Two things about the most famous charge in American memory. The first is that it was made on foot. The Rough Riders were formally the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, raised in the spring of 1898 under Leonard Wood with Roosevelt as his lieutenant colonel, and they became "Roosevelt's Rough Riders" only when Wood moved up to a brigade. But when the expedition sailed for Cuba there was not enough shipping. Only about three-quarters of the men got aboard, most of the horses stayed behind in Florida, and a cavalry regiment spent the campaign working as light infantry. Roosevelt's own summary was blunt: the great shortcoming throughout the campaign was the utterly inadequate transportation. The second thing is the hill. On 1 July 1898, in the assault on the San Juan Heights, the slope Roosevelt personally led his men up was Kettle Hill — the ridge next door. San Juan Hill is the name that attached itself afterward and never came off. He was mounted for part of it, one of the handful of men in the regiment who still had a horse, riding along the line to get people on their feet and moving. The regiment had already lost eight killed and thirty-one wounded at Las Guasimas a week earlier, and it lost heavily again on the Heights. What actually happened is a shorter, rougher and more interesting story than the painting of it.

The figure is Roosevelt in the field: campaign hat, canvas fatigue blouse, pistol belt and revolver, gauntlets, leggings, and the blue polka-dot neckerchief he wore so consistently it became a trademark. One correction is worth making, because it appears on nearly every description of this figure. San Juan Heights did not earn him the Medal of Honor. He was recommended for it in 1898 and the recommendation was refused on political grounds, and the medal was finally awarded on 16 January 2001 — a hundred and three years late, and long after his death — making him the only president to hold one. He spent the decade after this war being argued with by Mark Twain, who thought the empire it launched was a disgrace and said so in print until he died. In the same year, on the other side of the world, another young officer was making his name in a colonial war and writing about it: Winston Churchill in the Sudan, 1898. And for the other end of the presidents-in-uniform thread that runs through this collection, see Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.

Model: 10128 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set