“I had always worked for big cow outfits and looked down on settlers,” remembered the cowboy-turnedfarmer Teddy “Blue” Abbott. “Now I was on the other side of the fence, and finding out how damn hard it was to start out poor and get anywheres.” With years of hard work, Teddy and his wife, Mary, did get somewhere—they built a two-thousandacre farm and ranch, and raised eight children. He always enjoyed meeting up with old cowboys and swapping stories about life on the trail. “Only a few of us left now,” he said in 1938, when he was seventyeight years old. “The rest have left the wagon and gone ahead across the big divide.” Abbott crossed the divide himself a year later.
When the newly independent Republic of Texas held its first presidential election in 1836, Stephen F. Austin was pretty sure he’d get the gig. “The prosperity of Texas has been the object of my labors,” Austin said. “It has assumed the character of a religion, for the guidance of my thoughts and actions, for fifteen years.” But then, two weeks before the vote, the war hero Sam Houston jumped into the contest—and clobbered Austin (5,119 to 587). Later that year Austin developed pneumonia and died at the age of forty-three. Over time, Texans started to appreciate him more—they even named their capital city for him.
After spending eight years as a Crow chief, the African American mountain man James Beckwourth turned to other adventures: army scout, wagon driver, trader, hotel owner, guide, gambler, gold miner. He slowed down just long enough to dictate his autobiography, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, a big hit when it came out in 1856. (Beckwourth was supposed to get half the profits; he never got a dime.) The book is still famous for its priceless descriptions of real life in the Wild West. Beckwourth eventually returned to Crow territory, where he died in 1866, at the age of sixty-eight.
After the defeat of the Lakota, Black Elk remained a highly respected healer and holy man. Like Sitting Bull, he was offered a job with a traveling Wild West show. “My relatives told me I should stay at home and go on curing people,” he remembered. But he wanted to see a bit of the world. The show took him across the ocean to London, where he performed for Queen Victoria. (“She was little but fat and we liked her,” he recalled.) In 1931, when he was an old man and nearly blind, he told his life story in a book called Black Elk Speaks—an all-time classic account of the traditional life and religious beliefs of his people.
Upon returning from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, William Clark settled in St. Louis, ran a successful fur company, got married, and had five kids. While serving as territorial governor of Missouri, Clark was accused by some of being too friendly to Indians. He responded with an opinion that would be largely ignored in the decades to come (forgive
his spelling and grammar): “It is to be lamented that this deplorable situation of the Indians do not receive more of the humain feelings of this nation.” When Missouri joined the Union in 1820, Clark ran for governor. He lost. He kept busy, though, constantly updating his beloved maps of the West until his death in 1838.
After working for a while at a Nevada newspaper, Samuel Clemens realized he had a talent for writing funny stories. “It is nothing to be proud of,” he told his brother, “but it is my strongest suit.” Calling himself Mark Twain, he settled far from the Wild West (Connecticut) and wrote some of the most famous books in American literature (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and many more). His humor turned bitter as he aged, as you can tell from one of his later jokes: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” When a story spread in 1897 that Twain was on his deathbed, he responded with a classic line: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” He died for real in 1910, at the age of seventy-five.
Henry “Old Pancake” Comstock and his partners may have discovered a $400 million gold and silver mine, but as usual with major strikes, the real money was made by wealthy investors. Comstock sold his share of the mine for $11,000, invested the money in a store, lost everything, and shot himself. His partners fared no better. One got drunk, fell off his horse, and died of a cracked skull. The other began hearing voices, was sent to a hospital for the insane, and died there. Careful what you wish for.
After George Armstrong Custer’s death at Little Bighorn, Elizabeth Custer packed up, traveled back east—and found out the whole country was arguing about her husband. Some called Custer a fearless hero who died defending his country. Others said he was a reckless gloryseeker whose thirst for fame had led to disaster. What really stunned Elizabeth was President Ulysses S. Grant’s opinion: “I regard Custer’s massacre as a sacrifice of troops brought on by Custer himself.” Elizabeth Custer spent the rest of her life (and she lived another fiftyseven years) trying to rescue her husband’s reputation. It worked. “General Custer’s name was a shining light to all the youth of America,” remembered Theodore Roosevelt, a teenager at the time of Little Bighorn. In more recent years (without his wife around to defend him) historians have been much tougher on Custer.
As a lead builder of the transcontinental railroad, Thomas Durant had bragged that he would “grab a wad of money from the construction fees—and get out.” And that’s exactly what he did. He “got out” just in time too, leaving the Union Pacific shortly before the New York Sun ran the huge headline “THE KING OF FRAUDS—COLOSSAL BRIBERY.” The story exposed the fact that Durant and friends had handed out cash and stock to members of Congress in exchange for laws helping the railroad. Durant shrugged and moved on to a new project—building a railroad through New York’s Adirondack Mountains. He bought up 700,000 acres of wilderness, planning to slice it up and sell it for development as soon as the railroad was done. Luckily for hikers and canoers of the future, he built just sixty miles, then ran out of cash. Today, much of his land is part of Adirondack Park, the largest park in any state except Alaska.
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.
Biddy Mason, the formerly enslaved woman who won her freedom in a California court, settled in Los Angeles, where she began working as a nurse and midwife. In 1866, after ten years of hard work and frugal living, Mason bought her first piece of L.A. real estate (it cost her $250). With a few more years of smart buying and selling, Mason built a fortune, becoming one of the richest women in the West. She built a day care center and a church, and gave so much money to local charities that hungry people, black and white, heard about her generosity and often lined up outside her house to ask for help. Mason died in L.A. at the age of seventy-three.
While running for president in 1844, James K. Polk promised that if elected he’d serve only one term. Polk accomplished his major goals of securing American control of Texas, Oregon, and the rest of the West. Then he did something truly amazing—he kept a campaign promise. Refusing calls to run for reelection, Polk retired to his home in Tennessee in 1849. Exhausted and sick (turns out he had cholera), Polk died later that year—giving him the sad distinction of enjoying the shortest retirement (104 days) of any president in American history.
“Red Cloud, the famous old Sioux Indian chief, is dead.” That was the first sentence of a small article in the New York Times on December 11, 1909. Though he had led the most successful war ever fought by Native Americans against the United States, Red Cloud was unable to win lasting freedom for his people or himself. He lived the last thirty-five years of his life on reservations. Still a respected leader, Red Cloud spent much of that time arguing passionately against the U.S. government’s plans to break reservations into smaller and smaller pieces. “They made us many promises, more than I can remember,” Red Cloud said of the government. “But they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
The thirteen-year-old Donner Party survivor Virginia Reed settled with her family in California. When she was sixteen she fell in love with a young man named John Murphy. They wanted to marry, but Virginia’s father vowed, according to a newspaper report, “that he would shoot Murphy if he dared attempt a marriage.” “Sir, you may shoot me,” Murphy responded. “But I shall marry your daughter.” One night
soon after, Virginia told her mother she was going across the street to a friend’s house. There she met Murphy and they were secretly (and very quickly) married. And it worked out—they had nine children. Virginia Reed died in 1921, at the age of eighty-seven.
History loses touch with Sacagawea soon after the Lewis and Clark Expedition.Some sources report that she traveled west and rejoined the Shoshone, living happily with them until her death in 1884. But scholars who have spent time looking for clues say it’s much more likely that she died in 1812 at a fort in what is now South Dakota. In December of that year, a clerk at the fort wrote in his diary that the “wife of Charbonneau” had just died of fever. “She was a good and the best woman in the fort, age about 25,” wrote the clerk. Sacagawea would have been about twenty-five by 1812. One other piece of evidence: in 1820 William Clark wrote a report with updates on the members of his expedition. For Sacagawea, he wrote “dead.”
We know more about Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste, who crossed the West with Lewis and Clark as an infant. William Clark became his legal guardian and enrolled him in school in St. Louis. Jean Baptiste learned four languages and traveled the world before returning to the West and working as a fur trapper, mountain guide, and gold miner. He was on his way to search for gold in Montana when he died in 1866, age sixty-one.
After watching her parents die on the Oregon Trail, then witnessing the death of her adoptive parents in the Whitman massacre, life calmed down a bit for thirteen-year-old Catherine Sager. She spent her teen
years with a new family in Oregon, then married a minister named Clark Pringle, settled in Spokane, Washington, and had eight children. In her spare time she wrote an account of her adventures as a girl, planning to use the profits from book sales to build an orphanage. Incredibly, no one wanted to publish her story (what, not dramatic enough?). Catherine died in 1910, at the age of seventy-five, but her children saved her writing, and today you can (and should) read her book—it’s called Across the Plains in 1844.
After losing Texas and the rest of the West to the Americans, Antonio López de Santa Anna spent a few years in exile, then returned to Mexico City and regained the presidency. Now calling himself dictator for life (also “Most Serene Highness”) he pocketed millions in government money before being booted out yet again in 1855. He then drifted from Cuba to Colombia to New York City. Searching for a get-rich-quick scheme (to fund another attempt to take power in Mexico), he imported a shipment of chicle—a natural gum from Central American trees. His plan: find a way to turn chicle into rubber for carriage tires. This failed, but an American friend, Thomas Adams, mixed Santa Anna’s chicle with sugar and flavor, shaped it into balls, and sold it in drugstores as “chewing gum.” A new industry was born, though Santa Anna never saw a penny. He died broke and nearly forgotten in 1876.
After retiring from the army in 1884, William Tecumseh Sherman was so popular that Republican leaders started talking about nominating him for president. The general was not interested. “If nominated I will not run,” he grunted. “If elected I will not serve.” After years of harsh
and merciless war, Sherman retired to New York City, took up painting, and spent his time going to dinner parties and the theater. The major danger facing him now was that crowds of excited admirers followed him everywhere. In 1886 he shook so many hands that he broke a bone in his right hand. The next year he lost two fingernails. Sherman survived the mobs (and admitted privately that he loved the fame). He died in New York in 1891, at age seventy-one.
At the age of seventy, Benjamin Singleton could have slowed down a bit. But the man who helped spark the Exoduster movement kept urging black families to move west, encouraging them to combine their resources to start black-owned factories and schools. He spent so much money traveling and printing posters that he was always broke. On his seventy-third birthday, friends threw him a huge party in a park in Topeka, Kansas, asking everyone to donate a little something to the guest of honor. “Anything in the way of eatables will be kindly received,” Singleton added. He lived another nine years, always proud of his work, and especially proud of his nickname: “Father of the Exodus.”
Soon after the discovery of gold near John Sutter’s mill in California in 1848, all Sutter’s workers abandoned their jobs and raced off for the diggings. Then, as gold fever attracted miners from around the world, thousands swarmed onto Sutter’s land, trampling his crops and eating his cows. By 1852 Sutter’s vast empire was gone. “Without having discovered the gold, I would have become the richest man on the Pacific shore,” moaned Sutter. He moved east and spent the last fifteen years of his life pleading with Congress to compensate him for his stolen land. It never happened—Sutter died in a cheap Washington, D.C., hotel in 1880.
His victories in the U.S.-Mexican War made General Zachary Taylor a national hero. Affectionately nicknamed “Old Rough and Ready” (based on his sloppy appearance, plus the fact he always seemed ready to fight), Taylor was elected president in 1848. After spending the long, hot day of July 4, 1850, attending Independence Day celebrations, a terribly thirsty Taylor downed enormous amounts of cold milk and cherries. He was up all night with intense stomach pains—and died just five days later. Doctors suspected heatstroke or severe diarrhea. But stories spread that his cherries had been poisoned with arsenic. The rumors never died, and in 1991 Taylor’s remains were dug up and scientists tested his hair and fingernails. They did find some traces of arsenic (most people have a tiny bit in their bodies), but not nearly enough to have killed him.
As a Mexican leader in California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo had always welcomed American immigrants. When the Americans took over, Vallejo was tossed in prison for two months (though he was never charged with having done anything illegal). When he got out, Vallejo helped write California’s new state constitution and was elected to the state senate. But he was powerless to stop the flood of settlers onto his land. According to the treaty made with Mexico at the end of the U.S.-Mexican War, Mexicans who owned land in California would still own their land under U.S. law. Vallejo spent years in court trying to protect his rights, but he never got his land back. Once the owner of 250,000 acres, Vallejo moved into a small house on his last 300 acres. “What a difference between then and now,” he said. “Then, youth, strength, riches; now age, weakness, and poverty.”
The young Nez Perce warrior Yellow Wolf was not captured along with Chief Joseph. He slipped out of camp, raced toward Canada, and caught up with other escaping Nez Perce—including his mother and Joseph’s twelve-year-old daughter. Yellow Wolf lived in Canada until the following spring, when he got homesick and returned to the Wallowa Valley. “The places through which I was riding came to my heart,” he said. “My friends, my brothers, my sisters! All were gone! No tepees anywhere along the river. I was all alone.” Considered a fugitive from the law, Yellow Wolf was chased by soldiers and decided to turn himself in. He was eventually sent to the Colville Reservation in Washington, along with Chief Joseph. He lived there nearly fifty years, dying in 1935, at the age of seventy-nine.
The government rewarded all the members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with land and money—all except York. York was still enslaved, which meant he was legally entitled to nothing. Given his valuable services to Clark and to the country, York had the nerve to ask for his freedom. Clark refused. York asked at least to be sent, as a slave, to Louisville, Kentucky, where his wife was enslaved. Clark refused (agreeing only to allow York to visit his wife for three weeks). What happened next? Some believe York died in slavery. Others say York worked for Clark another ten years, was finally freed, and settled in Kentucky. Still others believe he escaped and headed west—in 1834 one witness claimed to have seen him living with the Crow Indians in Wyoming. The real fate of York is a mystery still to be solved. That seems like a good way to end the book, doesn’t it?