This Day…

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.

1862 Union soldiers find a copy of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s orders detailing the Confederates’ plan for the Antietam campaign near Frederick, Maryland. But Union General George B. McClellan was slow to act, and the advantage the intelligence provided was lost. On the morning of September 13, the 27th Indiana rested…

On this day in 1844, the western explorer John C. Fremont arrives at the shores of the Great Salt Lake, one of the many areas he will map for the lasting benefit of a westward-moving nation