Some guys just seem to have a knack for living, no other way to explain it.
Case in point Herman Ehrenberg....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Ehrenberg#cite_note-crisp423-41Born in Prussia, arrives in New York in 1834, by 1835 he's in New Orleans, 19 years old.
In New Orleans he meets Adolphus Stern, the German Jew who raised and financed the New Orleans Greys, the militia company prominent in Texian history.
With the Greys, Ehrenberg fought in the December '35 Battle of Bexar and then joined the Matamoras Expedition under Grant and Johnson, leaving that expedition to serve under Fannin at Goliad. After the Battle of Coleto Creek wherein Fannin and his men surrendered, Ehrenberg refuses an offer of clemency as a foreign national and is marched out with the rest of Fannin's command to be shot outside of Goliad.
Ehrenberg is one of a handful who escaped that massacre (which survivors also included, oddly enough, a Welsh labor activist who would later escape execution/transporation in England and then return as a fugitive to fight in the Mexican War).
Starving and lost, Ehrenberg cons Urrea so that he can find refuge with the Mexican Army until slipping away after San Jacinto. Whereupon he returns to Germany to get a college education.
Returns to the US in 1844, travels to Oregon with a wagon train, takes ship for Hawaii and there finds work as a surveyor. During this time he gets into sailing in a big way and operates a schooner bringing in goods from the mainland.
1846 he returns to California to fight in the Mexican War, 1854 he gets shipwrecked on an island off the Pacific Coast of Mexico, he and his companions sail to the mainland on a makeshift raft they had made.
Gets involved in mining in Arizona, lays out the future city of Yuma, spends the last three years of his eventful life as Indian Agent to the Mohaves.
Murdered along the road by robbers one day in 1866 at age fifty.
A life well lived.
Birdwatcher
