Leonard Wood

Leonard Wood was an Army contract surgeon who already held a Medal of Honor for Apache campaign service when the war with Spain began. In 1898 he took command of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry — the Rough Riders — with Theodore Roosevelt as lieutenant colonel. Wood led the regiment through the Cuban campaign's early fighting and training at Tampa and in the field until promotion moved him to brigade command; Roosevelt then took the regiment up Kettle Hill and into the San Juan Heights story Americans still tell. After the armistice Wood served as military governor in Cuba and later as Chief of Staff of the Army, pushing readiness in the years before World War I.

This register lists the 1898 volunteer command and Cuban field service that sit in War Department records, not the later presidential politics or the Wood–Roosevelt friendship as entertainment. The Rough Riders remain one of the best-documented volunteer units of the war.

Wood died in Boston in 1927 after surgery. The Agence Rol portrait (1919), public domain via Gallica/Commons, is used here. He is accounted for.