This Day…

1884 – Mark Twain publishes “Huckleberry Finn.”

1862 – The USS Red Rover is commissioned by the United States Navy as a hospital ship and takes aboard the first women to serve as nurses aboard a navy ship. They were Sisters of the Order of the Holy Cross.

1864 – The family of Nicolas P. Earp arrives in San Bernardino, California.  His children include Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil.

1852 – Future general George Crook graduates near the bottom of his class at West Point.

1883 – The Gambler Newt Boyce cut two men with a knife in a saloon fight with Caldwell, Kansas.  Marshal Henry Brown and Ben Wheeler arrested him for it and threw him in jail.

1871 – Wild Bill Hickok is dismissed as sheriff of Abilene, Kansas.

1870 – The opening round of the El Paso Salt War erupted in Ben Dowell’s saloon when a local lawyer named B. F. Williams killed Judge Gaylord Clarke and wounded the politician Albert Jennings Fountain.  Fountain brought Williams down with a rifle shot.

1839 – George Armstrong Custer is born in New Rumley, Ohio.

1859 – John Brown is hanged for the Harper’s Ferry insurrection.

Born in 1924 – Shirley Chisholm, American educator, politician, and author. She was the first African-American woman elected to Congress and the first black candidate from a major party. (d. 2005)