The Rough Riders, May 1898

In the spring of eighteen ninety-eight, San Antonio became the staging ground for one of the strangest military units ever assembled under the American flag. Theodore Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy, had helped push the United States into war with Spain over Cuba. When Congress authorized a volunteer cavalry regiment, he resigned his desk job in Washington and came to Texas to help fill it.

The camp was set up in the open ground south of the city near the San Antonio River, in an area that is now Roosevelt Park. The men who gathered there were not a typical military cohort. They included cowboys and ranchers from Arizona, New Mexico, and Indian Territory; Ivy League athletes from Harvard and Yale who had been recruited through Roosevelt's social connections; lawmen; and a contingent of Native American volunteers. The unit eventually numbered about one thousand sixty men, plus more than twelve hundred horses and mules.

Roosevelt was the unit's second-in-command under Colonel Leonard Wood. But he was its public face, and he trained alongside the men every morning starting at five-thirty in conditions that were dusty, hot, and according to multiple accounts written by participants, genuinely punishing. The Rough Riders left San Antonio by train on May twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-eight, bound for Tampa and then Cuba.

They fought at the Battle of San Juan Hill in July. Roosevelt would later describe the charge as the greatest day of his life. The battle made him famous. Within two years he was Vice President; within three, President.

Fort Sam Houston, on the northeast side of the city, traces a military presence in San Antonio to eighteen forty-five, built its permanent post in eighteen seventy-six, and took the name Fort Sam Houston in eighteen ninety. The military presence that drew the Rough Riders here was already decades deep by the time Roosevelt arrived.