This Day…

1891 – The Boston National League club shocks the baseball world by announcing the signing of King Kelly away from the rival Boston American Association club, thereby wrecking peace talks between the leagues. Kelly signs through the 1892 season for a total of $25,000, a figure that will not be topped by any player until the Federal League war of 1914 and 1915.

1910 – Rickwood Field, the first concrete-and-steel ballpark in the minor leagues, opens in Birmingham with the hometown Barons scoring two runs in the bottom of the ninth in their exciting 3-2 walk-off victory over Montgomery. The Alabamian landmark, which will become the oldest surviving professional baseball park in the country, is well attended by the citizens of the booming iron-and-steel town, often drawing standing-room-only crowds in excess of 10,000 fans in the first decade of it existence.

1912 – Shoeless Joe Jackson completes the stolen base cycle when he swipes home in the seventh inning of the Indians’ 8-3 victory over New York at Cleveland’s League Park. The 25 year-old outfielder had made his way around the bases by stealing second and third base before his thievery of the plate to complete the deed.

1890 – At Auburn Prison, New York murderer William Kemmler becomes first person to be executed by electric chair.

1895-Zip Wyatt was caught sleeping in a cornfield near Skeleton Creek, Oklahoma by another posse who gut shot him and shattered his pelvis before he was disarmed and taken into custody.

1877 – The lumberyard near the docks of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in San Francisco is set ablaze, and firemen come under attack by rioters.  Several men are killed and many injured.  The steamship company and the Central Pacific Railroad are chiefly blamed for the large influx of Chinese into the city.  The state militia is mobilized as federal gunboats stand by.

1874 – Former lawman, Bully Brooks, was being held in Wellington, Kansas on charges of stealing some mules.  Bully and two other miscreants were taken from jail by an angry mob and hanged.  The other two went cleanly, but Bully was left to strangle to death slowly and painfully.

1892-Congress bans the sale of alcohol on all Indian lands.  Also, federal troops are sent to the Coeur D’Alene mines in Idaho to force the strikers back to work.

Jesse and Frank James with other members of their gang, derail and hold up their first train on the Rock Island Line, between Adair and Council Bluffs, Iowa.  The James gang halts a load of transcontinental passengers.  During the derailment the engineer and a number of passengers are killed.

1803 – President Jefferson suggests removing Indians to west of the Mississippi River: a bill to this effect passes in the Senate, but fails in the House.