David Franklin Powell

David Franklin Powell, also known as D. Frank Powell and White Beaver (May 25, 1847 – May 7, 1906) was a pharmacist, physician, field surgeon, maker of patent medicines and sometime politician, associated with Buffalo Bill Cody. He served three terms as mayor of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and was twice a candidate for Governor of Wisconsin. He both wrote and appeared as a character in dime novels.

Background

In the words of one 19th-century chronicler, "The life of White Beaver, as Dr. Powell is popularly known, bears all the lights and shades of a frontier romance," and much of what was reported about his early life may be regarded with a certain degree of skepticism.

He was born May 25, 1847, in Kentucky, son of Dr. C. H. Powell, a Kentuckian physician of Highland Scotch descent, and a mother whose first name is unknown. She was said to be the daughter of a medicine chief of the Seneca people (of the Beaver clan) and a woman from the Tompkins family of Tompkins County, New York. Her Seneca grandfather was a soldier in the American Revolution, dying from war wounds in 1779. His parents met when his mother was with her father on a hunting excursion near Seneca Lake. The two settled in Kentucky on the Kentucky River. His father was a polyglot, and his mother a self-trained botanist with a deep expertise in the use of medicinal plants. Young Powell was homeschooled in his parents' log cabin.

After the death of his father

Powell's father died in 1855, and his mother returned with her three children to New York, settling about thirty miles from Ithaca, where attempts at farming were not successful. They then moved to Chicago, where Powell worked for two years as a clerk in a drug store, then on to Omaha, where Powell became a clerk at the large drug store of Dr. James K. Ish, with whom he rose to become a partner. The firm of Ish & Powell developed a large business, supplying over-the-counter medicines throughout the Territories.