On this day in 1865 in New Carlisle, Ohio, Funston was born to an artilleryman in the Union Army who after the war moved the family to Kansas and eventually was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. When Funston graduated from high school he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps by entering the military, but was denied an appointment to West Point because of poor grades, a weak competitive exam score, and his height. He subsequently enrolled at Kansas State University, but after two desultory years dropped out and took jobs as a court reporter for a West Arkansas newspaper and a ticket collector on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway. In 1890 he passed a civil service examination and became a botanist serving on expeditions to such forbidding locations as the just-pacified Bad Lands, the hellish Death Valley, and the frigid Yukon territory, where he completed a 1,400 mile solo trip down the Yukon River.
Funston was in New York City trying to sell rights to a memoir of his adventures, when out of curiosity on a spring evening in 1896 he followed a crowd into Madison Square Garden. There, he found a political rally in progress promoting the cause of the Cuban Revolution against Spain, with the former Union General Daniel E. Sickles the featured speaker. The event implanted martial images in Funston’s mind that kept him awake with excitement, and before dawn arrived the next morning he had decided to volunteer for his first war. During a visit to the Cuban junta, the Cubans said they particularly needed artillery officers. Although Funston’s experience with artillery was limited to once “having seen a salute fired to President Hayes at a county fair in Kansas,” he signed on with that designation and proceeded to teach himself the art of gunnery with a Hotchkiss twelve-pounder he found at an arms dealer. Thus, knowing no conversational Spanish and lacking any formal military training, Funston became an artillery officer in the Cuban insurrecto army.
Over the course of a year’s fighting in 1897, he was shot or hit by shrapnel three times – including a Mauser bullet that passed through both lungs in June – and had his horse shot out from underneath him on another occasion that crushed his legs and impaled his thigh upon a dry stick. In addition to the persistent hunger he shared with his revolutionary comrades, Funston contracted malaria and was subject to periodic fevers and chills, and contracted typhoid fever during one of his many hospital confinements. On 12 December 1897, while about to go on leave, Funston was captured by a Spanish patrol. Looking directly into the barrel of Spanish rifles, knowing he could be shot at any moment, Funston quickly invented a story about how he was actually deserting from the insurrecto army and had been looking for Spaniards to whom he could surrender. As he spun his tale, he subtly slid his hand in to his pocket, placed the incriminating leave papers in his handkerchief, pulled the handkerchief out to swab the perspiration on his face, and managed to slip the papers into his mouth and swallow them without being noticed. The Spaniards subsequently conveyed Funston to Havana, where he was soon placed upon the first available ship for New York.
To the average man, the series of wounds and diseases Funston suffered in Cuba would be enough to dissuade them from ever again volunteering for war in a tropical climate. But such was Funston’s passion for adventure – and perhaps his sense of invulnerability – that when the Spanish-American War erupted the following spring he leaped at the opportunity to serve as the colonel of the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry, one of three regiments the Jayhawk State was raising in response to President McKinley’s call for 125,000 volunteers to augment the meager regular army. While training his regiment and awaiting deployment in San Francisco, Funston undertook what may have been his most daring venture yet – in two weeks he met, wooed, and proposed to Ms. Eda Blankart. They were married on October 25, 1898. Two days later, Colonel Funston left his bride and sailed with the second and third battalions of the 20th Kansas on the transport Indiana, bound for Manila.
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| Frederick Funston, 5'4", 120 pounds, in the uniform of the 20th Kansas |
On 27 April, 1899, MacArthur and General Lloyd Wheaton’s combined brigades found themselves halted at the banks of the Rio Grande de la Pampanga by a formidable entrenchment of 4,000 Filipinos backed by artillery and a Maxim machine gun. The only way of establishing a beachhead on the enemy bank seemed to be by a combined artillery assault to cover the activities of a small unit in the river. After two Kansas privates swam across with a long coil of rope, Funston personally took seven men across on the a raft and, ordering the rest of his troops across in stages, he dashed with a half-dozen men into the trenches. “I realized perfectly well that according to the rules of the game a colonel should not leave the bulk of his regiment on one side of a stream and accompany a detachment smaller than a company in size,” Funston recalled, but he “knew mighty well that if I should send a small force across and sacrifice it I would be damned in my home State all the rest of my life, and held up to scorn by all the corner-grocery tacticians in the country.”
Although they only found dead and wounded Filipinos remaining in the trenches, they soon came under fire from the Filipino Maxim gun positioned across a stream 300 yards a way. An American soldier yelled out, “It’s the Maxim – we’re goners,” only to receive a kick from Funston, who told him to be quiet. Funston stood up, saw that the gun was beneath a railroad culvert, and ordered his prone men to rise. “Under that culvert, rapid fire,” he yelled, and the gun was silenced. Funston was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the crossing of the Rio Grande.
When the war devolved into a grinding counterinsurgency campaign, Funston was given command of the Fourth District of the army's Department of Northern Luzon, where because of his previous experience as an insurgent, he was one of the army's more effective counterinsurgency commanders. He was still serving in this position on February 4, 1901, when news arrived that a courier bearing dispatches from Aguinaldo had been captured. But that is another story . . .
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