American Heroes (Books in Motion)

Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) defied the conventions of her era. Born and raised on a farm in Oswego, New York, Walker became one of a handful of female physicians in the nation-and became a passionate believer in the rights of women.

In 1849, 11-year-old John Muir emigrated from Scotland to America. Here, he rose from farmer and sawmill worker to become a noted authority on the botany, glaciers, and forestry of the nation's wilderness.

As a tomboy growing up in Kansas, Amelia Earhart delighted in trying new and risky things. In her 20s she fell in love with flight while watching an aerobatics exhibition and grew even more enthralled when she took her first airplane ride.

Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce tribe, lived from 1840 to 1904. He became a legend through his heroic efforts to keep his people in their homeland in Oregon's Wallowa Valley. For years he tried to accommodate encroaching white men on his tribal lands, but finally gave up and attempted, in the fall of 1877, to lead his people safely to Canada. Born in 1840, Joseph was present at the signing of the 1855 treaty, which allowed the tribe to hold on to a five thousand square mile region in Idaho and Oregon, including their beloved Wallowa Valley. By 1877, a year after the Battle of Little Bighorn, word came from Washington that they had to move to a small reservation instead. Joseph, now chief, decided to take his people through Yellowstone and Montana, hoping to join Sitting Bull and his followers 300 miles north in Saskatchewan. They were caught by U.S. Army troops just 40 miles short of their goal, in the Battle of the Bear's Paw.

Perhaps no other figure in American history is more shrouded in myth and legend than David ("Davy") Crockett, the Tennessee frontiersman whose death at the Alamo in 1836 ensured his place in the Valhalla of American heroes.

Between 1753, when he was commissioned as a major of Virginia militia, and 1775, when the second Continental Congress named him Commander-in-Chief of all colonial military forces, George Washington rose from anonymity as a minor landowner and surveyor to become America's first national hero. With little military training he led the thirteen fledgling colonies through six years of grueling war against formidable British forces, steered the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and served two terms as the first president of the United States. His accomplishments were so stunning and he was so revered that by the end of the war some of his generals urged him to install himself as king, an idea he looked upon with "abhorrence," calling the very thought "painful." Nor would he consider standing for a third term as president.