Rough Riders:Theodore Roosevelt, His cowboy Regiment, and the Immortal Charge up San Juan Hill, by Mark Lee Gardner (Morrow)
Theodore Rooseveltap Rough Riders are one of America’s most beloved fighting forces. Recruited for the Spanish-American War by Roosevelt and Col. Leonard Wood, who was Rooseveltap superior officer, the Rough Riders included western cowboys, lawmen and Indians along with a few volunteers from elite eastern schools, two of them top-ranked tennis players.
They were all loyal to Roosevelt as he was to them, but they often chaffed under rigid army rules. When, after waiting 18 hours for transportation, a young officer commandeered a train to transport the troops, he was given a stern note from an adjutant general recommending he be reprimanded strongly. Roosevelt read the letter while the frightened officer steeled himself for the consequences. Instead, Roosevelt looked into the man’s eyes and asked, “Why the hell did you wait 18 hours?”
Colorado author Mark Lee Gardner tells the story of the Rough Riders based on accounts that have been moldering away in archives. There are dozens of vignettes of the brave men who fought not only the Spanish but the tropical diseases that proved even more deadly than the enemy.
Rooseveltap bravery is legendary, although some at the time disputed his actions at San Juan Hill. Roosevelt, in fact, was denied the Medal of Honor by jealous war department officials and wasn’t awarded it until 2001, more than 80 years after his death.
The Apache Wars, by Paul Andrew Hutton (Crown)
The 1861 capture of a white boy by Apaches led to what historian Paul Andrew Hutton calls the longest war in American history. It was not a war in the classic sense, of course, but a determined effort on the part of the U.S. government to capture or kill every Apache in the West. The pity is that it almost did just that.
“The Apache Wars” is an epic account of the America’s determination to make the West safe for white settlers. That meant treachery, deception, kidnapping and murder by both the Army and the Apaches.
The war began with the kidnapping of a one-eyed white boy, later known as Mickey Free (after a character in a pop novel.) He was raised Apache and later became an Army scout, once connecting with a white half-brother but never his parents. The kidnapping led to a genocidal war on the part of the army and brutal raids by the Apaches, who were famous for their methods of torture.
Both sides were guilty of deceit. Many Indians agreed to live on reservations, only to disappear to launch attacks. The army lured the great chief Mangas Coloradas to a peace parlay, where he was murdered by soldiers.
The end was all but foreordained. There was no way the Apaches could hold out against the United States. Their numbers were decimated, and they had no choice but to give in. Hutton describes one chief, old and exhausted, hearing peace terms with the aid of an ear trumpet.
Hutton’s massive opus includes all the famous chiefs — Cochise, Victorio, Geronimo, Nana — their skirmishes and battles in the U.S. and Mexico. “The Apache Wars” is a comprehensive narrative, as encompassing as the American West itself.
Asians in Colorado, by William Wei (University of Washington Press)
In 1890, there were 1,398 Chinese living in Colorado (and 10 Japanese). That was a small percentage of the state’s population, yet many Coloradans saw the Asians as a threat to jobs, morals and health. Chinese were thought to have unique diseases that were passed on in part by prostitutes. Many Caucasians believed all Chinese women in the U.S. were prostitutes.
Whites were so fearful of them that they passed anti-Chinese laws and regulated where they lived and the jobs they held, although many of those jobs were ones that whites refused to do. One of Denver’s most infamous events was the 1880 race riot in which a Chinese man was beaten to death and dozens more were savaged and driven out of their homes. Rioting was caused by a furor over the threat of thousands of Chinese coming to America and was fueled by Sinophobic articles in the Rocky Mountain News. Among the few who defended the Chinese were the white prostitutes and madams, who came to the aid of the “frail sisterhood.”
“Asians in Colorado” explores the history of this small minority in the state, against a background of exclusion and hatred, that ran from racist jokes to murder. While his emphasis is on the ill-treatment of Asians, author William Wei, a University of Colorado professor, also writes a compelling history of Asians in the state.
The Chinese population in the state began to decline about 1900, about the time more Japanese moved to Colorado. Wei quotes a former missionary as explaining the difference between the two nationalities: “The Japanese go to the West in order to acquire all the West can give. … The Chinaman goes steeled against its influences.”
Like the Chinese, the Japanese, many of whom were employed on farms or by the railroads, faced discrimination. During World War II, of course, Japanese from the West Coast were sent to relocation camps across the U.S., one of them, Amache, in southeast Colorado.
Since that time, attitudes toward Asians have changed dramatically. Asians are still a small minority in Colorado, just 2.8 percent of the population. But their contributions “will have little to do with their numbers,” Wei writes. “Instead, it will be because they share the same characteristic of past Asian Coloradans — true grit.”
