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General Joshua Chamberlain was in twenty-four battles and was wounded six times. He was chosen by Grant to receive the formal surrender of weapons and colors (April 12, 1865) from Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. During the ceremony he saluted the Confederate soldiers, an action that caused uproar in the North but which he defended as an act of honor among warriors. After the war, he was elected governor of Maine by the largest majority in the state’s history. He died at the age of eighty-five from complications of battle wounds, apparently having taken quite some time for those previous six battle scars to do their damage.

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In 1839 Samuel Colt patented the revolving-chamber pistol. As a teen he had worked as a sailor and had spent long hours staring at the ship’s wheel. He used this principle to invent a gun that could shoot multiple bullets without reloading. He excelled at both invention and marketing and today would be considered a compulsive workaholic. He struggled with a way to produce his guns cheaply but was forced to find a method of mass production after he received an order from the U.S. government in 1847 for 1,000 revolvers. By the time he died of exhaustion at age forty-seven, Samuel Colt had produced more than 400,000 Colt .45 revolvers. At his funeral in 1862 it was said of the Colt .45 he invented: “God created man, but Sam Colt [the Colt .45] made them all equal.”

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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.

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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.