Rough Riders | Page 6

father to son who had served in the army of the United States, and
in body and mind alike he was fitted to play his part to perfection. Tall
and lithe, a remarkable boxer and walker, a first-class rider and shot,
with yellow hair and piercing blue eyes, he looked what he was, the
archetype of the fighting man. He had under him one of the two
companies from the Indian Territory; and he so soon impressed himself
upon the wild spirit of his followers, that he got them ahead in
discipline faster than any other troop in the regiment, while at the same
time taking care of their bodily wants. His ceaseless effort was so to
train them, care for them, and inspire them as to bring their fighting
efficiency to the highest possible pitch. He required instant obedience,
and tolerated not the slightest evasion of duty; but his mastery of his art
was so thorough and his performance of his own duty so rigid that he
won at once not merely their admiration, but that soldierly affection so
readily given by the man in the ranks to the superior who cares for his
men and leads them fearlessly in battle.
All--Easterners and Westerners, Northerners and Southerners, officers
and men, cowboys and college graduates, wherever they came from,
and whatever their social position--possessed in common the traits of
hardihood and a thirst for adventure. They were to a man born
adventurers, in the old sense of the word.
The men in the ranks were mostly young; yet some were past their first
youth. These had taken part in the killing of the great buffalo herds, and
had fought Indians when the tribes were still on the war-path. The
younger ones, too, had led rough lives; and the lines in their faces told
of many a hardship endured, and many a danger silently faced with
grim, unconscious philosophy. Some were originally from the East, and
had seen strange adventures in different kinds of life, from sailing
round the Horn to mining in Alaska. Others had been born and bred in
the West, and had never seen a larger town than Santa Fe or a bigger
body of water than the Pecos in flood. Some of them went by their own
name; some had changed their names; and yet others possessed but half
a name, colored by some adjective, like Cherokee Bill, Happy Jack of
Arizona, Smoky Moore, the bronco-buster, so named because cowboys
often call vicious horses "smoky" horses, and Rattlesnake Pete, who
had lived among the Moquis and taken part in the snake-dances. Some

were professional gamblers, and, on the other hand, no less than four
were or had been Baptist or Methodist clergymen--and proved
first-class fighters, too, by the way. Some were men whose lives in the
past had not been free from the taint of those fierce kinds of crime into
which the lawless spirits who dwell on the border-land between
civilization and savagery so readily drift. A far larger number had
served at different times in those bodies of armed men with which the
growing civilization of the border finally puts down its savagery.
There was one characteristic and distinctive contingent which could
have appeared only in such a regiment as ours. From the Indian
Territory there came a number of Indians--Cherokees, Chickasaws,
Choctaws, and Creeks. Only a few were of pure blood. The others
shaded off until they were absolutely indistinguishable from their white
comrades; with whom, it may be mentioned, they all lived on terms of
complete equality.
Not all of the Indians were from the Indian Territory. One of the
gamest fighters and best soldiers in the regiment was Pollock, a
full-blooded Pawnee. He had been educated, like most of the other
Indians, at one of those admirable Indian schools which have added so
much to the total of the small credit account with which the White race
balances the very unpleasant debit account of its dealings with the Red.
Pollock was a silent, solitary fellow--an excellent penman, much given
to drawing pictures. When we got down to Santiago he developed into
the regimental clerk. I never suspected him of having a sense of humor
until one day, at the end of our stay in Cuba, as he was sitting in the
Adjutant's tent working over the returns, there turned up a trooper of
the First who had been acting as barber. Eyeing him with immovable
face Pollock asked, in a guttural voice: "Do you cut hair?" The man
answered "Yes"; and Pollock continued, "Then you'd better cut mine,"
muttering, in an explanatory soliloquy: "Don't want to wear my hair
long like a wild Indian when I'm in civilized warfare."
Another Indian came from Texas. He was a brakeman on the Southern
Pacific, and