The Roughest Riders (21 page)

“Oh, don't bother about me,” Haskell said when Roosevelt reached out to him. “I'm going to get well.” The twenty-two-year old officer survived the serious wound and lived for another thirty-two years.

Two of Roosevelt's other top aides went down by his side, one overcome by heat and exhaustion and the other wounded by a bullet that slammed into his neck. A third keeled over dead when a bullet ripped through his brain. Then Roosevelt suffered one of the greatest losses of the battle so far when his favorite sidekick, Captain Buckey O'Neill, the man who dove into the water in an attempt to save two black troops from drowning at the landing, was shot in the mouth.

W
illiam Owen O'Neill was born on February 2, 1860, either in Ireland, St. Louis, Missouri, or Washington, DC. His precise origin remained as much a mystery as the man himself, partly because he was a larger-than-life adventurer and entrepreneur, fond of spinning tall tales, some of them about himself. The claim that he was born in Ireland is most likely an invention of his; although his father served in the so-called Irish Brigade during the Civil War and was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, his parents had been in the United States since the 1850s.

Buckey—a nickname he earned because he liked to “buck,” or gamble, against the odds in poker and other card games—migrated from the east to Prescott, Arizona, in the spring of 1882 making brief stops along the way. The first was in Tombstone in 1880, where he reported on the war between the Earp brothers and the Clanton-McLaury gang of murders and cattle rustlers, which culminated in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral on October 26, 1881. Next he dallied in Phoenix, a town he didn't like all that much. Prescott suited him better, and it was there he made his home.

Buckey was first and foremost a man of action, but he was also a literary man—traits he shared with the leader of the Rough Riders and which endeared him to Roosevelt. He started his career as a court reporter, then moved up the ladder and became editor of the
Prescott Journal Miner
, after which he founded, wrote, edited, and published the
Hoof and Horn
, a livestock periodical. The action side of his nature took over when he ran for various offices and was elected sheriff of Yavapai County and later mayor of Prescott. Twice he ran for Congress as a territorial representative for the Populists, but he lost those races, in 1894 and 1896, to major-party candidates.

O'Neill made his real money developing onyx and copper mines and building a railroad line to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. He exhibited an interest in archaeology when he led a Smithsonian expedition to explore the Sinagua Indian ruins known today as Montezuma Castle in Arizona's Verde Valley. Buckey indulged a taste for military adventure at the same time, joining a local militia and helping organize the Arizona National Guard. Like an earlier Hemingway, the man of action turned his hand to fiction, publishing stories in the
San Francisco Examiner
and
Argosy.

His path met up with Roosevelt's in 1898 when Buckey helped found the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, the unit headed by Colonel Wood that was destined to become the heartbeat of the assemblage Roosevelt put together for the war in Cuba. Roosevelt and Buckey O'Neill hit it off from the start. Buckey was the prototypical cowboy Roosevelt had become intrigued with during his many trips out west, a man who could ride, shoot, and fight with the best of them. He was one of the first who volunteered to join Roosevelt in Cuba, telling him, “I am ready to take all the chances.” He shared Roosevelt's philosophy that the war would not be over until every officer in the unit was killed, wounded, or promoted.

On that fatal day, July 1, with the Rough Riders pinned down at the bank of the river, Roosevelt ordered Buckey O'Neill to lead
an advance team to get a better view of the Spanish positions on top of the incline. Buckey motioned his men forward toward a field of waist-high grass near the edge of a clearing on the other side of the river. The men dove to the ground in the grass and lay flat, still obeying orders not to fire back until they were commanded to do so. Buckey stood upright at the head of his detail, about twenty yards from the riverbank, smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarettes. Roosevelt thought he was taking unnecessary risk, but the captain didn't believe an officer should dive for cover when the men he led were in danger.

“Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you,” a sergeant said to Buckey, all but begging him to lie down.

Buckey blew out a cloud of smoke, laughed, and replied according to witnesses, “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn't made that will kill me.”

Moments later, he turned on his heel to face the Spanish guns, and a Mauser bullet flew into his mouth and exited through the back of his head. Buckey O'Neill was dead before his body hit the ground. The manner of his death and the life that preceded it grew into a legend, and the man was even lionized in a 1997 TV miniseries, in which he was portrayed by actor Sam Elliott. A bronze statue of Buckey erected in 1907 has become a Prescott landmark and occupies a prominent spot in front of the Yavapai County Courthouse.

Roosevelt was beside himself with anguish, grief, despair, and mounting anger. He clearly had to do something. He couldn't wait forever while the best of his men were falling dead around him with orders to hold their fire. He sent another message to Sumner and Wood, pleading for permission to shoot back and advance. Wood's and Sumner's impatience and frustration were also boiling over, as they themselves had no clear orders from Shafter on how to proceed. Sumner, whose troops included the black Ninth, later said that it had become “necessary either to advance or else retreat under
fire.” Roosevelt was at the point of taking it upon himself to move toward the hill when the long-awaited message arrived a little after 1:00
PM
from Sumner's camp, with Shafter's approval, to “move forward and support the regulars on the assault on the hills in front.”

It was the summons Roosevelt had been hoping for, and he sprang to action without delay. He mounted Texas, pointed his men in the direction of Kettle Hill, past the body of Buckey O'Neill, and led the charge in the midst of a blizzard of enemy gunfire.

As Roosevelt rode up from the riverbank, he saw one of his men lying in a bush off to the side. Roosevelt ordered him to get up and join the charge. The trooper staggered to his feet and tried to move forward, and it was then Roosevelt noticed that he had already been raked across the length of his body by Spanish gunfire. The man fell over dead. Roosevelt blanched when he realized that the bullets may have been intended for himself, an easier target mounted on his horse, but had claimed the life of one of his volunteers instead. That he was putting himself at greater risk by charging ahead of his men on horseback had not occurred to Roosevelt before then. But it was not his nature to shy away from danger; the incident rattled him temporarily, but he shrugged it off and rode on.

Ahead and to the left of Roosevelt, Pershing told his men to charge. He positioned himself at the head of the black Tenth as he observed the entire field of combat. They were all engaged now, as Pershing reported on the action afterward: “Each officer or soldier next in rank took charge of the line or group immediately in his front or rear and halting to fire at each good opportunity, taking reasonable advantage of cover, the entire command moved forward as coolly as though the buzzing of bullets was the humming of bees. White regiments, black regiments, regulars, and Rough Riders …
unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by ex-Confederate or not, and mindful of only their common duty as Americans.”

Pershing's Tenth Cavalry and Sumner's Ninth Cavalry rushed directly ahead toward San Juan Hill. Farther south, Kent also advanced with the black Twenty-Fourth and other men under his command toward San Juan, with some of the troops approaching along the smaller footpath seen from the balloon. The Rough Riders pushed on toward Kettle Hill north of them, and Wood's brigades formed another line of attack across the entire range of battle. When Pershing saw most of the attackers heading up the incline through the brush to San Juan, he veered the Tenth off to the right to reinforce Roosevelt's left flank and support the Rough Riders' steep climb to Kettle Hill.

The first ranks of attackers had now moved within about five hundred yards of Kettle Hill and could see the sugar refinery and some of the enemy emplacements through the constant cloud of Mauser bullets that continued to inflict heavy casualties on the Americans. The enemy was almost in sight, but what the attackers didn't know yet and would soon discover was the hills were protected by barbed wire fences that were all but invisible as they snaked through the thick brush around the Spanish entrenchments.

T
he advance was made under heavy infantry fire, through open flat ground, cut up by heavy wire fences,” Sumner recalled later. Beyond the barbed wire, the jungle growth ended and the incline became steeper. To his right, Pershing's Tenth joined up with Roosevelt and the Rough Riders as they continued to push slowly up the hill. Roosevelt wanted his men to get to the top before the others, and he urged them on while still mounted on Texas, shouting at the soldiers to not fall behind. Some of the Rough Riders ran a few steps before the hill became more demanding, and then they found themselves panting for breath and falling to the ground, trying to crawl up the incline when their legs gave out. Pershing's Tenth was beside the Rough Riders on the left, with Sumner's Ninth to the left of them, most of the black troops in better physical condition due to long years of battlefield experience. Together, they slogged their way closer to the enemy lines.

The Mauser bullets steadily took a toll, finding their marks from the riflemen on the hill and from snipers hidden in the trees to the right. The American lines of attack devolved into a welter of confusion, with troops strewn out along the slopes from Kettle Hill over
the Heights to San Juan, and down along the trails behind them with the rear guards still moving up from El Pozo. Medical corpsmen scampered up and down, pinning white tags on the slightly wounded, blue-and-white tags on those more seriously injured, and red tags on the more critical cases. They carted away the wounded as quickly as they could and left the dead where they had fallen, to be buried later. “We thought we had a soft snap,” a medic recalled later, referring to the outnumbered enemy, “but we got a tough proposition here.”

The front ranks of American attackers encountered the first strands of the Spaniards' barbed wire defenses. The enemy had strung the fences between palmetto poles sunk into the ground in a zigzag pattern about twenty-five yards apart. The Tenth reached the first jagged line of wire before the others and started to tear at it with their bare hands. Roosevelt tried to move ahead on horseback, but Texas began to stumble and rear up in fear as the hill grew more challenging. The horse almost became ensnared in the wire, temporarily bringing horse and rider to a halt. But Roosevelt was able to guide Texas across the fence when the troops pulled the poles out of the ground and flattened it.

At that moment, a sniper's bullet from the rear—or, possibly, an errant shot from one of his Rough Riders—grazed Roosevelt's cheek and ripped his eyeglasses from his nose. His nearsightedness was severe enough that he could barely see without them. Fearing such an event, he always kept a few pairs in reserve, one of which he put on. His luck was still holding out; three times so far bullets had nicked him or hit a nearby tree, and three times he came through with no serious injuries. His men scrambled with him over the downed fence and continued up the slope. One of them said later, “If Teddy was not on that horse, the bullets would not be coming so close.”

The men continued to receive head and chest wounds as they carried the yellow Rough Rider banner up the hill, which had now steepened to about a forty-five-degree angle. One of the troops had his hat shot off, the bullet just missing his head as it ripped through the crown. “I'll have to patch that up with a bit of sticking plaster, or I'll get my hair sunburned,” the redhead joked, drawing laughter from his comrades. Buffalo Soldiers from the Ninth and Tenth moved slightly ahead of them to their left as they drew closer to enemy lines. A British correspondent reported that the troops advanced slowly but steadily, likening their climb to his own country's Charge of the Light Brigade against the Russians during the 1854 Crimean War. Many of the American soldiers fell out with wounds or from exhaustion, but the majority didn't falter as they pushed on in the face of deadly fire.