Tag Archives: Rough Riders

Teddy’s 38 Brings Big Bucks, Leo’s Not So Mucho

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Theodore Roosevelt’s Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 was shipped from the factory just days after the bespectacled former New York City Police Commish and Assistant Secretary of the Navy had been officially sworn in as a new lieutenant colonel in the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry in May 1898. Better known as the “Rough Riders,” Teddy would go on to lead his swashbuckling cavalrymen (sans horses, which they had to leave behind due to lack of transport) in the campaign against the Spanish in Cuba.

Later believed to have been used by the famed “Bull Moose” as a nightstand gun late into his life, the vintage .38 Long Colt chambered six-shooter had a provenance that tied it from the late 26th President to his longtime valet and finally to well-known S&W historian Jeff Supica (the guy who literally wrote the book on collecting Smiths).

In the end, Teddy’s Smith brought just shy of a million, hitting the gavel at $910,625 last weekend.

One of Teddy’s biggest pals, Dr. Leonard Wood, became familiar with TR while Leo was on the White House staff in the role of a physician to Presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. Leaving his position to become the colonel in the Rough Riders in 1898, Wood had some legit prior military chops, having spent several years as an Army surgeon in the Arizona Territory during the Apache Campaigns, and by the end of the SpanAm War had risen to a brigadier general (of volunteers), commanding the brigade that included the Rough Riders.

1st US Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (Rough Riders) command, taken at camp in Tampa, Florida before embarking for Cuba: From Left to right, Maj. George Dunn, Major Brodie, Maj. Gen. (former Confederate Lt. Gen.) Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, Chaplain Brown of the Rough Riders, Col. Leonard Wood, and Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt. National Archives – (NARA 111-SC-93549)

Coincidentally, Wood’s S&W .44 DA revolver, shipped to him in 1905 when he was the Governor of the Moro Province in the Philippines, also came to the gavel in the same auction as part of the Supica Collection.

It, however, “only” went for $29,375.

120 years ago today, the rest of the picture

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Source Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, via 1898-07-03 Harper’s Weekly.

Here we see a group of U.S Army victors on Kettle Hill on about July 3, 1898, after the battle of “San Juan Hill(s).” Left to right are officers and men of the vaunted “Brave Rifles” of the 3rd U.S. Cavalry Regiment, center is the “Rough Riders” of the 1st Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (with former Asst. Scty of the Navy, Col. Theodore Roosevelt, center, with a revolver salvaged from the USS Maine in his holster) and the African-American Troopers (“Buffalo Soldiers”) of the 10th U.S. Cavalry to the right.

This photo is often shown cropping out all but the 1st Vol Cav and TR and billed as “Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the top of the hill which they captured, Battle of San Juan.”

 

Rough Rider Krag at auction

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Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill by Frederic Remington: Theodore Roosevelt leads the charge on his horse, Little Texas. K Troop officer, Woodbury Kane is the brown-uniformed officer in the foreground with pistol in right hand and saber in his left. To the upper right of Lt Kane is a hat-less African-American Buffalo Soldier from either the 9th or 10th Cavalry that got mixed in along with the Rough Riders as all of them raced to the top of Kettle Hill.

Last weekend, Skinners had an early 1895-production Springfield Model 1896 Krag Saddle-Ring carbine up for grabs. Few of 1896s were made, just 22,493– with only a handful being 1895-marked. With their handy 22-inch barrel and 41-inch overall length, the five-shot”half-capsule” fixed magazine, bolt action repeater had a magazine cut-off to allow single .30-40 Krag rounds to be fed to keep the stumpy horse gun topped off.

It was also the last saddle ring (due to its ring and bar sling attachment) carbine ever made for the U.S. government– the end of an era. It even had a cleaning rod that was stored in the butt trap.

Another thing that made this gun special is that it was SN 27892, known to be issued to Alvin C. Ash, a trooper in G Troop of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry.

More in my article at Guns.com

As noted by Springfield Armory, who has a similar 1895-marked M1896 (SN 30023) in their collection, TR and his buddy Leonard Wood (now remembered with Fort named after him) really worked to get them:

“Wood and Roosevelt had to put forth some effort to obtain the Krag carbine for the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry; this was the first-line cavalry weapon, and it had been in service only two years when the Spanish-American War broke out. All the carbines issued to the Rough Riders were new, unused weapons, even though many of them were manufactured in 1895. The mechanism of the Model 1896 Carbine had been improved in a number of respects over that of the Model 1892 Rifle, many of which were in the hands of regular infantry troops at Santiago.” – Franklin B. Mallory MAN AT ARMS, July/August 1989

In the end, Ash’s Krag went for $30,750, with most of that being the premium for a Rough Riders-connected named piece, as Saddle Rings of the same vintage normally go for about a 1/10th of that.

Scribbling from a Ukrainian Rough Rider

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SOFREP has this really interesting take on what it was like as a foreign volunteer soldier of fortune in the Ukrainian Army during the late great hate there in recent years.

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As a former professional soldier in my own country’s NATO army, I found myself embroiled in the conflict in Ukraine by my own choice in late July, 2014. While technically I was a “volunteer,” I viewed myself as a professional soldier serving in a foreign country’s armed forces. Far from trying to make this some kind of dramatic personal narrative, I will attempt to portray a picture of the Russian soldier from my own limited point of view—that of an opponent.

At this point, I’d like to sidetrack a bit so as to make some things more clear to the reader. The Ukrainian “volunteer battalions” should not be seen as militias or irregulars, but rather as a sort of “Rough Riders”-style unit, a unit formed by volunteers, yet armed and supplied by the Army and subjected to the regular command structure, having normal combat duties at the front line. The foreign volunteers themselves, again, should not be seen as the like of all these colorful characters that join the Marxist and Arab irregular militias in the Middle East, but rather like the Swedish volunteers during the Winter War, integrated normally within their unit and most of the time taking up a front-line role either in operations or training. The opposing forces can be divided easily in two parts: the bandits who initiated the rebellion and the Russian regulars who intervened later that same year.

The bandits, no matter what the pro-Western propaganda claims, were not mercenaries or Russian regulars posing as rebels. Many Russian nationals flocked to their banner from the onset of the rebellion out of pure patriotism. Of course there were exceptions, but these were just that—exceptions. That doesn’t mean that Russian military advisors or SOF units didn’t directly aid them in the beginning of the conflict. The military effectiveness of said bandit militias was horrendous.

More here