Long Island Books

JUDY CRICHTON

"Bully! Colonel Theodore Roosevelt,
The Rough Riders & Camp Wikoff"
Jeff Heatley, Ed.
Montauk Historical Society,
Pushcart Press, $29.95

In the late summer of 1898, on the Great Plain that stretched from the end of the rail line at Fort Pond Bay east to the lighthouse at Montauk Point, thousands of Spanish American War veterans were fighting for their lives.

Emaciated men who had fought in the bloody Battles of Kettle and San Juan Hill, in Cuba, were struggling against malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, typhoid, and the dreaded yellow fever. All summer there were charges that bad food and a shortage of medical supplies were contributing to the death toll.

By fall, more men would die from disease than had been killed by Spanish bullets.

A "Splendid" War

This fascinating and often wrenching story surfaces in contemporary newspaper accounts collected and skillfully edited by Jeff Heatley and published by the Montauk Histori-cal Society and Pushcart Press under the title "Bully! Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders & Camp Wikoff."

The book begins at the end of the Spanish American War, a "splendid," triumphant small war in which the United States had proven itself to be a world power, at very little cost.

Admiral Dewey had sunk the aging Spanish fleet in Manila Harbor without the loss of a single American sailor. U.S. forces had chased the ancient Spanish Empire out of Cuba and Puerto Rico with surprising ease and few casualties. But, as Mr. Heatley's research- reminds us, there are no easy wars.

The book opens in July of 1898, in Cuba, just days after the Battle of San Juan Hill. The United States Fifth Army Corps, including Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, was quartered in the hills above Santiago.

With the start of the rainy season, disease was sweeping through the steamy encampments. Men who had survived Spanish Mausers were being mowed down by tropical fevers. The sick list reached 4,000.

Supplies were short, the food was rotten. Those too ill to digest moldy hardtack and tainted meat were literally starving. On Aug. 4, Roosevelt reported the entire division was "so weakened and shattered as to be ripe for dying like rotten sheep." Not 10 percent of the troops were fit for active work. With seven other American commanders Colonel Roosevelt signed a petition declaring: "This army must be moved at once or perish."

Healthful Breezes

Negotiations had already begun to move the troops to an uninhabited area on Montauk Point, Long Island, where "the breeze blows cool and every wind is laden with health and strength from the surrounding waters."

Settling a disease-ridden army close to the "greatest population center in the country" was considered by some criminally risky. In Amagansett, fearful summer boarders were reported to be fleeing.

The Army insisted that men with infectious diseases would be carefully quarantined. Cynics suggested that wayward soldiers would pay off fishermen to carry them to the city under cover of night.

Logistical Nightmare

Logistically, setting up camp for over 22,000 men, plus 7,000 mules and horses, would prove to be a nightmare.

By the first week in August, the railroad, which ran beyond Amagansett to Fort Pond Bay, eight miles short of the end of the island, was delivering carloads of lumber, water and sewer pipes, tons of coal, and hay, along with food for the hundreds of workmen and their horses.

"There was none to be had in the wilderness." The first reporters on the scene wrote of a Montauk landscape once "as lonely as a Nebraska plain," covered with wildflowers-sea pink, snapdragon, and little orchids known as "ladies' tresses."

Out near the Point, at Third House, the Conklin family was running the one and only inn in Montauk. On a southern bluff were "six handsome summer cottages," abandoned because the area had proved to be too lonely. They would make perfect officers' quarters.

Not So Civilized

The journalist Richard Harding Davis, who had been with Roosevelt in Cuba, concluded that "war as it is conducted at the end of the century is civilized."

But Davis never saw the wasted men, those "shattered wrecks of humanity," who arrived at Camp Wickoff before the wells had been dug or supplies unpacked. Fever-ridden men were placed 10 to a tent on canvas strips on the ground. The first week one veteran told a reporter, "We haven't had a single thing but water since noon yesterday."

Heavy rains made matters worse. Overloaded mules balked in the mud. Work slowed but the ill kept arriving - trains and transports filled with haggard and emaciated soldiers.

Death Ships

At one point, three transports lay at anchor in Fort Pond Bay. The Mobile carried 300 dangerously ill men. At the camp hospital there were scarcely 150 cots at their disposal.

The War Department later admitted it was two weeks before the camp was in tolerable running order. It undoubtedly was longer. Complex systems had been ordered to isolate those suspected of having yellow fever. No one was to be placed in camp until thoroughly examined by medical officers. But, with hundreds close to death and an insufficient staff, regulations were ignored more often than not.

On Aug. 20, a syndicated story about the arrival of a "Death Ship" reported, "A tidal wave of anguish rolled over Camp Wikoff today." A cartoon titled "The Horrors of Peace" showed the spectre of death wrapped in yards of red tape.

Starving Heroes

The condition of the troops in Cuba, the rotten food, the slow evacuation, and lack of preparation at Camp Wikoff horrified Americans. Well-known heroes were reported to have died of starvation.

Sniping broke out between the Army and the press corps. The Surgeon General declared that "a great deal of rot" was being written. William Randolph Hearst countered that America "had the best soldiers and the worst army organization in the civilized world."

The controversy - the supply scandal, as it would be known - would haunt the McKinley Administration for years, and in time force the resignation of Secretary of War Russell Alger.

At the center of Mr. Heatley's book is Theodore Roosevelt, now the most famous man in America. T.R. had given up his job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to go off to war and glory.

An unlikely-looking hero, he had led the Rough Riders, a curious collection of socialites, Native Americans, New York policemen, and cowboys, through some of the bloodiest encounters in Cuba. Shrapnel nicked his elbow, a bullet punctured his boot, 89 of his men were killed outright, but Roosevelt appeared invincible.

Following the surrender of Santiago, his well-publicized reports on the condition of the Fifth Army Corps outraged the War Department and the White House and may, as he suspected, have cost him the Medal of Honor, but his audacity also increased his popularity.

Bronzed And Fit

On Aug. 15, when T.R. and his men pulled into port at Fort Pond Bay, The Sag Harbor Express declared that "the foxes on Montauk must have thought Wyandank and his whooping braves were back again . . . there arose such a shout along the hills . . . ."

As the ship approached the pier, one reporter saw "two flashes of sunlight from a pair of eyeglasses that looked like rays from a heliograph . . . ." Recognizing Roosevelt, the crowd began shouting "Teddy! Teddy!" As befit a legend, Roosevelt was bronzed and fit and was heard to say, "Oh, but we have had a bully fight."

From the moment of his arrival, T.R. the war hero and T.R. the potential political candidate vied for newspaper space. As he made his way through the throng he was repeatedly asked, "Will you be our next Governor?"

Fear Borne Out

T.R. turned aside the question but within days it was clear that he would indeed be the Republican candidate.

A foreword about Roosevelt at the start of the book reveals that the New York party boss, Senator Thomas C. Platt, who was fearful of the independent-minded Roosevelt, privately said, "If he becomes Governor of New York, sooner or later, with his personality, he will have to be President of the United States." Senator Platt was right, but that is another story.

While following the threads of these two primary stories, Mr. Heatley also provides a portrait of a key moment in American history. Eighteen ninety-eight was a time of enormous technological change and one can sense in "Bully!" the collision between the old ways and the new.

Changing Times

In one story, The Kansas City Star notes the decline of the cavalry, predicting that in the future the honors of warfare would go to the "plodding infantryman . . . pumping death out of his [machine] gun."

The signal corps was still using flags - sending messages by wig wag - but down in Montauk they had also strung miles of telegraph and telephone lines. In fact, men in quarantine were using telephones to reach families as far away as Chicago.

Attitudes about race and sex surface in a number of articles. Volunteer nurses are described in terms of their beauty and tenderness. Women visitors shield the fallen with their parasols or become surrogate mothers for delirious men. Black soldiers are described with "their white teeth gleaming," singing and dancing.

Forgotten Soldiers

In fairness, reporters also acknowledge that, if not for "the splendid charge of the black men," the Rough Riders might not have been able to hold their position on San Juan Hill - a fact often omitted from later accounts of the battle. And that one fact alone points up the value of Mr. Heatley's work.

Too often history has been distorted or lost, not by the original chroniclers, but by those who came after. It took a campaign by Colin Powell to make clear the contributions of black soldiers throughout the 19th century.

In 1898, the press regularly reported on black regiments in the Philippines and Cuba. Works like "Bully!" are revealing - and too rare.

Weird Gloominess

On a personal note, having spent years working on historical documentaries and more recently on a book about America in 1900, I have come to depend on local historians and historical societies, the self-appointed keepers of the all-too-fragile record of our past. It is cheering to see a local publisher, writer, and historical society collaborate on such an interesting and useful work.

On Saturday, Oct. 29, 1898, in The East Hampton Star, the editor, E.S. Boughton, described the "weird gloominess" that had settled over Montauk with the closing of Camp Wikoff.

"The picturesqueness of the once beautiful Fort Pond Bay" had been obliterated by a dozen or so dingy board buildings. The electric light plant and the power house were closed, the electric wires were down.

Ghost Camp

"Up on the camp ground," he wrote, "from the tops of the hills, one can look off on sea and sound and imagine Montauk to be what it was before its invasion by the army, but when the eye drops . . . hundreds of tall poles scattered far and near, standing as solemn sentinels, picture the transition from past to present.

"All that remains of the military grandeur of Camp Wikoff," Boughton noted, "is the little enclosed half acre on the summit of Rocky Ridge where lie the fever-stricken heroes of the Cuban war."

Over 350 men died at Montauk Point that summer. Those buried here at the time were later re-interred at the National Cemetery in Brooklyn. In October 1898, Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "They were American soldiers, no more and no less . . . . Dying, each faced with equal courage the fate which in an instant of time, blots out all the differences we rear with such infinite labor on this earth. . . ."

Judy Crichton was the founding producer of the PBS history series "The American Experience." She is the co-writer of a documentary, "America 1900," that will air in November, and Henry Holt will publish her book "America 1900: The Turning Point" the same month. She has a house in Wainscott.