Free The Roughest Riders by Jerome Tuccille Page B

the beach. They bivouacked on the beach outside Daiquiri where a railroad crossed a wagon road leading to the coastal town of Siboney, about six miles to the west. The Tenth, a black unit under the command of General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler—as were the Rough Riders—had also made it ashore earlier than most of the other troops. Already in his sixties, Wheeler had been a Confederate army general during the Civil War, and many of the men thought he had lost his grip on reality by this time. He seemed to have his wars mixed up when he exhorted his troops in Cuba to charge because “we’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again.” A small, intense man and a graduate of West Point, he represented Alabama in Congress for seven terms after the Civil War and was second in command to Shafter in Cuba. Wheeler was the physical opposite of Shafter, who weighed in at well over three hundred pounds and was, at that moment, indisposed with an attack of gout aboard the
Seguranca.
    Shafter was also an old veteran, a year older than Wheeler at sixty-three. He accepted a commission in a Michigan volunteer unit during the Civil War and received the nation’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his actions at the Battle of Fair Oaks, where he was wounded. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Thompson’s Station and spent three months in a Confederatejail. After his release, he was appointed colonel of the all-black Seventeenth Regiment and led it at the Battle of Nashville. By the time the war ended, he had risen to the rank of brigadier general. In the early 1890s, Shafter fought on the American frontier in the Indian Wars and earned the soubriquet “Pecos Bill” during his campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche, and other tribes.

    General Wheeler (left) was inclined to defy orders from his superior, General Shafter (right), whose tactics he regarded as too timid. They had fought on opposite sides during the Civil War, and Wheeler sometimes got his wars mixed up when he referred to the Spaniards as “damn Yankees.”
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    Not only were Shafter and Wheeler physical opposites, but they had fought on opposing sides during the Civil War. The gargantuan, ailing Shafter was regarded as an unlikely candidate for his commanding role in Cuba. He was past his prime, as was Wheeler, and the two men resented each other.
    The soldiers who camped that first night in Daiquiri immediately came under attack—not from enemy soldiers, as they’d feared, but from giant land crabs the size of small dogs that crawled into the two-man tents and skittered over the men while they attempted to sleep. The Americans had never seen anything like them before, not even the Westerners who were used to encountering snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, lizards, and all sorts of pinching and biting creatures in the desert. No one had ever seen crabs of this magnitude, and they fought them off throughout the night, unable to get much-needed rest during the ordeal. Fortunately, the crabs were scavengers that ate only carrion and weren’t interested in live meat.
    The crabs were gone by morning, and above the men and their campsites loomed the mountains with virtually impassable roads. Beyond them, eighteen miles of thick jungle teemed with venomous snakes and other reptiles, slithering and crawling over the hills between the troops and their primary objective: the town of Santiago de Cuba.
    The Twenty-Fifth black infantry and some white units were under the command of General Henry Lawton. General Shafter devised a plan for Lawton’s divisions to take the lead, trekking from the beach toward Siboney over rugged and swampy coastalterrain. Bringing up the rear would be a cavalry division composed of regulars and volunteers, including the black Ninth and Tenth, a few white units, and the Rough Riders, all dismounted except for Roosevelt, Wood, and some of the other officers. They were