This Day…

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.

1890-Conngress passes the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which supplants the Bland-Alison act of 1878.  The Sherman Act calls for government purchase of 4,500,000 ounces of silver each month.  The steady decline in the price of silver bullion, coupled with the economic recession, has strengthened the political weight of silver and pro-inflation forces.

1882-Ben Thompson and Jack Harris had been arguing for two years over a gambling debt.  It finally came to head in the vaudeville saloon in San Antonio, Texas when Harris attempted to ambush Thompson with a shotgun.  Thompson shot Harris through the chest and Harris died that night.  Thompson surrendered his weapon and had to resign as Marshall in Austin.

1865 – Although it has been three years since passage of the Pacific Railway Act, the Union Pacific Company only now lays its first rail out of Omaha, Nebraska.  Progress is extremely slow at first, averaging only one mile per week.

1846 – Commodore John Sloat lands at Monterey and claims possession of California for the United States as he hoists the Stars and Stripes.