The cow puncher has his big rawhide boot square down on one of the big illuminated pages of history. He has put his foot in it, to his undying glory and to the utter eradication of all the slighting things that have been said about the unruly herder of stampeded steers on wild Western plains.
    Col. Roosevelt never tires of lauding his regiment of Rough Riders, the basis of which, he says, is the cow puncher. There are ex-policemen, Harvard men, country doctors, dudes, and heirs to millions in his regiment, but the framework of the organization that has won fame in Cuba is the cowboy, bronzed, daredevil, loud and unveneered.
    "They scrapped by nature," says Roosevelt, and apologizes for the language, while sticking to the assertion. They were not ambushed. They knew where the Spaniards were and hit them because they wanted to. They had not had any excitement. Life without a little scrap was intolerable. Anything would do to liven things up a bit. The cow punchers had not had even a good yell since they left Arizona and Oklahoma. The fight in the tropical undergrowth was just like a day off in town to most of those uncouth fellows, every one made of heroic stuff.
    The Rough Riders will go into history along with other immortal fighters--the Light Brigade, Napoleon's Imperial Guard, Xenophon's Ten Thousand, Caesar's Tenth Legion; and they will by and by get into fiction as successors to the White Company of Conan Doyle and the Zulu Grays of Rider Haggard. And their names will be fragrant of romance, and their deeds, magnified and gilded, will thrill many a fireside circle in the golden days that are to come. It is worth something to be one of Teddy's Terrors.

Source:

Unknown, "'Teddy's Terrors', The Cow Puncher is Said to Have Vindicated Himself in the West," New York Times, New York, Sunday, 28 August, 1898, p. 6.