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An eyewitness to one presidential assassination, in the same building but not an eyewitness to another, and would have been present at another had he not declined an invitation on the grounds of fatigue from travel.
I claimed to be a direct descendant of Biblical kings. My landlocked Christian country flourished for decades under my leadership, and became a charter member of the UN. I was revered as a deity by a well-known movement named after me, that began on a distant island 40 years before my death, but I was widely known under a different name. I am thought to have died in prison, but the time and circumstances remain disputed.
In the absence of a new submission by the winning entrant, I'll toss out an interim entry:
I was an important pioneer in one of the most romanticized activities in American history. I acquired great wealth, although I never learned to read and write, and I died in poverty after making bad investments. My center of activity was the Wild West, although I was rather mild mannered, and donated large sums to churches. I lived to my mid 90s in spite of being a heavy cigar smoker. At age 91, I married a woman whom I met by chance owing to the fact that we had the same unusual surname. One of the most famous American novels is a fictionalized version of my life. Robert Duval played the part on the screen.
Charles Goodnight...and you are incorrect about the source of inspitation for Gus McRae. That character was based on Goodnight's friend and fellow cattle rancher, Oliver Loving. Goodnight appears in Lonesome Dove as himself.
The Woodrow Call character is not based on Charles Goodnight, but the incident where Call takes McRae's body back to Texas for burial was based on Goodnight's taking of Loring's body back to Texas for burial. As did McRae in the novel, Loring had died from blood poisoning following an arrow wound.
I suspected as much, however this rather murky reference in Wikipedia is perhaps misleading:
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove and its sequels, Larry McMurtry based the relationship between Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call on the relationship between Goodnight and Loving.
Anyway, I knew you'd get this one right away, so its your turn.
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