Free The Roughest Riders by Jerome Tuccille Page A

commander shifting for himself,” Roosevelt wrote. They landed at the squalid port village of Daiquiri, where a railroad and ironworks factory was located. There were no landing facilities there, so the American transport ships were forced to remain offshore near the gunboats, while the men jumped down onto the few landing vessels they had and then rowed toward land in a heaving sea.
    The larger boats carried ten or twelve men each, while the smaller craft had room for only six or seven. Making matters worse, the uniforms issued to the men were made of heavy canvas and wool, more suitable for winter in Montana than for summer in Cuba. The thickness of the Rough Riders’ campaign hats alone could stop anything short of an axe, one of the men quipped. The clothing, along with their weapons, shelter-halves, and other equipment, weighed the men down unmercifully in the damp air and mounting heat. Slowly, the men inched toward shore and approached an abandoned and dilapidated railroad pier. To get from the boats onto land, the men had to leap from the water amid turbulent waves while in fullpossession of their gear. The pack mules and horses had to be pushed off the boats so they could swim ashore on their own.
    Not everyone made it safely to land. A boat transporting black soldiers from the Tenth capsized, and two of the soldiers attempted to leap onto the dock but fell beneath the churning waters of the harbor and sank under the weight of their blanket rolls and other equipment. One of the Rough Riders, Captain William Owen “Buckey” O’Neill, a former mayor of Prescott, Arizona, plunged into the water in full uniform in an attempt to save them. His efforts, sadly, failed, and the men vanished from sight and lost their lives before they had a chance to fire a single shot at the enemy.
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    T he troops of the black Twenty-Fifth were among the first to land a short distance from the pier. “We landed in rowboats, amid, and after the cessation of the bombardment of the little hamlet and coast by the men-of-war and battle-ships,” wrote a soldier in the unit. “We then helped ourselves to cocoanuts [
sic
] which we found in abundance near the landing.”
    The first wave of troops had now landed on Cuban soil, and the veteran soldiers pitched right in and looked about for suitable campsites. Most of them, both black and white, had seen action in earlier wars, with battle scars to show for their combat experience, but some were young recruits no more than seventeen or eighteen years old and weren’t yet familiar with the rigors of warfare. Some of the Rough Riders had also made it onto dry ground, if one could describe the wet Cuban coastline that way. These volunteers, although experienced adventurers and hunters from the West or thrill-seeking wealthy Easterners, were, like the teenage soldiers, as yet untested against live enemy fire.
    The troops were wet and tired, and some of the animals were even worse off. Sadly, one of Roosevelt’s mounts, Rain in the Face,swam the wrong way and drowned among the heaving waves. The other, Texas, made it to the beach with most of the other animals. Texas showed signs of wear and tear after having spent two weeks on the transport ship, and he was breathing heavily after his efforts to swim ashore, but Roosevelt was delighted that his horse perked up in short order and was able to carry his master.
    About one-third of the men and equipment reached land by nightfall on June 22, but it would take another two days for the entire army to hit the beach. While the men were struggling toward land, a group of horsemen came galloping down from the hills waving a Cuban flag above their heads. They also carried a white flag, a prearranged signal that indicated the Spanish forces under General Arsenio Linares had abandoned Daiquiri and taken up defensive positions in the hills outside Santiago.
    The troops pitched camp below the cliffs rising from