Legh Freeman Richmond was known as the author of many articles and stories on the American frontier, which he published in numerous resources. He was the first to ever write about the Yellowstone country. Besides, he was really the first to write about the west and have those writings back to the east coast within a week. He also began to publish The Ogden Freeman, a four-page semi-weekly paper.
Background
Legh Richmond was born on December 4, 1842, in Culpeper, Virginia, United States, a son of Arthur Ryland and Mary (Kemper) Freeman.
In the East, Freeman’s family had strong political connections. It was believed in the family that John Hoomes Freeman (Legh’s grandfather) was Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary; the truth is that he had a lesser role as one of Jefferson’s overseers. Freeman was also the nephew of the former governor of Virginia, James Lawson Kemper. Despite the influence of the Freeman family in the East, Freeman journeyed westward and eventually became a major voice for the W.
Career
As a young man, Freeman joined the Confederate Army. Serving as a Confederate private in a Kentucky Cavalry regiment, Freeman was captured and imprisoned in 1864. His specialty was working as a telegrapher and it is thought that he may have been gathering intelligence in the Kentucky Appalachians when captured. Freeman was detained at Rock Island military prison in the Mississippi River between Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, and was eventually released when he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army out west. According to Thomas H. Heuterman, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Freeman envisioned himself as “Horatio Vattel, Lightning Scout of the Mountains,” and he would come to embody this fantasy in his adult life.
Traveling within a regiment of Unionized Southerners, he reached Fort Kearney, Nebraska, the day Southern troops surrendered at Appomattox (April 9, 1865). Freeman took the position of telegraph operator at the fort. He earned as much as $150 per month in this capacity. Freeman used money from his salary, along with equipment at Fort Kearney, to initiate his own publication: the Kearney Herald. Freeman’s equipment consisted mainly of makeshift materials, even whittling needed letters from small blocks of wood.
Freeman’s reporting focused upon numerous minor events, though he did know how to discern notable news stories. He once interviewed mountain man Jim Bridger. An admirer of explorers, Freeman decided to follow Bridger west. Asking his brother, Frederick Kemper Freeman, to assume control of the Herald, Freeman went to satisfy his attraction toward goldfields and Native Americans.
Freeman lived in Yellowstone from the summer of 1866 until the spring of the following year. At that time, the Herald was renamed the Frontier Index, as Freeman’s brother moved the paper to frontier territories, such as North Platte and Julesburg, Nebraska Territory, and Fort Sanders and Laramie, Dakota Territory. In 1868, Freeman resumed his position as editor of the newspaper. The Frontier Index entertained readers with “a mixture of tall tales, anecdotes, humorous essays, and travel narratives in columns adjacent to news of railroad construction and booming towns,” states Heuterman.
Also an alienator of criminals, Freeman wrote an article that resulted in the burning of his newspaper office. In this article, Freeman zestfully reported the deaths of three robbers hung by vigilantes who had broken into the town jail. One week later, on November 20, 1868, friends of the victims destroyed the Frontier Index office. Freeman escaped, but at least fourteen others were killed in the riot.
Later, he moved to Rock Island, Illinois, to once again work as a telegrapher. He soon left for Rock Springs, Wyoming, to mine coal. Freeman then re-released the Frontier Index in Butte, Montana, in 1878. Freeman spent the next five years in Montana, putting out six different periodicals. During this period, he successfully weathered a lawsuit against himself, but his business ventures did not farewell.
Freeman faced some difficult times in later life. He attempted a U.S. Senate seat, and later a mayoral post in North Yakima, but gathered few votes. Just three months after the mayoral election, Freeman died on February 7, 1915.
Achievements
Legh Richmond Freeman was a prominent American journalist, associated as reporter or editor with various newspapers, including Kearney Herald, Yellowstone Country, Frontier Index, Ogden Freeman, and Washington Farmer. Some his articles were published under pseudonym Horatio Vattel. Besides, Freeman was influential in the 1906 passage of irrigation legislation in Yakima, Washington.
Politics
Initially, Freeman was Liberal, but after the death of his first wife he considered it mysticism and shifted his political stance from Liberal to “John Brown Republican.”
Later, Freeman joined the Populist Party in the hopes of economic assistance through politics; he also eyed, but did not attain, a congressional nomination. He also organized a People’s Party that won no seats.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
As Heuterman explains, Freeman believed in “a widely held Western view” that “Chinese coolies threatened the jobs of whites, and Indian depredations justified the red man’s extinction.” Freeman also could not stomach Ulysses S. Grant; he referred to the president as a “whiskey bloated, squaw ravishing adulterer, monkey ridden, nigger worshipping mogul.”
Connections
Freeman married Ada Virginia Miller of Strasburg, Virginia. His wife was killed. In 1886, he married again, this time to a woman from Georgia named Janie Nicholas Ward. His second wife passed away in 1897. In 1900, he married a third time, to Mary Rose Genevieve Whitaker.
His children: (first marriage) three sons, (second marriage) two.
