Nicholas Tucker

"His brother was not an honest man, and in fact could be said to be a very bad man, whose dealings with the natives had been dishonest and sometimes violent, but at his heart he was still his brother, at his heart he was still family, and he was, in any case, a better man, a more skilled one, a smarter one."

- Andrew Tucker, thinking about his brother, Nicholas

Nicholas Tucker (6th May 1611—c. 1655) was a gunsmith, and planter from Chichester, Sussex, Kingdom of England, who immigrated to the Colony of Virginia in the early 1630s with his brother, Andrew Tucker. The father of Nicholas Tucker II, better known as Nicky Lightfoot, he is earliest traceable American ancestor, and therefore progenitor, of the infamous Lightfoot dynasty of what would become West Virginia.

Biography
Born in Chichester, Tucker was from an early age the guardian and mentor to his younger brother Andrew, who, crueler and more impulsive than Nicholas, seemed to be always getting into trouble.

Some years after the successful establishment of the Jamestown colony and the growing expansion of the Virginia colony, Andrew was accused of a local baker of trying to rape his daughter, and so to avoid legal trouble and set out for a new life, Nicholas took his dog, Boy, and his brother across the Atlantic. There they built a mud-and-stud house that they lived in for a time.

Very soon Nicholas began amassing a fortune with some shady and ill-regarded deals with the native Powhatan and, apparently, other colonists, enough that he was able to purchase a pair of slaves, Turner Jack and his wife Pretty, and grow moderately wealthy.

Appearances

 * "Her Judges Are Evening Wolves"