Gustave Aimard

Gustave Aimard (13 September 1818[1] – 20 June 1883) was the author of numerous books about Latin America and the American frontier.

His father, François Sébastiani de la Porta (1775–1851) was a general in Napoleon’s army and one of the ambassadors of the Louis Philippe government.

[2] After one more stay in America (where, according to himself, he was adopted into a Comanche tribe), Aimard returned to Paris in 1847 – the same year his half-sister, Duchess de Choiseul-Pralin, was brutally murdered by her noble husband.

In 1854 he married Adèle Lucie Damoreau, an ‘artiste lyrique’, and wrote about seventy books, many about them about American Indians.

In 1870 Aimard and other members of the press participated in the Franco-Prussian war and in the short-lived success at the Battle of Le Bourget.

In 1879 Aimard visited Rio de Janeiro where he was received by the Emperor Dom Pedro II of Brazil and feted by the literary community.