Early Life and Military Service
Nicholas came from a family of English and Ulster Scots descent. Soon after his birth, the clan moved from Virginia to Hartford, Kentucky in 1813, where Nicholas spent the remainder of his childhood. As a young man, Nicholas was involved in the Black Hawk War of 1831 and later was a sergeant in the Mexican-American War. It was during the Mexican-American War that Nicholas served under Captain Wyatt Berry Stapp of the Illinois Mounted Volunteers. Nicholas later honored Captain Stapp by naming his fourth, and most famous son, Wyatt, after him. During the Civil War, Nicholas also served in Iowa as a provost marshal for recruitment; taking on the burden of sending local boys and men as well as his own sons Newton, James, and Virgil off to fight for the Union Army.
Read more about this topic: Nicholas Porter Earp
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, military and/or service:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)