This Day…

1852 – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is published and becomes the best-selling book of the 19th century.

1917 – Loretta Perfectus Walsh became the first woman to join the navy and the first woman to officially join the military in a role other than a nurse

1986 – Susan Butcher won the first of 3 straight and 4 total Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races in Alaska.

1912 – Juliette Gordon Low assembled 18 girls together in Savannah, Georgia, for the first-ever Girl Scout meeting

1917 – Jeannette Rankin (R-MT) took her seat as the first female member of Congress

1828 – The first printing press designed to use the newly invented Cherokee alphabet arrives at New Echota, Georgia.

1847 – The first rescuers reach surviving members of the Donner Party, a group of California-bound emigrants stranded by snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

1812 Wilson Hunt arrives at Astoria, Oregon.  Having departed St. Louis more than two years earlier, Wilson Hunt and his party stumble into the fur-trading post of Astoria, Oregon.