Rough Riders | Page 4

best quarterback who ever played on a Harvard Eleven; and
so with Bob Wrenn, a quarterback whose feats rivalled those of Dean's,
and who, in addition, was the champion tennis player of America, and
had, on two different years, saved this championship from going to an
Englishman. So it was with Yale men like Waller, the high jumper, and
Garrison and Girard; and with Princeton men like Devereux and
Channing, the foot-ball players; with Larned, the tennis player; with
Craig Wadsworth, the steeple-chase rider; with Joe Stevens, the crack
polo player; with Hamilton Fish, the ex-captain of the Columbia crew,
and with scores of others whose names are quite as worthy of mention
as any of those I have given. Indeed, they all sought entry into the ranks
of the Rough Riders as eagerly as if it meant something widely
different from hard work, rough fare, and the possibility of death; and
the reason why they turned out to be such good soldiers lay largely in
the fact that they were men who had thoroughly counted the cost before
entering, and who went into the regiment because they believed that
this offered their best chance for seeing hard and dangerous service.
Mason Mitchell, of New York, who had been a chief of scouts in the
Riel Rebellion, travelled all the way to San Antonio to enlist; and
others came there from distances as great.
Some of them made appeals to me which I could not possibly resist.
Woodbury Kane had been a close friend of mine at Harvard. During the
eighteen years that had passed since my graduation I had seen very
little of him, though, being always interested in sport, I occasionally
met him on the hunting field, had seen him on the deck of the Defender
when she vanquished the Valkyrie, and knew the part he had played on

the Navajoe, when, in her most important race, that otherwise unlucky
yacht vanquished her opponent, the Prince of Wales's Britannia. When
the war was on, Kane felt it his duty to fight for his country. He did not
seek any position of distinction. All he desired was the chance to do
whatever work he was put to do well, and to get to the front; and he
enlisted as a trooper. When I went down to the camp at San Antonio he
was on kitchen duty, and was cooking and washing dishes for one of
the New Mexican troops; and he was doing it so well that I had no
further doubt as to how he would get on.
My friend of many hunts and ranch partner, Robert Munro Ferguson, of
Scotland, who had been on Lord Aberdeen's staff as a Lieutenant but a
year before, likewise could not keep out of the regiment. He, too,
appealed to me in terms which I could not withstand, and came in like
Kane to do his full duty as a trooper, and like Kane to win his
commission by the way he thus did his duty.
I felt many qualms at first in allowing men of this stamp to come in, for
I could not be certain that they had counted the cost, and was afraid
they would find it very hard to serve--not for a few days, but for
months--in the ranks, while I, their former intimate associate, was a
field-officer; but they insisted that they knew their minds, and the
events showed that they did. We enlisted about fifty of them from
Virginia, Maryland, and the Northeastern States, at Washington. Before
allowing them to be sworn in, I gathered them together and explained
that if they went in they must be prepared not merely to fight, but to
perform the weary, monotonous labor incident to the ordinary routine
of a soldier's life; that they must be ready to face fever exactly as they
were to face bullets; that they were to obey unquestioningly, and to do
their duty as readily if called upon to garrison a fort as if sent to the
front. I warned them that work that was merely irksome and
disagreeable must be faced as readily as work that was dangerous, and
that no complaint of any kind must be made; and I told them that they
were entirely at liberty not to go, but that after they had once signed
there could then be no backing out.
Not a man of them backed out; not one of them failed to do his whole
duty.
These men formed but a small fraction of the whole. They went down
to San Antonio, where the regiment was to gather and where Wood

preceded me, while I spent a week in Washington hurrying up the
different bureaus and telegraphing my various railroad friends, so as to
insure our getting the carbines,