The Roughest Riders Read online

  Unfortunately, while the men holding the balloon were preoccupied, the giant aerial target drifted out over the water above the troops, showing the Spanish soldiers on the hill precisely where the Americans were crossing the river. The Spaniards launched a steady discharge of rifle fire that not only inflicted more death on the men below the balloon but also punctured it. The incoming fire was vicious and intense, shredding the balloon’s skin and sending it into a freefall until it crashed ingloriously into the trees beside the trail. The men in the basket managed to get out with their lives, but many soldiers on the ground were not as fortunate. Spanish shells and bullets exacted a heavy toll, with the Rough Riders near the lead taking a good deal of the punishment. Many of them dashed off to the sides looking for whatever cover they could find. Sections of Kent’s and Wood’s regiments were trapped and unable to flee from the carnage. At least eighty men were killed, and many more were wounded.

  Simultaneously, a thirty-eight-year-old captain rushed to the front of the pack, with the black Tenth charging behind him. The captain’s name was John J. Pershing, the officer who would gain fame almost twenty years later as General “Black Jack” Pershing when he led the American Expeditionary Forces during World War I. Pershing had long been a champion of African Americans, having taught at the Negro School in Missouri, where he was born, before he entered West Point in 1882. He earned his nickname as a defender of black equality and a spokesman for their performance in battle when it was unfashionable to do so—the soubriquet first registering as “Nigger Lover,” then “Nigger Jack,” before it was sanitized as “Black Jack.”

  This was not the first time that Pershing had led black soldiers in combat. He had headed the Tenth and a white cavalry unit during the Indian Wars in the early part of the decade, praising their valor in combat. Pershing was an instructor of military tactics at West Point when the Maine exploded in February 1898, and he asked for permission to rejoin the Tenth when it was ordered to Cuba. He hooked up with the black troops in Chickamauga, Georgia, traveled with them to Florida, and sailed as the leader of the group from Tampa. Pershing complained bitterly about the conditions the men endured below deck on their way to Cuba, about the shabby treatment they received from their white compatriots, and even about the heavy, unsuitable uniforms the men were issued as they headed off to a tropical warzone. He marched with them every step of the way after they landed on Cuban soil, earning his men’s respect and admiration. Now they followed him willingly into battle in the face of a murderous enemy onslaught.

  Although Pershing thought that Shafter had botched the operation from the start, he came to the general’s defense when a white officer complained about the “fat old slob” who was getting them all killed. “Why did you come to this war if you can’t stand the gaff?” chastised Pershing, a military man through and through. “War has always been this way. The fat old man you talk about is going to win this campaign. When he does, these things will be forgotten. It’s the objective that counts, not the incidents.”

  Pershing positioned himself waist-high in the middle of the fast-flowing river as he motioned the Tenth forward through exploding shells and heavy Mauser fire. He moved back and forth from the water to the shore, urging the men on. An enemy shell screeched in and landed between him and Wheeler, who was mounted on his horse. Pershing saluted Wheeler, who saluted him back and remarked, “The shelling seems quite lively.” Then Wheeler rode off while Pershing continued to direct his men to the other side of the river. He stood exposed in the midst of the intense pounding as his men were hit and fell to the ground all around him. Every so often, he returned to land to find some of his men who were lost in the jungle and to direct them across the river. Pershing held steady amid the carnage, and when a man in his command was shot next to him, he calmly noted the way the soldier’s arms flew up and his hands flapped downward at the wrists: “That’s the way it is with all people when they are shot through the body,” Pershing observed, “because they want to hold the torso steady, because if they don’t it hurts.” One of the black troops in his command, who had witnessed Pershing in action, commented later that through it all, “Pershing remained as cool as a bowl of cracked ice.”

  The American troops following the Tenth across the river started to refer to it as “Hell’s Crossing,” and they called the open field on the far side “the Bloody Angle.” When Wood made it over, he looked back at the tattered balloon and said it was “one of the most ill-judged and idiotic acts I have ever witnessed.” One of his officers agreed, saying, “What the balloon didn’t get hit us.”

  Roosevelt followed in their wake and deployed the remnants of the Rough Riders to the right in the direction of Kettle Hill. Their numbers were significantly depleted, and more would lose their lives before the battle was over. Those who were left made it across with their leader. They passed the Tenth as they veered north, with orders to meet up with Lawton’s men after the latter finished mopping up El Caney.

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  At about 1:00 in the afternoon, Ludlow’s brigade commenced firing again at the Spanish emplacements from its position southwest of El Viso. Lawton ordered Miles and Chaffee to move forward with the white Fourth and black Twenty-Fifth to see if they could get any closer to the fort. A second line of black troops, led by Lieutenant James A. Moss, followed about two hundred yards behind them, firing over their heads in the direction of El Viso.

  Moss was an 1894 graduate of West Point who had earned some earlier fame experimenting with the use of bicycles in war. In 1896, he formed the Twenty-Fifth Bicycle Corps, which covered forty miles a day over rugged mountain terrain, crossing streams, and even hauling their bikes over fences up to nine feet high. Each soldier carried a knapsack, blanket roll, and shelter-half strapped to his handlebars, plus a rifle containing fifty rounds of ammunition slung on his back. Moss designed the bikes himself and had them built by the sporting good company Spalding with steel rims, tandem spokes, extra-heavy side forks and crowns, gear cases, luggage carriers, frame cases, brakes, and special saddles. Fully packed, the bicycles weighed about sixty pounds.

  Now Moss found himself leading black foot soldiers in battle. Two lines of trees that ran along a railroad track hid him and his second rank of attackers from the eyes of the Spaniards. Just north of the trees stood a line of barbed wire, beyond which lay an open field of pineapples. No sooner did Moss and his men in the rear cross over into the pineapple field than a hail of Spanish bullets and shells roared down on them, raking them as they crossed open ground with no protection. Moss was more concerned about the carnage inflicted on his men than he was for his own wellbeing. “It’s raining lead!” he wrote later. “The line recoils like a mighty serpent, and then in confusion, advances again! The Spaniards now see us and pour a murderous fire into our ranks! Men are dropping everywhere … the bullets cut up the pineapple at our feet … the slaughter is awful…. Our men are being shot down at our very feet, and we, their officers, can do nothing for them!”

  Chaffee, to the right, ordered his own men to move ahead, away from the deadly gunfire behind them and closer to El Viso. Slowly, his troops closed to within two hundred yards of the fort and could begin to make out the shapes of the Spanish riflemen inside the structure as well as in the rifle pits around it. He called for his best sharpshooters to come to the front of the line and take aim at the enemy. Close to forty of them inched forward, took their positions, and opened fire. This time, the American bullets found their marks. Spanish troops began to fall, shot where they lay in their rifle pits and winged in the head and shoulders by bullets that made it through the firing slots in the wall of the fort. The number of Spanish dead and wounded climbed rapidly.

  “Thirty or forty of these dead shots are pouring lead into every rifle pit, door, window, and porthole in sight,” read Chaffee’s exuberant message from the front. “The earth, brick, and mortar are fairly flying! The Spanish are shaken and demoralized.”

  The black Twenty-Fifth surged forward, emboldened
by the sudden turn of events—an almost instantaneous and unexpected reversal of fortune, it seemed. They got there first in the face of “a galling fire,” about twenty minutes before the next wave of soldiers arrived at the fort, according to Lieutenant Colonel A. S. Daggett, a white officer with the group. When the Spaniards saw the Smoked Yankees—as they had referred to them earlier at Las Guasimas—charging forward, they retreated from the fort over the far side of the hill and ran toward the village of El Caney. One by one, those who were still able-bodied cut and ran off.

  “Bareheaded and without rifles, they are frantically running from their rifle pits,” Chaffee went on with undisguised elation. “Our men are shooting them down like dogs.”

  The Twenty-Fifth charged inside the fort, with their comrades closing in behind them. The Spanish dead and wounded lay everywhere, carpeting the dirt floor and soaking it with their blood. Bullet holes pockmarked every square inch of the stone walls. The trenches outside were layered with the dead and groaning enemy in contorted positions. Many had been shot through the forehead as they had peeked above their barricades. One officer noted that “their brains oozed out like white paint from a tube.” Others had been maimed by shrapnel from Capron’s artillery and writhed half-dead in the trenches. Men from the Twenty-Fifth seized the Spanish flag from the top of the fort and raised it overhead in victory.

  From their vantage point at El Viso, the American troops could see some of the retreating Spaniards trying to circumvent El Caney and flee into the hills to the north. The route was blocked, however, by a band of Cuban rebels who were marching south in an attempt to attack the village from the other side. In effect, the roughly three hundred Spanish soldiers who were left to defend the village itself were trapped there by Cubans to the north and the Americans in command of El Viso, who now outnumbered the enemy twenty to one. Nonetheless, General Joaquín Vara del Rey y Rubio, who had been tasked by Linares with holding El Caney with so few men, decided to fight on. The battle may have been all but decided, but he knew the attackers would head south to reinforce the troops at San Juan at their first opportunity, and he figured he could at least deprive Shafter of about one-third of his army by bogging it down at El Caney.

  The odds greatly favored the American forces, but the battle for El Caney was not yet over, not as long as General Rubio still had a breath of life in his fifty-eight-year-old body and a handful of soldiers under his command. The general regrouped some of his men in front of a blockhouse on the southeast corner of the village, and from there they launched a stream of bullets at the advancing American troops. A line of trenches ran from that blockhouse westward until it reached another blockhouse that anchored the southwest corner of El Caney. Spanish sharpshooters occupied a row of fortified houses extending northward along the west side of town, from which they fired down at Ludlow’s men, who had circled to their left to cut off a Spanish retreat along the road toward Santiago. The Americans shot back, but their bullets had little effect on the well-entrenched enemy.

  “As long as we remain in our present position,” one of Ludlow’s officers said, “we can accomplish but little, as the walls of the blockhouse are impervious to our bullets.” The unfavorable situation prompted them to veer farther to their left, down the slope of the hill and then up to a ridge that overlooked the blockhouse and the houses on the west side of the town. The higher vantage point allowed them to fire down at the Spaniards in the blockhouse and in the row of houses from about two hundred yards away.

  This line of attack proved more successful and caused many of the defenders to abandon the blockhouse and seek cover among the houses to their north. They tried to make a final stand there against the encircling Americans, who kept closing in on them like a noose drawing tighter every minute. The men of the Twenty-Fifth had continued on past the fort after seizing the Spanish flag and swarmed into the village from the east, shooting retreating enemy soldiers as they backed them into town. General Rubio rode through the village on horseback, exhorting his men to fight on against the Americans and deprive them of an early victory.

  The conquest of El Caney took longer than anticipated, and much of the credit for the victory belonged to the black Twenty-Fifth, which launched the major assault on the village that led to its ultimate collapse.

  Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-104748)

  As the Americans moved closer from all sides, the Spanish kept up a steady attack from the center of the village, the heart of which was the old stone church that sat like a sentinel in the midst of the bloodshed. Despite their mounting losses, the Spaniards refused to submit to the overwhelming tide of American attackers. They held on for the next few hours, until reality overwhelmed them late in the afternoon.

  “The action lasted nearly throughout the day, terminating about 4:30 p.m.,” Chaffee wrote in his report. The sheer weight of the numbers against the Spaniards told the final story. Down to the last eighty-four soldiers of the more than five hundred they started with, the Spanish forces collapsed after ten brutal hours of combat.

  One of the last to be killed was the general who had inspired his men to rise above their dire circumstances and accomplish the nearly impossible. Rubio was shot through the legs as he fired his gun in the square in front of the church. His men lifted him from his horse and were lowering him onto a stretcher when an American bullet crashed through his head and killed him where he lay. Two of his sons had been lost in action earlier that day. American soldiers buried the Spanish leader with full military honors, praising him as “an incomparable leader; a heroic soul,” whose men had shown “magnificent courage” during the battle for El Caney. Later that year, Rubio’s remains were repatriated to Spain, where he received his country’s highest military decoration.

  As Rubio’s life fled from his body, so too did the will to continue flee from the bodies of his men. More than four hundred Spanish soldiers died or were wounded defending El Caney. The survivors escaped past Ludlow’s troops and scampered down the road to Santiago. An equal number of Americans were killed or wounded taking the village—which the soldiers soon started calling “Hell Caney”—with the initial successful charge on El Viso spearheaded by the black Twenty-Fifth.

  A British officer who witnessed the American assault on El Caney blamed their heavy losses—despite the overwhelming odds on their side—on poor generalship and disorganized planning overall, laying the blame squarely at Shafter’s feet. “Is it customary with you to assault blockhouses and rifle pits before they have been searched by artillery?” the Brit asked an American officer.

  “Not always,” the officer answered, his embarrassment showing.

  The British officer didn’t need to point out that in this battle meant to be a speedy prelude to the main action farther south, nearly a tenth of the American troops were badly wounded, killed immediately, or else died later from untreated injuries because of poor medical attention. Adding to the poor showing was the absence of a major part of Shafter’s army, who was not able to relieve their comrades at El Caney because they were trying to storm the San Juan Heights. Some of the blame fell on the cautious Lawton, the commanding general in the El Caney operation, but ultimately the buck stopped with the man presiding over the entire war, the bedridden Shafter, hampered by gout and other ailments.

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  With the battle for El Caney now ended, Lawton decided to rest his men for the night rather than risk more of their lives on a drive southwest toward San Juan over unfamiliar terrain. Instead, he marched them due south, back down the path taken that morning, past Marianage to El Pozo, where they bivouacked overnight. By the time they arrived that evening, Lawton’s men were clearly spent, bruised and battered by the rigors of the daylong battle. And even had they headed directly toward San Juan to join the troops fighting there, according to the original plan, it was already too late for them to be of any help to the beleaguered American forces struggling to fight their way up a different set of treacherous hills.
/>   Close to noon on July 1, before Lawton called an end to the ceasefire at El Caney, Roosevelt had deployed the Rough Riders to the right along the San Juan River toward Kettle Hill, hoping that Lawton’s men would be heading southwest to their assistance. To his immediate left was Pershing at the head of the Tenth. Roosevelt led his men into a jungle on his right flank as Mauser bullets drove down on them in sheets through the trees, inflicting heavy casualties. Sumner sent a courier up to Roosevelt’s position with instructions to send a search party to make sure the Spanish hadn’t planned another ambush for his men. The best Roosevelt could do in the dense foliage was to lead a skirmish line farther into the jungle, taking the lead himself on foot.

  His second order from Sumner was to refrain for the time being from firing at the enemy, since Pershing and the Tenth were in the process of advancing ahead of him through more open terrain and he didn’t want the Rough Riders putting them in their line of fire. Roosevelt smoldered again at being relegated to reserve status, but he had no option except to follow orders as he waited for an opportunity to engage the Spaniards at closer range. He sent couriers of his own over to Wood, who was leading his own detachment in the direction of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt’s men were tumbling around him, their losses growing by the minute, and he hoped that Wood would be more sympathetic to his plight. While Roosevelt inched his skirmish line through the jungle, he encountered six dark-skinned men wearing ragged uniforms he couldn’t identify and that were all but slipping off their backs. They claimed to be Cuban rebels looking to return to their unit. Since they were unarmed and Roosevelt had no way of knowing for sure who they were, he let them disappear back into the jungle in the direction they had come from.