s well as
thirty-eight whites, captured two hundred head of stock and returned
to Mexico after having traveled four weeks and covered over 1,200
miles.

It was into such warfare that Wood was plunged. No sooner had he
arrived and begun his work than he put in a request for line duty in
addition to his duties as a medical officer. This was granted
immediately, because the need of men who could do something was too
great to admit of much punctiliousness in the matter of military
custom. Before the arrival of his commission as Assistant Surgeon,
January, 1886, he {31} had served as commanding officer of infantry in
a desperately hard pursuit in the Sierra Madres, ending in an attack
on an Indian camp. He was repeatedly assigned to the most strenuous,
fatiguing duty. After having marched on foot one day twenty-five miles
with Indian scouts he rode seventy-three miles with a message at
night, coming back at dawn the next day, just in time to break camp
and march thirty-four miles to a new camp. He was given at his own
request command of infantry under Captain Lawton, and this assignment
to line duty was sanctioned by General Miles, who had recently taken
over the command of the troops along the border.

General Miles was one of the greatest Indian fighters the country has
ever known. He was peculiarly fitted to assume this new job of
suppressing the Apache. He judged and selected the men who were to be
a part of this campaign by his own well-established standards. As its
leader he selected Captain Lawton, then serving with the Fourth United
States Cavalry at Fort Huachuca, primarily because Captain Lawton
believed that these Indians could be subjugated. {32} He had met their
skill and cunning and physical strength through years of such warfare
under General Crook, and possessed the necessary qualifications to
meet the demands of the trying campaign that faced him. After speaking
of Captain Lawton, General Miles says in his published recollections:

"I also found at Fort Huachuca another splendid type of American
manhood, Captain Leonard Wood, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army.
He was a young officer, age twenty-four, a native of Massachusetts, a
graduate of Harvard, a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great
intelligence, sterling, manly qualities and resolute spirit. He was
also perhaps as fine a specimen of physical strength and endurance as
could easily be found."

"... His services and observations and example