Typical examples of this true American spirit were Theodore Roosevelt and his comrade, Army Surgeon Leonard Wood. Roosevelt saw in Wood a man after his own heart. Wood traced his ancestry back to the “Mayflower”; he was directly descended from Susanna White, whose son, Peregrine White, was the first white child born in New England. Wood was born at Winchester, New Hampshire, on October 9, 1860. His father was Dr. Charles Jewett Wood, who followed the profession of a country doctor. The boy Leonard went to the district school and later attended an old-fashioned academy at Middleboro. Upon the death of his father in 1880, Wood entered the Harvard Medical School. When he graduated he became an intern at the Boston City Hospital. At twenty-four he began the practice of medicine in Staniford Street, Boston. He was located in a poor neighborhood and had all he could do to make ends meet. In 1885 he took an examination for admission as a surgeon in the army. He passed second in a competitive class of fifty-nine. His first service was at Fort Warren, Massachusetts. From this post he was ordered to Arizona. Here he met Captain H. L. Lawton of the Fourth Cavalry, who later became Major-General Lawton. The two fought Apaches together. Wood developed into such a good fighting man that before he had been commissioned three months, and while he still held the rank of surgeon, he was given the command of the infantry of the expedition. While engaged in this work he announced his opinion that a well-trained white man could endure more than an Indian. It became his ambition to prove this so far as he himself was concerned. General Miles, in forwarding to the War Department his report of Captain Lawton’s expedition against Geronimo, had this to say of Wood: “He not only fulfilled the duties of his profession in his skillful attention to disabled officers and soldiers, but at times performed satisfactorily the duties of a line officer, and, during the whole extraordinary march, by his example of physical endurance, greatly encouraged others, having voluntarily made many of the longest and most difficult marches on foot.” After service in Mexico, Los Angeles, New Mexico and other posts, General Wood was ordered to duty as an army surgeon in Washington in 1895. He became a friend of President Cleveland and his family, and later received a summons from President McKinley to become the regular medical adviser to Mrs. McKinley and himself. It was at this time that he met Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. Their first meeting occurred when they were guests at dinner of the Lowndes family. They were at once attracted to each other. They possessed the same ideals. They went tramping together, ran foot races, scaled steep hills, crossed log bridges and did anything that would increase their strength and endurance.