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Alternative Titles: Black Raven, Samuel Houston
Sam Houston, byname of
Samuel Houston, (born March 2, 1793, Rockbridge county, Virginia, U.S. died July 26, 1863, Huntsville, Texas), American lawyer and politician, a leader in the Texas Revolution (1834–36) who later served as president of the Republic of Texas (1836–38; 1841–44) and who was instrumental in Texas’s becoming a U.S. state (1845).
In his youth Houston moved with his family to a farm in rural Tennessee after the death of his father in 1807. He ran away in his mid-teens and lived for nearly three years with the Cherokee Indians in eastern Tennessee, where he took the name Black Raven and learned the Cherokee language, skills, and customs. Houston thus developed a rapport with the Indians that was unique for his day. As a consequence, after service in the War of 1812 and an interlude of study and teaching, in 1817 Houston became a U.S. subagent assigned to manage the removal of the Cher