TODAY’S NOTABLE TEXAN GIDEON LINCECUM For MAY 12th 2014 Gideon Lincecum was a Texas pioneer, historian, physician, philosopher, and naturalist. He is best remembered for his exploration and settlement of Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, which were then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. He had good relations with the natives as he explored the wilderness. He was born in Warren County, Georgia in 1793. He was self-educated man, who spent his boyhood principally in the company of Muskogee Indians. Lincecum had contact with Chickasaw, Creek, and Choctaw Indians before their forced removals in the 1830s. He learned how to speak and write their languages, learned about their medicine, and recorded their history. He frequently visited an elderly Choctaw man named Chahta Immataha, who gave him a detailed account of Choctaw oral history. He was a self-taught naturalist and would spend countless hours observing birds, insects, weather, rocks, and plants. He regularly corresponded with like-minded individuals, including Charles Darwin. He published numerous articles in scholarly scientific journals and came to be recognized as a thorough and respectable researcher. After successive moves, he and his wife and extended family, moved to Mississippi. While living among the Choctaw Indians there, he recorded their legends and traditions in the Choctaw language. After moving to Texas, he translated it to English. In 1868, with his widowed daughter and her seven children, he joined a Confederate colony in Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico. He died on November 28, 1874 after a long illness at his Long Point, Texas, home.
Posted on: Mon, 12 May 2014 00:13:41 +0000
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