The Colonel made a slight error when he said his mixed command contained some colored infantry.  All the colored troops in that command were cavalry men.  His command consisted mostly of Rough Riders, with an aggregate of about one troop of the Tenth Cavalry, a few of the Ninth and a few of the First Regular Cavalry, with a half dozen officers.  Every few minutes brought men from the rear, everybody seeming to be anxious to get to the firing line.  For a while we kept up a desultory fire, but as we could not locate the enemy (he all the time keeping up a hot fire on our position), we became disgusted, and lay down and kept silent.  Private Marshall was here seriously wounded while standing in plain view of the enemy, trying to point them out to his comrades.

There were frequent calls for men to carry the wounded to the rear, to go for ammunition, and as night came on, to go for rations and entrenching tools.  A few colored soldiers volunteered, as did some from the Rough Riders.  It then happened that two men of the Tenth were ordered to the rear by Lieutenant Fleming, Tenth Cavalry, who was then present with part of his troop, for the purpose of bringing either rations or entrenching tools, and Colonel Roosevelt seeing so many men going to the rear, shouted to them to come back, jumped up and drew his revolver, and told the men of the Tenth that he would shoot the first man who attempted to shirk duty by going to the rear, that he had orders to hold that line and he would do so if he had to shoot every man there to do it.  His own men immediately informed him that “you won’t have to shoot those men, Colonel.  We know those boys.”  He was also assured by Lieutenant Fleming, of the Tenth, that he would have no trouble keeping them there, and some of our men shouted, in which I joined, that “we will stay with you, Colonel.”  Everyone who saw the incident knew the Colonel was mistaken about our men trying to shirk duty, but well knew that he could not admit of any heavy detail from his command, so no one thought ill of the matter.  Inasmuch as the Colonel came to the line of the Tenth the next day and told the men of his threat to shoot some of their members and, as he expressed it, he had seen his mistake and found them to be far different men from what he supposed.  I thought he was sufficiently conscious of his error not to make a so ungrateful statement about us at a time when the Nation is about to forget our past service.

Had the Colonel desired to note the fact, he would have seen that when orders came the next day to relieve the detachment of the Tenth from that part of the field, he commanded just as many colored men at that time as he commanded at any other time during the twenty-four hours we were under his command, although colored as well as white soldiers were going and coming all day, and they knew perfectly well where the Tenth Cavalry was posted, and that it was on a line about four hundred yards further from the enemy than Colonel Roosevelt’s line.  Still when they obtained permission to go to the rear, they almost invariably came back to the same position.  Two men of my troop were wounded while at the rear for water and taken to the hospital and, of course, could not come back.