighting had scarcely begun.

O
ne of the biggest problems facing the Spanish was their scarcity of provisions. The number of Spanish soldiers in Cuba was estimated to be close to two hundred thousand, but the great majority were located in and around Havana and were scattered in garrisons throughout the countryside, where they rode herd over their rebellious subjects. The troops near Santiago lacked decent uniforms and shoes and subsisted on small rations of rice, beans, and whatever game they could kill. Spain was having financial problems and had not paid its soldiers in Cuba in more than a year. Their ammunition supply was dwindling along with their morale.

Spain had also failed to understand the strategic difference between an occupying army and one that was geared for combat. The garrison troops whom Spain had stationed around the country were proficient at suppressing the locals—burning down their houses, setting fire to their crops, and keeping them under the boot—but what they had not been trained well for were the tactical skills required to defend a country against a determined invading army. The Americans had committed their own share of blunders during their first few days on Cuban soil, but they were experienced
at charging enemy fortifications, and they had the resilience to alter their strategy when the situation called for it.

Wood, in an effort to share in the attention the press showered on Roosevelt, summed up the battle with garbled syntax that had none of Roosevelt's flair: “A superior force of the enemy was driven from a strong position of their own choosing and thrown into a disorderly fight in which he could readily have become destroyed,” he said. Old Icebox seemed to be a nickname that suited him well.

Word of the American victory at Las Guasimas reached General Shafter, who was still nursing the gout aboard his ship. He was furious at first that Wheeler had disobeyed his orders and attacked without authorization, but he decided to let the matter pass in light of the favorable press his army was already commanding in the nation's newspapers. Besides, he had more immediate problems to deal with, as he observed the remaining troops and supplies being loaded onto the beach through his spyglass. He wondered out loud how long it would take all of them to get ashore.

After the battle was over, the Rough Riders made camp in the afternoon and took care of their wounded. Afterward, they chowed down on a cache of beans they had found on a Spanish mule that had been killed by an American bullet. Dr. Bob Church had ventured out onto the firing line himself and carried several men down the trail on his back or in his arms. Reporters on the scene noted his heroism in combat, and the great strength he exhibited in accomplishing what he did. Richard Harding Davis reported that he saw Church, a Princeton graduate, carrying a wounded man much heavier than himself across his shoulders, the man's blood saturating Church's breeches. He repeated the feat several more times that afternoon, carrying one wounded man after another a half mile or so down the trail from the firing line under relentless enemy fire to a makeshift hospital.

Those who could walk hobbled back to the field hospital on their own while Wood and Roosevelt wandered through the sea of carnage, searching for their dead and wounded comrades. Around the badly maimed, the two men observed the large, gruesome-looking land crabs gathered in an ominous circle, waiting for all signs of life to leave the bodies before they swarmed. The vultures had already discovered some of the dead before Wood and Roosevelt came upon them; the decision was to leave the soldiers where they died, with mangled bodies and eyeless faces.

“Well, some of the boys got it in the neck,” one of the cowboys said to another.

“Many a good horse dies,” the other replied.

The men improvised stretchers from their tents and carried the badly wounded back to Siboney that afternoon and the following morning. As the men treaded slowly down the trail, tales about how the black troops had saved the day reached Lawton's troops. There was much talk about how the Tenth Cavalry had encountered the enemy first and rescued the Rough Riders. The black regulars congratulated one another for their actions on the battlefield, remarking on how they had raised their standing in the eyes of the Spanish defenders. An illustration of the battle that was widely circulated afterward depicted the Tenth rescuing the Rough Riders and putting the Spaniards in flight down the other side of the hill.

Richard Harding Davis, loyal to Roosevelt in his public dispatches, wrote privately to his family that the Rough Riders were caught in a clear case of ambush. John Dunning was less reticent, reporting to the Associated Press that “as perfect an ambuscade as was ever formed in the brain of an Apache Indian was prepared, and Roosevelt and his men walked squarely into it.”