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By Root 3250 0

6:00 A.M. next morning the Rough Rider convoy finally pulled out of San Antonio. “I doubt,” Roosevelt wrote afterward, “if anybody who was on the trip will soon forget it.”39 For four sweltering days the seven trains chugged eastward and southward, strewing a trail of cinders, vomit, and manure across the face of the old Confederacy. Roosevelt, who was in charge of the rear sections, punished all cases of drunkenness severely, “in order to give full liberty to those who would not abuse it.”40 Two or three times a day, as he read his way steadily through Demolins’s Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons, he sent buckets of hot coffee back to his men to compensate for lack of hot food.41 But the most eagerly awaited refreshments were free watermelons and jugs of iced beer at stopping-places en route. These were passed through the car windows by “girls in straw hats and freshly starched dresses of many colors,” whose beauty some troopers would remember for half a century.42 No Louisiana village or Mississippi cotton-depot was so remote as to have escaped Rough Rider newspaper publicity: exotic celebrities like Woodbury Kane and Hamilton Fish were requested to appear so often that the cowpunchers took to impersonating them. Everywhere, of course, there were gap-toothed cries for “Teddy.”43

As he waved at grizzled old Southerners, and they in turn waved the Stars and Stripes back at him, Roosevelt reflected that only thirty-three years before these men had been enemies of the Union.44 It took war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home. But what future war would heal the scars of this one?

ON THE EVENING OF 2 June the seven trains ground to a halt on the pine flats of western Florida, six miles short of Tampa. For some reason railroad employees refused to haul the regiment any farther, so the Rough Riders were forced to complete their journey on horseback, dragging their equipment behind in commandeered wagons. No official welcome awaited them at the sleep-shrouded Fifth Corps campground outside of town; Roosevelt and Wood had to ride through acres of dim tents before stumbling, almost by accident, upon their allotted space.45

Next morning they awoke to see the largest gathering of the U.S. Army in four decades. For miles in every direction a pitched city spread out across the savanna. Under the moss-hung pines twenty-five thousand troops, mostly Regulars, were enduring what one of them called “the bane of a soldier’s life—waiting for something to happen.” Tampa itself lay a mile or so away, shimmering in coastal haze: it looked like some Middle Eastern mirage, with silver domes and minarets.46

Half an hour’s ride into the freshening sea breeze disclosed that the mirage was real. Here, among mosquito-swamps, derelict shacks, and ankle-deep drifts of sand, stood Henry B. Plant’s famous “folly,” a five-hundred-room hotel in authentic Moorish style, with its own casino, ballroom, swimming pool, and peacock park. On its street-wide verandah, Army and Navy officers, newspaper correspondents, foreign attachés, and pretty Cuban women rocked in elegant bentwoods, sipping iced tea and champagne.47

“This was the rocking-chair period of the war,” wrote Richard Harding Davis of the New York Herald, himself an indefatigable rocker. “It was an army of occupation, but it occupied the piazza of a big hotel.”48

Roosevelt dismissed the Tampa Bay Hotel with a single haughty sentence in his own memoir of those days: “We spent very little time there.”49 Actually he spent three nights in its luxurious accommodations, for Edith came down to Tampa, and Colonel Wood discreetly allowed him leave “from before dinner to after breakfast each day.”50 Having attended Edith through much of her recent illness, that gentlemanly officer must have sensed her need to be with Theodore now that she was returned to health and strength.

CONSPICUOUS AMONG THE ELITE who daily crossed the Tampa Bay Hotel lobby was dropsical, gouty old Brigadier General William Rufus Shafter, commander of the Fifth Corps. At three hundred pounds, or