Lamar Fontaine, hero and teller of tall tales

Lamar Fontaine was born in Texas in 1829, 1830, 1840 or 1841 depending on who you believe.

According to his own accounts, he was captured by Comanche Indians as a boy and lived with them for four years. He also sailed to the Arctic on a naval vessel, was a Texas Ranger and fought the British as a Russian soldier during the Crimean War—all before the age of 27.

Fontaine’s name is synonymous with tall tales, but he was a remarkable man, nonetheless. He wrote the Civil War song, “All Quiet Along the Potomac.” He was awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor for smuggling supplies into Vicksburg during the siege, eluding first the Union Army and then the Union Navy. When Fontaine realized he could not sneak through the siege lines, he decided to canoe down the Yazoo River to the Mississippi, not an easy task because the river was full of gunboats, but he succeeded in bringing much-needed supplies to the city.

Later, he was a member of the “Immortal 600” a group of Confederate prisoners who their Union captors used as human shields at Morris Island in the Charleston, S.C., harbor in 1864.

After the war, he settled in Lyon, Miss., where he died in 1921.

His book, “My Life and Lectures,” is available on the internet as a free download, and it is an interesting read. But take some of the things he says with a grain of salt.

His account of serving in the same Missouri unit with Mark Twain is hilarious. Twain wrote about it in the short story “A Private History of a Campaign that Failed.”