John Rowlands

John Rowlands was a young man when the American Civil War broke out and he was drafted into the Confederate Army.  He found military life not to his liking, so he deserted.  He managed to make it to Union lines where he was promptly drafted into the Union army. He succeeded in finagling a medical discharge, but soon found he was not able to find a job to support himself, so he enlisted in the United States Navy.  After his discharge, he found work with a business man whose last name was Stanley and Mr. Rowlands changed his name.  After such an unpromising start, he managed to win immortality as a journalist under the byline, Henry Stanley in the New York Times which published letters from his trip to Africa.  It was during this trip he was able to locate a missionary who’d been missing for years; approaching him with the immortal question, “Dr. Livingston I presume?”