William Walker - Doctor, Lawyer, Journalist, Duellist, And President Of Nicaragua
Looking back at the astonishing career of a man who took US embroilment in the rest of the Americas to extraordinary lengths.
Ask someone in Central America to name a figure from US history and there’s a good chance they’ll say William Walker. Of course, if you mention that name to most Americans, you’ll receive a blank look for your trouble. But in Belize, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and, most especially, Nicaragua, the people know all about Colonel Walker. Just don’t expect to hear anything good about him.
In the world of the renaissance men, William Walker was king. Before he got ideas above his station, Walker – born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824 – studied medicine at the Universities of Edinburgh and Heidelberg, qualified as a doctor aged just 19 in Philadelphia, practised law in New Orleans in his early twenties, bought a newspaper, the New Orleans Crescent, and appointed himself editor.
During this era, he also had the romantic good sense to fall in love with Ellen Martin, a deaf mute rumoured to be the most beautiful woman in the whole of Louisiana. Tragically, Ellen would die of yellow fever before the couple could marry, a tragedy from which Walker would never recover.
Seeking new purpose in life, Walker set up shop in San Francisco. There he busied himself writing for local newspapers and fighting a series of duels. His first taste of national fame came in 1851 when, as editor of the San Francisco Herald, Walker had his honour impugned by William Hicks Graham, a gunslinger-turned-court clerk who objected to the way he had been portrayed in Walker’s paper.
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