The Roughest Riders (25 page)

Many communities throughout the North and South honored the Buffalo Soldiers with parades, receptions, luncheons, gifts, and other accolades when they returned to American soil. Philadelphia invited all the black units that had fought in Cuba to a “Peace Jubilee,” during which the city showered them with cheers that were “almost deafening, and lasted until the last of the soldiers
disappeared,” according to the
Army and Navy Journal.
New York City's black West Fifties neighborhood, then called the “Tenderloin” district, was renamed San Juan Hill in their honor. Compliments about the performance of the black troops in combat even came in from the enemy camp. “If you will be as brave in the future to your country as you have proven yourselves today,” said General Toral when he addressed them after the battle, “it will not be very long before you will have generals in the army of the United States.”

The real reason for Roosevelt's betrayal of the Buffalo Soldiers in his evolving public comments appeared to have been the competition they presented to the Rough Riders as the true heroes of the war in Cuba. In the immediate wake of combat, Richard Harding Davis and many of the other correspondents reported on Roosevelt's exploits in hagiographic language, creating the myth that he had charged at the head of his men up San Juan Hill and taken it by storm, almost singlehandedly. The lopsided coverage created a rift between the volunteers, especially the Rough Riders, and the regular army troops who did much of the fighting. Some of the regulars retaliated by saying that they had never actually seen Roosevelt on top of San Juan.

General of the army Nelson A. Miles said during a speech he gave in Washington that Roosevelt “was not at San Juan Hill at all,” based on reports he received from officers in the field. Captain John Bigelow, a white officer with the Tenth, maintained that he never saw Roosevelt on San Juan, although he fought with him on Kettle Hill. Roosevelt almost certainly did make it up to San Juan Hill after the main battle was over, but comments to the contrary probably were made to restore some balance to the publicity bestowed on the Rough Riders. Regarding the Buffalo Soldiers, Bigelow wrote, “Their conduct made me prouder than ever of being an officer in the American Army, and of wearing the insignia of the Tenth United States Cavalry.” Wheeler remarked sarcastically in a
letter to the
New York Herald
, “It is touching to see the regulars get American newspapers, read how redoubt after redoubt was taken by the volunteers, with scarcely any mention of the regular army. How disappointed and disgusted they are!”

One black private speculated in a letter, “I thought we would be the whole thing on account of having taken the hill[,] but the adjutant says the Rough Riders will get all the credit because they have their press agents along. And what do you think, they were not even in the fight. They say our charge will make Roosevelt President someday. Well, I suppose I shouldn't kick, as I am looking for a laurel wreath myself.” Another wrote that he knew from the beginning that the Rough Riders would “steal their thunder.”

The war to kick the Spanish out of Cuba had ended, but the public-relations war would continue for another fifteen years and longer. In a sense, Roosevelt got in the last word when his own book on the war, published the next year, outsold and outlasted all others on the subject. His bully pulpit as president also enabled him to drown out the other voices. Years later, he finally grew tired of all the carping after someone claimed that “his one military deed was firing his pistol at some poor devil who was running away.” He retaliated by replying, “He wasn't shot in the back, but in the left breast as he turned.”

Yellow fever, dysentery, and typhoid fever struck with a vengeance in the days after the warring parties signed their peace agreement. “The starving time was nothing to the fever time, where scores died per day,” wrote a black trooper in a letter to Chaplain Theophilus Steward of the Twenty-Fifth. “We were not permitted to starve; but had fever, and had it bad; semi-decayed beef, both from refrigerators and from cans. We had plenty of fever, but no clothing until
very late; no medicine save a little quinine which was forced into you all the time, intermittent only with bad meat.”

The ailments had already stricken many men in the days leading up to the battle at San Juan Hill, but by mid-July the American army officially announced that they had become epidemic. Doctors ordered the men to boil the water before drinking it, but in the intense heat their thirst was unquenchable, and many of the soldiers drank water wherever and whenever they could find it. Sergeant Horace Bivins, who had been in charge of the Hotchkiss guns with the Tenth, found fresh, uncontaminated water flowing from two springs near a mango grove. He placed a detachment of troops there to guard it, while hundreds of men lined up to take their turns filling their canteens. Bivins succumbed to illness himself on July 26, and he was carried back on a stretcher to the camp hospital in Siboney, where he lay for twelve days “at the point of death.”

The Buffalo Soldiers were assigned to an all-black hospital. It was no more than an open tent in which they had to lie on the ground, getting soaked by torrential downpours that blew in on them from both ends with the shifting winds. Major A. C. Markley of the black Twenty-Fourth referred to it as “a charnel house of the wrecked army.” Men were dying every hour, and even the doctors, nurses, and medics were laid low by the diseases. The chaplain of the Tenth, William T. Anderson, had a degree in medicine as well as divinity, and he complained in no uncertain terms about the conditions the black troops were forced to endure, until they were finally moved to an enclosed tent near Wheeler's headquarters. There they could rest in bunks while they waited to receive better medical attention. “It seems he was just in time to save us,” Bivins wrote.

The call went out for soldiers to volunteer as nurses when the medical professionals became ill, and the entire Twenty-Fourth stepped forward after most of the whites refused. Sixty of them were initially selected, and within days forty-two of the men had
contracted fevers. Again, the need for more help arose, and the rest of the unit volunteered to the last man. They pitched in where necessary, unloading supplies, putting up and striking tents, carrying the sick from place to place, digging graves, and mopping up the mess resulting from widespread dysentery. They kept at it until all the “deaths warned us to stop,” wrote Markley. Out of a total of 456 members of the Twenty-Fourth, 432 lost their lives to the rampaging disease.

By August, conditions in Cuba had become intolerable, and the troops left behind in Cuba were ordered home to convalesce in Camp Wikoff, named in honor of the colonel killed in Cuba who had headed the Twenty-Fourth. The government chose the camp—in Montauk, New York, near the tip of the South Fork of Long Island and east of the Hamptons—since the remote site had a deep-water port where the big ships could dock, and it also provided a quarantine zone of sorts a safe distance from heavily populated areas. In Cuba, bands played and ships flew the colors as the Twenty-Fourth marched to the vessel that would take them back to America. But only 198 men and 9 officers could make it aboard under their own power; the rest of the Twenty-Fourth were carried onto the ship on stretchers. Another thirty of them died from tropical illness after their arrival at Montauk. The official report stated that the transport ship entered the waters of Montauk on September 2 with 385 troops on board, many of them sick, but there were no deaths during the voyage.

Other troops, including the Rough Riders, had already departed on different vessels to make the journey from Cuba to Fort Pond Bay in Montauk. Once back on US soil, they were directed to find accommodations among ten thousand tents stretched in rows across the rolling hills. Most of the men were emaciated and incapacitated. More than thirty-two hundred men were so ill they had to be carried down the gangway on stretchers. Eighty-seven died
during the voyage. Wheeler admitted in his report on the campaign that “the great bulk of the troops that were at Santiago were by no means well.” Compared with the men of the Twenty-Fourth, those of the Ninth, Tenth, and Twenty-Fifth fared reasonably well and recuperated rapidly.

One of the healthiest men to land at Montauk was the home-town favorite from Long Island, the leader of the Rough Riders. As his ship the
Miami
pulled into port in mid-August, Roosevelt waved from the railing at the crowd assembled on the dock to greet him. He was distinctive in his Rough Riders hat, bushy mustache, and thick spectacles. “I'm in a disgracefully healthy condition!” he
shouted. “I've had a bully time and a bully fight! I feel as strong as a bull moose!”

Roosevelt returned to a hero's welcome after the war in Cuba. Always a favorite with the press, he received most of the credit for the victory on San Juan Hill, which he was happy to accept.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-stereo-1s01903)

Most of the others were not as fortunate. Chaplain Steward thought a radical improvement in the men's diet would be the best medicine they could get, and he sent a note to the
Daily Evening News
in southern New Jersey asking local farmers to ship fresh fruit and vegetables to Montauk to help the returning veterans—whites as well as blacks—if they were so inclined. The community complied, and when word of its generosity made the rounds, new shipments of melons, peaches, homemade pies, and vegetables started to pour in from the locals of Long Island, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and other areas. The fresh food produced the desired effect; the men responded almost immediately, and their health was slowly restored.

The logistics of caring for ten thousand sick men in a remote camp hours removed from a major city were almost insurmountable, but more help began to come in from diverse locations throughout the country. The Merchants' Relief Association sent supplies worth thousands of dollars, then distributed them equitably among the recuperating troops. Other charitable organizations followed suit. The Women's Patriotic Relief, the Women's War Relief, the International Brotherhood League, and the Red Cross shipped food, medical supplies, and other goods to Montauk to assuage the suffering. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
set up a tent to organize the relief effort and provide a refuge for wounded warriors unable to return home. For a while, the racial barriers evaporated as blacks, whites, and some American Indians fraternized with one another, joined by necessity in their common plight. For the moment, it was comforting to believe that racial antagonism was now a plague of the past.

“This short war has done so much for America at home and abroad,” wrote Reverend Sylvester Malone in a letter he sent to Camp Wikoff, “that we must take every soldier to our warmest
affection and send him back to peaceful pursuits…. This past war must kindle in our souls a love of all the brethren, black as well as white, Catholic as well as Protestant, having but one language, one nationality, and it is to be hoped, yet one religion.”

The healing time continued over the next few weeks. By the time President McKinley arrived in a flag-bedecked train on September 1, the camp community had already grown to a sprawling
complex of tents, wooden buildings, two hastily built hospitals, and a power plant that stretched from an eighteenth-century building on the western edge to another old structure on the eastern rim, which was torn down and replaced by Montauk County Park. He shook hands with his leading officers, including Roosevelt, gave a speech, and checked out camp conditions. Roosevelt departed with the Rough Riders to great fanfare and cheers from the throngs gathered to see them off on September 13. But the sickest among the troops, including most of the men of the Twenty-Fourth, had to remain for another month before they fully recuperated.