effort has been made either by Cubans or
Americans to designate the lines that once encircled and menaced
Santiago, and Nature, always at her best under a tropical sun, has done
all in her power to disguise and forever obliterate the scene of the
army's one battle. Those features which still remain unchanged are very
few. The Treaty Tree, now surrounded by a tall fence, is one, the
block-house is another. The little lake in which, even when the bullets
were dropping, the men used to bathe and wash their clothes, the big iron
sugar kettle that gave a new name to Kettle Hill, and here and there a
trench hardly deeper than a ploughed furrow, and nearly hidden by growing
plants, are the few landmarks that remain.

Of the camps of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Bates, Sumner, and Wheeler, of
Colonels Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt, there are but the slightest
traces. The Bloody Bend, as some call it, in the San Juan River, as some
call that stream, seems to have entirely disappeared. At least, it
certainly was not where it should have been, and the place the hotel
guides point out to unsuspecting tourists bears not the slightest
physical resemblance to that ford. In twelve years, during one of which
there has been in Santiago the most severe rainfall in sixty years, the
San Juan stream has carried away its banks and the trees that lined them,
and the trails that should mark where the ford once crossed have so
altered and so many new ones have been added, that the exact location of
the once famous dressing station is now most difficult, if not
impossible, to determine. To establish the sites of the old camping
grounds is but little less difficult. The head-quarters of General
Wheeler are easy to recognize, for the reason that the place selected was
in a hollow, and the most unhealthy spot along the five miles of
intrenchments. It is about thirty yards from where the road turns to
rise over the ridge to Santiago, and all the water from the hill pours
into it as into a rain barrel. It was here that Troop G, Third Cavalry,
under Major Hardee, as it was Wheeler's escort, was forced to bivouac,
and where one-third of its number came down with fever. The camp of
General Sam Sumner was some sixty yards to the right of the head-quarters
of General Wheeler, on the high shoulder of the hill just above the camp
of the engineers, who were on the side of the road opposite. The camps
of Generals Chaffee, Lawton, Hawkins, Ludlow