June Vintage Show Top Ten #3

All righty then. back to the countdown. Today we have a card from a pre-war set about Indians featuring a white dude who founded Texas.

1933 Goudey Indian Gum No. 61 Sam Houston

The groundbreaking 1933 Goudey baseball card set had a sister non-sports set featuring Indian Chiefs. If you look on the back of a '33 Goudey card you'll see an ad at the bottom "Made by the originators of INDIAN GUM". Well, these cards were the inserts in those Indian Gum packs. There are 216 cards in the set, but the set was issued in a gigantic number of different series so there are 432 cards in the master set when you account for all the variations. The cards are even more colorful than the baseball series, and if you find the '33 baseball cards to be too pricey, you can find copies of the Indian set really cheap instead. While the early cards in the set focused on Indian Chiefs, somewhere along the line it devolved into a Wild West theme and cards were produced of distinctly non-Indian subjects such as General Custer, Billy the Kid and The Pony Express. Sam Houston was at least an adopted member of the Cherokee Tribe and fought for Indian rights while in the US senate.

There is absolutely nothing I can say about Sam Houston that isn't better said on the back of this card.

This adventurous daring pioneer when a mere boy left home and joined the Cherokee Indian tribe. At the age of 21 he was fighting the Creeks in Alabama receiving wounds from which he never fully recovered. In 1836 with 783 men, he surprised the Chief, Santa Anna, and in fifteen minutes killed and captured all of the 1300 Indians including Santa Anna himself. Always the good Indians' friend, while a Texas Senator at Washington, he arrayed himself in full Indian costume and pleaded the cause of the Redman.

They just don't write card backs like that anymore. Things I learned from this card:

• Sam Houston was a member of the Cherokee tribe.
• Sam fought people from Alabama, which is perfectly reasonable for anyone from Tennessee.
• General Santa Anna was an Indian Chief of the Mexico tribe. Wait.. what??
• Sam was a member of the Washington Senators, and helped engineer their move to Texas by wearing a Cleveland Indians uniform. 
• Sam is a great fan of Redman, which means he probably also loves the movie How High.

Makes you wonder how ridiculous all these blog posts will be 80 years from now.