Which Way to the Wild West? (22 page)

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Authors: Steve Sheinkin

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Percy Ebbutt,
the ten-year-old pioneer from Britain, left his family's Kansas farm when he was fourteen. “Good-bye, Jack,” he wrote to his brother. “Don't wait for me, for I'm not coming home anymore.” He spent a couple of years traveling and working, then headed east. When a Philadelphia con man tried to steal his hard-earned cash, Ebbutt used a trick he'd learned in the Wild West. He put his hand into his pocket, “as though I had a revolver,” he explained. “Look here,” he told the crook, “if you don't hand over my coins in about two shakes, I'll let daylight into you.” Ebbutt got his money. Then he boarded a ship and sailed back to London.
After getting fired in Abilene, Kansas, the gunfighter and lawman
James “Wild Bill” Hickok
was desperate for money. He drifted east, took a job in a Wild West show, hated it, and quit. Back in the West he married a former tightrope walker named Agnes Lake. “My eyes are getting real bad,” he admitted. “My shooting days are over.” Hickok's new plan to support the family: win money gambling. But he'd make lots of enemies over the years, and while he was playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, a man snuck up behind him and shot him in the head. (Poker fans may know that Hickok was holding two aces and two eights—forever after known as the “dead man's hand.”)
After leading Texans to victory in their war for independence,
Sam Houston
was elected president of the Republic of Texas in 1836. He later served as a U.S. senator from Texas, and then governor of the state—the only person ever to be governor of two different states (Tennessee and Texas). As tensions between North and South threatened to explode
into Civil War, Houston pleaded with both sides to avoid disaster. “I see my beloved South go down in the unequal contest,” he predicted, “in a sea of blood and smoking ruin.” Texas seceded anyway, and Houston was removed from the governor's job for refusing to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. He died during the Civil War, at the age of seventy.
When you read short biographies of
Thomas Jefferson,
they usually start by saying that he's the guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence. But right there with the Declaration is his Louisiana Purchase, which changed the whole course of U.S. history. It was popular too, and Jefferson was reelected by a landslide in 1804. He served his second term in the White House, lost pretty much all the popularity he once had, then retired to Virginia and spent seventeen much happier years gardening, renovating his house, founding the University of Virginia, and writing letters (as many as 1,200 per year). He died at home in 1826.
In 1879
Chief Joseph
traveled to Washington, D.C., to try to get the government to honor its promise to let the Nez Perce settle on a reservation in their traditional territory. “I only ask of the government to be treated as all other men are treated,” Joseph said. Six years later, the Nez Perce were allowed to return to the Northwest—but Joseph was denied the right to live on the reservation in Nez Perce land (the government still considered him dangerous). In 1904, on a reservation in northern Washington, Joseph lay in his tepee, dying. He asked his wife to bring him his old chief's headdress. “I may die at any time,” he said, “and I want to die as a chief.” She went to get it, but Joseph
passed away before she returned. The American doctor on the reservation reported an unusual cause of death: “Chief Joseph died of a broken heart.”
Meriwether Lewis
had a much shorter, sadder career than his old partner, William Clark. Appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, the brilliant explorer proved to be a terrible politician. Struggling with depression and alcohol abuse, Lewis fought with everyone and was slow to answer official letters. So many people complained that in 1809 he decided he'd better go to Washington, D.C., to defend his reputation. On the way, he stopped at a tavern in a clearing in the woods in Tennessee. The innkeeper, Priscilla Grinder, later said that Lewis behaved strangely at dinner, and that he “had eaten only a few mouthfuls when he started up, speaking to himself in a violent manner.” Later that night Grinder heard a gunshot. Then she heard Lewis cry, “Oh, Lord!” Then another gunshot. Lewis was found lying on his bed, with a hole in his skull so big she could see his brains. He was just thirty-five. Both Thomas Jefferson and William Clark believed Lewis had committed suicide. But Lewis's family was convinced he was murdered, either by political enemies or robbers (he had been carrying $125; it was never found). No one knows what really happened.
When most people think of
Abraham Lincoln
they think of the Civil War, or ending slavery, or that crazy beard—not the West. Lincoln always thought of himself as a westerner, though (Illinois was the West when he was a young man), and he had a major impact on western history. As president, Lincoln pushed hard for construction of the transcontinental railroad. He also signed the Homestead Act, under which the
government gave people 270 million acres of western land—that's 10 percent of the entire United States. After he was assassinated in 1865, a train carried his body back west to Illinois, where he was buried.
“After quitting the cowboy life I struck out for Denver,” remembered the newly retired cowboy
Nat Love.
“Here I met and married the present Mrs. Love.” Then he looked for a job. When city life proved too boring, Love found work as a porter on Pullman railroad cars—one of the few decent jobs open to African American men in those days. He had a bit of trouble on his first day: “I succeeded in getting the shoes of passengers, which had been given to me to polish, badly mixed up,” he recalled. “This naturally caused a good-sized rumpus the next morning. And sundry blessings were heaped on the head of yours truly.” Love figured out the job, worked fifteen more years, saw the country, and retired in Los Angeles, where he wrote his amazing autobiography,
The Life and Adventures of Nat Love.

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