The Roughest Riders by Jerome Tuccille

regular white and black troops led by Young proceeded in a more disciplined fashion, acting like seasoned professionals soon to be facing death. They had been in combat before and knew what it was like to engage well-armed enemies. As the sun rose higher in the cloudless blue sky, the heat and humidity built up with a tropical ferocity, and the spirits of the Rough Riders started to flag along with their stamina. Both Wood and Roosevelt knew that the men were not in the best shape for arduous hiking, and from their vantage atop their horses, they looked on in dismay as their troops faltered on the sides of the path and discarded their equipment. The incline grew steeper, taxing the group’s ability to maintain a steady pace. Soon the path turned into a rocky scramble as the men were forced to claw their way up on their hands and feet. Wood and Roosevelt did all they could do to keep their mounts from sliding backward down the slope.
    Not all of the Rough Riders made it to the top. Foot weary from the unaccustomed exertion, they were burdened by their winter-weight uniforms and drenched in sweat, their dehydration worsened by heavy consumption of rum instead of water. Behind them all, the elderly LaMotte lumbered uphill with his mules, stopping often to keep the rope hitches from coming undone when they got snagged in low-hanging branches. Wood and Roosevelt rode at the head of the pack, trying to preserve some semblance of order in their unraveling ranks. Before they reached Las Guasimas, the two leaders came across a wooden blockhouse that would have served as a good defensive fort for the Spanish, except that it was occupied by some of Lawton’s troops, including members of the black Twenty-Fifth. When Lawton had realized that Wheeler could not be diverted, he had sent an advance party to head Wheeler off at the pass, so to speak, but instead they had intercepted the Rough Riders while Wheeler’s men trekked across the valley.
    The outer wall of the blockhouse measured twelve feet in height, with a few feet of dirt banked against the inner wall, allowing the defenders to fire on their stomachs through narrow slits. It struck Wood and Roosevelt immediately that had Lawton’s troops not gotten there first to chase off the Spaniards, the Rough Riders would have stumbled into an ambush and taken heavy losses. The Spaniards had retreated to a hill a few miles farther along the pass, and Lawton’s regulars said they would keep some guards at the blockhouse to prevent the Spaniards from circling back down while the Rough Riders continued their climb. Wood sent word to LaMotte to hurry along the mules that were carrying the weapons. LaMotte hung back with most of the mule train and sent the three bearing machine guns ahead.
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    T he going got a bit easier when the Rough Riders crested a hill and reached more level ground. The jungle growth thinned out, allowing a refreshing ocean breeze to waft in over the cliff and cool them off. The troops in the lead could see their own ships in the harbor and the tents strung out along the beach. The sky was blue and clear, and the idyllic view stood in sharp contrast to the punishing terrain they had just endured. The area was “carpeted with grass almost as soft as the turf in the garden of an old English country house,” reported Edward Marshall in the
New York Journal.
“The tropical growth on our right shot up rank and strong for ten or fifteen feet, and then arched over until our resting-place was almost embowered. On the left was a narrow, treeless slope on which tall Cuban grass waved lazily.”
    Every now and then they passed through glades and shoulders along the trail, from which they could see far out to the horizon. Roosevelt thought the area was strikingly beautiful and peaceful. It seemed to him and some of the Rough Riders from the West that they were off on a hunting excursion instead of tromping ahead into a gory