The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [323]
“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.6
ROOSEVELT REACHED San Antonio on the morning of 15 May 1898, wearing a new fawn uniform with canary-yellow trim.7 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.”8
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.”9 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 1780.10 Here was an Indian named Adair: Roosevelt had spent hours poring over the “ponderous folio” his Cherokee ancestors had written 150 years before.11 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.”12 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.13 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.”14
DAWN AT CAMP WOOD 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.15 Reveille sounded at 5:30, and within half an hour a thousand bleary men were answering roll call.16 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