[Transcriber's note]

Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book.

Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" spelling is left unchanged. Apparently conflicting spelling is not resolved, as in "Gouraud" and "Gourand".

[End Transcriber's note]

LEONARD WOOD

THE CAREER OF LEONARD WOOD

BY
JOSEPH HAMBLEN SEARS

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

NEW YORK
LONDON

1920

Copyright 1919 by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

TO GENERAL LEONARD WOOD

By Corinne Roosevelt Robinson

CONTENTS

THE SUBJECT

I

THE SUBJECT

In these days immediately following the Great War it is well upon beginning anything--even a modest biographical sketch--to consider a few elementals and distinguish them from the changing unessentials, to keep a sound basis of sense and not be led into hysteria, to look carefully again at the beams of our house and not be deceived into thinking that the plaster and the wall paper are the supports of the building.

Let us consider a few of these elementals that apply to the subject in hand as well as to the rest of the universe--elemental truths which do not change, which no Great War can alter in the least, which serve as guides at all times and will help at every doubtful point. They range themselves somewhat as follows:

The human being is entitled to the pursuit of happiness--happiness in the very broadest sense of the word. No one can approach this object {12} unless he is in some way subordinated to something and unless he is responsible for something. No man can get satisfaction out of life unless he is responsible for what he does to some authority higher than himself and unless there is some one or something that looks to him for guidance. Perhaps the existence of religion has much to do with this. Perhaps prayer and all that it means to us belongs in the category of the first of these elementals. Certainly the family is an example of the second.

The family is the unit of civilization--always has been and always will be. The father and the mother have their collective existence, and their children looking to them for guidance, support and growth, both physical and moral. The moment the family begins to exist it becomes a responsibility for its head, and around it centers a large part of the life and happiness of the human being.

In like manner the state is the unit to which we are subordinated.

These constitute two examples of responsibility and subordination which are necessary to the {13} acquirement of civilization, of happiness and of the rewards of life.

Wherever the state has presumed to enter too far into the conduct of the family it has overstepped its bounds and that particular civilization has degenerated. Wherever the family has presumed to give up its subordination to the state and gather unto itself the responsibility through special privilege, that particular state has begun to die.

In modern civilization it is as impossible to conceive of a state without the unit of the family, as it is to consider groups of families without something that we call a state. It is ludicrous to think of a strong and virile nation composed of one hundred million bachelors. We must go back to the feudal days of the middle ages to get a picture of the family without a state.

In other words, a man, to approach happiness, must have his family in support of which it is his privilege to take off his coat and work, and--if fate so decree--live; and he must have his country's flag in honor of which it is his privilege to take off his hat, and--if need be--die.

Love and patriotism--these are the names of two of the sturdy beams of the house of civilization.

These old familiar laws have been brought forward again by the outbreak of the Great War. There is a letter in existence written by a young soldier who volunteered at the start, a letter which he wrote to his unborn son as he sat in a front line trench in France. It tells the whole great truth in a line. It says: "My little son, I do not fully realize just why I am fighting here, but I know that one reason is to make sure that you will not have to do it by and by." That lad was responsible for a new family, and was the servant of his state--and he began his approach to the great happiness when he thought of writing that letter.

It will be well for us to remember these simple laws as we proceed.

Fifty-eight years ago these laws and several more like them were just as true as they are now. Fifty-eight years hence they will still be true, as they will be five thousand eight hundred years hence. Fifty-eight years ago--to be exact, {15} October 9, 1860--there was born up in New Hampshire a man child named Leonard Wood, in the town of Winchester, whence he was transferred at the age of three months to Massachusetts and finally at the age of eight years to Pocasset on Cape Cod. This man child is still alive at the time of writing, and during his fifty-eight years he has stood for these elemental truths in and out of boyhood, youth and manhood in such a fashion that his story--always interesting--becomes valuable at a time when, the Great War being over, many nations, to say nothing of many individuals, are forgetting, in their admiration of the new plaster and the wall paper, that the beams of the house of civilization are what hold it strong and sturdy as the ages proceed.

This place, Cape Cod, where the formative years of Leonard Wood's life were passed, is a sand bank left by some melting glacier sticking out into the Atlantic in the shape of a doubled-up arm with a clenched fist as if it were ready at any moment to strike out and defend New England against any attack that might come from the eastward. Those who call it their native place have acquired {16} something of its spirit. They have ever been ready to oppose any aggression from the eastward or any other direction, and they have ever been ready to stand firmly upon the conviction that the integrity of the family and of the state must be maintained. And young Wood from them and from his Mayflower Pilgrim ancestors absorbed and was born with a common sense and a directness of vision that have appeared throughout his life under whatever conditions he found himself.

There seems to have been nothing remarkable about him either in his boyhood or in his youth. He achieved nothing out of the ordinary through that whole period. But there has always been in him somewhere, the solid basis of sense and reason which kept him to whatever purpose he set himself to achieve along the lines of the great elemental truths of life and far away from visionary hallucinations of any sort. If it was Indian fighting, he worked away at the basis of the question and got ready and then carried out. If it was war, the same. If it was administration, he {17} studied the essentials, prepared for them, and then carried them out.

Like all great achievements, it is simplicity itself and can be told in words of one syllable. In all lines of his extraordinarily varied career extending over all the corners of the globe he respected and built up authority of government and protected and encouraged the development of the family unit. One might say "Why not? Of course." The answer is "Who in this country in the last thirty years has done it to anything like the same extent?"

Many minds during this time have advanced new ideas; many men have invented amazing things; many able people have opened up new avenues of thought and vision to the imagination of the world, sometimes to good and lasting purpose, sometimes otherwise. But who has taken whatever problem was presented to him and invariably, no matter what quality was required, brought that problem to a successful conclusion without upheaval, or chaos, or even much excitement for any one outside the immediately interested group?

It is not genius; it is organization. It is not {18} the flare of inventive ability; it is the high vision of one whose code rested always on elemental, sound and enduring principles and who has not swerved from these to admire the plaster and the paper on the wall. It is finally the great quality that makes a man keep his feet on the ground and his heart amongst the bright stars.

Of such stuff are the men of this world made whom people lean on, whom people naturally look to in emergency, who guide instinctively and unerringly, carrying always the faith of those about them because they deal with sound things, elemental truths and sane methods--because they give mankind what Leonard Wood's greatest friend called "a square deal."

It is difficult to treat much of his youth because he is still living and the family life of any man is his own and not the public's business. But there is a certain interest attaching to his life-work for his country in knowing that his great-great-grandfather commanded a regiment in the Revolutionary army at Bunker Hill and that his father was a doctor who served in the Union army during the Civil War. Out of such heredity has {19} come a doctor who is a Major General in the United States Army.

At the same time his own life on Cape Cod outside of school at the Middleboro Academy was marked by what might distinguish any youngster of that day and place--a strong liking for small boating, for games out of doors, for riding, shooting and fishing. These came from a fine healthy body which to this day at his present age is amazing in its capacity to carry him through physical work. He can to-day ride a hundred miles at a stretch and walk thirty miles in any twenty-four hours.

Later in life this was one of the many points of common interest that drew him and Theodore Roosevelt so closely together. It has no particular significance other than to make it possible for him in many lands at many different limes to do that one great thing which makes men leaders--to show his men the way, to do himself whatever he asked others to do, never to give an order whether to a military, sanitary, medical or administrative force that he could not and did not do himself in so far as one man could do it.

There was little or no money in the Wood family and the young man had to plan early to look out for himself. He wanted to go to sea--probably because he lived on Cape Cod and came from a long line of New Englanders. He wanted to go into the Navy. He even planned to join an Arctic expedition at the age of twenty and began to collect material for his outfit. But finally, following his father's lead, he settled upon the study of medicine.

This led to the Harvard University Medical School and to his graduation in 1884. There then followed the regular internship of a young physician and the beginning of practice in Boston.

Then came the change that separated Wood from the usual lot of well educated, well prepared doctors who come out of a fine medical school and begin their lifework of following their profession and building up a practice, a record, a family and the history which is the highest ideal man can have and the collective result of which is a sound nation.

Wood wanted action. He wanted to do {21} something. He had a strong inclination to the out-of-doors. And it is probably this, together with his inheritance and the chances of the moment, that led him to enter the army as a surgeon. As there was no immediate vacancy in the medical corps he took the job of contract surgeon at a salary of $100 a month and was first ordered to duty at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor where he stayed only a few days. His request for "action" was granted in June, 1885, and he wais ordered to Arizona to report to General Crook on the Mexican border near Fort Huachuca.

And here begins the career of Leonard Wood.

THE INDIAN FIGHTER

II

THE INDIAN FIGHTER

The problem was what turned out to be the last of the Indian fighting, involving a long-drawn-out campaign. For over a hundred years, as every one knows, the unequal struggle of two races for this continent had been in progress and the history of it is the ever tragic story of the survival of the fittest. No one can read it without regret at the destruction, the extermination, of a race. No one, however, can for a moment hesitate in his judgment of the inevitableness of it, since it is and always will be the truth that the man or the race or the nation which cannot keep up with the times must go under--and should go under. Education, brains, genius, organization, ability, imagination, vision--whatever it may be called or by how many names--will forever destroy and push out ignorance, incompetence, stupidity.

The Indians were not able--tragic as the truth {26} is--to move onward, and so they had to move out and give place to the more worthy tenant.

The end of this century of struggle was the campaign against the Apaches in the Southwest along the Mexican border, where they made their last stand under their able leader Geronimo.

The young doctor was detailed at once for duty on a broiling fourth of July under Captain--afterwards General--Henry W. Lawton, and the next day he rode a horse over thirty-five miles. That incident to the initiated is noteworthy, but even more so is the fact that shortly afterwards in a hard drive of five succeeding days he averaged eighteen hours a day either in the saddle or on foot, leading the horses. It was a stiff test. To make it worse he was given the one unassigned horse--that is to say, a horse that was known as an "outlaw"--whose jerky gait made each saddle-sore complain at every step. The sun beat down fiercely; but, burned and blistered fore and aft, Leonard Wood could still smile and ask for more action.

The stoicism of the tenderfoot who had come to play their game was not lost on the troopers {27} with whom he was to spend the next two years fighting Indians. He "healed in the saddle" at once and a few weeks later was out-riding and out-marching the best of Captain Lawton's command, all of whom were old and experienced Indian fighters.

This was not to be the last time that Leonard Wood was to find himself faced at the outset by tacit suspicion and lack of confidence on the part of the men he was to command. Years later in the Philippines he was put up against a similar hostility, with responsibilities a thousandfold more grave, and in the same dogged way he won confidence--unquestioning loyalty--by proving that he was better than the best. "Do it and don't talk about it," was his formula for success. It was this quality in him that made it possible for Captain Lawton to write to General Nelson A. Miles, who had then succeeded General Crook, after the successful Geronimo campaign: "... I can only repeat that I have before reported officially and what I have said to you: that his services during the trying campaign were of the highest order. I speak particularly of services {28} other than those devolving upon him as a medical officer; services as a combatant or line officer voluntarily performed. He sought the most difficult work, and by his determination and courage rendered a successful issue of the campaign possible."

General Crook, who commanded the troops along the border, characterized the Apaches as "tigers of the human race." Tigers they were, led by Geronimo, the man whose name became a by-word for savagery and cruelty. For a time these Indians had remained subdued and quiet upon a reservation, and there can be no question but what the subsequent outbreaks that led to the long campaign in which Wood took part were due largely to the lack of judgment displayed by the officials in whose charge they were placed. Both the American settlers and the Mexicans opposed the location of the Indians on the San Carlos reservation and lost no opportunity to show their hostility. When General Crook took command of that district he found he had to deal with a mean, sullen and treacherous band of savages.

The American forces were constantly embroiled with the Chiricahuas. Treaties and agreements {29} were made only to be broken whenever blood lust or "tiswin"--a strong drink made from corn--moved the tribe to the warpath and fresh depredations. Due to General Crook's tireless efforts there were several occasions when the Indians remained quietly on their reservation, but it was only a matter of months at the best before one of the tribes, usually the Chiricahuas, would break forth again. Not until the treaty of 1882 with Mexico was it possible for our troops to pursue them into the Mexican mountains where they took refuge after each uprising. In 1883 General Crook made an expedition into Mexico which resulted in the return of the Chiricahuas and the Warm Springs tribes under Geronimo and Natchez to the Apache reservation.

Two years of comparative quiet followed. The Indians followed agricultural pursuits and the settlers, who had come to establish themselves on ranches along the border, went out to their plowing and fence building unarmed. In May, 1886, the Indians indulged in an extensive and prolonged "tiswin" drunk. The savagery that lurked in their hearts broke loose and they escaped from {30} their reservation in small bands, leaving smoking trails of murder, arson and pillage behind them. Acts of ugly violence followed. General Crook threatened to kill the last one of them, if it took fifty years, and at one moment it seemed as though he had them under control. "Tiswin" once again set them loose and they stampeded.

Their daring and illusiveness kept the American and Mexican troops constantly in action. One band of eleven Indians crossed into the United States, raided an Apache reservation, killed Indians as well as thirty-eight whites, captured two hundred head of stock and returned to Mexico after having traveled four weeks and covered over 1,200 miles.

It was into such warfare that Wood was plunged. No sooner had he arrived and begun his work than he put in a request for line duty in addition to his duties as a medical officer. This was granted immediately, because the need of men who could do something was too great to admit of much punctiliousness in the matter of military custom. Before the arrival of his commission as Assistant Surgeon, January, 1886, he {31} had served as commanding officer of infantry in a desperately hard pursuit in the Sierra Madres, ending in an attack on an Indian camp. He was repeatedly assigned to the most strenuous, fatiguing duty. After having marched on foot one day twenty-five miles with Indian scouts he rode seventy-three miles with a message at night, coming back at dawn the next day, just in time to break camp and march thirty-four miles to a new camp. He was given at his own request command of infantry under Captain Lawton, and this assignment to line duty was sanctioned by General Miles, who had recently taken over the command of the troops along the border.

General Miles was one of the greatest Indian fighters the country has ever known. He was peculiarly fitted to assume this new job of suppressing the Apache. He judged and selected the men who were to be a part of this campaign by his own well-established standards. As its leader he selected Captain Lawton, then serving with the Fourth United States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, primarily because Captain Lawton believed that these Indians could be subjugated. {32} He had met their skill and cunning and physical strength through years of such warfare under General Crook, and possessed the necessary qualifications to meet the demands of the trying campaign that faced him. After speaking of Captain Lawton, General Miles says in his published recollections:

"I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type of American manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army. He was a young officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and resolute spirit. He was also perhaps as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as could easily be found."

"... His services and observations and example were most commendable and valuable, and added much to the physical success of the enterprise."

General Field Orders No. 7, issued April 20, 1886, by General Miles for the guidance of the troops in his command, tell clearly and concisely the character and demands of the time.

"The chief object of the troops will be to capture or destroy any band of hostile Apache Indians found in this section of the country, and to this end the most vigorous and persistent efforts will be required of all officers and soldiers until this object is accomplished.

"... The cavalry will be used in light scouting parties with a sufficient force held in readiness at all times to make the most persistent and effective pursuit.

"To avoid any advantage the Indians may have by a relay of horses, where a troop or squadron commander is near the hostile Indians, he will be justified in dismounting one half of his command and selecting the lightest and best riders to make pursuit by the most vigorous forced marches until the strength of all the animals of his command shall have been exhausted.

"In this way a command should, under a judicious leader, capture a band of Indians or drive them from 160 to 200 miles in forty-eight hours through a country favorable for cavalry movements; and the horses of the troops will be trained for this purpose."

To get a picture of young Wood at this time it is necessary to look at the situation through the eyes of that day and through the eyes of youth as well.

A young man of twenty-four had been brought up by the sea in what we will call for the sake of politeness conservative New England. He had all the sound and sane basis of character that comes from what in this country was an old and established civilization. He had been educated in his profession at the most academic and conservative institution in the United States; a profession which while not an exact science is nevertheless a science requiring sane methods and the elimination of risks. He had begun the regular work of this profession. He possessed also what every young man with a healthy body of that day possessed-- and still possesses--a passion for romance, for the road, for the great adventure which at that time in this country still centered around the pistol shooting, broncho riding, Indian fighting cowboy.

We who are old have forgotten the paper covered stories we used to read surreptitiously {35} about the "Broncho Buster's Revenge," or "The Three-Fingered Might of the West." But we did read them and long for the great life of the plains. Even Jesse James was a hero to many of us.

But for a New Englander educated at Harvard to the practice of medicine to pick up his deeply driven stakes and actually go into this realm of romance was unusual in the extreme; and to be so well trained and in such good condition, with such high courage as to make good at once amongst those men who looked down on an Eastern tender-foot was sufficiently rare to promise much for the future.

The young man had the love of romance that all young lives have, but he had the unusual stimulus to it that led him to make it for the moment his actual life. And those who study his whole life will find again and again that when the parting of the ways came he invariably took the road of adventure, provided that it was always in the service of his country. Such then was the makeup and the condition of this young man when in the spring of 1886 Captain Lawton, having {36} received orders to assume command of the expedition into Mexico against the hostile Apache, included Wood as one of his four officers. The force consisted of forty-five troopers, twenty Indian scouts, thirty infantrymen and two pack trains. And thus began the two-thousand-mile chase into the fastnesses of Sonora and Chihuahua which ended with the surrender of Geronimo.

General Miles' campaign methods differed from those of General Crook in many ways. He always assumed the aggressive. His motto was, "Follow the Indian wherever he goes and strike him whenever you can. No matter how bad the country, go on." Under these instructions the troops went over the border and down into the depths of the Sonora, jumping the Indian whenever an opportunity offered, never giving him any rest. Wherever he went the troops followed. If he struck the border, a well arranged system of heliostat stations passed the word along to a body of waiting or passing scouts. General Miles' methods differed from those of General Crook also in the matter of the use of the heliostat, a system of signaling based on flashes of the sun's rays from {37} mirrors. He had used them experimentally while stationed in the Department of the Columbia, and now determined to make them of practical use at his new station. Over the vast tracts of rough, unpopulated land of Arizona and Mexico the signals flashed, keeping different detachments in touch with their immediate commands, and the campaign headquarters in touch with its base.

Even before Captain Lawton's command could be made ready the Indians themselves precipitated the fight. Instead of remaining in the Sierra Madres, where they were reasonably safe from assault, they commenced a campaign of violence south of the boundary. This gave both the American troops and the Mexicans who were operating in conjunction with them exact knowledge of their whereabouts. On the 27th of April they came northward, invading the United States. Innumerable outrages were committed by them which are now part of the history of that heart-breaking campaign. One, for example, typical of the rest was the case of the Peck family. Their ranch was surrounded, the family captured and a number of the ranch hands killed. The husband {38} was tied and compelled to witness the tortures to which his wife was submitted. His daughter, thirteen years old, was abducted by the band and carried nearly three hundred miles. In the meantime Captain Lawton's command with Wood in charge of the Apache scouts was pursuing them hotly. A short engagement between the Mexican troops and the Indians followed. On the heels of this the American troops came up and the little Peck girl was recaptured. Nightfall, however, prevented any decisive engagement, and before daybreak the Indians had, slipped away.

The Indians found it better to divide into two bands, one under Natchez, which turned to the north, and the other under Geronimo, which went to the west. The first band was intercepted by Lieutenant Brett of the Second Cavalry after a heartbreaking pursuit. At one time the pursuing party was on the trail for twenty-six hours without a halt, and eighteen hours without water. The men suffered so intensely from thirst that many of them opened their veins to moisten their lips with their own blood. But the Indians suffered far more. In Geronimo's story of those {39} days, published many years later, he wrote: "We killed cattle to eat whenever we were in need of food, but we frequently suffered greatly for need of water. At one time we had no water for two days and nights, and our horses almost died of thirst." Finally on the evening of June 6th the cavalry came into contact with Geronimo's band and the Indians were scattered.

For four months Captain Lawton and Leonard Wood pursued the savages over mountain ranges and through the canyons. During this time the troops marched 1,396 miles. The conditions under which they worked were cruel. The intense heat, the lack of water, and the desperately rough country covered with mountains and cactus hindered the command, but the men had the consolation of knowing that the Indians were in worse plight. Furthermore, the trustworthiness of the Indian scouts, a tattered, picturesque band of renegades, was coming under suspicion. Perhaps it was because of their unreliability that an attack made upon the 18th of July was not an entire success. The Indians escaped, but their most valued {40} possessions, food and horses, fell into the hands of our troopers.

It was the beginning of the end. A month later they received word that the Indians were working towards Santa Teresa, and Captain Lawton moved forward to head them off. Leonard Wood's personal account of this engagement follows:

"On the 13th of July we effected the surprise of the camp of Geronimo and Natchez which eventually led to their surrender and resulted in the immediate capture of everything in their camps except themselves and the clothes they wore. It was our practice to keep two scouts two or three days in advance of the command, and between them and the main body four or five other scouts. The Indian scouts in advance would locate the camp of the hostiles and send back word to the next party, who in their turn would notify the main command; then a forced march would be made in order to surround and surprise the camp. On the day mentioned, following this method of procedure, we located the Indians on the Yaqui River in a section of the country almost impassable for man or beast and {41} in a position which the Indians evidently felt to be perfectly secure. The small tableland on which the camp was located bordered on the Yaqui River and was surrounded on all sides by high cliffs with practically only two points of entrance, one up the river and the other down. The officers were able to creep up and look down on the Indian camp which was about two thousand feet below their point of observation. All the fires were burning, the horses were grazing and the Indians were in the river swimming with evidently not the slightest apprehension of attack. Our plan was to send scouts to close the upper opening and then to send the infantry, of which I had the command, to attack the camp from below.

"Both the Indians and the infantry were in position and advanced on the hostile camp, which, situated as it was on this tableland covered with canebrake and boulders, formed an ideal position for Indian defense. As the infantry moved forward the firing of the scouts was heard, which led us to believe that the fight was on, and great, accordingly, was our disgust to find, on our arrival, that the firing was accounted for by the fact that {42} the scouts were killing the stock, the Apaches themselves having escaped through the northern exit just a few minutes before their arrival. It was a very narrow escape for the Indians, and was due to mere accident. One of their number, who had been out hunting, discovered the red headband of one of our scouts as he was crawling around into position. He immediately dropped his game and notified the Apaches, and they were able to get away just before the scouts closed up the exit. Some of these Indians were suffering from old wounds. Natchez himself was among this number, and their sufferings through the pursuit which followed led to their discouragement and, finally, to their surrender."

The persistent action of our troops was beginning to have its effect, and when the Indians ceased to commit depredations it was good evidence to those who knew Indians and Indian nature that they were beginning to think of surrender.

One night the troops ran into a Mexican pack-train, which brought the first reports that Indians were near Fronteras, a little village in Sonora. Two of their women had come into town to find the {43} wife of an old Mexican who was with the Americans as a guide, hoping, through her, to open up communications looking to a surrender. As soon as the report was received Captain Lawton sent Lieutenant Gatewood of the Sixth Cavalry, who had joined the command, with two friendly Apaches of the same tribe as those who were out on the warpath, to go ahead and send his men into the hostile camp and demand their surrender. This he eventually succeeded in doing, but the Indians refused to surrender, saying that they would talk only with Lawton, or, as they expressed it, "the officer who had followed them all summer." This eventually led to communication being opened and one morning at daybreak Geronimo, Natchez and twelve other Indians appeared, in camp. Their inclinations seemed at least to be peaceful enough to allow the entire body of Indians to come down and camp within two miles of the Americans. It was agreed that they should meet General Miles and formally surrender to him and that the Indians and the troops should move further north to a more convenient meeting place. To give confidence to the Indians in this new state {44} of affairs, Captain Lawton, Leonard Wood and two other officers agreed to travel with them. Due to a mistake in orders, the American troopers started off in the wrong direction, and Captain Lawton was obliged to leave in search of them. This left the three remaining officers practically as hostages in the Indian camp. Speaking of this incident. General Wood says:

"Instead of taking advantage of our position, they assured us that while we were in their camp it was our camp, and that as we had never lied to them they were going to keep faith with us. They gave us the best they had to eat and treated us as well as we could wish in every way. Just before giving us these assurances, Geronimo came to me and asked to see my rifle. It was a Hotchkiss and he had never seen its mechanism. When he asked me for the gun and some ammunition, I must confess I felt a little nervous, for I thought it might be a device to get hold of one of our weapons. I made no objection, however, but let him have it, showed him how to use it, and he fired at a mark, just missing one of his own men, which he regarded as a great joke, rolling on the {45} ground, laughing heartily and saying 'good gun.'

"Late the next afternoon we came up with our command, and we then proceeded toward the boundary line. The Indians were very watchful, and when we came near any of our troops we found the Indians were always aware of their presence before we knew of it ourselves."

For eleven days Captain Lawton's command moved north, with Geronimo's and Natchez's camps moving in a parallel course. During these last days of Geronimo's leadership his greatest concern was for the welfare of his people. The most urgent request that he had to make of Captain Lawton was to ask repeatedly for the assurance that his people would not be murdered.

Captain Lawton in his official report says of Wood's work in the campaign:

"No officer of infantry having been sent with the detachment ... Assistant Surgeon Wood was, at his own request, given command of the infantry. The work during June having been done by the cavalry, they were too much exhausted to be used again without rest, and they were left in camp at Oposura to recuperate.

"During this short campaign, the suffering was intense. The country was indescribably rough and the weather swelteringly hot, with heavy rains for day or night. The endurance of the men was tried to the utmost limit. Disabilities resulting from excessive fatigue reduced the infantry to fourteen men, and as they were worn out and without shoes when the new supplies reached me July 29th, they were returned to the supply camp for rest, and the cavalry under Lieutenant A. L. Smith, who had just joined his troop, continued the campaign. Heavy rains having set in, the trail of the hostiles, who were all on foot, was entirely obliterated.

"I desire particularly to invite the attention of the Department Commander to Assistant Surgeon Leonard Wood, the only officer who has been with me through the whole campaign. His courage, energy and loyal support during the whole time; his encouraging example to the command when work was the hardest and prospects darkest; his thorough confidence and belief in the final successes of the expedition, and his untiring efforts to make {47} it so, have placed me under obligations so great that I cannot even express them."

Through the formal language of a military report crops out the respect of a commanding officer who knew whereof he spoke, the acknowledgment that here was a young subordinate who never despaired, never gave up, who always did his part and more than his part, and who placed his commanding officer under obligations which he was unable "even to express." That was a great deal for any young man to secure. To-day, after the Great War, there are many such extracts from official reports and all are unquestionably deserved. But they are the result of a nation awakened to patriotism when all went in together. In 1886, when the nation was at peace, when commercial pursuits were calling all young men to make their fortune, young Leonard Wood answered a much less universal call to do his work in a fight that had none of the flare or glory of the front line trench in Flanders.

Out of it all came to him at a very early age practice in handling men in rough country in rough times--men who were not puppets even {48} though they were regular army privates. They had to be handled at times with an iron hand, at times with the softest of gloves; and an officer to gain their confidence and respect had to show them that he could beat them at their own game and be one of them--and still command.

The Congressional Medal of Honor awarded him years later for this Indian work is a fair return of what he accomplished, for this Medal of Honor, the then only prize for personal bravery and high fighting qualities which his country could give him, has always been the rare and much coveted award of army men.

It was in Wood's case the mark of conspicuous fighting qualities, conspicuous bravery and marked attention to duty--a sign of success of a high order for a New England doctor of twenty-five.

THE OFFICIAL

III

THE OFFICIAL

Chance no doubt at times plays an important part in the making of a man. Yet perhaps Cassias' remark, through the medium of Shakespeare, that "The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings," has the truer ring. Chance no doubt comes to all of us again and again, but it is the brain that takes the chance which deserves the credit and not the accidental event, opportunity or occasion offering.

It was not chance that sent Leonard Wood to Arizona to fight Indians. It was the result of long hours of meditation in Boston when, as a young doctor, he decided finally to leave the usual routine of a physician's career and strike out in another and less main-traveled road. There was nothing of luck or chance in this decision, the carrying out of which taught him something that he used later to the advantage of himself and his country.

Out of the Indian experiences came to him in {62} the most vigorous possible way through actual observation the necessity for bodily health. No man could ride or walk day in and day out across waterless deserts and keep his courage and determination, to say nothing of his good common sense, without being in the best of physical condition. No man could get up in the morning after a terrific night's march, and collect his men and cheer and encourage them unless he was absolutely fit and in better condition than they.

He learned, too, that all matters of outfit, care of person, of equipment, of horses required the most constant attention day by day, hour by hour. He had to deal with an enemy who belonged to this country, who knew and was accustomed to its climatic conditions as well as its topography, and he had to beat him at his own game, or fail.

He learned that preparation, while it should never delay action, can never be overdone. This must have been drilled into the young man by the hardest and most grueling experiences, because it has been one of the gospels of his creed {53} since that time and is to this day his text upon all occasions.

He learned, too, something deeper than even these basic essentials of the fighting creed. He developed what has always been a part of himself--the conviction that authority is to be respected, that allegiance to superior officers and government is the first essential of success, that organization is the basis of smoothly running machinery of any kind, and that any weakening of these principles is the sign of decay, of failure, and of disintegration.

He learned that a few men, well trained, thoroughly organized, fit and ready, can beat a host of individualists though each of the latter may excel in ability any of the former, and there is in this connection a curiously interesting significance in the man's passionate fondness throughout his whole life for the game of football. At Middleboro, in California, in service in the South and in Washington, he was at every opportunity playing football, because in addition to its physical qualities, this game above all others depends for {54} its success upon organization, preparation and what is called "team play."

Through these early days it is to be noted, therefore, as a help in understanding his great work for his country which came later that his sense of the value of organization grew constantly stronger and stronger along with a solid belief in the necessity for subordination to his superior officers and through them to his state and his flag. The respect which he acquired for the agile Indians went hand in hand with the knowledge that in the end they could not fail to be captured and defeated, because they had neither the sense of organization, nor the intelligence to accept and respect authority which not only would have given them success, but would in reality have made the whole campaign unnecessary, had the Indian mind been able to conceive them in their true light and the Indian character been willing to observe their never-changing laws.

The result, however, was that the spirit of the Indians was broken by the white man's relentless determination.

The hostile Apaches were finally disposed of by {55} sending them out of the territory. They were treated as prisoners of war and the guarantees that General Miles had given them as conditions of surrender were respected by the Government, although there was a great feeing in favor of making them pay the full penalty for their outrages. President Grover Cleveland expressed himself as hoping that "nothing will be done with Geronimo which will prevent our treating him as a prisoner of war, if we cannot hang him, which I would much prefer."

At the end of the campaign General Miles set about reorganizing his command. For several months Wood was engaged in practice maneuvers. The General wished to expand his heliographic system of signaling, and to that end commenced an extensive survey of the vast unpopulated tracts of Arizona, which his troops might have to cover in time of action. Wood was one of the General's chief assistants in this survey, and in 1889, when he was ordered away, he probably knew as much of Arizona and the southwestern life as any man ever stationed there.

The orders which took him from the border {56} country made him one of the staff surgeons at Headquarters in Los Angeles. This post promised to be inactive and uninteresting but Captain Wood managed to distinguish himself in two respects, first as a surgeon and second as an athlete. This period of his life varied from month to month in some instances, but in the main it was the usual existence of an army official in the capacity of military surgeon. It extended over a period of eleven years, from 1887 to 1898. These were the eleven years between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-seven--very critical years in the existence of a man. It was during these years that he met Miss Louise A. Condit Smith, a niece of Chief Justice Field, who afterwards became his wife and began with him a singularly simple and homelike family life that is the second of his vital interests in this world. He has never allowed his family life to interfere with his service to his country. And, paradoxical as it may seem, he has never allowed his lifework for his state to interfere with the happy and even tenor of his home existence. Children came in due course and the family unit became complete--that quiet, straightforward {57} existence of the family which is the characteristic of American life to-day, as it is of any other well-organized civilized nation.

In the practice of his profession he was able to do a lasting service to his commanding officer. General Miles suffered a grave accident to his leg when a horse fell upon it. It was the opinion of the surgeon who attended him that amputation would be necessary. But the General was of no mind to beat a one-legged retreat in the midst of a highly interesting and successful career. Captain Wood had inspired confidence in him as an Indian fighter--a confidence so strong that he thought it might not be misplaced if it became confidence in him as a doctor--and so Wood was summoned.

"They say they will have to cut off this leg, but they are not going to do it," said the General. "I am going to leave it up to you. You'll have to save it."

A few weeks later General Miles was up and about, and under his young surgeon's care the wound healed and the leg was saved.

While stationed at Los Angeles headquarters {68} Wood found himself with enough time for much hard sport. It was a satisfying kind of life after the strenuous months of border service.

In 1888 he was ordered back to the border where he served with the 10th Cavalry in the Apache Kid outbreak. After a few months of active service, he was ordered to Fort McDowell and then, in 1889, to California again.

From California he was ordered to Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, where he again distinguished himself at football. He trained the first team in the Georgia Institute of Technology, became its Captain and during the two years of his Captaincy lost but one game and defeated the champion team of the University of Georgia.

An incident has been told by his fellow players at Fort McPherson which shows exceedingly well a certain Spartan side to Wood's nature. One afternoon at a football game he received a deep cut over one eye. He returned to his office after the game and, after coolly sterilizing his instrument and washing the wound, stood before a mirror and calmly took four stitches in his eyelid.

Such were the characteristics, such the {59} experience, of the young man when in 1896 he was ordered to Washington--that morgue of the government official--to become Assistant Attending Surgeon. The holder of this position often shares with the Navy Surgeons the responsibility of medical attention to the President, and in addition he acts as medical adviser to army officers and their families and is the official physician to the Secretary of War.

It was not an office that appealed to Captain Wood. It could not; since he was a man essentially of out-of-doors, of action and of administration. Yet he seems to have made such a success of the work that he became the personal friend of both Cleveland and McKinley. His relations with President Cleveland were of the most intimate sort, resulting from mutual respect and liking as well as a mutual understanding on the part of both men of the other's good qualities. He saw him in the White House at all hours of the day and night; saw him with his family and his children about him; noted their fondness for their father and his devotion to them. It was a quality so marked in Lincoln, so strong in most great men {60} of the sound, calm, fearless, administrative sort. Wood himself has exhibited the same quality in his own family. And in those days the perfect understanding of the father and his children, the simple family life that went on in the splendid old house in Washington which combined the dignity of a State and the simplicity of a home unequaled by any great ruler's house upon this earth--all tended to bring out this native quality in the President's medical adviser.

It was at the conclusion of Cleveland's second term that Wood was assigned to this position. On one of the President's trips for recreation and rest--a shooting expedition on the inland waters near Cape Hatteras--he was one of the party which included also Admiral Evans and Captain Lamberton. The hours spent in shooting boxes or in the evenings in the cabin of the lighthouse tender gave opportunity for him to study Cleveland off duty when the latter liked to sit quietly and talk of his early life, of his political battles, of fishing, shooting, and of the urgent questions which beset him as President. And Wood brought away with him a profound respect for the {61} combination of simplicity and unswerving love and devotion to his country, coupled with rugged uncompromising honesty which seem to have been the characteristics of Grover Cleveland.

This particular trip was immediately after the inauguration ceremonies of President McKinley, and Cleveland was not only tired from the necessary part which he himself had taken in them, but also from the first natural let-down after four years of duty in the White House. Wood has given a little sketch of the man:

"I remember very well his words, as he sat down with a sigh of relief, glad that it was all over. He said: 'I have had a long talk with President McKinley. He is an honest, sincere and serious man. I feel that he is going to do his best to give the country a good administration. He impressed me as a man who will have the best interests of the people at heart.'

"Then he stopped, and said with a sigh: 'I envy him to-day only one thing and that was the presence of his own mother at his inauguration. I would have given anything in the world if my mother could have been at my inauguration,' {62} and then, continuing: 'I wish him well. He has a hard task,' and after a long pause: 'But he is a good man and will do his best.'"

He has spoken often, too, of Cleveland's love of sport, of the days which Jefferson, the actor, and Cleveland spent together fishing and shooting on and near Buzzard's Bay--the same spot where he himself as a boy spent his days in like occupations. The sides of Cleveland's character that appealed to him were the frankness with which he expressed his views on the important questions of the day, the sterling worth and high ideals which emphasized his sense of duty, his love of country and his desire to do the best possible for his fellow citizens, coupled with his perfectly unaffected family feelings and the amazing devotion and affection which he invariably elicited from all those who came into association with him, even to the most humble hand on the light house tender. Jeffersonian simplicity could have gone no further, nor could any man have been more definite, far-sighted and fearless than was Cleveland in his Venezuelan Message. These two extremes made a vivid and lasting impression upon {63} the young man, because both sides struck a sympathetic chord in his own nature.

There followed, then, the same association with McKinley, growing out of the necessary intimacy of physician and patient. But in this latter case two events, vital to this country as well as to the career of Leonard Wood, changed the quiet course of Washington official life to a life of intense interest and great activity.

These two events were Wood's meeting with Theodore Roosevelt and the Spanish War.

One night in 1896 at some social function at the Lowndes house Wood was introduced to Roosevelt, then assistant Secretary of the Navy. It seems strange that two men so vitally alike in many ways, who were in college at about the same time, should never have met before. But when they did meet the friendship, which lasted without a break until Roosevelt's death, began at once.

That night the two men walked home together and in a few days they were hard at it, walking, riding, playing games and discussing the affairs of the day.

This strange fact of extraordinary similarities {64} and vivid differences in the two men doubtless had much to do with bringing them together and keeping them allied for years. Both were essentially men of physical action, both born fighters, both filled with an amazing patriotism and both simple family men.

On the one hand, Roosevelt was a great individualist. He did things himself. He no sooner thought of a thing than he carried it out himself. When he was President he frequently issued orders to subordinates in the departments without consulting the heads of the departments. Wood, on the other hand, is distinctly an organizer and administrator. When he later filled high official positions, he invariably picked men to attend to certain work and left them, with constant consultation, to do the jobs whatever they were. If a road was to be built, he found the best road builder and laid out the work for him leaving to him the carrying out of the details.

Yet again both men had known life in the West, Roosevelt as a cowboy and Wood as an Indian fighter. Both had come from the best old American stock, Roosevelt from the Dutch of {65} Manhattan and Wood from New England. They were Harvard men and lovers of the outdoor, strenuous life. Their ideals and aspirations had much in common and they were both actuated by the intense feeling of nationalism that brought them to the foreground in American life.

Soon they were tramping through the country together testing each other's endurance in good-natured rivalry. When out of sight of officialdom, they ran foot races together, jumped fences and ran cross-country. Both men had children and with these they played Indians, indulging in most exciting chases and games. They explored the ravines and woods all about Washington, sometimes taking on their long hikes and rides various army officers stationed at Washington. Few of these men were able to stand the pace set by the two energetic athletes, and it was of course partially due to this fact that Roosevelt in later years when he was President ordered some of the paunchy swivel-chair Cavalry and Infantry officers out for cross-country rides and sent them back to their homes sore and blistered, and with {66} every nerve clamoring for the soothing restfulness of an easy chair.

Wood was dissatisfied in Washington, bored with the inaction. He longed for the strenuous life of the West. The desire became so strong that he began a plan to leave the army and start sheep-ranching in the West. It was the life, or as near the life as he could get, that he had been leading for years; and the present contrast of those days in the open with the life he was now leading in Washington became too much for him.

Here again seemed to arise a turning point. Had it not been for his own confident conviction that war was eventually coming with Spain, Wood would probably have gone to his open life on the prairie. What this would have meant to his future career nobody can tell, nor is speculation upon the subject very profitable. But it is interesting to note that what deterred him were his ideas on patriotism and a man's duty to his country, which struck a live, vibrating chord also in Theodore Roosevelt's nature and influenced Wood to stay in his position and wait.

It is only possible to imagine now the {67} conversations of these two kindred spirits on this subject. Roosevelt, as is well known, was for war--war at once--and he did what little was done in those days to prepare. There must have been waging a long argument between the now experienced Indian fighter and doctor, and the great-hearted American who knew so little of military affairs.

These talks and arguments became so frank and outspoken that they were well-known in Washington circles. Even President McKinley used to say to Wood:

"Have you and Theodore declared war yet?"

And Wood's answer was:

"No, we think you ought to, Mr. President."

As each day passed it seemed more likely that Spain and America would become involved over the injustices Cuba and the Philippines were being forced to suffer at the hands of their greedy and none too-loving mother country. On their long walks they discussed all the phases of such a conflict and each of them became anxious for war without further delay, for delay was costing time and money, and peaceful readjustment seemed {68} quite out of the question. So keen had they become in this war question that the two of them became known in Washington as the "War Party."

It was becoming evident to many others that war was inevitable when the destruction of the Maine in Havana Harbor brought the situation to a head. It found both these men prepared in their own minds as to what their courses should be. When Wood arrived at Fort Huachuca in 1885 he was asked by Lawton why he came into the army. Lawton had studied law at Harvard after the Civil War and was interested in the views of a man who had studied medicine there. Wood replied that he had come into the army to get into the line at the first opportunity; and from that moment he began systematically his preparation for transfer. As a part of this policy he took every opportunity to do line duty. The result was that when the Spanish War came he had strong letters from Lawton, General Miles, General Graham, Colonel Wagner, General Forsythe, and others, recommending him for line command. These recommendations varied from {69} a battalion to a regiment. Both Roosevelt and Wood had discussed the possibility of organizing regiments, Roosevelt in New York and Wood in Massachusetts, but as turmoil and confusion enveloped the War Office they realized that this plan was not feasible.

The efforts of Roosevelt's superiors to keep him in his official capacity as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and away from active service were fruitless. Finally, when it became evident that he would go into the service and see active fighting, Secretary of War Alger offered him the colonelcy of a regiment of cavalry. Roosevelt, because of his lack of experience in military affairs, refused the offer but agreed to accept the position of lieutenant colonel of such a regiment if his friend, Leonard Wood, would accept the colonelcy. Secretary Alger and Leonard Wood agreed, and work was commenced at once organizing a regiment that was later to become known as the Rough Riders. The official name of the regiment was the 1st Volunteer Cavalry. The name Rough Riders "just grew." The organization became known under that name among the friends {70} of its leaders, later among the newspaper correspondents and consequently the public, and finally when it appeared in official documents it was accepted as official.

Preparedness was all too unknown in those days, but Wood, who became its nation-wide champion in the days to come, was well schooled even in those days in its laws. He only learned more as time went on. The chaos and tangle of red tape, inefficiency, unpreparedness in all branches of the service blocked every effort that a few efficient and able men were making. Seeing the hopelessness of trying to accomplish anything under such conditions Wood introduced a novel method of organization into the War Department.

Instead of pestering the hopeless and dismayed functionaries of the various Government departments with requests for things they did not have and would not have been able to find if they did have them, Wood merely requested carte blanche to go ahead and get all necessary papers ready so that they might be signed at one sitting. He made requisitions for materials that he needed {71} and when these materials were not to be found in the Government stores he wrote out orders directed to himself for the purchase in the open market of the things required. Alger recognized immediately that in Wood he had a man accustomed to action and full of vision--a man whom nothing could frighten. The two men understood one another. If those who surrounded the Secretary of War in those days had been as capable of organization, the history of Washington during wartime would have been quite different. But for the most part they failed. The see-nothing, hear-nothing, do-nothing, keep-your-finger-on-your-number spirit among many of them was quite great enough to throw the War Office into chaos. The game of "passing the buck" did not appeal to Wood; neither did he stop to sympathize with a certain highly placed bureaucrat who complained:

"My office and department were running along smoothly and now this damned war comes along and breaks it all up."

When all of his papers and documents were ready. Wood appeared before Secretary Alger. {72} "And now what can I do for you?" said the Secretary.

"Just sign these papers, sir. That is all," replied the Rough Riders' Colonel.

Alger, beset by incompetence, hampered by inefficiency in his staff, was dumbfounded as he looked through the papers Wood had prepared for him to sign. There were telegrams to Governors of states calling upon them for volunteers; requisitions for supplies and uniforms; orders for mobilization and requisitions for transportation. Alger had little to say. He placed enough confidence in Wood to sign the papers and give him his blessing.

When the army depots said that they could not supply uniforms, Wood replied that his men could wear canvas working clothes. As a result the Rough Riders, fighting through the tropical country in Cuba, were far more comfortable than the soldiers in regulation blue. The new colonel seemed to know what he wanted. He wanted Krag rifles. There were few in existence, but General Flagler, Chief of Ordnance, appreciated what the young officer had done and saw that he got them. {73} He did not want sabers for the men to run through one another in the pandemonium of cavalry charges of half wild western horses. The Rough Riders therefore went into action carrying machetes, an ideal weapon for the country in which they were to see service. With the saber they could do nothing; but with the machete they could do everything from hacking through dense jungle growths to sharpening a pencil. During the days that followed many troopers equipped with sabers conveniently lost them, but Wood's Rough Riders found the machetes invaluable.

The authority to raise the regiment was given late in April, and on the twenty-fourth day of June, against heavy odds, it won its first action in the jungles at Las Guasimas. This was quick work, when it is remembered that two weeks of that short six or seven week period were practically used up in assembling and transporting the men by rail and sea. Here is where organization and well-thought-out plans made a remarkable showing.

It was not only a question of knowing what he wanted. It was his old slogan: "Do it and don't talk about it."