The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (55 page)

Both Josephine and Teddy were left behind in Tampa, since it would obviously have been nonsensical to bring a cougar and an eagle into battle.
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The third mascot, however, made it to Cuba. Roosevelt’s regiment had a “jolly dog” named Cuba, owned by Corporal Cade C. Jackson of Troop A from Flagstaff, Arizona. The mutt had dirty gray poodle-like fur and the personality of a Yorkie. Little Cuba could be easily scooped up with one hand. Frisky as a dog could be, Cuba actually accompanied the regiment “through all the vicissitudes of the campaign.” Aboard the
Yucatan
, Roosevelt had a Pawnee Indian friend draw Cuba—who ran “everywhere round the ship, and now and then howls when the band plays”—for his daughter Ethel.
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Every time the Rough Riders went into battle, Cuba would run off and disappear into the jungle, frightened by the noise of the artillery. Once the smoke cleared, however, when the men were bandaging wounds or frying eggs over a wood fire, Cuba would suddenly slink back into camp looking for handouts and back-scratches.
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Later, after the victory, a reunion photograph of the Rough Riders was taken in Montauk, with all three mascots in the same frame, Cuba begging near Colonel Roosevelt’s leg for either a treat or attention.
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According to Roosevelt, the dog was occasionally “oppressed” by Josephine but was sometimes able to “over
awe the mountain lion “by simple decision of character.” Sometimes when Josephine growled, however, Cuba backed off, like a horse hearing the hum of a rattlesnake.
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Perhaps because Roosevelt was so comfortable with the trio of animals, knowing how to feed mice to the eagle and scratch Josephine behind the ears, these mascots added a Dr. Doolittle dimension to his character. In both San Antonio and Tampa Bay his two horses—Rain-in-the-Face and Texas—practically never left his side. When Vitagraph motion picture technicians were filming the Rough Riders wading ashore in Cuba off the
Yucatan
, a soldier was ordered to bring Roosevelt’s steeds safely onto the beach. Unfortunately, a huge wave broke on Rain-in-the-Face, causing him to drown: he inhaled seawater and could not be released from his harness. For the only time during the war days Roosevelt, his mind unsteadied, went berserk, “snorting like a bull,” as Albert Smith of Vitagraph recalled, “split[ing] the air with one blasphemy after another.” As the other horses were brought onto shore, Roosevelt kept shouting, “Stop that goddamned animal torture!” every time salt water got in a mare’s face.
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Skeptics of Rough Riders lore point out that Roosevelt was only seeking glory, always appearing—abracadabra—when a camera came along. Some critics carped that he used friendly reporters, such as Richard Harding Davis and John Fox, as tools. Roosevelt—so the opprobrium went—was thinking only about himself in Cuba, seeking fame amid the parlous carnage. What makes it clear that these are misrepresentations is the fact that
all
the surviving Rough Riders, even those who lost their legs or eyes, testified that he was a phenomenal leader. Never once did Roosevelt expect more from any volunteer than he gave of himself. No matter how dangerous the situation, he was in the thick of the action. The Spanish soldiers, for example, used smokeless powder, which made it impossible to tell where bullets were coming from in the jungle. At all hours and in all circumstances, Colonel Roosevelt, placing fate in the hands of God, refused to duck or run for cover as the bullets whizzed by. Calmly, even under enemy fire, Roosevelt helped wounded men make primitive tourniquets out of tree branches and bandannas. “Yesterday we struck the Spaniards and had a brisk fight for 2½ hours before we drove them out of their position,” Roosevelt wrote to Corinne and her husband, Douglas Robinson. “We lost a dozen men killed or mortally wounded, and sixty severely or slightly wounded [out of about 500]. One man was killed as he stood beside a tree with me. Another bullet went through a tree behind which I stood and filled my eyes with bark. The last charge I
led on the left using a rifle I took from a wounded man…. The fire was very hot at one or two points where the men around me went down like ninepins.”
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The Spanish snipers in Cuba fired high-speed Mauser bullets and had deadly aim. The U.S. volunteers, including the Rough Riders, in fact, faced some of the worst combat in the history of warfare.
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As Stephen Crane, embedded with the Rough Riders, noted, “The tropical forests were regularly aglow in fighting.”
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Constant barrages of rifleshots resulted in heavy American losses. “In the period of about four and a half months they were together, 37 percent of those who got to Cuba were casualties,” historian Virgil Carrington Jones said of the Rough Riders. “Better than one out of every three were killed, wounded, or stricken by disease. It was the highest casualty rate of any American unit that took part in the Spanish-American campaign.”
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The letters Roosevelt wrote from Cuba crackle with the kind of martial detail also found in Crane’s Civil War novel of 1895,
The Red Badge of Courage
. Yet they’re also full of natural history, with observations about the “jungle-lined banks,” “great open woods of palms,” and “mango trees,” “vultures wheeling overhead by hundreds,” and even a whole command “so weakened and shattered as to be ripe for dying like rotten sheep.” Constantly, Roosevelt tried to conjure up nature as a way to increase personal power. When the director Terrence Malik made
The Thin Red Line
in 1998—a film about the Battle of Guadalcanal, based on a World War II novel by James Jones—he constantly cut away to exotic birds. This device helped illustrate that nature always watched the pageant of human combat from the sidelines, waiting for the artillery to cease before coming back to life and inventorying the new morning.

In Roosevelt’s correspondence and war memoir the land crab is omnipresent, almost the central metaphor of his Cuban campaign. Experts noted that the local species,
Gecarcinus lateralis
, commonly known as the blackback, Bermuda, or red crab, leaves the tropical forests each spring to mate in the sea. This made for an eerie spectacle all along Cuba’s northern coast as these disfigured creatures, many with only one giant claw, crawled out of the forests across roads and beaches to reach the water. Swollen with eggs, the female red crabs made their journey to the Caribbean Sea, which was their incubator, traveling five to six miles a day over every obstacle. Roosevelt noted that they avoided the sun’s glare, often gravitating to shade, just like wounded soldiers. As if in a scene from Borges or García Márquez, these burrowing red crabs—their abalone-like shells marked with gaudy dark rainbow swirls—while living on land,
still had gills, so they needed to stay cool and moist. “The woods are full of land crabs, some of which are almost as big as rabbits,” Roosevelt wrote to Corinne; “when things grew quiet they slowly gathered in gruesome rings around the fallen.”
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For the first time as an adult, Roosevelt was in the tropics. The very density of vegetation was daunting, the white herons often standing out against the greenery like tombstones. These red crabs were to him what tortoises or finches were to Darwin; everything about them spoke of evolution. Unlike the stone crabs of Maine, these red crabs, by contrast, weren’t particularly good-tasting; from a culinary perspective they were off-putting. Still, with food supplies sparse, the soldiers smashed the red crabs with rocks, discarded the shells, and mixed the meat into their hardtack, calling the dish “deviled crab.” Although the crabs were not dangerous, many Rough Riders were jarred awake at night by the formidable pincers. And the crabs were persistent—a soldier would shake them away from his bedroll, but after scurrying away, the crabs would come back a short while later. Sleeping off the ground on a hammock became more coveted than having a can of tobacco or bottle of rum. What disturbed Roosevelt the most about the Cuban crabs, however, was their attraction to carrion, fallen soldiers as well as dead animals. It wasn’t pleasant to think that the price of liberating Cuba was to die on a lonesome beach with red crabs and ants crawling all over your body, entering your mouth and eyes and ears.

In
The Rough Riders
, Roosevelt ably described the timeworn, brush-covered flat in the island village of Daiquirí where his volunteer regiment camped one evening, on one side of them the tropical jungle and on the other a stagnant, malarial pool fringed with palm trees. After the sacking of Santiago, many of his Rough Riders, a third of whom had served in the Civil War, lay wounded in ditches with flies buzzing around them. Sometimes, after an American died, local Cubans would strip the corpse of all its equipment. Humans could be scavengers, too. Roosevelt turned to images of avians and crustaceans to explain the horror of death. “No man was allowed to drop out to help the wounded,” he lamented. “It was hard to leave them there in the jungle, where they might not be found again until the vultures and the land-crabs came, but war is a grim game and there was no choice.”
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Roosevelt then went on to tell of U.S. volunteer soldiers, comrades in arms, mortally wounded—perhaps shot through the stomach—dying without uttering a sound or gasping out a last wish. Men lucky enough to crawl propped themselves up against palm trees and expired in the
dismal shade, their uniforms drenched in sweat, urine, and blood. A little field hospital was set up, and Roosevelt witnessed the pathos of men heaving for air, their lungs collapsed, broken ribs piercing vital organs. “We found all our dead and all the badly wounded,” he wrote. “Around one of the latter the big, hideous land-crabs had gathered in a grewsome ring, waiting for life to be extinct. One of our own men and most of the Spanish dead had been found by the vultures before we got to them; and their bodies were mangled, the eyes and wounds being torn.”
*
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If that ghastly scene wasn’t harrowing enough, Roosevelt proceeded to tell another story. After staring at a corpse that had been mutilated by vultures, the blood having coagulated hours before, Rough Rider Bucky O’Neill, who at home was the mayor of Prescott, Arizona, came up to Roosevelt, shook his head, and said, “Colonel, isn’t it [Walt] Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes out of princes and tear the flesh of kings?” Not wanting to discuss poetry, Roosevelt muttered that he wasn’t sure about the proper attribution and walked away. Then, as if to demonstrate how tenuous life really was, Roosevelt matter-of-factly noted in
The Rough Riders
that O’Neill himself soon perished in the trenches of Cuba: “Just a week afterward we were shielding his own body from the birds of prey.”
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V

In his review essay “Kidd’s Social Evolution” for
The North American Review
, Roosevelt offered an example of when the dictates of natural selection superseded a love of wildlife. “Even the most enthusiastic naturalist,” he wrote, “if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark.”
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By this criterion, Roosevelt was a success in Cuba in two ways. He not only thwarted the Spanish sharks but
managed to make detailed diary notes about vultures and crabs, which he planned to use in his memoir
The Rough Riders
.

When the victorious Rough Riders returned to the United States, Roosevelt was the most acclaimed man in America. His homeward journey, in fact, had been treated as major news. In hard, good health, taut and fit, his face coppered and his hair cut short, he was living his boyhood fantasy of being a war hero. Roosevelt had endured the vicissitudes of war with commendable grit, and now it was all bouquets. “His personal view of the war was reported to have been extracted from Social Darwinism,” the historians Peggy Samuels and Harold Samuels say in their landmark work
Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan
. “The superior Anglo-Saxon race necessarily won over the decadent Spaniards.”
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As Roosevelt wrote in a new foreword to
The Winning of the West
, the Spanish American War had completed “the work begun over a century before by backwoodsmen” by booting “the Spaniard outright from the western world.”
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Anglo-Saxonism was hardly all there was to the victorious battlefield prowess of the Rough Riders. Something in the American wilderness experience, Roosevelt believed, gave his regiment the upper hand over the Spaniards. Not a single Rough Rider got cold feet or shrank back. Something about the mesas of New Mexico and Arizona had taught them to be tough. In an important essay, “The Darwinist Frontier,” the historian Patrick Sharp has contended that Roosevelt believed the American fighting spirit would continue only as long as outdoorsmen didn’t get lazy and rest on the laurels of modernity.
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Slowly, Roosevelt was developing a theory about this, which he would call the “strenuous life.” The majestic open spaces of America like the Red River Valley, Guadalupe Mountains, Black Mesa, Sangre de Cristo Range, Prescott Valley, and Big Chino Wash had hardened his men, teaching them the kind of self-reliance Emerson promoted. Wouldn’t Rough Riders make terrific forest rangers and wild-life wardens? Didn’t the wildlife protection movement need no-nonsense men in uniform to stop poaching in federal parks? “In all the world there could be no better material for soldiers than that afforded by these grim hunters of the mountains, these wild rough riders of the plains,” Roosevelt said. “They were accustomed to following the chase with the rifle, both for sport and as a means of livelihood.”
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While the Rough Riders recovered from bodily atrophy at Montauk, where they were watched for signs of yellow fever, New York’s Republican Party was urging Roosevelt to run for governor that fall. Two prominent local politicians—Lemuel Ely Quigg (who had backed him for mayor
in 1894) and Ben Odall Jr. (chairman of the Republican state committee), met with him on August 19 to strategize how best to turn a war hero, about whom New Yorkers were currently fanatical, into a sitting governor.