David Benjamin Herman (1844-1876)

David Benjamin Herman was born in Silver Spring Township in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania on December 29, 1844. He entered Dickinson College in nearby Carlisle and graduated with the class of 1865. While at the College, Herman had been active in the Belles Lettres Society and was a member of Phi Kappa Sigma. He studied law in Carlisle with his elder brother, Michael Christian Herman of the Dickinson class of 1862, and was admitted to the Cumberland County bar in January 1867 although he left for the western territories that same spring.

Herman quickly engaged himself in the cattle trade in Iowa and expanded his operations into Nebraska with the opening of the territory during those years. The natives of the Plains did not submit without a fight, and in the climactic year of the wars that followed, 1876, David Herman was killed by hostile Lakota Sioux on the North Platte River on May 20, just a month before Crook's defeat at the Rosebud and Custer's disaster at the Little Big Horn. Family information indicated that he was intending to end his business and return to Carlisle. He was killed on December 29, 1876. He was thirty-one years old.