The Rough Riders' Tampa Summer
Near Tampa Bay, Florida
In the spring of eighteen ninety-eight, Tampa transformed almost overnight from a sleepy cigar town into the staging ground for an American war.
The United States had declared war on Spain in April, and the Army needed a port of departure for forces heading to Cuba. Tampa had the necessary combination: a Gulf port deep enough for troop ships, a railroad connection that could move men and materiel south in quantity, and a hotel large enough to house the generals. Henry Plant had built all three. He lobbied personally for Tampa's selection. The War Department agreed.
By late May, thirty thousand soldiers were encamped across the Tampa area. The lawns of the Tampa Bay Hotel, those elaborate grounds that Plant had designed for guests taking the air, were covered with army tents. The hotel itself became the planning headquarters for the invasion of Cuba. Generals met in its ornate rooms to argue over logistics and strategy. War correspondents filled its veranda, including the young Richard Harding Davis and a reporter and author named Stephen Crane.
Among the thirty thousand soldiers was the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders, under Colonel Leonard Wood and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt was thirty-nine years old, recently resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, in search of the military glory that would, he believed, be the making of his political career. His Rough Riders, recruited from both western cowboys and eastern Ivy League athletes, ran drills on the hotel grounds while officers debated when and how they would embark.
On June fourteenth, eighteen ninety-eight, Roosevelt and the Rough Riders boarded the steamship Yucatan at Port Tampa and sailed for Cuba. The subsequent charge up Kettle Hill, often misremembered as San Juan Hill, made Roosevelt a national hero. He was elected governor of New York that fall and became president three years later.
The war lasted less than four months. What happened in Tampa in those months is almost completely absent from the tourist materials around the Plant Museum.
