This Day…

In celebration of the nation’s centennial, a special Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco from New York in a record-breaking 83 hours and 39 minutes.  It will be 50 more years before such service is instituted on a daily basis.

The first two volumes of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West are published.  Roosevelt’s action-packed drama traces the spread of the United States across the continent, from the day Daniel Boone first pierced the Cumberland Gap in 1765 to the day Davy Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836.  He will complete two additional volumes in 1896.

1874 – John Wesley Hardin celebrated his 21st birthday in Comanche, Texas.  He won heavily betting on horse races and finished the day by killing Deputy Sheriff Charles Webb.  Hardin escaped the pursing posse but his brother, Joe, and Bud and Tom Dixon were soon caught and lynched by townsmen.

President Buchanan, after hearing reports from Utah’s territorial judges in Washington, sends a U.S. Army contingent to the territory; he is convinced that the region is in a ‘state of rebellion.’  Many of the reports he has heard are exaggerated.

1877 – Frank Freeman and Charlie Bowdre were whooping it up in Lincoln, Nebraska.  Freeman got himself arrested for shooting a cavalryman in the head, but he escaped custody on his way to Fort Stanton.  This colorful affray had nothing to do with the bloody Lincoln County War that erupted in 1878.

1887 – The Swan Land and Cattle Company of Wyoming, only four years old, declares bankruptcy following the devastating winter of 1886-7.  The demise of the huge livestock corporation is symbolic of the Depression that will grip the cattle industry on the Great Plains during the next 10 years.  Over the period the number of cattle in Wyoming alone will decline from 9 million head in 1886 to only 3 million by 1895.

1885 – During an attempted arrest bootlegger Ned Christie killed U.S. Marshal, Dan Maples near Tahlequah, Oklahoma.  Later in the same month Ned Shot, at different times, two other deputies who tried to arrest him for killing Maples.  Ned built himself a strong fortress and survived many bloody encounters with lawmen over the next eight years.

1874 – Jesse James married Zee Mimms and they had a passel of kids down in Tennesse.  Jesse became a devout Christian, but he was still a thief and a ruthless killer and had no intention of ever supporting his family in an honest fashion.

1887 – The Swan Land and Cattle Company of Wyoming, only four years old, declares bankruptcy following the devastating winter of 1886-1887.  The demise of the huge livestock corporation is symbolic of the Depression that will grip the cattle industry on the Great Plains during the next 10 years.  Over this period the number of cattle in Wyoming alone will decline from 9 million head in 1886 to only 3 million by 1895.

1867 – General William T. Sherman devised a plan to drive all the Plains Indians either north of the Platte or south of the Arkansas River, leaving a broad belt of territory for the transcontinental railroad and the Kansas Pacific Railroad.