NAVAL SECRETARY AND ROUGH RIDER 
53 
Roosevelt, “the man will fight. He is the man for the place. He has 
a lion heart.” 
He not only kept Dewey in Chinese waters, but held his fleet 
together. The “Olympia” was ordered home, but Roosevelt secured 
the repeal of the order. “Keep the 'Olympia/ ” he cabled him, “and 
keep full of coal.” 
He saw clearly what was in the air. And when the day for 
fighting came the blood throbbed strongly in his veins. “There’s 
nothing more for me to do here,” he said. “I’ve got to get into the 
fight myself. I have done all I could to bring on the war, because it 
is a just war. Now that it has come I have no business to ask others 
to do the fighting and stay at home myself.” 
The fact is, chains could not have kept him at home. There was 
in him too much of the berserker strain for that. He had been fighting 
all his life. Whether in the legislature, on the ranch, in the hunting 
field, in the police service; it was not in him to lose the chance to feel 
the blood-boiling sensation of the battlefield. 
It was a happy idea of his that suggested the Rough Rider regi¬ 
ment. The name “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders” struck the popular 
fancy, and helped greatly to make Roosevelt’s name a household word. 
Before the regiment was organized it had become famous. The taking 
title, “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” was on every one’s tongue. 
Never before had such a body of athletes and daredevils been got 
together. Only America could have furnished them. The cowboy, 
the Indian trailer, the hunter, the Indian himself, the pick of the West, 
formed the bulk of the regiment, but with them were mingled the 
athletes of the East, the college football player, the oarsman, the polo 
champion, the trained policeman, even the wealthy society man of 
athletic training. The one pity is that they were not able to show 
their prowess as horsemen, for such a body of cavalry as they would 
have made the world has rarely seen. 
They were out of their native element afoot, and their humorous 
title for themselves, “Wood’s Weary Walkers,” after their long 
marches in the Cuban jungle, had more truth than poetry in it. 
Roosevelt had been for four years a member of the Eighth Regi¬ 
ment of the New York State National Guard, and had risen to the 
