Frederick Funston

Biography

Frederick Funston stood five foot four, failed the West Point entrance exam, and became the most famous American soldier of the war. A botanist and adventurer who had rafted the Yukon alone, he learned soldiering as a filibuster artillery officer with the Cuban rebels before talking his way into command of the 20th Kansas Volunteers in 1898. In the Philippines he made his name by swimming rivers under fire — winning the Medal of Honor for crossing the Rio Grande de la Pampanga at Calumpit clinging to a raft rope — and cemented it in March 1901 with the war's most audacious stroke: the Palanan expedition, in which he and four other Americans posed as prisoners of their own Macabebe Scouts to walk into Aguinaldo's headquarters and seize him. His blunt public defenses of harsh war methods made him a lightning rod — Mark Twain devoted an entire essay, 'A Defence of General Funston,' to dismantling him. As commanding general in San Francisco in 1906 he took charge of the earthquake response, and he was the presumptive commander of the American army for the European war when he dropped dead in a hotel lobby in February 1917 — leaving that command to John J. Pershing.

Key Battles