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

Was Howard Cushing the Inspiration for John Carter and Luke Skywalker?-- Part 3

Meanwhile, another of Howard Cushing's brothers, William, was a Union naval officer who gained fame by sinking the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle in a daring raid.  His other numerous exploits have him sometimes called "Lincoln's Commando."  He needs to be put up for a Medal of Honor in his own right.

"So, how does Howard Cushing, greatly outshone by two of his brothers, end up possibly inspiring Luke Skywalker  Through the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who dreamed up John Carter of Mars, which he serialized in a pulp magazine before creating Tarzan."

Jim Heinz said that Howard Cushing was the forgotten Cushing brother.  While he was researching his life, he found a fanzine for Edgar Rice Burroughs which said that Howard was the basis for the John Carter of Mars character.  After further research, he concluded that the fanzine was probably right.

--Old Secesh