Rough Riders | Page 8

stretch through fifty miles of death-like desert was a good
school out of which to come with profound indifference for the
ordinary hardships of campaigning.
As a rule, the men were more apt, however, to have had experience in
warring against white desperadoes and law-breakers than against
Indians. Some of our best recruits came from Colorado. One, a very
large, hawk-eyed man, Benjamin Franklin Daniels, had been Marshal
of Dodge City when that pleasing town was probably the toughest
abode of civilized man to be found anywhere on the continent. In the
course of the exercise of his rather lurid functions as peace-officer he

had lost half of one ear--"bitten off," it was explained to me. Naturally,
he viewed the dangers of battle with philosophic calm. Such a man was,
in reality, a veteran even in his first fight, and was a tower of strength
to the recruits in his part of the line. With him there came into the
regiment a deputy-marshal from Cripple Creek named Sherman Bell.
Bell had a hernia, but he was so excellent a man that we decided to take
him. I do not think I ever saw greater resolution than Bell displayed
throughout the campaign. In Cuba the great exertions which he was
forced to make, again and again opened the hernia, and the surgeons
insisted that he must return to the United States; but he simply would
not go.
Then there was little McGinty, the bronco-buster from Oklahoma, who
never had walked a hundred yards if by any possibility he could ride.
When McGinty was reproved for his absolute inability to keep step on
the drill-ground, he responded that he was pretty sure he could keep
step on horseback. McGinty's short legs caused him much trouble on
the marches, but we had no braver or better man in the fights.
One old friend of mine had come from far northern Idaho to join the
regiment at San Antonio. He was a hunter, named Fred Herrig, an
Alsatian by birth. A dozen years before he and I had hunted mountain
sheep and deer when laying in the winter stock of meat for my ranch on
the Little Missouri, sometimes in the bright fall weather, sometimes in
the Arctic bitterness of the early Northern winter. He was the most
loyal and simple-hearted of men, and he had come to join his old
"boss" and comrade in the bigger hunting which we were to carry on
through the tropic midsummer.
The temptation is great to go on enumerating man after man who stood
pre-eminent, whether as a killer of game, a tamer of horses, or a queller
of disorder among his people, or who, mayhap, stood out with a more
evil prominence as himself a dangerous man--one given to the taking of
life on small provocation, or one who was ready to earn his living
outside the law if the occasion demanded it. There was tall Proffit, the
sharp-shooter, from North Carolina--sinewy, saturnine, fearless; Smith,
the bear-hunter from Wyoming, and McCann, the Arizona book-keeper,
who had begun life as a buffalo-hunter. There was Crockett, the
Georgian, who had been an Internal Revenue officer, and had waged
perilous war on the rifle-bearing "moonshiners." There were Darnell

and Wood, of New Mexico, who could literally ride any horses alive.
There were Goodwin, and Buck Taylor, and Armstrong the ranger,
crack shots with rifle or revolver. There was many a skilled packer who
had led and guarded his trains of laden mules through the
Indian-haunted country surrounding some out-post of civilization.
There were men who had won fame as Rocky Mountain stage-drivers,
or who had spent endless days in guiding the slow wagon-trains across
the grassy plains. There were miners who knew every camp from the
Yukon to Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose memories were stored
the brands carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assiniboia. There
were men who had roped wild steers in the mesquite brush of the
Nueces, and who, year in and year out, had driven the trail herds
northward over desolate wastes and across the fords of shrunken rivers
to the fattening grounds of the Powder and the Yellowstone. They were
hardened to the scorching heat and bitter cold of the dry plains and
pine-clad mountains. They were accustomed to sleep in the open, while
the picketed horses grazed beside them near some shallow, reedy pool.
They had wandered hither and thither across the vast desolation of the
wilderness, alone or with comrades. They had cowered in the shelter of
cut banks from the icy blast of the norther, and far out on the
midsummer prairies they had known the luxury of lying in the shade of
the wagon during the noonday rest. They had lived in brush lean-tos for
weeks at a time, or with