This Day…

1863 – Grant is given command of Union forces in West

1864 – Battle of Tom’s Brook  Union cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley deal a humiliating defeat to their Confederate counterparts at Tom’s Brook, Virginia. Confederate General Jubal Early’s force had been operating in and around the Shenandoah area for four months. Early’s summer campaign caught the attention of Union General-in-Chief Ulysses S. Grant, who was laying…

1866 – The Reno gang carries out the first robbery of a moving train in the U.S., making off with over $10,000 from an Ohio & Mississippi train in Jackson County, Indiana. Prior to this innovation in crime, holdups had taken place only on trains sitting at stations or freight yards.

1856 – The outlaw Tom Bell was captured by vigilantes on the Merced River in California.  They patiently allowed him to write letters to his mother and to his mistress and then strung him up.

1872- Jesse James shot a little girl in the leg during a scuffle over a cash box that Jesse was trying to pilfer from Ben Wallace at the Kansas State Fair.

1895 – Loss Hart killed Bill Dalton with a rifle bullet near Ardmore, Oklahoma.  By the time the posse got back to town with Dalton’s body the heat made him swell up to twice his size even though they dumped several buckets of well water on him along the way.

1862 President Abraham Lincoln issues a proclamation calling for all slaves within the rebel states to be freed on January 1, a political move that helps keep the British from intervening on the side of the South.