Born John Jeremiah Smith on Dec. 4, 1826 in Pennsylvania, he first came to Texas in 1842 as a 16-year-old. He stayed only a short time, but within a year or two he had settled in Texas for good. His nickname, earned in surviving a Comanche lance wound, came from a corruption of the Spanish word for lame, “cojo.”

Self-educated and fluent in several languages, including Comanche, Smith was quite a character. He recorded his more notable adventures in a journal and drew sketches of things he saw and did, including a striking color depiction of a fight with Comanches along the Rio Grande in 1847.

Cohographs is the compilations of his journal and sketches by his grand-daughter Iva Roe Logan.