San Juan Heights begged to be controlled, as the Spanish now did. At 26, after Valentine’s Day, 1884, when wife Alice and mother Mittie both died, he went west, buying a ranch in North Dakota, working cattle and even hunting rustlers. Author of a number of scholarly books, Roosevelt had been an avid boyhood naturalist.
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The press, enthusiastic fans of the ebullient Roosevelt, had dubbed him and his men “Rough Riders,” a nom de guerre borrowed from placards advertising professional plainsman William F. Natty in white tropical suit and matching pith helmet, another, better-known war correspondent, Richard Harding Davis, was on hand.
Stephen Crane, a young journalist and writer, had come, covering the war for the New York World. Portly artist Frederic Remington was there, along with Zeta Sigma fraternity member-turned-cavalryman Frank Knox. The colonel had recruited or welcomed into the ranks leathery, bowlegged cowboys from Oklahoma and New Mexico, Wild West lawmen like Bucky O’Neill, Native Americans, some in war paint, and others, such as Harvard football quarterback Dudley Dean, American tennis champ Bob Wrenn, and Joseph Sampson Stevens, the world’s greatest polo player.
Roosevelt was leading an odd lot of characters. Roosevelt had hoped that once his outfit left the jungle the lack of cover would discourage the Spanish from sniping, but on these grasslands, his soldiers were the ones losing heart, exposed as they were to merciless rifle fire. Army headquarters with orders to advance. Rising in a distant purple haze were the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range blocking Cuba’s cooling northeast breezes. For the past day, the unit had been traversing intense undergrowth and forests at the base of the San Juan Heights. Upon landing as part of an American expeditionary force 20 days earlier, Roosevelt and his men had hacked inland through coastal jungles near Santiago de Cuba to a landscape of savanna and patchwork clearings carved out for planting sugar cane. Hearst papers and the American public blamed Spanish authorities, and the United States went to war against Spain. When in response pro-Spanish gangs in Havana rioted against Americans, McKinley ordered the battleship USS Maine from Key West, Florida, to Havana Harbor, where on February 15, 1898, the warship exploded, killing 260 sailors. His papers’ highly exaggerated coverage spurred President William McKinley to demand that Spain reform its behavior in Cuba. Hearst sent reporters and artists to the island. American publisher William Randolph Hearst undertook to help the Cubans-and boost newspaper circulation–by publicizing these and other Spanish transgressions. The violence on the heights overlooking Santiago de Cuba had its origins in the third attempt by inhabitants of Cuba to throw off Spanish rule, a revolt smashed by Spanish troops engaging in torture and confining civilians in concentration camps.
Formerly New York City’s police commissioner, Roosevelt, 39, and his men were part of an American force attempting to capture Santiago de Cuba, in whose harbor the Spanish war fleet was riding at anchor. He had orders only to support an initial attack on Spanish troops holding the San Juan Heights that lay east of Santiago de Cuba, a port in eastern Cuba, but the situation was growing fraught. Sioux among his soldiers had dubbed their boss Laughing Horse for the unusually large teeth he exposed when he laughed, which was often.Īt the moment, though, Laughing Horse, better known as Theodore Roosevelt, was not laughing. Hunkering in the tall grass on a rise identified by maps as Kettle Hill, the warrior leader peeked now and then, studying the terrain ahead through thick spectacles. On San Juan Hill, a boyhood tenderfoot became a war heroīY MID-MORNING on July 1, 1898, sniper fire from the hills to the north had forced Laughing Horse to dismount from Little Texas, his favorite horse. Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Ride | HistoryNet Close