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Updated: June 8, 2025
Instead of resisting General Shafter's advance, however, with obstinate pertinacity on the Siboney road, he abandoned his strong position at Guasimas, after a single sharp but inconclusive engagement, and retreated almost to Santiago without striking another blow.
But the people in the United States did not laugh after the battle of Las Guasimas. That June morning it was thought best to separate and march by two roads, meeting near the Spanish fort. The way of the "Rough Riders" led them up steep hills.
The eager spirit in which this was accomplished is best described in the Spanish soldier's answer to the inquiring civilian, "They tried to catch us with their hands." The Rough Riders should adopt it as their motto. After the Guasimas fight on June 24, the army was advanced along the single trail which leads from Siboney on the coast to Santiago.
General Wood states that Leonardo Ros, the Civil Governor of Santiago at the time of the surrender, told him that the Spanish force at Guasimas consisted of not less than 2,600 men, and that there were nearly 300 of them killed and wounded.
Then they knocked the blocks of wood out of the slides and threw fresh coal into the firebox, and in a very short time the locomotive was pulling a train of ore cars loaded with soldiers. For a few days after the battle of Las Guasimas no great event took place. There was no fighting.
There was a valley between us, and the bushes were so thick on both sides of our trail that it was not possible at any time, until we met at Guasimas, to distinguish the other column.
Early Sunday morning, at the little zinc-walled telegraph office under the camp of the marines at Guantanamo, I happened to meet two war correspondents one of them, if I remember rightly, Mr. Howard of the New York "Journal" who had just come from the front with a detailed account of the fight at Guasimas.
They had worked for a "scoop" at La Guasimas; they had gone up on the firing-line and had sent back authentic accounts of that little skirmish; but they did not make the "scoop."
The detachment was organized on the spur of the moment, to utilize material which would otherwise have been useless, and was with the Fifth Corps in all the campaign. It participated in all the fighting of that campaign, except the fight at La Guasimas, and was disbanded upon the return of the Fifth Corps to Montauk.
Arrived in Cuba,, the first troops, accustomed only to the saddle, had to hobble along as best they could, on foot, so that some wag rechristened them " Wood's Weary Walkers." The rest of the regiment, with the mounts, came a little later, and at Las Guasimas they had their first skirmish with the Spaniards. Eight of them were killed, and they were buried in one grave.
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