The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (126 page)

Commercial or not, Harvard supplied a sizable number of recruits to the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, as did the other Ivy League schools and the better clubs of Manhattan and Boston. Roosevelt had enlisted fifty of these “gentleman rankers,” as he called them, in order to give the regiment its necessary tone. He made it clear, however, that no man would earn a commission save through bravery and merit, and that once in Texas, “the cowboys and Knickerbockers ride side by side.”
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In choosing them, Roosevelt paid as much attention to physique as ancestry. There was his old classmate Woodbury Kane, a yachty dandy who “fought with the
same natural ease as he dressed.”
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There was Joseph Sampson Stevens, the world’s greatest polo player.
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There were Dudley Dean, the legendary Harvard quarterback; Bob Wrenn, tennis champion of the United States; and Hamilton Fish, ex-captain of the Columbia crew. There were high-jumpers from Yale and football players from Princeton, and huntsmen with names like Wadsworth and Tiffany. For good measure Roosevelt added a Scottish friend of Cecil Spring Rice, and two blue-blooded Englishmen, one of whom insisted on arriving in San Antonio with a delicate walking-stick, in the belief that “cavalrymen carried canes.”
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“This was the rocking-chair period of the war.”
Piazza of the Tampa Bay Hotel, early summer 1898
. (
Illustration 24.1
)

The Lieutenant Colonel admitted to some qualms in sending such men to Texas, and their appearance caused much amusement among the more leathery Rough Riders.
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R
OOSEVELT REACHED
San Antonio on the morning of 15 May 1898, wearing a new fawn uniform with canary-yellow trim.
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The official name of his destination, in the state fair grounds two miles outside of town, was Camp Wood, but a sign at the railroad station already proclaimed, “This Way to Camp of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.”
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There was a wave of disappointment among the recruits when he arrived at regimental headquarters. “The big objection,” recalled one onlooker, “was that he wore glasses.”
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After years in Dakota, Roosevelt was used to this attitude, and if he felt mistrust in their stare, it did not bother him. He gazed back at them through the same offending lenses, with interest but no feelings of novelty. These weather-beaten faces and sinewy, bowlegged bodies were as familiar to him as the aristocratic lineaments of Woodbury Kane (who, he noticed with approval, was cooking and washing dishes for a troop of New Mexicans). He had ridden many a roundup with such men in his youth, and proved himself as tough as they. He had described them intimately in
Thomas Hart Benton
and
The Winning of the West
. As he got to know their thousand names—soon he would memorize every one—time and again it was as if the creatures of his pen were reincarnated before him. Here was young Douglass Campbell, grandson of the man who led the cavalry up King’s Mountain
in 1780.
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Here was an Indian named Adair: Roosevelt had spent hours poring over the “ponderous folio” his Cherokee ancestors had written 150 years before.
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Here was another Indian, named Colbert—perhaps one might trace his origins back to the half-Scottish, half-Chickasaw Colberts who dominated the eastern Mississippi in the eighteenth century. Roosevelt interviewed him and found that he was “as I had supposed, a descendant of the old Chickasaw chiefs.”
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Perusal of the muster-rolls disclosed a Clark and a St. Clair, no Boone but two Crocketts, and several apiece of Adams, Hamilton, and Jackson.
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Surely, in those early days of dust and mounted drill, the line between past and present (never clearly demarcated in Roosevelt’s mind) must have blurred until he found himself galloping, not across the plains of Texas, but over the wooded hills of Revolutionary Kentucky. “More than ever,” he confessed to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I fail to get the relations of this regiment and the universe straight.”
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D
AWN AT
C
AMP
W
OOD
disclosed a flat grassy park, rather the worse for hoofprints, five hundred wedges of dewy canvas, a grove of cottonwood trees, and in the background the sluggish silver of the San Antonio River. A certain surgical precision in the layout of tents, the neatly swept “streets,” and gleaming latrines all testified to the medical instincts of the commanding officer.
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Reveille sounded at 5:30, and within half an hour a thousand bleary men were answering roll call.
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The range of the accents, from New England drawl to Southwestern twang, from Idaho burr to Pawnee grunt, was matched by an early-morning variety of costume that Wood may have deplored, but Roosevelt cheerfully tolerated. The “Knicks” and Harvard men wore Abercrombie and Fitch shirts and custom leather boots; the polo set wore British breeches, tight at the knee and blossoming around the thighs; the cowboys, who numbered about three-quarters of the total regiment, scorned their Army felt hats for sombreros, and insisted on carrying their own guns.
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At
6:
10 the ranks broke for stable call—twenty minutes of rubbing down and feeding horses, followed by breakfast. Between
8:30 and 9:30 the animals were watered in the river, then saddled up for mounted drill. This, the main exercise of the day, lasted at least an hour and a half under the climbing sun. Roosevelt was required to supervise it while Colonel Wood occupied himself in the cool of headquarters with problems of requisition and supply. Clouds of dust reduced visibility to nil as the troopers thundered raggedly across the Texas plain. “Our lines were somewhat irregular,” Roosevelt admitted when describing the early maneuvers.
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According to other accounts, there were often no lines at all. 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 endless 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.
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Spare time before “dinner” at 1:30 was usually given over to bronco-busting. Then the horses were put to rest while the men assembled on the parade-ground for skirmish practice, again under Roosevelt’s command. High-heeled boots and bandy legs caused further problems of drill: the order to change step often led to a general domino-like collapse of the ranks. When Roosevelt reproved Trooper Billy McGinty for his inability to keep step, the little Oklahoman replied that “he was pretty sure he could keep step on horseback.”
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By 3:30 a thick coating of dust, mixed with sweat, had rendered the likes of William Tiffany and “Dead Shot” Jim Simpson indistinguishable. Only two spigots of brackish water were available for shower baths, so most men took their soap down to the river.
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There followed another stable call at 4:00, and another roll call at 5:00, then the troops reassembled for fifty minutes of dress parade. Scrubbed and spruce in their slouch hats, blue-flannel shirts, brown trousers, leggings, and boots, and sporting loosely knotted neckerchiefs—already the Rough Rider emblem—they looked, in Roosevelt’s fond opinion, “exactly as a body of cowboy cavalry should look.”
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After supper at 7:00, there was night school for both commissioned
and non-commissioned officers until final roll call at 8:30. But Roosevelt himself did not allow the “Dismiss” to cut short his military education for the day. With obsessive dedication he carried on by himself. “He was serenely unselfconscious,” recalled Quartermaster Coleman. “He would practice giving commands within fifty feet of half the regiment as earnestly as he would have done had he been alone in a desert.”
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Taps sounded at 9:00. As darkness spread from tent to tent, the Lieutenant Colonel turned up his table lamp and began to write his nightly quota of letters.

Quietness descended over Camp Wood, broken only by the occasional bray of a pack-mule, and the creaking of loose fence-planks, as one by one Roosevelt’s Rough Riders squeezed out of bounds and headed for the fleshpots of San Antonio.
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I
T DID NOT
take the men long to size Roosevelt up, to compare him with “Old Poker Face,” and find Wood wanting. Although some cowpunchers were put off by the New Yorker’s overbearing courtesy (“he was polite almost to the extent of making one uneasy”),
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they could not help being impressed by his drive. “It was evident to all who met him that he was tremendously ambitious.”
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They noticed that Wood often asked advice, but seldom information; Roosevelt asked information, but never advice.
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For all the punctilious deference of the older man to the younger, for all Wood’s mastery of military bureaucracy (the Rough Riders were easily the
best-armed and best-equipped regiment in the Army),
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there was no doubt, within a week of Roosevelt’s arrival, as to whom they considered to be colonel
malgré lui
. Wood knew it, and knew that his superiors in Washington knew it. “I realized that if this campaign lasted for any considerable length of time I would be kicked upstairs to make room for Roosevelt.”
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