Gideon Lincecum

Gideon Lincecum (1793-1874) was a historian, physician, philosopher, and naturalist. He was son of Hezekiah and Sally (Hickman) Lincecum, was born in Warren County, Georgia, on April 22, 1793.cite web
url = http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/LL/fli3.html
title = The Handbook of Texas Online
accessdate = 2008-08-11
author = Lois Wood Burkhalter
last = Burkhalter
first = Lois
date =
format = HTML
publisher = TSHA Online] Lincecum was self-educated and spent his boyhood principally in the company of Muskogees. After successive moves he and his wife, the former Sarah Bryan, moved in 1818 with his parents and siblings to the Tombigbee River above the site of present Columbus, Mississippi.

While living among the Choctaws in Mississippi he recorded their legends and traditions in the Choctaw language and after moving to Texas translated it to English as the "Chahta Tradition." He sought a new frontier in 1868 and, at the age of seventy-six, with a widowed daughter and her seven children, joined a Confederate colony in Tuxpan, Vera Cruz, Mexico. He died on November 28, 1874 after a long illness at his Long Point Texas home.

Historian

Lincecum had contact with Chickasaw and Choctaw Native Americans before the Indian Removals of the 1830s began. He learned how to speak and write their languages, learned about their medicine, and recorded their history. Lincecum frequently visited an elderly Choctaw man called Chahta Immataha who gave him a detailed account of Choctaw oral history.cite web
url = http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/index.php?id=82
title = Gideon Lincecum (1793-1874): Mississippi Pioneer and Man of Many Talents
accessdate = 2008-08-11
author = Greg O'Brien
last = O'Brien
first = Greg
date = Posted 2004
format = HTML
publisher = Mississipp History Now]

Works

*“Autobiography of Gideon Lincecum.” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. 8 (1905), 443-519.

*“Choctaw Traditions about Their Settlement in Mississippi and the Origin of Their Mounds.”Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. 8 (1904), 521-542.

*“Life of Apushimataha.” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society. 9 (1906), 415-485.

*"Pushmataha: A Choctaw Leader and His People." Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2004.

*"Science on the Texas Frontier: Observations of Dr. Gideon Lincecum." Edited by Jerry Bryan Lincecum, Edward Hake Phillips, and Peggy A. Redshaw. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1997.

Bibliography

*Lois Wood Burkhalter, Gideon Lincecum, 1793-1874: A Biography (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).
*Jerry Bryan Lincecum and Edward Hake Phillips, eds. Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist: The Life and Times of Dr. Gideon Lincecum (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1994).

Citations

External Links

* [http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/LL/fli3.html Texas History- Gidoen Lincecum]
* [http://mshistory.k12.ms.us/index.php?id=82 Mississippi Pioneer and Man of Many Talents]