Boatman Jim’s dad moved out to the frontier to marry a beautiful woman. When he discovered that the woman was already married, he said what the hell and married her sister as a consolation prize. This very romantic union produced Boatman Jim, who they named after his dead older brother, because why waste a perfectly good name. While Boatman Jim was still a baby, his dad died, leaving the family to live in terrible poverty in a log cabin. They were pretty much nineteenth century trailer trash. The family couldn’t even afford shoes. This led to Boatman Jim being constantly made fun of by the other children, something he dealt with by keeping his nose buried in a book while his doting mother told him that all those mean kids were just jealous of how cool he was.
While still quite young, Boatman Jim left home and got himself a job on a canal boat, earning the worst presidential nickname ever. Deciding that boating sucked ass, he went to college, earning money to pay for it by working as a janitor and a bell ringer. After graduating, Boatman Jim worked as a teacher, lawyer, and preacher. It was during his tenure as a teacher that he met his one true love, Lucretia Rudolph, who also happened to be one of his students. Boatman Jim fought in the Civil War for a little while, but later quit to go into politicking. In 1880, his party couldn’t agree on who should run for president, so they instead just pointed randomly into the crowd and decided Boatman Jim should do it. Boatman Jim, not big on travelling, took the novel campaign approach of just sitting on the front porch of his dilapidated house and waiting for people to come up and ask him questions. Somehow this worked and he won the election.
Even as president, Boatman Jim was poor as hell. He even had to borrow a horse and carriage from former President Granny to get around. Boatman Jim spent most of his presidency impressing visitors by writing in Greek with one hand while simultaneously writing in Latin with the other, declaring a national holiday so people could go decorate Civil War graves, and juggling bowling pins to build his manly physique. Like many people with rock hard bodies, Boatman Jim had a stalker. During the election, a man named Charlie Guiteau, who was all sorts of crazy, had ranted and raved in the streets about how Boatman Jim should be president. Mr. Guiteau felt that this unasked for service had earned him a government job. When he was not given a government job, he bought a gun that he thought would look good in a museum one day and used it to shoot Boatman Jim.
The shooting of Boatman Jim left the old timey doctors of the time with a perplexing medical case because they were unable to find the bullet lodged in his spine. They tried to use an old timey metal detector to find the bullet, but it kept getting false positives because of the metal springs in the mattress. This didn’t stop the doctors from cutting numerous holes into Boatman Jim and probing the holes with their dirty fingers. After eighty days of these shenanigans, Boatman Jim very reasonably died of blood poisoning. The doctors than cut out his spine (to finally find that pesky bullet) and put it on display in a museum.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:President_Rutherford_Hayes_1870_-_1880_Restored.jpg