The Roughest Riders by Jerome Tuccille

under the command of General Wheeler, who hated the idea of being in the rear, since he wanted to lead the charge against those Yankees up in the hills.
    â€œThat night about 7 o’clock the Captain asked the First Sergeant to send me to him,” wrote C. D. Kirby with the black Ninth. “I reported to the Captain, who asked me if I was afraid of the Spaniards, and I replied that I was not afraid of anything, whereupon the Captain ordered me to take my gun and belt and report to him. I soon returned and he said, ‘I want you to go to the dock and watch the grub, and if anyone comes around there kill him.’”
    It was pitch black where Kirby was stationed, but at about 12:30 in the morning he made out two figures approaching in the dark through the brush. Kirby remained quiet until they drew closer. He admitted that he was shaking with fear, but he held his ground and commanded them to halt. They ignored his warning and kept on coming. Kirby called out twice more in a loud voice, but still the two figures kept approaching. Finally, Kirby stepped behind a rock, took aim, and shot one of the men, killing him on the spot. The dead soldier’s companion shot back and missed, the bullet glancing off a rock and winging Kirby on the shoulder. Kirby shot him too, knocking him to the ground but not killing him. Kirby advanced and asked the man how he was feeling. “Pretty bad,” the Spaniard said. Kirby slammed him across the head with the butt of his pistol, knocking him unconscious and temporarily putting him out of his misery. For this incident, as well as his action in combat later, the captain gave the black trooper the name “Brave Fighting Kirby.”
    Around dawn, the order came for the first column of men, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Twenty-Fifth, to leaveimmediately and push along on the path to Siboney. The black Ninth and Tenth stayed behind with Wheeler’s forces, also serving under his second-in-command, General Samuel B. M. Young. The Twenty-Fifth and some white units marched single file on the unpaved trail, with orders to hook up with the black Twenty-Fourth under General Jacob Kent after they landed. The Twenty-Fifth and their white compatriots left almost as soon as they hit the beach and made first camp around 8:30 that evening.
    â€œWe marched about four and a half miles through the mountains; then we made camp,” a black soldier with the Twenty-Fifth wrote later. Another with the same outfit wrote, “A short distance ahead (from the shore) we bivouacked for the night. We were soon lying in dreamland, so far from friends and home, indeed, on a distant, distant shore.”
    A white staff officer described the movement similarly in his own account of the action: “General Lawton, with his Division, in obedience to this order, pushed forward from Daiquiri about five miles, when night overtook him and he bivouacked on the road.” The campsite was a brush-covered flat with heavy jungle growth on one side and a shallow, stagnant pool on the other. The men dined on canned meat and beans heated on open fires; hardtack; and coconuts and chili peppers they found in the area, all washed down with coffee made from river water.
    The rainy season had arrived, making the going more treacherous as the men slogged over muddy trails beneath dripping canopies of trees. The land crabs returned, their appetites for carrion intensified with the advent of the steady tropical downpours, turning them into even more formidable adversaries than the men had first thought. The Spanish proved to be less of a problem, offering only token resistance at Siboney, which the first column of Americans occupied on the morning of June 23. Shafter had instructed Lawton to remain there while the rest of the supplies were beingunloaded onto the beach at Siboney, now that his troops were in control there.
    Wheeler and Roosevelt fumed at being left behind at the Daiquiri campsite to guard