The Triumphant Life of Theodore Roosevelt edited by J. Martin Miller

THE ROUGH RIDERS 107
ture, had followed his once chief to the war, with the college
athlete, the football player and the oarsman, the dare-devil
mountaineer of Georgia, fresh from hunting moonshiners as
a revenue officer, and with the society man, the child of
luxury and wealth from the East, bent upon proving that a
life of ease had dulled neither his manhood nor his sense of
our common citizenship."
INVARIABLY DECLINED COMMISSIONS
Harvard being Mr. Roosevelt's own college, he naturally
received a great many applications from that institution, but
what particularly' pleased him was that not only the applicants
from his Alma Mater, but also the Yale and Princeton men,
invariably declined commissions. And so it came to pass that
Dudley Dean, the celebrated quarterback; Wrenn and
Larned, the champion tennis players; Waller, the high
jumper; Garrison, Girard, Devereaux and Channing, the
football players; Wadsworth, the steeple-chase rider; Joe
Stevens, the polo player; Hamilton Fish, ex-captain of the
Columbia crew, and others, all entered the Rough Riders and
accepted the hard work and rough fare as though they had
been accustomed to nothing else. There were recruits from
clubs like the Somerset of Boston and the Knickerbocker of
New York, and, as Mr. Roosevelt expressed it, it seemed as
though every friend that he had in every State had some one
acquaintance who was bound to go with the Rough Riders
and for whom he had to make a place.
NOT A MAN BACKED OUT
'Before allowing them to be sworn in," says Mr. Roosevelt,
"I gathered them together and explained that if they went in
they must be prepared not merely to fight, but to perform