COL. ROOSEVELT AT CAMP WYKOFF, IN AUGUST, 1898-THE OFFICER ON THE COLONEL'S

IS MAJOR-GENERAL JOSEPH WHEELER

RIGHT

Spain. European opinion was that the Spanish navy equaled our own, and possibly was superior to it; but we had become a naval power in the war of the sixties, to maintain a blockade of the Southern ports and aid in military operations. Great glory was won, and good will for the Navy gained. A series of Secretaries of the Navy had pride in our fleets, and we took up the manufacture of modern artillery at a time when the skilled labor and the art of armament was perfected in our shops. We had, like the jingoes in England, the men and ships and "guns and money, too," and though Spain did not know her decline or our advance, she was not in our class.

The Assistant Secretary of the Navy took upon himself the task of putting our fleets on the Atlantic Coast and Asiatic Station in condition for active and effective service. Others might have done as well, but he was the man who had the chance and improved it in well doing. A few words state the casecoal and powder to burn, and bolts and shells to fit the guns and guns with gunners behind them. When Dewey in the Manila battle got the report that the five-inch shells were almost all gone, it was not true. There was coal-the best that could be got-and powder and shot for target practice and for the battle ten thousand miles from Washington. We had power for the ships and for the guns. Our gunners had been educated to shoot by shooting. That is the royal road to marksmanship, and there is no other. The "hits" our men behind the guns made were what counted. When we fired, it was noticed that there was but little splashing in the water. The shots entered the ships that were the targets, and our ships of war were ships to fight with. Roosevelt knew when he had done what he could for the Navy. The President and Secretary of the Navy desired he should stay in the Navy office. He had, however, provided for the victories that swiftly came to pass. He was not a book-keeper or a theorist as to the distribution of parcels or one who waged war on a high stool. He passed from the Navy to the Army. As he had seen to the supplies for burning powder and coal to some purpose, he prepared to get into the Army with the war material he discovered and understood when. "Winning the West." He appealed to the stalwarts of the States of the plains, and the mountains, from Texas to Montana, and as by magic enlisted and organized a regiment of war material such as is possessed by no other people -characteristic Cossacks, and more effective fighters. He might have claimed to have discovered a standing army that did not require an act of Congress. The modern requirements of soldiers ready to go anywhere and do all that can be done, are mobility, hardihood, marksmanship, shifty in doing the best that is possible with slender stores, in taking care of supplies, and of themselves. Lives of hardship harden strong men. The Rough Riders had all the qualifications for warriors, and though they lost their specialty when dismounted, they were brave, quick, keen and self-reliant. They have, in the

expert opinion of the military nations of the earth, re-inforced our Regular army and doubled its strength, by their very existence and availability. There could be twenty-five regiments of such men put into the field, if we had a sudden call to arms. Some months ago the President of France had forty thousand French cavalry gallop before the Czar. There was a deep roar as if an earthquake thundered by, and it was indeed a stirring spectacle. Fancy twenty thousand Rough Riders from the plains at full speed on the stage of prairies framed in mountains worthy the mighty pageantry of "war's magnificently stern array," men and horses that would surpass the Arabs and their chargers. The long range rifle has interfered with the tactics of the "shock" of cavalry; but this the Rough Rider would understand to be like the rush of a column of myriads of buffalo, whose onset was that of a cyclone, and given such a mass of fiery valor, rolling, monstrous-where is the foe that could stand before us?

Roosevelt's men in the advance, under the fire of invisible riflemen, knew that the way to do business was to go into the fire, and their Colonel was there where the Mauser bullets were chirruping like a swarm of crickets.

The battle won, the Spanish forces captured, two fleets and two armies of Spain sunk and surrendered, the next thing was that our braves should be saved from the pestilence; and Roosevelt appeared again as a leader, and the army was rescued from the fever and the awaiting hospitable graves.

The same energy that flung the troops into Cuba and won there, did not hold the army in the plague-stricken village and hideous jungles, or make the vain attempt to move them from place to place in Cuba, for each march would have been a procession of death. The return movement from Santiago to Montauk, was done by strategy, commendable as that which landed a force able to do the work cut out for it near Santiago. It was a picturesque country, into which the fortunes of war had thrown our troops. There is no brighter, better picture of Cuba than President Roosevelt has drawn in these glowing words:

"The surroundings of the city of Santiago are very grand. The circling mountains rise sheer and high. The plains are threaded by rapid winding brooks and are dotted here and there with quaint villages, curiously picturesque from their combining traces of an outworn old-world civilization with new and raw barbarism. The tall, graceful, feathery bamboos rise by the water's edge and elsewhere, even on the mountain-crests, where the soil is wet and rank enough; and the splendid royal palms and cocoanut palms tower high above the matted green jungle. Generally the thunder-storms came in the afternoon, but once I saw one at sunrise, driving from the high mountain valleys toward It was a very beautiful and almost terrible sight; for the sun rose behind the storm, and shone through the gusty rifts, lighting the mountain-crests here

us.

and there, while the plain below lay shrouded in the lingering light. The angry, level rays edged the dark clouds with crimson, and turned the down-pour into sheets of golden rain; in the valleys the glimmering mists were tinted every wild hue; and the remotest heavens were lit with aming glory. One day General Lawton, General Wood and I, with Ferguson and poor Tiffany, went down the bay to visit Morro Castle. The shores were beautiful, especially where there were groves of palms and of the scarlet-flower tree, and the castle itself, on a jutting headland overlooking the sea and guarding the deep, narrow entrance to the bay, showed just what it was, the splendid relic of a vanished power and a vanished age. We wandered all through it, among the castellated battlements, and in the dungeons, where we found hideous rusty implements of torture, and looked at the guns, some modern and some very old. It had been little hurt by the bombardment of the ships. Afterward I had a swim, not trusting much to the shark stories."

When Colonel Roosevelt returned home from the war, of course, the war was over. No one had been lost by the change of air, water, food and faces, and thousands saved. The people were warm in their welcome, and he was soon in great request for the office of Governor, and presently it was seen by those opposed that they must take the rising man or sink themselves. He made a striking campaign and was inaugurated Governor without being mortgaged. His administration of the Gubernatorial office was stirring, and he did not attempt the impossible task of pleasing everybody. He was himself at his best as Governor, and his record is one that will command respect in proportion as it is read. The best history of his public principles, and evidence of the vigor of his understanding and the processes of his mind, are in the volumes of his Public Papers. He left the office of Governor, as other positions which he occupied and outgrew in their turn, not because he had no more to do there, but because he was wanted to go up higher, where he could do more. He was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, and there was great interest in his part in the campaign. He made two wide, sweeping Western tours, having an earlyin-the-summer engagement to meet his old friends of the Southwest at Oklahoma. July 6th, he was at Canton, Ohio, and had a conference with President McKinley, having met Senator Hanna in Cleveland. He said to a reporter about his interview with Mr. Hanna: "I have been conferring with the Senator about the itinerary that we shall follow out this fall. It has been determined that, if possible, I shall visit all the Rocky Mountain States."

It was made known by the newspaper correspondents that on the Oklahoma excursion the Westerners received New York's Governor with open arms and vivid demonstrations of their admiration. The Western trip of Governor Roosevelt had many instructive aspects and nowhere was he more enthusiastically received and energetically applauded than in Oklahoma City. The