There are many famous/infamous people that the much we know about them is legend. The accounts of their lives have been embellished through the years that legend is bigger than the person. The tragedy to all this is many times their real lives were just as interesting as the legend. This section is dedicated to those people.
Pocahontas | Daniel Boone | Davy Crockett |
Casey Jones | Lizzie Borden | Sergeant Alvin York |
If you've browsed my War of Independence Section you might read where I mentioned Walt Disney's "butchering" of the story of Pocahontas. Walt Disney needs to stick to Mickey Mouse and forget historical cartoons. Did you know that Pocahontas was a nickname, her real name was Matoaka. She was not adult when she met John Smith, but a child of ten to twelve years old. She died when she was only 22 years old. Following are some good pages about the real life of Pocahontas, a young woman greater than the legend.
Daniel Boone adventurer that blazed the trail for westward expansion. While he didn't wear a coon-skin cap as depicted in movies and children's books, his life was certainly filled with adventure and danger.
David Crockett is probably best known for his adventures in the wilderness, and for dying at the Alamo in Texas. Did you know that while he was living in Tennessee, he was a state legislator and a later was elected to the national congress where he opposed the removal of the Indians from the South-East?
Killed in train accident at Vauhghn, Mississippi, Jonathan Luther "Casey" Jones became an American Legend. He and the accident would probably soon been forgotten if had not been for the song of a black "wiper" (engine wiper) named Wallace Saunders. Was the accident Casey's fault, or the fault of other railroad employees? Read and decide.
Murderess? "Lizzie Borden took an axe gave her mother forty whacks when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty one", so the legend goes. What do you think?
Sgt. York was a World War I hero from Pall Mall, Fentris County, Tennessee. A rowdy turned christian fundamentalist, he would enter the army at age thirty as a conscientious objector. He would distinguish himself at the battle of the Argonne Forest in the fall of 1918 and receive the French Medaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre, the Italian Groce de Guerra and the American Medal of Honor. The story of Sgt. York was made into a movie in 1941 with Gary Cooper playing the lead role.
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