The Treaty Tree, Now Surrounded By A Tall
Fence, Is One, The Block-House Is Another.
The little lake in which,
even when the bullets were dropping, the men used to bathe and wash
their
Clothes, the big iron sugar kettle that gave a new name to
Kettle Hill, and here and there a trench hardly deeper than a
ploughed furrow, and nearly hidden by growing plants, are the few
landmarks that remain.
Of the camps of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Bates, Sumner, and Wheeler,
of Colonels Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt, there are but the
slightest traces. The Bloody Bend, as some call it, in the San Juan
River, as some call that stream, seems to have entirely disappeared.
At least, it certainly was not where it should have been, and the
place the hotel guides point out to unsuspecting tourists bears not
the slightest physical resemblance to that ford. In twelve years,
during one of which there has been in Santiago the most severe
rainfall in sixty years, the San Juan stream has carried away its
banks and the trees that lined them, and the trails that should mark
where the ford once crossed have so altered and so many new ones have
been added, that the exact location of the once famous dressing
station is now most difficult, if not impossible, to determine. To
establish the sites of the old camping grounds is but little less
difficult. The head-quarters of General Wheeler are easy to
recognize, for the reason that the place selected was in a hollow,
and the most unhealthy spot along the five miles of intrenchments.
It is about thirty yards from where the road turns to rise over the
ridge to Santiago, and all the water from the hill pours into it as
into a rain barrel. It was here that Troop G, Third Cavalry, under
Major Hardee, as it was Wheeler's escort, was forced to bivouac, and
where one-third of its number came down with fever. The camp of
General Sam Sumner was some sixty yards to the right of the head-
quarters of General Wheeler, on the high shoulder of the hill just
above the camp of the engineers, who were on the side of the road
opposite. The camps of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Hawkins, Ludlow,
and the positions and trenches taken and held by the different
regiments under them one can place only relatively. One reason for
this is that before our army attacked the hills all the underbrush
and small trees that might conceal the advance of our men had been
cleared away by the Spaniards, leaving the hill, except for the high
crest, comparatively bare. To-day the hills are thick with young
trees and enormous bushes. The alteration in the landscape is as
marked as is the difference between ground cleared for golf and the
same spot planted with corn and fruit-trees.
Of all the camps, the one that to-day bears the strongest evidences
of its occupation is that of the Rough Riders. A part of the camp of
that regiment, which was situated on the ridge some hundred feet from
the Santiago road, was pitched under a clump of shade trees, and to-
day, even after seven years, the trunks of these trees bear the names
and initials of the men who camped beneath them. {4} These men will
remember that when they took this hill they found that the
fortifications beneath the trees were partly made from the
foundations of an adobe house. The red tiles from its roof still
litter the ground. These tiles and the names cut in the bark of the
trees determine absolutely the site of one-half of the camp, but the
other half, where stood Tiffany's quick-firing gun and Parker's
Gatling, has been almost obliterated. The tree under which Colonel
pitched his tent I could not discover, and the trenches in which he
used to sit with his officers and with the officers from the
regiments of the regular army are now levelled to make a kitchen-
garden. Sometimes the ex-President is said to have too generously
given office and promotion to the friends he made in Cuba. These men
he met in the trenches were then not necessarily his friends. To-day
they are not necessarily his friends. They are the men the free life
of the rifle-pits enabled him to know and to understand as the
settled relations of home life and peace would never have permitted.
At that time none of them guessed that the "amateur colonel," to whom
they talked freely as to a comrade, would be their Commander-in-
Chief. They did not suspect that he would become even the next
Governor of New York, certainly not that in a few years he would be
the President of the United States. So they showed themselves to him
frankly, unconsciously. They criticised, argued, disagreed, and he
became familiar with the views, character, and worth of each, and
remembered. The seeds planted in those half-obliterated trenches
have borne greater results than ever will the kitchen-garden.
The kitchen-garden is immediately on the crest of the hill, and near
it a Cuban farmer has built a shack of mud and twigs and cultivated
several acres of land. On Kettle Hill there are three more such
shacks, and over all the hills the new tenants have strung stout
barbed-wire fences and made new trails and reared wooden gateways.
It was curious to find how greatly these modern improvements confused
one's recollection of the landscape, and it was interesting, also, to
find how the presence on the hills of 12,000 men and the excitement
of the time magnified distances and disarranged the landscape.
During the fight I walked along a portion of the Santiago road, and
for many years I always have thought of that walk as extending over
immense distances. It started from the top of San Juan Hill beside
the block-house, where I had climbed to watch our artillery in
action.
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