Miles was a true army hero. He enlisted at the start of the Civil War, was commissioned a captain, and fought in practically every major battle other than Gettysburg, missing that only because he was recovering from a wound. A handsome man, whose opinion of his own skills and potential was monumental (Theodore Roosevelt would call him “the brave peacock”), his first postwar duty was commanding Fort Monroe with its prisoner Jefferson Davis. His second was to command the all-Negro Fortieth Infantry.13 In the American West, Miles fought in the Indian Wars and went after Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Crazy Horse. In 1886 he captured Geronimo; in 1890 he dealt with the Sioux. In 1891, General Miles watched a bicycle race in Madison Square Garden and came away wondering how to make use of bicycles in the army. When Moss's proposal came across his desk in 1894, Miles had not forgotten that race nor his time with the Buffalo Soldiers. He approved Moss's request. The new unit was called the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Bicycle Corps.
Imposing its designation may have been, but the “corps” consisted of exactly “one lieutenant, one sergeant, one corporal, one musician, and five privates, one of them a good mechanic.”14 And, of course, bicycles. A. G. Spalding & Bros., the sporting goods company, smelled an opportunity here to boost bicycle sales. This—and no doubt its spirit of patriotism—moved it to donate bikes to the army. They were strong and rugged, with frames and rims made of steel, which made them very heavy. Exactly what the army and Lieutenant Moss wanted.
In July 1896, testing of the bikes and the soldiers began. Moss had to come up with new commands for his new corps. “Jump fence” was for climbing over an obstacle. It alerted a rider to stand on his bike's seat, climb over whatever was in the way, then reach back and pull his “steel steed” across. Different physical conditioning was demanded. The men undertook long rides, up to 126 miles, in rain and heat, through mud and dust, testing themselves and their equipment. It all went very well.
The final test would be an almost-two-thousand-mile ride from Fort Missoula to St. Louis, Missouri, by twenty men, including Sergeant Mingo Sanders, who was responsible for the riders’ morale.15 They, the assistant post surgeon, and a reporter from the Daily Missoulian were off and cycling on June 14. As they departed Missoula at 5:30 a.m., an hour timed to meet the sun as it rose over the big sky of Montana, its citizens were in the streets, cheering for and encouraging them.
Moss set a goal of fifty miles a day, but this proved much too ambitious. Edward Boos, the accompanying reporter, wrote back to Missoula that the men were nearly “jolted to pieces.” But on they soldiered. On July 24, as they prepared for the final leg into St. Louis, people from the city bicycled out to meet them, and together they crossed into the city, where they were welcomed by ten thousand people.
The biking Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry showed that Miles and Moss were right. The bike could be used by the army.16 Alas, the idea had a short shelf life. Very quickly, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, along with the other Buffalo Soldier units, white regular-army units, and volunteers, including Theodore Roosevelt, found themselves fighting in Cuba.
ON FEBRUARY 15, 1898, at 9:45 p.m., the US Navy's battleship Maine blew up while visiting Havana, Cuba. President McKinley's assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, knew the Maine's sinking meant war with Spain. Demanding thorough planning, preparation, and problem solving from others just as he did from himself, Roosevelt sent orders to ships at sea instructing them where to position themselves for the coming battles, alerted other ships gently rocking in port to be prepared to get underway, transferred big guns to New York to defend the city from attack by way of the sea, asked Congress for special wartime legislation, and ordered Admiral George Dewey to steam his fleet to Hong Kong to bottle up the Spanish fleet and begin offensive operations against it when war was declared.17 He did all this on his own authority without consulting anyone.
A man did not have to have the foresight of a Theodore Roosevelt to see war coming. There was intense speculation at military posts, including those in faraway Montana, where Sergeant Frank Pullen of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, a man who did not like the deep freeze in Montana called winter, was looking forward to fighting so long as it was in someplace warmer.18 When the regiment received its orders to move out, almost a month before Congress declared war on Spain, the men “cheered as the order was read to them.”19 According to Lieutenant R. J. Burt, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was the first army regiment ordered to war. When it reassembled in Tampa, Florida, on May 7, 1898, it would be the first time all its units had been together as a regiment in eighteen years. Training for combat began immediately. After all of those duties more appropriate for young laborers and old bank guards, the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry were going to war, where they would be soldiers, fighting soldiers. On June 6, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry received orders to embark for Cuba, and sixteen days later it landed on the beach.20
THE MEN OF THE Twenty-Fifth Infantry, and no doubt their fellow Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry and Tenth Cavalry, were no less delighted to be going to war than the man who may have done more than any other American to put them there—Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt now had his war, one he would be in the middle of as a soldier. When he resigned his position as assistant secretary of the navy to go to Cuba, his friends thought either he had lost his mind or that his wife Edith, in a sickbed recovering from surgery, must have died.21 Edith Roosevelt would recover, thank you, without his help or even his presence. (He would say later he would have left her on her deathbed to go.) Roosevelt formed a regiment of volunteer cavalry and in time became its commanding officer. In that role he would display leadership, coolness under fire, and courage enough to earn him the Medal of Honor.22 He came home from Cuba a hero. What seemed to other men a dangerous detour from his career would instead take him to the White House.23
THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE Twenty-Fifth Infantry brushed up against each other on July 1, 1898. The primary mission that day was to capture San Juan Heights, which overlooked General William Shafter's ultimate target, the city of Santiago and the Spanish army there. From San Juan Heights, Shafter would be able to lay down a siege to starve the city into surrender with minimal American casualties. First, though, he had to neutralize Spanish soldiers in an outpost known as El Caney. General Henry Ware Lawton's infantry, including the riflemen of the Twenty-Fifth, was ordered to secure El Caney on the morning of July 1. When he had it, he would turn his men west and link up with General Samuel S. Sumner's cavalry; together they would make the midday assault on San Juan Heights. Lawton was sure he could seize his objective in two hours. Shafter gave him three. Both were too optimistic; El Caney was not secured until 4:30 p.m.24
Waiting back at the bottom of San Juan Heights for Lawton's infantry to join them were the Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry and Roosevelt's Rough Riders.25 The day wore on, and from his position along the bank of a creek, Roosevelt suddenly saw Americans beginning the advance he wanted for himself and his Rough Riders. This was all Roosevelt needed to order his men to move out. As the assault began, Spanish sharpshooters took a frightening toll on the Americans, but Roosevelt ignored this and remained high on his horse, encouraging his men behind him. To those hesitant to charge forward with him, he called back, “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?” To a regular army captain whose unit blocked Roosevelt's way, Roosevelt snarled, “I am the ranking officer here, and I give the order to charge.” When the officer still did not budge, Roosevelt yelled, “Then let my men through, sir,” and began what would be the famous charge up San Juan Heights, what Roosevelt would call his “crowded hour.”26 With Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry tearing away barbed-wire fence ahead of him and whooping and hollering Rough Riders behind him, Roosevelt, lashing his pony Little Texas, began his ride that would bring him a Medal of Honor, carry him to the White House, carve his face into Mount Rushmore, and solidify his place in history.
With San Juan Heights secure, Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, an
d the Buffalo Soldiers would pose at the summit with the Stars and Stripes snapping behind them in the wind. A photo of that triumph shows Roosevelt standing with hands on his hips, his head jutting forward in victory, with his men around him. Everyone who made the charge and survived is in the photo. Everyone earned his place in it. It appears in practically every Roosevelt biography published since 1898. What it shows may have been what Joe Rosenthal had in mind when he snapped his photo of Marines raising another Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima forty-seven years later. Only Roosevelt's had many more men in it. Many more faces. Many more heroes. All white.
It turns out the original photo included soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry, who risked just as much and whose bravery and heroism was just as great, standing on either side of the Rough Riders, but extending out from the American flag and Theodore Roosevelt, the man of the hour, just far enough to be conveniently cropped out of the picture and out of history. The Tenth Cavalry was there, but until the complete photo was rediscovered, no one knew it.27
As the men of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry arrived from El Caney and marched westward past San Juan Heights, they could see the Americans at its crest. One of its soldiers would say, “The next day about noon we heard that the Tenth Cavalry had met the enemy and that the Tenth Cavalry had rescued the Rough Riders. We congratulated ourselves that although not of the same branch of service, we were of the same color, and that to the eye of the enemy we, troopers [cavalry] and footmen [infantry] all looked alike.”28
The Twenty-Fifth Infantry may have missed history that day by arriving at the bottom of San Juan Hill too late to take part in that famous charge, but it had seen its share of fighting at El Caney. One of its officers was killed and three were wounded; seven enlisted soldiers died, and twenty-eight suffered wounds.29 Before it left Cuba, its commanding officer would tell his men, “the brightest hours of your lives were on the afternoon of June 1st…. You may well return to the United States proud of your accomplishments; and if any one [sic] asks what you have done, point him to El Caney.”30 A white southern soldier would say, “I've changed my opinion of the colored folks, for of all the men I saw fighting, there were none to beat the Tenth Cavalry and the colored infantry in Santiago, and I don't mind saying so.”31 Rough Rider Frank Knox, Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of the navy in World War II, said, “I fought with them shoulder to shoulder, and in justice to the colored race, I must say I never saw braver men anywhere. Some of those who rushed up the hill will live in my memory forever.”32
Roosevelt called the black soldiers “Smoked Yankees” and said they were always welcome to share canteens with him.33 When he used this odd expression, was he thinking of an incident Mingo Sanders of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry would recall a decade later? They had come together at a place called Siboney. The army had not resupplied the Rough Riders, and walking over to the Twenty-Fifth Infantry and by happenstance encountering Sergeant Sanders, Roosevelt made what Sanders would call a “special request.” Would the Buffalo Soldiers share their hardtack with the Rough Riders? They would. In both his autobiography and The Rough Riders, his memoirs of the war in Cuba, Roosevelt never mentioned the incident. Mingo Sanders never forgot it.34
THE PEACE TREATY WAS signed by a rickety Spain and a rocketing United States, passing each other in different directions as one lost what remained of its empire and the other acquired what would be the beginning of its own. The war ended with Spain losing almost all of what had been a worldwide and fabulously wealthy domain. Its remnants—most important, Cuba in the Western Hemisphere and the Philippines in the Eastern—fell into America's lap.
For America, the question was what to do with them. For Cuba it would be independence. For the Philippines, so foreign and far away, this was out of the question. After agonizing over what to do, President McKinley decided the Philippines had to be occupied and Westernized. Filipinos wasted no time rejecting America's patronizing way. On February 9, 1899, only seven months since the Twenty-Fifth Infantry was at El Caney, they began an insurrection against the United States. The Philippine Insurrection continued into the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, who saw the Philippines as part of an American empire but not solely for economic purposes. Instead, anticipating the role America was to play from then on, Roosevelt wanted American outposts as listening posts in the rest of the world, especially in the Far East, where Roosevelt had his concerns about Japanese imperial designs.35 As part of his plan, the navy's home port in Asia would be the Philippines. Having sent Admiral Dewey to seize them, Roosevelt intended to keep them.
With the Filipinos in revolt, retaining the islands would require detachments from every unit of the regular army. Less than a month after Congress authorized combat, the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, just settled into new posts in the Arizona and New Mexico Territories, got word that some of its units, including Company B of the First Battalion, later to be sent to Fort Brown, were going to the Philippines. By the beginning of August 1899, they were “in country.”
They would stay there almost two years. As in any guerrilla war, combat was mostly a series of hit-and-run skirmishes, one side striking the other suddenly and viciously. The first fighting for the Twenty-Fifth Infantry took place in November. Men handpicked from Companies B, E, and K were ordered to capture a town called O'Donnell from insurgent forces. After a night march, the Americans reached their objective in the early morning and deployed to encircle it. More than one hundred insurgents were completely surprised, and the American force captured them, along with 273 rifles, several bolos (large knives similar to machetes), and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Mission accomplished without a casualty.36
Ahead lay the battle on Mount Arayat, where the insurgent General Servillano Aquino had his headquarters and where the Twenty-Fifth Infantry would be introduced to combat at its most gruesome. Aquino's main camp was at the end of a mountain trail. As they got closer to the top, an insurgent sniper opened fire. First Lieutenant William T. Schenck “yelled to one of the men on my right to kill the ‘hombre,’ and two of the scouts let drive and missed.” The sniper continued his shooting. “Just then, someone in the rear opened up and then the whole outfit—about seventy men—turned loose…. Three bullets hit just below my feet, fired by my own men…. [I] yelled like a stuck pig to cease firing.” When it ceased, Schenck and his black infantrymen rushed the hill “and carried it.”37
Schenck described the “hill” he and his Buffalo Soldiers rushed and took as “a stairway made of logs held by forked sticks, and the drop here was fully 150 feet, and the slope was about 90 degrees. In fact, you could not get into the town without climbing a slope as steep as the roof of a house. The place is a regular Gibraltar and absolutely impregnable on all sides except from the mountain. American troops could never be ripped out of it, and when in future years the place is pointed out where the Twenty-Fifth charged the hill, the tourists will put it down as a lie.”38
In his letter from Mount Arayat, Schenck wrote that the insurgents that day “were thousands in number…. They had evidently had all they wanted of the ‘soldados negroes.’” With Schenck that day was First Sergeant Mingo Sanders of Company B. Having missed what Theodore Roosevelt referred to as the “charge” up San Juan Heights in 1898, Sanders took part in what Schenck called the “rush” up Mount Arayat. It was the proudest moment of his army career, and he would remember it just as he would recall sharing rations with Roosevelt in Cuba.39
For the Twenty-Fifth Infantry, there would be more fighting and skirmishing, but with Mount Arayat, the worst was over. By September 18, 1902, all units were back in America and at their new posts. For the First Battalion, this was Fort Niobrara, Nebraska, its last posting before Brownsville.
FORT NIOBRARA AND THE nearby town of Valentine welcomed the black soldiers. Not long after their arrival, the Valentine Republican complimented the soldiers on their behavior: “A more gentlemanly or better behaved lot of men never garrisoned Fort Niobrara than they have thus far p
roven themselves to be, and may it be said to their credit, they show a disposition to create less disturbance and noise than did many white soldiers who have been stationed here…. If they could know the compliments paid them on their conduct by Valentine citizens, they certainly would feel proud; and the Republican wants them to know this good feeling that exists toward them.”40
Their stay in Nebraska would be short. By 1906, the government was reassessing the need for army protection from Indians. Confined to reservations, they no longer were thought to be a menace, especially in Nebraska, and it was not easy to justify the cost. What ultimately may have doomed Fort Niobrara as an army post, however, was not the end of the frontier but the near end of the buffalo and Theodore Roosevelt's determination to do something about it.
For Americans of the twenty-first century, Theodore Roosevelt's interest in conservation may have the greatest meaning. In The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, the historian and writer Douglas Brinkley inventories the national forests, federal bird reservations, national game preserves, national parks, and national monuments that Roosevelt established. The total number is an astonishing 229. That is one for every ten days of his presidency. Not on the list is Fort Niobrara National Wildlife Refuge (it was created by Roosevelt's successor, President Taft, in 1912), but it owes its existence to Roosevelt and his determination to preserve the great American buffalo.41 Fort Niobrara was in the middle of the Great Plains and an ideal home for the small group of buffalo raised and protected at the Bronx Zoo in New York. It was intended as the seed for the reinvigorated grand herds of the future. Before the buffalo could move in, the Buffalo Soldier had to move out.42 On May 26, 1906, the War Department ordered the post closed and issued orders sending three companies of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry to Fort Brown, Texas.43
Taking on Theodore Roosevelt Page 6
