The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [324]
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.18 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.19
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.”20
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.21
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.”22
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.”23
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.
Dear Mr. President, This is just a line to tell you that we are in fine shape. Wood is a dandy Colonel, and I really think that the rank and file of this regiment are better than you would find in any other regiment anywhere. In fact, in all the world there is not a regiment I would so soon belong to. The men are picking up the drill wonderfully … We are ready now to leave at any moment, and we earnestly hope that we will be put into Cuba with the very first troops; the sooner the better.…24
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.25
IT 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