Cavalry with no horses — theirs were left on a Florida dock — they charged a Cuban hill on foot, and one week of fighting carried Roosevelt to the White House.
When the USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor in February 1898 and the United States went to war with Spain, Congress authorized three regiments of volunteer cavalry drawn from the frontier. Only one ever saw combat: the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry. Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, resigned his desk to help raise it — but knowing he had no combat experience, he turned down command and served as second-in-command under his friend, the army surgeon Leonard Wood.
The plan was to fill the ranks with cowboys, ranchers, lawmen, and Native Americans from the western territories, and many came. But Roosevelt's fame pulled in a stranger crowd: Harvard and Yale athletes, polo players, New York clubmen, and Texas Rangers, all mixed together. 'The difficulty in organizing was not in selecting, but in rejecting men,' Roosevelt wrote. The name was lifted from Buffalo Bill Cody's touring show, 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.'
After training in San Antonio, the regiment fell apart on the docks at Tampa. There was room on the transports for only eight of the twelve companies, and almost all the horses had to be left behind. Men who had signed up as cavalry would fight the war on foot as infantry, and they grumbled that they were now 'Wood's Weary Walkers.'
Their first fight, at Las Guásimas on June 24, was a confused clash in dense jungle against an unseen enemy using smokeless powder. Eight Rough Riders were killed, including the young Captain Allyn Capron. When a war correspondent was shot and mistaken for Colonel Wood, Roosevelt briefly believed he was in command of the whole regiment.
On July 1 came the assault on the San Juan Heights outside Santiago. Wood had been bumped up to brigade command, so Roosevelt now led the regiment. Pinned down at the foot of Kettle Hill under Mauser fire, he lost patience, got on his horse Little Texas, and led a charge uphill — then continued on foot up the main ridge, his men fighting alongside the Black regular troopers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry and white regulars in a jumbled rush.
The charge is remembered as Roosevelt's, but he always insisted the credit belonged to Lieutenant John Parker's detachment of three Gatling guns, which poured some 18,000 rounds into the Spanish trenches and broke the defense. 'It's the Gatlings, men! Our Gatlings!' Roosevelt shouted when he heard them open up. A Spanish counterattack later that day was cut to pieces by the same guns.
The Rough Riders paid for the day. Scores of the roughly 490 men who went up the hill were killed or wounded, the heaviest loss of any American regiment in the battle. Buckey O'Neill, the celebrated sheriff and mayor of Prescott, Arizona, was walking his line encouraging his men when a bullet struck him in the mouth and killed him instantly, moments after he had scoffed that the Spanish bullet was not made that could kill him.
The regiment existed for less than five months. It was mustered out on September 15, 1898, after a miserable quarantine at Camp Wikoff on Long Island, where malaria and fever did more damage than the Spanish had. By then Spain had surrendered and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and the United States had become an overseas empire almost overnight.
One week of campaigning and one hard day of fighting turned Roosevelt into a national celebrity. Within months he was Governor of New York; in 1900 he was Vice President; and in September 1901, when an anarchist killed President McKinley, he became the youngest president in the nation's history at 42.
Roosevelt was recommended for the Medal of Honor for the charge, but a feud with the War Department killed the nomination and he never got it in his lifetime. In January 2001 — more than a century later, and 82 years after his death — the award was finally granted, making Theodore Roosevelt the only U.S. president to hold the Medal of Honor.