led him to select Leonard Wood for the Colonelcy, under
whom he was himself glad to serve as Lieutenant-Colonel. So it was that
Wood first went to Cuba, as Colonel of the First Regiment of United
States Cavalry Volunteers. There soon followed the achievements at
Guasimas and at San Juan Hill, to which reference has already been made,
in recognition of his services in which on July 8, 1898, he was promoted
to be Brigadier General, and on December 7 following to be Major General
of Volunteers. It may be added that he was promoted to these same ranks
in the regular army respectively on February 4, 1901 and August 8, 1903.

With these antecedents, on September 24 he entered upon the task of
governing Santiago and the Province of Oriente. It was a position of
unique responsibility and power. The President's order made it
incumbent upon him to administer the existing municipal laws so far as
in his own judgment they were properly applicable to the new state of
affairs. That was all. Otherwise he was thrown absolutely upon his own
resources, with no treaty obligations or government promises to bind
him. He was simply a "benevolent despot," intent upon tranquillizing and
rehabilitating that vast eastern province of Cuba by methods of his own
devising. It was a region at once the most unruly and the most
impoverished in Cuba, and it had for its capital a plague-smitten city.
For six months he labored there, and in that short period he so far
advanced the work of reconstruction that thereafter Oriente served as an
example and a model for all the other provinces of Cuba. Sympathetic,
alert, untiring, frank, without vanity or ostentation, resolute,
diplomatic, and always supremely just, General Wood's personality stood
to the people of Cuba for qualities seldom if ever before associated
with the occupant of the governor's palace, while his energy in fighting
disease, relieving distress, reviving industry and maintaining order
revealed to them as the Spanish regime never had done the beneficence of
enlightened government. It would be impossible to estimate too highly
the value of his services during those few months at Santiago, in
commending to Cubans the benevolent purposes and attitude of the
Americans toward them and in disclosing to them the vast material and
moral benefits which would accrue to them through self-government wisely
administered.

He began his work at Santiago in gruesome circumstances. An epidemic of
smallpox a