All 8 of these people are largely forgotten by American History textbooks. In fact during all my years of public school education on American history…only 2 of these people were ever mentioned, much less pictured. So I will tell you (briefly) who they are and what they did.
From Left To Right:
Top Row:
Jim Bridger: mountain man, trapper and scout.
An unusual ability to survive in extreme conditions, his conversational grasp of several native languages and a keen mental map of most of the west made Bridger near invaluable in the western movement of Americans. He walked the Rockies from Southern Colorado all the way to the Canadian border and back again. Found a way to shorten the Oregon Trail by 61 miles through what’s today known as Bridger’s gap. He was an explorer and reportedly the first white man to view the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Geysers in Yellowstone. If you go out west, you’ll find his name on a bunch of things like bridges, trails, schools, mountain views and passes. But I found that if I asked locals about him, most just shrug saying they don’t know much about him.
Jim Bridger was not mentioned in one single history textbook I ever read in school. I know, because I used to look for his name. I only knew his name because I had a Johnny Horton record as a kid and it contained a song called “Jim Bridger”. It wasn’t till I went out west in 2001 that I even saw his name in print. I bought a book about him in used book store in Wyoming. He IS mentioned in “Inglourious Basterds” by Lt. Aldo Raines. Raines was supposedly a descendant of Bridger, maybe that at least inspired a few more people to look into him.
Buffalo Hump: Comanche Chief, leader of the Great Raid of 1840.
I don’t think most people have a grasp of the level of fear and anger at the Comanche that existed in Texas well into the 20th century. Buffalo Hump is one of the reasons for that. A fierce warrior and eventual war chief of the Penateka band of Comanche, Buffalo Hump lead a raid on Texas in 1840 that stretched from the Llano Estacado in North West Texas all the way to the city of Linville on the Eastern coast of Texas. The raid was organized as a response to the Council House Fight where Comanche chiefs were murdered by the U.S. Government while under the white flag of truce. Vowing to make whites pay for their treachery, Buffalo Hump and his war party scarred the Texas people for generations to come with their raid.
Buffalo Hump wasn’t ever mentioned in anything, much less a textbook when I was a kid. He had passed into obscurity after surrendering to the whites and leading his people onto the reservation. In fact, the Comanche were never mentioned outside of John Wayne movies as far as I could tell. The last tribes to be broken were far more prevalent in textbooks.
The Comanche and Buffalo Hump had a slight resurgence several years ago because in 1995, Larry McMurtry wrote a book as a prequel to his famous Lonesome Dove series. Buffalo Hump was a character in the book and suddenly interest in the Comanche began to rise for a time. So what history had forgotten, fiction brought back to life for me and other McMurtry fans who are not just readers but…well…nerds. If you want to learn more about the Comanche, I recommend “Comanches: The Destruction of a People” by a guy named Fehrenbach. It’s a very thorough book on the history of the Comanche.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain: College Professor and later Civil War General.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain saved the Union during the Civil War. During the battle of Gettysburg, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the 20th Maine held the Little Round Top. From their vantage point, they could see the entirety of the Union line…and the Confederates knew it, so they attacked. In a desperate pitched battle, the 20th Maine held the hill against wave after wave of Confederate infantry attack. Then, low on ammunition and nearly at the breaking point, in a final desperate move Chamberlain ordered a counterattack where his left wing crashed into the Confederates while the rest of the 20th made a frontal assault. It worked. The Little Round Top held, and the Confederacy was forced to withdraw to their original lines. Chamberlain and his men had saved the Union Army from a defeat at Gettysburg, which may have changed the whole war’s outcome.
Chamberlain shows up in Ken Burns’ remarkable documentary on the Civil War. He is also heavily featured in the movie “Gettysburg” based on Jeff Shaara’s book “The Killer Angels”. I know he is taught in Maine history courses…but outside of those places and unless you’re interested in the Civil War, you probably don’t know him. But, if you love this country …then you should be thankful he was where he was on July 2nd 1863.
Kit Carson: frontiersman, scout and Indian Fighter.
Kit Carson is one of those figures in history that did everything. He helped John C. Fremont to map vast areas of the Great Northwest which opened up the west even further to white settlement. He was a hunter, trapper and trader par excellence. He tried to start a war with Mexico over California not long before there was an actual war between the US and Mexico. He led Union troops during the Civil War. He fought the Comanche and the Kiowa Indians in the southwest. Like I said… he did a lot.
Kit Carson is probably the best known among the 8 men pictured here and one of the two names I mentioned that you could learn in history class. He is one of the names that are synonymous with the old west, though I have found that most people have no idea what exactly it was that he did. Most people I polled around my office believe he was a gunfighter, others have never even heard his name. And that’s a shame, especially considering so much is named after him, including the Nevada state capital, Carson City.
Bottom Row:
Charles Goodnight: Cattle Baron, Inventor of the chuck wagon.
Charles Goodnight was a cowboy’s cowboy. He started out as a cowboy in Texas, eventually fighting the Comanche raiders while with the Texas Rangers. He (along with his partner Oliver Loving) was the first man to drive cattle north from Texas to the railroads starting the true era of the cattle drive as more people followed. As part of that first journey, Goodnight constructed a special wagon to haul the food and equipment required for the men to eat on the drive, the first chuck wagon.
This is the other name I mentioned as having been learned in US History courses in public schools. He and Loving were both attached to their cattle driving trail “The Goodnight-Loving Trail”. My favorite story about him was outright stolen by Larry McMurtry in Lonesome Dove. In his old age, a young reporter said that people referred to Goodnight as a “man of vision” and wondered what Goodnight thought about that. Goodnight replied “Yes Sir. It’s a hell of a vision.”
Judge Roy Bean: Only Law West of the Pecos.
Judge Roy Bean is a larger than life character from the old west. A man who wandered into a west Texas town and declared himself a judge, Bean was a self made man from the word go. From a dirt poor family in Kentucky, Bean bounced around the west getting in fights and generally making trouble, even to the point of being hanged by some friends of one of his dueling partners. Eventually, after finding a Law book he wound up in a small town in Texas, where he setup a saloon/courtroom and held court over the Pecos district of Texas. The Texas Rangers had him legitimated as a Justice of the Peace and he became known for his unusual antics including saying “may God have mercy on your soul” at the end of marriages he performed. He once accidentally caused a small stock market panic when he flagged down the train of railroad speculator Jay Gould and invited him to dinner. News reports had assumed that Gould’s train had crashed killing him, and the New York Stock Exchange panicked for a bit.
Even though he was a colorful character and actually set some legal precedents, Bean too eventually passed into obscurity as the west marched onward into history. In his later years though, he contributed vast sums of his money to the poor in and around Langtry, and guaranteed that the schoolhouse would have plenty of wood for their heaters in winter.
Samuel Walker: Texas Ranger, Inventor of the Colt Walker pistol.
When the Indian wars were just getting started good the Comanche Indians were some of the finest light cavalry in the world and they slaughtered whites in just about every conflict. Samuel Walker helped to change that trend when he outfitted his rangers with a revolver built by Samuel Colt from Samuel Walker’s specifications. The Walker Colt was a game changer on the frontier. The new gun could kill from a decent distance, had a bullet large enough to kill a horse (literally) and could fire 6 rounds instead of just 5. Suddenly the Indians found themselves at a disadvantage as one Ranger could theoretically kill 6 Indians (or their horses) in a melee. By 1847, all mounted forces in the Texas Republic were carrying them in hostile territory, but Samuel Walker never really got to see that, he died in battle during the Mexican War. The legend is he died with 2 of his Walker Colts blazing away.
Samuel Walker is still taught about in Texas History curriculums…but outside of there he is a virtual unknown even though his contribution to the shaping of America was profound. For starters, it made the Texas Rangers a more effective force vital to the protection of settlements in the west. The Walker Colt also paved the way for the later .45 Peacemaker which many claimed tamed the American West and broke the backs of the plains Indians. (They’re wrong by the way, ask me why some time and I will tell you.)
William Holland Thomas: Cherokee Indian Chief and White Man.
Ever wonder why some Cherokee Indians were sent to Oklahoma along the “Trail of Tears” while some remained in Western North Carolina? It’s because of William Holland Thomas.
At around 15 years old, William Holland Thomas signed a 3 year contract with US Congressman Felix Walker to clerk at a trading post in western North Carolina. He got room, board and $100 out of the deal and Walker got a clerk at his store. Thomas moved in and quickly became familiar with the Cherokee living in that area. He learned their language and was adopted by Chief Yonaguska.
Around 1820, Felix Walker could no longer afford to keep the store open or to pay William, so instead he gave the boy a set of law books. Since there was no “bar exam” at the time, anyone who studied law could become a lawyer and that’s what William did eventually becoming the lawyer for the Cherokee tribes in North Carolina. He is the guy who negotiated successfully on behalf of the North Carolina Cherokee in the Treaty of New Echota. He secured the land rights of what is today the Eastern Band of Cherokee. For this, Yonaguska had his adopted son made Chief just before his own death. As chief and legal representative, Thomas labored on behalf of the Cherokee in Western North Carolina throughout the 1840’s and 1850’s, constantly trying to get them recognized as citizens.
During the Civil War he formed a Confederate Legion of Cherokee, the only man in NC to form a legion of any kind. He and his legion fired the last shot east of the Mississippi at the end of the war by capturing Waynesville, after Lee had surrendered nearly a month before.
You probably don’t know Thomas, unless you’ve seen “Unto These Hills” the outdoor play in Cherokee, NC. He is mentioned there, and in the Cherokee Museum his legion’s flag is still hanging. I didn’t even realize he was real until I went there. I had read Charles Frazier’s book “Thirteen Moons” which has a protagonist whose life story is very much like Thomas’s. I was surprised to find out he wasn’t fiction.
So there you go, 8 people who played a role in shaping this country (or at least part of it) and have been largely forgotten by history. And it makes me wonder…who else is out there, who gave us this country and who has been forgotten?
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