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Updated: July 9, 2025
It was learned afterward that the Spanish garrison had retired in the direction of Siboney soon after daylight. By night about 6,000 troops were on shore. Gen. Lawton was ordered to push down a strong force to seize and hold Siboney. On the 23d the disembarkation was continued and about 6,000 more men landed. Early on this date Gen.
The positions of the vessels of my command off Santiago at that moment were as follows: The flagship New York was four miles east of her blockading station and about seven miles from the harbor entrance. She had started for Siboney, where I intended to land, accompanied by several of my staff, and go to the front to consult with General Shafter.
And never did heroes receive a more royal welcome than that accorded this handful of blue-jackets by their comrades of the army. From the outermost trenches all the way to Siboney, where a launch awaited them, their progress was an ovation of wildest enthusiasm.
The army did not have sufficient small vessels to effect a landing; but the navy came to its assistance, and on the 22d of June the first American troops began to disembark at Daiquiri, though it was not until the 26th that the entire expedition was on shore. On the second day Siboney, which had a better anchorage and was some six miles closer to Santiago, was made the base.
If there was any reason to believe, when the army first began to disembark at Siboney, that the houses of the village were likely to become sources of infection, they should have been burned or fumigated at once. To burn them after they had set yellow fever afloat in that malarious and polluted atmosphere was like locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen.
Edward Marshall, took an active part in this engagement, and the latter was so severely wounded by a Mauser bullet, which passed through his body near the spine, that when he was carried from the field he was supposed to be dying. He rallied, however, after being taken to Siboney, and has since partially recovered.
Siboney at that time was a wretched little hamlet containing only ten or fifteen abandoned and incredibly dirty Spanish houses, most of which were in use either as hospitals or for government offices.
Nothing, perhaps, is more important, so far as its influence upon health is concerned, than food, and the rations of General Shafter's army were deficient in quantity and unsatisfactory in quality from the very first. With a few exceptions, the soldiers had nothing but hard bread and bacon after they left the transports at Siboney, and short rations at that.
The Siboney hospital, thanks to the devotion and unwearied energy of Major Lagarde and his assistants, was by this time in fairly good working order.
During my absence at the front on Monday, the auxiliary cruiser Yale, with two or three regiments of Michigan troops on board, arrived off Siboney, and when I went on deck on Tuesday morning these reinforcements were just beginning to go ashore in a long line of small boats, towed by a steam-launch from one of the war-ships of the blockading fleet.
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