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Updated: May 3, 2025
The officers, too, had many strange experiences to relate; none, not even Llewellen or O'Neill, had been through what was better worth telling, or could tell it better, than Capron. He had spent years among the Apaches, the wildest and fiercest of tribes, and again and again had owed his life to his own cool judgment and extraordinary personal prowess.
General Wood also writes me at length about Mr. Bonsal's book, stating that his account of the Guasimas fight is without foundation in fact. He says: "We had five troops completely deployed before the first shot was fired. Captain Capron was not wounded until the fight had been going on fully thirty-five minutes. The statement that Captain Capron's troop was ambushed is absolutely untrue.
We had an idea about where the Spaniards were and depended upon Cuban scouts to warn us but they did not do it. At about 8:30 o'clock in the morning we met a volley from the enemy, who were ambushed, not only on our ridge, but on the one to the right, beyond the Negro troops, and the Negro soldiers were under a cross fire. That is how Capt. Capron and Hamilton Fish were killed."
I got separated once and was scared until I saw the line again, as my leg was very bad and I could not get about over the rough ground. I went down the trail and I found Capron dying and the whole place littered with discarded blankets and haversacks.
Their frames seemed of steel, to withstand all fatigue; they were flushed with health; in their eyes shone high resolve and fiery desire. Two finer types of the fighting man, two better representatives of the American soldier, there were not in the whole army. Capron was going over his plans for the fight when we should meet the Spaniards on the morrow, Fish occasionally asking a question.
But we tied our horses to the wire fence, and Capron's troop knelt with carbines at the "Ready," peering into the bushes. We must have waited there, while Wood reconnoitred, for over ten minutes. Then he returned, and began deploying his troops out at either side of the trail. Capron he sent on down the trail itself.
The writer had so much to say that could not be conveyed in a letter, and longed above all things to see Bertha, the only being in whom, at a very grave juncture in her life, she could absolutely confide. "We shall be quite alone Mr. and Mrs. Capron are going to town immediately after lunch. This is a lovely place, and we shall have it to ourselves all the afternoon.
"Can't we round out that disappearance story a little; the suburban woman who hasn't been seen since she went to New York three days ago? Get Capron to fake up a picture of the home with the three children in it grouped around Bereaved Husband, and here, how would something like this do for caption: "Mamma, Mamma! Come Back!" Sob Tiny Tots. The human touch.
It was probably half or three-quarters of an hour after the firing began that Captain Capron was killed, and perhaps twenty minutes after that I was struck as we were about to make a charge. Our men had been instructed to save their ammunition and not shoot unless they saw something to shoot at.
As it was, Troop L, the advance-guard under the unfortunate Captain Capron, was almost surrounded, and but for the reinforcement hurriedly sent forward every man would probably have been killed or wounded. When the reserves came up there was no hesitation.
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