nd yellow fever was raging, and clouds of smoke hung over the
city from the funeral pyres where were being burned many of the bodies
for which burial was impossible. The city was reeking with filth. Half
the people were threatened with starvation. Lawlessness and complaints
of grievances were rife. He had to be at once sanitarian, steward and
judge. He labored heroically at all three tasks, and performed them so
well that in a few weeks Santiago seemed like a new city. Of course
there was much to do in other places in the province. In Holguin there
were three thousand cases of smallpox, of which he treated 1,200 in
hospitals. He sent thither as nurses 600 thoroughly vaccinated immunes,
not one of whom contracted the disease. Hundreds of infected buildings,
of flimsy construction, were burned, while all others were thoroughly
disinfected, and the epidemic was conquered.

Early the next year General Wood sought a well earned rest in a brief
visit to his former home in Boston, leaving, as he thought, affairs in
Santiago in a securely satisfactory condition. But he was compelled to
hasten back in July, 1899, to deal with another outbreak of disease. On
his arrival he found both the city and his own army camp in the grip of
malignant yellow fever. It was a time for heroic action, and that was
what he performed. In a day he removed his troops to healthful places on
the adjacent hills, and then subjected the city to such a cleansing and
scientific sanitation as neither it nor any other Cuban city had ever
known. The island and the world looked on with interest, to see if thus
he could cope with and suppress the epidemic.

He succeeded. Not yet had the theory of Dr. Carlos J. Finlay, that
mosquitoes were the sole propagators of the disease, been practically
tested and applied, though it had been propounded by that eminent Cuban
physician many years before. That immortal achievement was postponed for
Messrs. Reed, Carroll, Agramonte and Lazear to effect, under General
Wood's subsequent administration at Havana. But even without it, by
means of strenuous sanitation, the epidemic of July, 1899, was
conquered, and Santiago was made clean and sound.

Another achievement of General Wood's at Santiago in the latter part of
1898 proved highly successful and was soon afterward extended to the
other provinces of the island. This was the organization of the Rural
Guards, a force which became invaluable for the policing of the rural
port