Item - Latungafo

(source: NIU Libraries)

Online Full Text:	Northern Illinois University
Series:	The Banner Weekly — v. 10 no. 512 — page 1
Subject / Tag:	Poem
Part of:	The Banner Weekly, v. X, no. 512, September 3, 1892 (Issue)
Author:	Powell, George E., -1920
Date:	September 3, 1892
Edition Description:	*The Samoan hero, one of a tribe of born athletes who, with his people occupying the heights above the bay of Apia, watched the American war-ships, Trenton and Vandalia, March, 1889, go on the rocks a hundred feet below, with no means of rendering aid. No rope to scale the cliff, too steep to climb, Latungafo took the lead—"the lightest first, the heaviest last"—that formed a human ladder which assisted eighty sailors to climb to safety and the cliff above. Afterward exhibited in the dime museums of America with others of his tribe, contracting consumption as the cost of civilized ways, deserted by friends, and left in the streets of Denver to die, far from his island home, it became his strange, romantic lot to feel his last, lone pillow smoothed, and find a hero's grave, at the hands of a people whose drowning sailors were the beneficiaries of his heroism—Author