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Rh Mexico. Before he had been commissioned three months, the command of all the infantry of the expeditions fell to him, and sometimes that of the Indian scouts. These expeditions were fraught with remarkable hardships and required extraordinary endurance and fortitude in the men under whose command they were undertaken. So well did Surgeon Wood acquit himself throughout the campaign against the Apaches that he was recommended to congress for a medal of honor, which he did not receive, however, until ten years later.

In the spring of 1887, he was rewarded by an appointment as one of the staff surgeons at the headquarters of the department of Arizona. A year later he served with the 10th cavalry in the Kid outbreak in New Mexico, and later he was engaged in the work of the heliographic survey of Arizona. After this service he spent a year at Fort McDowell, and then returned to California, and later was assigned to duty at Fort McPherson, near Atlanta, Georgia, for a time. His next post of duty was at Washington, District of Columbia, beginning in September, 1895, where he often made professional visits to President Cleveland and his family; and, after the accession of President McKinley, he was the regular medical adviser to the president and Mrs. McKinley. It was about this time that he met President Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy. Their friendship was immediate; and in much of his subsequent career he has been directly or indirectly associated with the president.

At the beginning of the Spanish-American war, even before it began, Wood was commissioned to raise a regiment and recruited the 1st United States volunteer cavalry (known as "Rough Riders") and was appointed colonel of the same, May 8, 1898. After the opening of hostilities, this regiment made a famous record at Santiago, Las Guasimas, and San Juan Hill, in which latter battle it was in the severest of the fighting. For gallant service at Las Guasimas and San Juan, Colonel Wood was made a brigadier-general of volunteers, July 8, 1898, and eleven days later he was appointed governor of Santiago.

After rehabilitating the stricken city of Santiago, his territory of command was extended to the entire province, and in addition to his routine administrative duties, he organized a supreme court, established a school system, devised new methods of taxation, forbade bull-fighting, and improved the local government in many important