Fort Walla Walla Museum's Living Historians bring history to life, portraying real people from Walla Walla's past.
Sam Black was the master of Fort Nez Perce at the mouth of the Walla Walla River from 1825 to 1830. He was 46 years old when he assumed charge of the Walla Walla post.
Because of Sam Black, we have a “vocabulary” of the Cayuse language that was the beginning of all later efforts to revive an extinct language; historians and anthropologists also gleaned other cultural and ethnographic information about regional Indian people from Black’s writings.

Sam Black is portrayed by Tom Williams.