TV SERIES · 1997– · USA
Rough Riders
26 archived facts 4 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
All facts (26)
- #001
The Sioux people were so pleased with the portrayal of Native Americans in this film that they made writer and director John Milius an honorary member of the tribe.
- #002
As well as being a feared and respected lawman, Bucky O'Neill was also an Indian scout and the Mayor of Prescott, Arizona, as well as a self-taught, very well-read and multilingual man (speaking French, Spanish and several Indian languages). He and Roosevelt became close friends and spent much of their time on the campaign discussing military history, Indian customs and classic European literature.
- #003
The battle scenes were written from diaries and military correspondence; Theodore Roosevelt really did trip over his sword and fall.
- #004
The Rough Riders' actual casualty rate was forty percent, and because the US would not let them return home, most died of malaria after the war. Theodore Roosevelt eventually managed to bring them back to a quarantine camp at Montauk, New York. The Library of Congress American Memory website has Edison's early films of the Montauk quarantine camp.
- #005
This was Brian Keith's last film. He took on the role of President in this film just a few weeks before his death. In an earlier John Milius film, The Wind and the Lion (1975), Keith played Teddy Roosevelt, who was President during that film's period.
- #006
Colonel Leonard Wood was a Medal of Honor recipient in the Indian Wars and a very good friend of Roosevelt. Wood was a medical doctor.
- #007
Lieutenant Pershing's real story was that he was in charge of the Buffalo Soldiers alongside Roosevelt. He would go on to become General of the Armies in World War I.
- #008
Hamilton Fish was a real person and died as such. The screenplay was taken from a diary. The Fish family was a very famous and wealthy family of the time.
- #009
Tom Isbell took as many bullet wounds at the Battle of Las Guasimas as he is depicted taking in the film, and survived.
- #010
Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri was named after Colonel Leonard Wood. Colonel Wood was played by retired US Navy Captain Dale Dye, who also served as Military Advisor on the film.
- #011
The rifles used were real and came from the film The Rough Riders (1927).
- #012
Indian Bob died of tuberculosis two years later.
- #013
The woman singing the song "Garry Owen" is John Milius's wife.
- #014
The song the woman sings and the music playing as the Rough Riders leave the train is "Garry Owen," the official march of the US Army's 7th Cavalry Regiment.
- #015
Edward Marshall (William Katt) was partly based on the real-life journalist Richard Harding Davis.
- #016
William Tiffany was a real person and survived the battle of Santiago, but died of yellow fever shortly after the Rough Riders returned to their camp at Montauk on Long Island, New York, when hostilities with Spain ended. He was one of the sons of the New York Tiffany family, famous for its jewelry stores of the same name.
- #017
The role of Colonel Theodore ("Teddy") Roosevelt was offered to Stephen Lang. Lang (who had previously played Confederate General George Pickett in the 1993 American Civil War film "Gettysburg") politely declined because of the low salary offered.
- #018
Milius completed the film in fifty days.
- #019
The stagecoach robbers are reading newspapers and eating breakfast at a ranch in Alpine, Texas, that belonged to a friend of John Milius.
- #020
Stephan Crane, the real author of The Red Badge of Courage about the Civil War, died two years after these events. The wounded Edward Marshall, however, lived another twelve years.
- #021
Adam Storke was thirty-five years old when he played Stephen Crane, ten years older than Crane was at the time.
- #022
It is a TV miniseries made for Turner Network Television.
- #023
B. F. Goodrich, the American industrialist who founded the B. F. Goodrich Company, is the name of the character played by Titus Welliver. In reality, B. F. Goodrich died in 1888, ten years before the events of this film. His son, David Marvin Goodrich, however, served in the Rough Riders and later served in World War I under the command of General John Pershing, one of the lieutenant characters in this film played by Marshall Teague.
- #024
Sam Elliott, Tom Berenger, Patrick Gorman and Buck Taylor were all in Gettysburg.
- #025
Stupidity is no trivial point: Cuba has land crabs that could have caught the attention of a nineteenth-century field hospital, but the crab Nash kicks from his leg wound is a coastal blue crab, which would never voluntarily leave the water.
- #026
Tom Berenger and Sam Elliott appeared in Gettysburg (1993).
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