The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (54 page)

When the
Yucatan
finally set sail for Cuba on June 13, Roosevelt was nearly giddy with joy at escaping from Tampa. As the regimental band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “The Girl I Left behind Me,” he looked at the other forty-eight vessels in the flotilla, neatly aligned in three columns, steaming to war. As his boat headed southward, he used his descriptive powers in his correspondence, saying that the Florida Keys area was “a sapphire sea, wind-rippled, under an almost cloudless sky.”
⁴¹
There was no sign of an equinoctial storm that could throw the armada off course; it was, to use the sailors’ cliché, clear sailing. But Roosevelt was hard pressed to turn a naturalist phrase in his diary. There was a certain unrest about these tiny islands themselves—waves breaking heavily on their beaches, tides advancing and retreating—which transcended description. When he first caught sight of the shoreline of Cuba’s Santiago Bay, waves beating in diagonals, Roosevelt finally turned somewhat poetic. “All day we have steamed close to the Cuban Coast,” he told his sister Corinne, “high barren looking mountains rising abruptly from the shore, and at a distance looking much like those of Montana. We are well within the tropics, and at night the Southern Cross shows low above the horizon; it seems strange to see it in the same sky with the Dipper.”
⁴²

On June 23 the Rough Riders landed at the fishing village of Siboney about seven miles west of Daiquirí, behind General Henry Ware Lawton’s Second Division and General William Shafter’s Fifth Corps. They were ready for action. Their attitude toward the Spanish occupation of Cuba was best summed up by Wister’s ultimatum in
The Virginian
: “I’ll give you till sundown to leave town.”
⁴³
In New York and Washington, D.C., Roosevelt had romanticized the Cuban insurgents who were fighting the Spanish. However, he soon called them “the grasshopper people,” for the shabby way they had treated the land.
⁴⁴
The woods and fields were so dry that Roosevelt feared they would catch on fire. Only the little grasses tossing purplish shadows in the sand seemed irrigated. Everything man-made looked battered and cheap. Ironically, the Rough Riders were under
the command of Brigadier General S. B. M. Young, whom Roosevelt called “as fine a type of the American fighting soldier as a man could hope to see.” By happenstance General Young had once been in command of Yellowstone National Park, and Roosevelt, as president of the Boone and Crockett Club, had worked with him on wildlife protection and forest preservation issues.
⁴⁵

The Rough Riders took ashore blanket rolls, pup tents, mess kits, and weaponry, but no one thought to give them any insect repellent. It was hot. There was no wind, and they felt on fire. The tangled jungles and chaparral of Cuba, particularly in early summer, were breeding grounds for flies that now swarmed over the camps. As it turned out, these insects were as much the enemy in the Cuban heat as the Spaniards. They filled the air with psssing, droning, chirping, and humming; not for a second were they quiet. Sleeping with a mosquito net was a must. There were 100 varieties of ants in Cuba, including strange stinging ants that seemed to come from a different world. (Darwin, in
The Descent of Man
, claimed that “the brain of an ant is one of the most marvellous atoms of matter in the world, perhaps more so than the brain of a man.”
⁴⁶
) The little crouching chameleons with coffin-shaped heads, unafraid of the soldiers, changed color from bright green to dark brown depending on the foliage they rested on. “Here there are lots of funny little lizards that run about in the dusty roads very fast,” Roosevelt wrote to his daughter Ethel, “and then stand still with their heads up.”
⁴⁷

Unfortunately, the military mapmakers had failed to tell Colonel Roosevelt and company that Las Guásimas, the dingiest village imaginable, was, with only modest exaggeration, the world’s biggest scorpions’ nest. Soldiers soon swelled up from scorpion bites, which also caused dizzyness and arthritic-like aches. Stephen Crane, who was then a war correspondent for the
New York World
(and whom Roosevelt disdained as immoral because of his novella
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
), wrote nastily that the former New York police commissioner and bird-watcher recognized “the beautiful coo of the Cuban wood-dove” but inexplicibly seemed deaf to the fatal noise of a “Spanish guerrilla wood dove which had presaged the death of gallant marines.”
⁴⁸
It was a Craneian cheap shot; still, Roosevelt may have been the only soldier in Cuba who recorded ornithological observations of cardinals and tanagers.

Just two days after landing, the Rough Riders got their taste of combat at the battle of Las Guásimas. Although they were just one of many U.S. outfits assaulting the Spanish fortifications around the coastal city of Santiago, the Rough Riders deserved the praise they’ve received for their
performance. Just like the army regulars, they truly were a bold, well-disciplined fighting force; and McKinley acknowledged this by the eve of the horrific battle of Santiago, promoting Colonel Wood (to brigadier general) and Roosevelt (to colonel) within the week. Trying to deflect all the press attention being showered on him only, Roosevelt often trumpeted the prowess of his gutsy troops. “They were a splendid set of men, these Southwesterners—tall and sinewy, with resolute, weather-beaten faces,” he wrote, “and eyes that looked a man straight in the face without flinching.”
⁴⁹

One Rough Rider to whom Roosevelt took a real shine was Corporal David E. Warford of Troop B (Arizona Territory), under the leadership of Captain James H. McClintock.
⁵⁰
Warford came from Globe, Arizona, a one-trough mining town in the heart of Apache country. It seemed to Roosevelt that Warford had been born on horseback. Constantly smoking, the most confident equestrian around, and able to call out a bird by its song, Warford never complained and was full of bounce. Colonel Roosevelt grew even closer to Warford after the young volunteer was shot in both thighs in the battle of Las Guásimas and continued fighting, injured, before repairing to a hospital ship.
⁵¹
Warford was not literate, and he bragged that he had “kilt” Spaniards and that a wounded fellow Arizonian was “crow-bait,” but Roosevelt admired his western spirit. If the forest reserves had brave outdoorsmen like Warford protecting them, Roosevelt later realized, timber thieves and game poachers could finally be stopped.

What Roosevelt called his “crowded hour” occurred on July 1, 1898, when, on horseback, he led the Rough Riders (plus elements of the Ninth and Tenth regiments of regulars, African-American buffalo soldiers, and other units) up Kettle Hill (near San Juan Hill) in what is known in military history as the battle of San Juan Heights. Once the escarpment was captured Roosevelt, now on foot, killed a Spaniard with a pistol which had been raked up from the sunken
Maine
. Social Darwinism seemed to have played out in Roosevelt’s favor that day—he was the fittest pistolero. Roosevelt later said that the charge up Kettle Hill surpassed all the other highlights of his life. Somewhat creepily, it was reported, Roosevelt had beamed through the battlefield depredations and gory deaths, always flashing a wide smile, but with his pistol pointed. Whether he was ordering artillery reinforcements, helping men cope with the prostrating heat, finding canned tomatoes to feed the troops, encouraging Cuban
insurgent
, or miraculously procuring a huge bag of beans, Roosevelt was always on top of the situation, doing whatever was humanly possible to help
his men avoid both yellow fever and unnecessary enemy fire. There was no arguing about it: Colonel Roosevelt had distinguished himself at Las Guásimas, San Juan, and Santiago (although the journalists did inflate his heroics to make better copy). By the Fourth of July, Roosevelt had become a legend in the United States, the most beloved paragon produced in what Secretary of State John Hay called “a splendid little war.”
⁵²

With the capture of San Juan Heights—the villages and vista spots overlooking Santiago—the city itself soon surrendered. The war was practically over. The stirring exploits of Colonel Roosevelt were published all over America, turning him overnight in to the kind of gallant warrior he always dreamed of being. But the hardships Roosevelt had suffered were real. Supplies like eggs, meat, sugar, and jerky were nonexistent. Hardtack biscuits—the soldiers’ staple—had attracted hideous little worms. Just to stay alive the Rough Riders began frying mangoes.
⁵³
Worse still, the 100-degree heat caused serious dehydration. Then there was the ghastly toll from tropical diseases. Diarrhea and dysentery struck the outfit like a plague. Fatigue became the norm. So many Rough Riders were dying from yellow fever and malaria that Colonel Roosevelt eventually asked the War Department to bring them home to the Maine coast, hoping to save lives.
⁵⁴
The request showed Roosevelt at his best, putting the welfare of his men first, not worrying that history might misconstrue it as a way to dodge combat. On August 14, the Rough Riders, following a brief stopover in Miami, arrived at Montauk peninsula at the end of Long Island (not Maine) and were placed in quarantine for six weeks.
⁵⁵

IV

An odd feature of Roosevelt’s leadership of the Rough Riders was his continued biophilic obsession with animals, even when preparing for combat. In fact, this distinguishes his war memoir
The Rough Riders
from all other accounts of the 1898 Cuban campaign. And in his autobiography, Roosevelt presents his theory about the role of pets in sustaining military morale. Compared with military tactics and the toll of yellow fever, such passages can seem frivolous, but they do offer a valuable perspective on Roosevelt as a war leader and as a person. Largely at Roosevelt’s instigation, his First Volunteer Cavalry Regiment had three animal mascots, brought all the way from San Antonio through their stay in Tampa Bay. Most famously, there was a young mountain lion, Josephine, brought in by an Arizona trooper named Charles Green, a gift from a supportive citizen in Prescott.
⁵⁶

Roosevelt adored everything about the cougar cub: her sand-colored
coat, dark rounded ears, white muzzle, and piercing blue eyes, which would turn brown as she matured. He knew that as an adult, Josephine would be able to run elusively at thirty-five miles per hour and leap from boulder to boulder with breathtaking grace. Eventually Josephine would weigh at least ninety pounds and be able to pull down a 750-pound elk with her powerful jaw.
⁵⁷
But for now she was domesticated, though at times surly. (Roosevelt wrote in
The Rough Riders
that she had an “infernal temper.”) As the
New York Times
wrote of Josephine, she “rejoiced” when her name was uttered. She was, in turn, beloved by all the men.
⁵⁸
Purrs were commonplace, even though Josephine learned to distrust anybody who wasn’t wearing a military uniform. As the reporter Edward Marshall put it, Josephine “hated civilians.”
⁵⁹

Roosevelt spent as much time with the cougar cub as he could. She became something of a shadow cat. One evening when they were in Montauk, Josephine got loose, climbed into bed with a soldier, and began playfully chewing on his toes. Roosevelt later chuckled in
The Rough Riders
that the volunteer “fled into the darkness with yells, much more unnerved than he would have been by the arrival of any number of Spaniards.”
⁶⁰
Writing to his children from Tampa Bay, Roosevelt told how their mother, Edith, who had visited him for a few days, was stunned to find him with a cougar at his side. “The mountain lion is not much more than a kitten yet,” he explained, “but it was very cross and treacherous.”
⁶¹

Another steadfast companion in the Rough Riders was a golden eagle, one of the largest bird species in North America and the national emblem of Mexico. The volunteers named it Teddy in Roosevelt’s honor. As in N. Scott Momaday’s novel
House Made of Dawn
, Roosevelt considered himself a charter member of the Eagle Watchers Society.
⁶²
Roosevelt loved following these raptors as they swooped down to pluck up snakes and darting prey, and he had even managed to learn a little about the art of falconry. Wearing leather gloves in order not to get clawed, he would hold his arm out for Teddy, calling the New Mexican–born eagle back to camp after it had had its fill of lizards and squirrels. “The eagle was let loose and not only walked at will up and down the company streets, but also at times flew wherever he wished,” Roosevelt recalled. “He was a young bird, having been taken out of his nest when a fledgling. Josephine hated him and was always trying to make a meal of him, especially when we endeavored to take their photographs together. The eagle, though good-natured, was an entirely competent individual and ready at any moment to beat Josephine off.”
⁶³

Colonel Roosevelt pets Teddy the golden eagle while members of the Rough Riders play with Cuba the dog and Josephine the cougar.