This Day…

1873-Tiburcio Vasquez and six others were robbing a store in Pinos, California when violence erupted. Three townsmen were killed and a child beaten unconscious.

1869-A drunken cavalryman, John Mulrey, was killed by Wild Bill Hickok in Hays City, Kansas while resisting arrest.

1871-In one of the bloodiest and most violent shootings of the period Mike McCloskie was killed by Hugh Anderson in a Newton, Kansas saloon brawl. When McCloskie went down his eighteen year old friend, Jim Riley, calmly walked over and locked the door. He then opened up on pretty much everyone left standing.

1805-Lewis and Clark cross the Continental Divide.
1812-General Hull surrenders Fort Detroit and 1400 men without fighting. The entire Northwest is now exposed to the alliance between the British and the Tecumseh’s Indians

1873-Happy Jack Morco participated in a quarrel with Ben Thompson that resulted in the shooting death of Sheriff C B Whitney in Ellsworth, Kansas. Whitney was a participant in the Battle of Beecher’s Island against the Sioux in 1868.

1879-The last Indians with a reservation in Colorado, the Utes, come under increasing pressure from greedy whites. A newspaper campaign is launched under the slogan, ‘the Utes must go.’ During this period the Ute Indians are blamed for any regional malady, including a series of forest fires.

1896-Black Jack Will Christian and his gang, the high fives, robbed a bank in Nogales, Arizona. Newsman Frank King spotted them and opened fire with a .41 Colt wounding two of the horses. The oulaws fled town with an empty sack.

1895-Zip Wyatt was caught sleeping in a cornfield near Skeleton Creek, Oklahoma by a posse member who gut shot him and shattered his pelvis before he was disarmed and taken into custody. (Look for the story of Zip Wyatt’s female associates in the book The Bedside Book of Bad Girls coming to book stores everywhere in October).

1821 – Missouri inches closer to becoming the twenty-fourth state, the twelfth that permits slavery. The capital is at Jefferson City, and the 1820 census shows 66,856 people including 10,222 slaves.

1831 – Joseph Smith chooses Independence, Missouri, as the Holy City of Zion for the Mormon Church.

1884-Killin’ Jim Miller snuck up on his brother-in-law, John Coop, while he was asleep on his porch in Plum Creek, Texas and murdered him with a shot through the head. Miller was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, but got off on a technicality. Killin’ Jim went on to commit several more murders before he was finally hanged in 1909.