calm about it, and I certainly was taking photographs of them at the time, and the rest of the regiment, instead of being half an hour’s march away, was seated comfortably along the trail not twenty feet distant from the men of L Troop.  You deployed G Troop under Captain Llewellen into the jungle at the right and sent K Troop after it, and Wood ordered Troops E and F into the field on our left.  It must have been from ten to fifteen minutes after Capron and Wood had located the Spaniards before either side fired a shot.  When the firing did come I went over to you and joined G Troop and a detachment of K Troop under Woodbury Kane, and we located more of the enemy on a ridge.

     If it is to be ambushed when you find the enemy exactly
     where you went to find him, and your scouts see him soon
     enough to give you sufficient time to spread five troops
     in skirmish order to attack him, and you then drive him
     back out of three positions for a mile and a half, then
     most certainly, as Bonsal says, “L Troop of the Rough
     Riders was ambushed by the Spaniards on the morning of
    June 24th.”

General Wood also writes me at length about Mr. Bonsal’s book, stating that his account of the Guasimas fight is without foundation in fact.  He says:  “We had five troops completely deployed before the first shot was fired.  Captain Capron was not wounded until the fight had been going on fully thirty-five minutes.  The statement that Captain Capron’s troop was ambushed is absolutely untrue.  We had been informed, as you know, by Castillo’s people that we should find the dead guerilla a few hundred yards on the Siboney side of the Spanish lines.”

He then alludes to the waving of the guidon by K Troop as “the only means of communication with the regulars.”  He mentions that his orders did not come from General Wheeler, and that he had no instructions from General Wheeler directly or indirectly at any time previous to the fight.

General Wood does not think that I give quite enough credit to the Rough Riders as compared to the regulars in this Guasimas fight, and believes that I greatly underestimate the Spanish force and loss, and that Lieutenant Tejeiro is not to be trusted at all on these points.  He states that we began the fight ten minutes before the regulars, and that the main attack was made and decided by us.  This was the view that I and all the rest of us in the regiment took at the time; but as I had found since that the members of the First and Tenth Regular Regiments held with equal sincerity the view that the main part was taken by their own commands, I have come to the conclusion that the way I have described the action is substantially correct.  Owing to the fact that the Tenth Cavalry, which was originally in support, moved forward until it got mixed with the First, it is very difficult to get the exact relative position of the different troops of the First and Tenth in making the advance.