This Day…

1821-Congress passes the Relief Act, which allows price adjustments on unpaid-for land purchases in the West.

1836-Declaration of Texan Independence is made in Washington-on-the Bravos, where David G. Burnet is chose as provisional president and Sam Houston as Army Commander.

1884-King Fisher and Ben Thomson were drunk and full of fun at the Variety Theatre in San Antonio, Texas when they were both playfully gunned down by friends of a man that Thompson had killed there two years previously.

1766-Don Antonio Ulloa arrives to take over as governor of Louisiana as Spain takes control of Louisiana from France.

1766-The Suffering Traders, who organized the Indian Company in 1763, organize the Illinois Company.

1909-William Howard Taft is inaugurated as the twenty-seventh president.

1775-Daniel Boone sets out with 30 woodcutters to mark out and hew the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky. In the next quarter-century, some 200,000 pioneers will pass along this trail.

1898-Posse led by Valentine Hoy Cornered escaped convicts Harry Tracy, Dave Lant, and Swede Johnson in Browns Park, CO. As he approached them Hoy was shot through the heart by Tracy.

1912-Theodore Roosevelt throws his hat into the political ring again, announcing that he is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

1892-Following discovery of rich veins of silver in southern Colorado by NC Creede, there is a minor rush to the area, as land grants are auctioned off. The town that springs up overnight on this site is named Creede and soon becomes a typical wild mining town. It is here, this year, that Robert Ford, who had killed Jesse James in 1882, will be killed in his own saloon.

1869-James Oliver patents a chilled-iron plow equipped with a smooth-surfaced moldboard that can slip through the hardened prairie soil without clogging. Other inventors will improve on his basic implement by covering the blade with an edge of tempered steel that can be removed for sharpening. By 1877 completely modern plows will be used.