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Pocahontas, a nickname meaning “little spoiled one,” was born Amonute, daughter of Chief Powhatan in 1595, She was an extrovert from a young age, inquisitive and naturally good-natured. At eleven years old she played a miner role in securing John Smith’s survival. Later she was the go-between for trade among the settlers and Indians bartering at Jamestown. The fictionalized version of her love affair with Smith may, in fact, bear some truth, but in a much more disturbing way for our modern sensibilities. Today, a thirty-year-old having sex with a preteen is pedophilia and a crime. But, in that era, relations with non-Christian pagans of any age was not considered wrong. Pocahontas was known to have “long, private conversations” with Smith during her frequent visits to the Jamestown complex, yet the true dimensions of the encounters are a matter of conjecture. A few years later she was betrothed to the older Englishman John Rolfe, only after she agreed to be baptized in 1614. Two years later Rolfe took her to London, where she was received as a celebrity, billed as a real live Indian princess by high society, and held an audience with King James. In 1617 she believed the smoky air of London was the cause of her coughs and bouts of weakness and wished to return to the forests she had known. Along with Rolfe she boarded a ship to return to Virginia, but the vessel only made it to the end of the Thames River before it turned back. Pocahontas died in London at age twenty-two of a disease called the king’s evil, a form of tuberculosis characterized by swelling of the lymph glands.

To learn more about the death of legendary characters read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of some of the West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Outlaws.

Enter to win a copy of Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of some of the West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Outlaws.

The most decorated American war hero in World War II, Audie Murphy returned home with no place to go but down. What could top his spectacular battle feat? After lying about his age to join the army at 17, he had been wounded three times and credited with killing 240 Germans. Of 235 men in his company, Murphy was one of two who survived. Not yet 21, he won twenty-seven medals, including three from the French and one from Belgium.

After the war, Murphy was recruited to Hollywood by James Cagney, and in 1955 he starred in a movie version of hit autobiography, To Hell and Back. He said it was “the first time, I suppose, a man has fought an honest war, then come back and played himself doing it.” Murphy joked about his lack of talent, but in twenty years his boyish face and freckles appeared in forty movies, mostly war films and Westerns in which he played eager fighters. It was a far cry from his youth as one of eleven children of a Texas cotton sharecropper – and from the battle fields of Europe – and the transition was not smooth. Murphy said the war left him with nightmares for years. He slept with a loaded automatic pistol under his pillow, and when he was asked how people survive a war, he said, “I don’t think they ever do.”

One of Murphy’s friends, cartoonist Bill Maudlin, said, “Murphy wanted the world to stay simple so he could concentrate on tidying up its moral fiber wherever he found himself.” Murphy became a quasi law-enforcement officer in the 1960s. He was made a special officer of a small California police department and rode around with police during drug busts. In 1970, he and a bartender friend beat up a dog trainer in a dispute over treatment of the friend’s dog. Murphy was acquitted of attempted murder.

Though he had earned more than $2.5 million in his film career, Murphy was forced by too many bad business ventures to declare bankruptcy in 1968. Three years later, hounded by creditors and still trying to rebuild financial security for his wife and two teenage sons, he became interested in a company in Martinsville, Virginia, that manufactured prefabricated homes. He was on a small charter flight from Atlanta to see about making an investment when the plan crashed in a wooded mountain area during a light drizzle. The region, northwest of Roanoke, was so isolated that the wreckage, including the bodies of Murphy and five company officials, was not found for three days. The war hero was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

To learn more about the death of legendary characters read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of some of the West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Outlaws.

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Daniel Boone, America’s most famous pioneer hero, had set off into a hostile world without roads, toting only a flintlock musket and a knife; the region was so wild he reportedly killed over ten thousand bears while he surveyed and settled vast virgin wildernesses of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri. In 1820, at the age of eighty-five, Boone went on his final hunting trip near his home in St. Charles, Missouri, caught pneumonia, and died. Although he spent his life in the woods and claimed a lot of property for himself and his family, he lost it all to the slick dealings of investors using issues of unclear titles and creditors liens to strip him of all but his name. His funeral was held in his son’s barn instead of the house; hundreds showed up unexpectedly to pay their respects. Many remember a TV show that portrayed Daniel Boone wearing a coonskin cap. He actually wore a felt-brim hat in the Quaker style now seen on boxes of oatmeal. The TV theme song: “Daniel Boone was a man. Yes a big man. With an eye like an eagle as tall as a mountain was he,” was also a stretch. Boone was 5 feet 8 and weighed about 175 pounds. He did have a keen and active mind and stayed physically fit, a fact that kept him alive long after what is currently considered retirement age.

To learn more about how legends such as Daniel Boone died read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of some of the West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Outlaws.

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The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.

Women Medical Students – 1893

“No Women Need Apply.”  These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West.  Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor.  Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, and delivered generations of babies-and solidified a place for women in the medical field.

In the beginning, western communities where Doctor Mary Canaga Rowland practiced were reluctant to accept her skills. After hanging her shingle out in Lebanon, Oregon, she overheard people talking as they passed by her sign. “Doctor Mary Canaga Rowland, a woman doctor, well, well, well…” The first patient she saw in Oregon in 1909, was not opposed to women doctors. In fact he sought her out for just that reason: “He was a little boy of ten or eleven. He came to me about half past eleven one night and woke me up to take care of his hurt finger. He was crying and I asked him how he happened to come to me and he said, “Cause I know’d you’re a woman and you’d be careful…”

To learn more about Mary Canaga Rowland and other lady healers on the frontier read The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West.