A
CHARACTER
class of fifty-nine ; and there being no va cancies, he accepted a contract position, which he held until he was commissioned, January 5, 1886. H i s first service was on an assignment for two days at F o r t Warren, Massachusetts. IN
PURSUIT
O F GERONIMO.
In June, 1885, he was ordered to Arizona. He determined even before he left Boston that, i f an opportunity should ever present itself, he would enter the active branch of the service. He did not then know how soon his desire i n this regard was to be gratified. On the night of J u l y 4, 1885, he arrived at F o r t Huachuca, i n Arizona. There he met Captain H . W . L a w t o n of the Fourth Cavalry, now Major-General L a w t o n . Lawton had been at Harvard, and the two at once became friends. L a w t o n was leaving at four o'clock the next morning on what was to become one of the most famous of Indian campaigns—the pursuit of Geronimo, and Wood was ordered to report to him for duty. There was only one unassigned horse in the troop—a vicious, unreliable animal— and Wood knew next to nothing of riding. The instant he was mounted, the horse rushed into some heavy trees, to the damage of the young surgeon's clothing, but the rider never let go. That day he rode t h i r t y miles, through some of the roughest country i n Arizona, in the heat and dust of midsummer, and for five days afterward he was i n the saddle eighteen hours a day. It was what a cavalryman calls " healing i n the saddle," and a man who can do i t and live to ride any further has the mettle of a soldier i n him. F r o m July, 1885, u n t i l March, 1887, the young surgeon was almost continuously in the field, chasing Apaches through A r i zona, New Mexico, and 400 miles into old Mexico. Before he had been commissioned three months, and even then he was not a line officer, he was assigned to command a l l the i n fantry of the expedition, and sometimes the Indian scouts. B u t that was the way of the man—he went up by sheer personal force. I t w a s Wood's opinion that a well-trained white man could endure more than any In dian, and he set about deliberately to prove it. Governor Theodore Roosevelt, who knows him as well, perhaps, as any one, recently said of him : " No soldier could outwalk him, could live w i t h greater indifference on hard and scanty fare, could endure hardship better, or do better without sleep." Perhaps there never was an expedition so
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remarkable for its hardships and the extra ordinary endurance and fortitude of the men who took part i n i t as this chase for Geronimo and his Apaches among the cactus and chap arral of their own burning hills. Of t h i r t y picked frontiersmen who started out, only fourteen lasted to the end, and only two of these were officers—Lawton and Wood. B u t they brought i n Geronimo. The spirit of the wildest of a l l the Indian tribes had been broken by the relentless determination of a handful of white men. A t another time Wood was detailed with a force of twenty-seven Indian scouts to follow a straggling minor t r a i l . A l l they carried with them was little sacks of coffee and salt. There were only six tin cups i n the party. B u t they killed and ate deer, and these, with prickly pears and roots that the Indians dug, sufficed them for food. A s for water, they found it when they could, on those parched hills. A n d Wood slept and ate and marched with the Indians ; managed them, too, as he has since managed the Cubans ; and so severe was the expedition that two of these hardy scouts died from the effects of it, after they returned. Once, sleep ing half-clad on the ground, Wood was stung by a tarantula, and yet marched on foot, though suffering exquisitely, for two days, when finally he fell delirious. A t another time, arriving at a stockaded ranch, he bought a large steer, and such was the hun ger of the party that the twenty-eight men ate the animal to the bones i n two meals. " In this remarkable pursuit," writes Gen eral Miles, i n his report, " he [Captain L a w ton, w i t h his command] pursued them from one range of mountains to another, over the highest peaks, often 9,000 and 10,000 feet above the level of the sea and frequently in the depths of the canons, where the heat i n July and August was of tropical intensity. A portion of the command leading on the t r a i l were without rations for five days, three days being the longest continuous period. They subsisted on two or three deer killed by the scouts and mule meat without salt. These men made marches where i t was impossible to move cavalry or pack-trains ; but their la borious and painful efforts were crippled by the miserable shoes made at and furnished by the military prison at F o r t Leavenworth. The worthless material fell to pieces i n three or four days' marching. The troops suffered somewhat from fever, but fortunately they were very strong men and endured their hard ships with commendable fortitude. When on the Y a q u i River and i n the district of Moctezuma, the hostile camp was surprised and