With these antecedents, on September 24 he entered upon the task of governing Santiago and the Province of Oriente. It was a position of unique responsibility and power. The President's order made it incumbent upon him to administer the existing municipal laws so far as in his own judgment they were properly applicable to the new state of affairs. That was all. Otherwise he was thrown absolutely upon his own resources, with no treaty obligations or government promises to bind him. He was simply a "benevolent despot," intent upon tranquillizing and rehabilitating that vast eastern province of Cuba by methods of his own devising. It was a region at once the most unruly and the most impoverished in Cuba, and it had for its capital a plague-smitten city. For six months he labored there, and in that short period he so far advanced the work of reconstruction that thereafter Oriente served as an example and a model for all the other provinces of Cuba. Sympathetic, alert, untiring, frank, without vanity or ostentation, resolute, diplomatic, and always supremely just, General Wood's personality stood to the people of Cuba for qualities seldom if ever before associated with the occupant of the governor's palace, while his energy in fighting disease, relieving distress, reviving industry and maintaining order revealed to them as the Spanish régime never had done the beneficence of enlightened government. It would be impossible to estimate too highly the value of his services during those few months at Santiago, in commending to Cubans the benevolent purposes and attitude of the Americans toward them and in disclosing to them the vast material and moral benefits which would accrue to them through self-government wisely administered. He began his work at Santiago in gruesome circumstances. An epidemic of smallpox and yellow fever was raging, and clouds of smoke hung over the city from the funeral pyres where were being burned many of the bodies for which burial was impossible. The city was reeking with filth. Half the people were threatened with starvation. Lawlessness and complaints of grievances were rife. He had to be at once sanitarian, steward and judge. He labored heroically at all three tasks, and performed them so well that in a few weeks Santiago seemed like a new city. Of course there was much to do in other places in the province. In Holguin there were three thousand cases of smallpox, of which he treated 1,200 in hospitals. He sent thither as nurses 600 thoroughly vaccinated immunes, not one of whom contracted the disease. Hundreds of infected buildings, of flimsy construction, were burned, while all others were thoroughly disinfected, and the epidemic was conquered.