Who was I named for?

This began as a comment in someone else’s blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever told it here, and it’s a fun story and at least 88% true, as Sailor Jim Johnston would say.

Am I named after anybody interesting?  Well, yeah, kinda.  I was named after my g-g-g-g-g-uncle, Samuel Price Carson, who was a member of Congress from North Carolina in the early 1830s.  During a campaign for re-election, his opponent made remarks at a public rally about Sam’s family that were unforgivable by the standards of the day, and Sam ended up having to challenge the man to a duel.  (The plan was that if Sam didn’t win, his brothers would challenge the opponent by order of age, and if all of THEM lost, the old patriarch of the clan would challenge him!  They took family honor a lot more seriously in those days.)

Now Sam had never been in a duel, hadn’t even had to learn how to shoot much.  So he asked one of his colleagues in the House—a Congressman from Tennessee, name of Crockett—to teach him how to shoot, seeing he had this duel to fight and all.  So that’s what they did, and when it came down to the duel, which had to be held across the line in South Carolina, ’cos dueling was officially outlawed in North Carolina by then, Sam mortally wounded his opponent on the first shot.  (The opponent did have the grace to apologize for his remarks before he died, and said he knew they weren’t really true.)

After that, North Carolina was a little too hot to hold Sam, so he decided to up and follow his friend Crockett, who’d gone out to Texas where some colonists were having a shooting scrape with the Mexican gummint.  Sam and his companions ended up arriving at a wide spot in the road known as Washington-on-the-Brazos, where a few days prior they’d had a convention and voted to declare independence from Mexico.  News was that a Mexican army was on the way, and no one was left in town but a few clerks feverishly packing what archives the nascent nation had.  Nonetheless, the legend goes that when Sam and his friends got there, they insisted on being allowed to sign the Declaration document regardless. And it’s indeed true that his signature is one of the last half-dozen on the document.

After independence, Sam ended up being appointed by this other fellow—man name of Houston—to be the “special envoy to the United States,” trying to raise funds, supplies, and everything else under the sun, all of which Texas needed.  In today’s world, he would have been called “Ambassador to the United States from the Republic of Texas,” ’cos that’s what he was.

Before long Sam had to give up his post and come home from New York; he’d contracted the consumption that killed him a year or so after that.  He was buried in what was then Texas and is now far southwestern Arkansas.  Some years ago the graveyard where he was got moved so the gummint could build I-30, so we don’t know exactly WHERE he is by now—possibly under several feet of asphalt and roadbed somewhere around Fulton, Arkansas.

Dark are the fnord that live in the deeps of space.