The White Indian Boy The Story Of Uncle Nick Among The Shoshones

At age 12 Elijah Nicholas Wilson ran away from his family. Fighting off the constraints of his Mormon upbringing he found a new home with a Shoshone Indian tribe. Under their guidance, particularly of the Great Chief Washakie, he learned how to live and survive in the wild lands of the far west. When Elijah turned fourteen, to prevent reprisals against his tribe for his 'abduction, ' he returned to his white family. He then worked as a Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, trapper, translator, hostler, Indian agent, and whatever else was required to support himself and his family. Elijah Wilson was known as 'Yagaiki' when among the Shoshones, and in his later years as Uncle Nick when entertaining young children with his adventurous exploits. The White Indian Boy is his story.

True stories about Indian home life, Indian warfare, the Pony Express, and Overland Stage.

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First published in 1910, The White Indian Boy quickly became a western classic. Readers fascinated by real-life 'cowboys and Indians' thrilled to Nick Wilson's frontier exploits, as he recounted running away to live with the Shoshone in his early teens, riding for the Pony Express, and helping settle Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The volume was so popular that Wilson's son Charles was compelled to write a second book, The Return of the White Indian, which picks up in 1895 where the first memoir ends, telling the adventures of Nick Wilson's later life. These books, published here as a single volume, are testaments to a unique time and place in American history. Because he had a heart for adventure and unusual proficiency with Native American languages, Wilson's life became an historical canvas on which was painted both the exploration and the closing of a frontier, as he went from childhood among the Shoshone to work as an interpreter for the U.S. government on Indian reservations in Wyoming and Idaho in his later years. This volume includes new introductory material, a family tree, and a background of Indian-white relations in Jackson Hole. Packed with amazing details about life in the Old West, Wilson's colorful escapades are once again available to a new generation of readers.

Excerpt from The White Indian Boy, the Story of Uncle Nick, Among the Shoshones The number of men and women who played a part in the conquest and settlement of the Great West grows smaller year by year, and the passing of these plainsmen and mountaineers marks the close of an era in our national life. To put into permanent form, as has been done in this book, a pioneer's recollections of his early days, with their trials and adventures, is to make a certain contribution to history. Such a record shows us the courage, perseverance, and hardihood with which the foundations of the nation were laid, and to read it is to watch a state in the making. As a story of the days when Indian tribes still roamed the plains, this book will have for boys and girls all the interest of a tale of adventure. It is hoped that it will also give them a realization of the hardships and dangers so manfully faced by the settlers of the West and will implant in them a desire to prove themselves worthy successors to those builders of the nation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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