Carlos Montezuma

Carlos Montezuma as Azteka on tour with Texas Jack and Buffalo Bill in 1872.

Carlos Montezuma was born Wassaja, a Yavapai, in 1866. When he was five, Akimel O'odham raiders captured him and sold him into slavery. An Italian photographer named Carlo Gentile soon bought him for thirty dollars—about seven hundred in today's money. But instead of treating him as property, Gentile adopted the boy, renamed him Carlos Montezuma, and gave him an education as they traveled the frontier together.

In late 1872, this journey put Carlos right in the middle of American pop-culture history. Through his adoptive father's connection to Italian prima ballerina Giuseppina Morlacchi, young Carlos joined the cast of The Scouts of the Prairie, the stage show that basically invented the Wild West genre. He performed alongside Texas Jack Omohundro, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Ned Buntline, playing an "Apache child" for audiences while spending his time off-stage taking in everything around him. Eventually he realized his real future was in medicine, not show business.

Carlos didn't just get an education, he made history. In 1889, he graduated from Northwestern University Medical School as the first Native American man to earn a medical degree in the United States. He didn't settle for a quiet practice either. He founded the Society of American Indians and spent his life fighting the reservation system and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. From a child sold in the Arizona desert to a doctor and activist challenging the system in Washington, Montezuma's story is one of the most remarkable in American history.