The announcement that Leonard Wood would lead the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, with Theodore Roosevelt as his second-in-command, was made on April 25, 1898, and the news produced in a few weeks twenty-seven sacks of mail – applications from potential recruits. Most of the letters were addressed to Roosevelt.

Indeed, newspaper coverage of the announcement paid only lip service to Wood and his distinguished record in the Southwestern Indian campaigns. During the time when troops were being formed in the territories of the West and weeks before the volunteers were organized in San Antonio, the ever-inventive press devoted countless column inches to suggesting alliterative labels for the regiment, virtually all of them spun off Roosevelt's nickname (which he disliked): "Teddy's Terrors," "Teddy's Terriers," "Teddy's Riotous Rounders," "Teddy's Cowboy Contingent," "Teddy's Texas Tarantulas" and "Teddy's Gilded Gang," the latter apparently a reference to the number of wealthy New England sportsmen and Harvard friends who announced their intention of joining the regiment. "Wood's Wild Westerners" cropped up in one newspaper but didn't catch on.

On April 21, the Tucson Arizona Star inadvertently landed on the magic name, quoting Governor Myron McCord's reference to "Colonel Brodie's regiment of Rough Riders." This perfect word-pairing, used by Roosevelt himself – "harum-scarum rough riders of the West" – in his correspondence from the Black Hills in 1886, perhaps derived from the garish posters advertising the "Congress of Rough Riders" in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. In any event, "Rough Riders" and more often "Roosevelt's Rough Riders," was the name that stuck.

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