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Updated: June 28, 2025
Thanks to his knowledge of the situation and promptness, we immediately put in our requisitions for the articles indispensable for the equipment of the regiment; and then, by ceaseless worrying of excellent bureaucrats, who had no idea how to do things quickly or how to meet an emergency, we succeeded in getting our rifles, cartridges, revolvers, clothing, shelter-tents, and horse gear just in time to enable us to go on the Santiago expedition.
For this they had contrived many devices, the favorite means being dugouts that is, pits dug in the ground, and roofed over, with shelter-tents, and having at one end a fire-place and chimney ingeniously constructed with sod.
There are camps in the North Woods that are really fine villas, costing thousands of dollars and there are log-houses and shanties and bark camps and A tents and walled tents, shelter-tents and shanty-tents.
For this they had contrived many devices, the favorite means being dugouts that is, pits dug in the ground, and roofed over, with shelter-tents, and having at one end a fire-place and chimney ingeniously constructed with sod.
In this wintry weather, striking tents meant stripping the log huts of the bits of canvas that ordinarily served as the shelter-tents of the soldiers.
They had nothing else to carry it in, nothing else to keep it in after they got it to camp, and nothing bigger than a tin cup in which to boil it or make coffee. In the matter of tents and clothing the equipment of the soldiers was equally deficient. Dog-kennel shelter-tents will not keep out a tropical rain, and when the men got wet they had to stay wet for lack of a spare suit of underclothes.
Beyond them were the scattered and smouldering fires, the rude shelter-tents of the men, the white tops of the army wagons; beyond these the dark outlines of the massive hills; above them all the brilliant, placid stars; around them the hush of nature, broken only by the drowsing swish and plash of rapid, running waters, the stir of the night wind in the scattered trees, the stamp and snort of some startled troop-horse, the distant challenge of the night sentries.
The long grass had been beaten down into such trails as a bear would make in wandering hither and thither among the dirty shelter-tents; and following one of these devious paths across the encampment, we found Lieutenant-Colonel Roosevelt standing with two or three other officers in front of a white-cotton rain-sheet, or tent-fly, stretched across a pole so as to protect from rain, or at least from vertical rain, a little pile of blankets and personal effects.
The hospital, when I arrived, consisted of three large tents for operating-tables, pharmacy, dispensary, etc.; another of similar dimensions for wounded officers; half a dozen small wall-tents for wounded soldiers; and a lot of "dog-kennels," or low shelter-tents, for the hospital stewards, litter-bearers, and other attendants.
Shelter-tents, buttoned or sewed together, form the roof, which, by the aid of talmas or ponchoes, is generally made water-proof. Three or four men usually unite in the construction of a hut, and share one another's skill and stores.
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