Was Howard Cushing the Inspiration for Luke Skywalker?-- Part 5

Twenty-five years later, Edgar Rice Burroughs was stationed at Fort Grant with the 7th Cavalry, the same unit which lost so many at the Little Big Horn with George Custer.  By 1896, Fort Grant was a desolate outpost where Burroughs spent his time fighting dysentery, digging ditches and running the cavalry unit's.

Homesick, he wrote his politically connected father back in Chicago and managed to get an early discharge after serving just ten months of a three-year enlistment.

Burroughs scholars point out that he studied John G. Bourke's books for research, including an ethnology report in which Bourke described caves with peculiar medicinal properties used by the Apaches.

Burroughs may have used that as a plot device; in his series, John Carter enters a cave where he's overcome, leaves his body and ends up on Mars.  Bourke also described Howard Cushing in several chapters in his memoir, "On the Border With Crook," which Burroughs most likely read.

Definitely an Inspiration for John Carter.  --Old Secesh