At the end of May in 1898, the battalion headed to Florida, and in June they sailed to Cuba. According to The Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, six Texas Rangers were among those who landed in Cuba. On July 1, Roosevelt mounted his horse (named Little Texas) and led the Rough Riders on a charge up Kettle Hill. Alongside several thousand members of the 5th Corps of the U.S. Army, the Texas-trained volunteers routed the Spanish.
Of the nearly 500 members of Roosevelt’s unit, 100 were either killed, wounded, or went missing, yet journalists lauded the effort. In the following weeks, the Spanish left Cuba and ceded Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines to the U.S. in the Treaty of Paris. The Rough Riders became national heroes.
Riding his newfound fame, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1898 and then vice president under President William McKinley. In 1901, he became president when McKinley was killed. After winning reelection in 1904, Roosevelt returned to Texas to attend a Rough Riders reunion. He paraded with several dozen veterans of the Spanish-American War, and during the same trip he visited the Texas Capitol with Gov. Samuel W.T. Lanham. A vintage photo at the Menger shows the men in black top hats in a horse-drawn carriage in Austin.
Reports describe a cocksure Roosevelt and his regiment swaggering around the streets.
During my San Antonio visit, I stopped by the Menger Bar to pay homage to Roosevelt’s legacy. With its finely carved cherry wood and antique French beveled mirrors, the pub has been an attractive place for a drink since it opened in 1887. Hanging in the barroom, a dramatic painting depicts Roosevelt astride Little Texas, leading a mass of charging soldiers, who are on foot, up Kettle Hill. The oil painting is a reminder of Roosevelt’s good fortune to have a horse in Cuba: Most of the Rough Riders landed on the island to find their horses had been left in Florida.
A couple from New York, fellow Roosevelt devotees, took a seat at the end of the bar, and the bartender gestured me over as he told them about the olden days. He pointed to a few pockmarks in the walls that were allegedly made by Rough Rider bullets. That was back when the West was still wild, and Cuba still belonged to Spain.
Sifting through the sands of history, I was struck that just as Texas made an impression on Roosevelt, he also made an impression on us. His success on the battlefield fused the contradictory identities of the statesman and the cowboy, and just as the American frontier closed, a new sort of Texas hero was born.