American Lives

Americans in History: January 9

1775: Loyalist Daniel Leonard wrote a letter to the residents of Massachusetts Bay, defending British rule over the American colonies.

1789: The Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy signed the Treaty of Fort Harmar.

1793: The first balloon flight in America was made by Jean Pierre Blanchard and a stray dog; President Washington witnessed the launch from a Philadelphia prison yard.

1859: After members of Choctaw Tom's family and hunting party were ambushed by whites at Palo Pinto, TX, the governor issued a warning against further attacks on Indians.

1861: The Star of the West, a merchant vessel bringing reinforcements to Fort Sumter, retreated after being fired upon by Citadel cadets in the first hostile act of the Civil War.

1864: The commander of the Pacific Squadron advised Navy secretary Gideon Welles that a Confederate privateer was being outfitted on Vancouver Island.

1873: Victoria Woodhull was charged with sending obscene literature through the mail after publishing details of an illicit romance involving Rev Henry Ward Beecher.

1879: The Cheyenne Outbreak began when Dull Knife's people escaped from Fort Robinson.

1937: The Journal of the American Medical Association published the first report of insulin shock therapy for mental illness in an American hospital.

1942: The US government reported that 40% more American Indians had enlisted in the armed forces than had been drafted; over 44,000 Indians eventually served in WWII, including 800 women.

1945: In France, Sgt Charles Carey earned the Medal of Honor when his battalion was overrun at Rimling.

1945: The Enoura Maru was sunk by US aircraft at Takao Harbor, Formosa, killing 316 of 1,070 Americans POWs aboard, who had survived the earlier sinking of the Oryoku Maru, also by the US.

1952: In Phenix City, AL, the home of anti-vice crusader Hugh Bentley was destroyed by a bomb.

1968: A number of US troops were killed or captured during fierce combat in Quang Tin Province, and some of them are still missing.

1970: SP4 Danny Peterson earned the Medal of Honor while protecting the crew members of a disabled tank under heavy enemy fire in Tay Ninh Province.

Egghead 10:31 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 8

1779: Patrick Henry, as governor of Virginia, ordered Capt Evan Shelby to mount a campaign against the Chickamauga Cherokees.

1811: In the Slave Revolt of 1811, hundreds of slaves seized guns, swords and horses and set off down the River Road for New Orleans; white plantation families along the route fled in terror.

1815: The British were defeated by Gen Andrew Jackson's forces in the Battle of New Orleans; pirate Jean Lafitte supplied Jackson with men, weapons and knowledge of the area.

1847: US forces attacked the Californios at Los Angeles in the Battle of the San Gabriel River.

1864: Confederate spy David Owen Dodd, age 17, was hanged at Little Rock.

1865: In the Battle of Dove Creek, Texas militiamen attacked a peaceful Kickapoo camp.

1877: In the Battle of Wolf Mountain in Montana, US troops engaged a force of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors led by Crazy Horse.

1880: Emperor Norton I died on a San Francisco street on his way to a lecture; at least 10,000 people attended his funeral.

1884: Due to increasing violence in the Fence-Cutters War, the Texas legislature made cutting fences a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

1892: An explosion at Osage Coal Mine #11 killed nearly 100 men and boys at Krebs in Indian Territory; on this day in 1943, fire in a Pursglove coal mine killed 13 West Virginia miners.

1917: In New York, Emma Goldman was acquitted on a charge of circulating birth control information; one year later on this date, the ruling in New York v. Sanger made it legal for doctors to advise married patients about birth control for health purposes.

1922: The US Army's highest-ranking black officer, Col Charles Young, died of malaria at Lagos, Nigeria, during a research expedition.

1941: The USS Louisville left Simonstown, South Africa, carrying almost $150 million in British gold for deposit in American banks.

1968: Door gunner Pfc Gary Wetzel earned the Medal of Honor when his helicopter was trapped by heavy enemy fire in a landing zone near Ap Dong An.

1984: USMC Cpl Edward Gargano was killed in an ambush at the US embassy in Beirut.

Egghead 10:36 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 7

1598: Juan de Oņate, with 130 men, women and children and huge herds of livestock, set out across the vast Chihuahuan desert en route to northern New Mexico, blazing the trail known as El Camino Real.

1608: Fire ravaged Jamestown, destroying most of the colonists' provisions, including supplies that had just arrived on the John & Francis.

1795: In the Yazoo Land Fraud, legislation was signed in Georgia providing for the sale of 40 million acres of land to the Yazoo land companies for about $500,000.

1859: George Jackson discovered gold at Idaho Springs in Colorado Territory.

1865: In retaliation for the Sand Creek Massacre, Cheyenne, Sioux and Arapaho warriors attacked Fort Rankin and Julesburg, CO.

1873: A major blizzard on the northern Great Plains killed dozens of settlers in Minnesota and bordering states; on this date 13 years later, the Blizzard of '86 hit Kansas, killing 100 people and 80% of cattle in the state.

1942: As the Siege of Bataan began in the Philippines, ill-equipped and poorly-fed US troops faced a long and costly effort to hold their ground on Luzon.

1943: German planes sank the SS Benalbanach off Bougie, Algeria, killing 340 of 389 American soldiers en route to North Africa.

1945: The USS Hovey, which had just picked up 149 survivors of the sunken USS Long, and the USS Palmer were sunk off Luzon with numerous casualties.

1947: In Maryland, Spring Grove State Hospital announced the release of several patients who had undergone prefrontal lobotomies.

1962: In Operation Ranch Hand, the first three modified C-123s arrived at Tan Son Nhut airbase outside Saigon to begin herbicide-spraying missions; on this day in 1971, Ranch Hand flew its last mission, spraying crops in Ninh Thuan.

1997: An American pilot, employed by DynCorp to spray herbicides on Amazon coca fields in Colombia, was killed in a plane crash.

Egghead 10:27 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 6

1663: Mary Barnes was indicted for witchcraft in Connecticut.

1702: French Canadians led by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville unloaded cargo at Massacre Island on the Mobile River for the construction of Fort Louis de la Louisiane.

1778: In the Battle of the Kegs, floating mines were used in an attempt to disrupt British shipping on the Delaware River; the event was commemorated by satirist and Signer Francis Hopkinson.

1832: William Lloyd Garrison and others founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

1864: US troops led by Kit Carson entered Canyon de Chelly in their scorched-earth pursuit of the Navajo.

1895: Former Queen Liliuokalani was arrested in Hawaii, accused of plotting a coup against the American government led by Sanford Dole.

1927: Robert Elliot, a freelance executioner, led six men to the electric chair in one day: three in Charleston, MA, and three at Sing Sing.

1944: A tanker accidentally rammed the gunboat USS St Augustine, which sank in four minutes off Cape May, NJ, with 115 sailors lost.

1944: The submarine USS Scorpion made her last contact with the USS Herring, then disappeared with 76 men aboard; in a tragic coincidence, a later sub was also designated the USS Scorpion, and was lost with all hands in 1968.

1944: Gen Frank Merrill was given command of a volunteer unit in Burma that became known as Merrill's Marauders.

1968: Medevac pilot Maj Patrick Brady earned the Medal of Honor when he rescued 51 wounded men under heavy fire near Chu Lai; Cpl Jerry Wickam earned the Medal of Honor when his troop was attacked southwest of Loc Ninh.

Egghead 10:00 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 5

1719: An ad in the Boston News Letter offered for sale an Indian woman "fit for all manner of household work."

1734: The Georgia trustees ordered that unauthorized Jewish settlers in the colony be removed.

1807: Gen James Wilkinson learned that former vice president Aaron Burr might have several thousand men at Natchez and declared martial law in New Orleans.

1825: The first engineering college in the US, the Rensselaer School, opened at Troy, NY.

1854: The steamship SS San Francisco was wrecked by a storm in the Atlantic, killing more than 300 of her 750 passengers and crew, including US troops bound for California via Cape Horn.

1868: Big Tree led his Kiowa warriors in attacks on white settlements in Montague and Cooke Counties in Texas.

1882: In Kansas, the Ellsworth Reporter reported that a lynching victim "came to his death by strangulation, through his own exertions and assistance of parties unknown."

1943: In the Bismarck Archipelago, two B-17s were lost as US aircraft bombed the harbor and airfield at Rabaul on New Britain Island; Gen Kenneth Walker was among those killed.

1945: Kamikaze fighters attacked a convoy bound for the Lingayen Gulf, damaging the USS Louisville, the USS Manila Bay and the USS Stafford, with numerous casualties.

1968: US Navy pilot Robert Schweitzer spent five years as a POW after being shot down over North Vietnam; a Huey gunship was downed by hostile ground fire in South Vietnam, where three crew members were taken prisoner by the Viet Cong.

Egghead 10:10 AM - [Link]
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Americans in History: January 4

1772: Final payment was made for construction of the Old Exchange in Charleston; total cost was 41,740 pounds.

1776: During their epic journey across the desert wilderness from the presidio at Tubac in southern Arizona, Juan Bautista de Anza and his party reached the San Gabriel mission in Alta California.

1874: Eskiminzin and other Aravaipa Apache tried to escape from the San Carlos reservation in Arizona.

1933: Angry over farm foreclosures in Iowa, members of the Farmers Holiday Association in Iowa threatened to hang a district judge unless he promised not to issue any more eviction notices.

1945: Sgt Isadore Jachman, of the 513th Parachute Infantry, earned the Medal of Honor at Flamierge, Belgium, when his company was pinned down by enemy fire.

1945: A kamikaze crashed into the USS Ommaney Bay in the Sulu Sea, killing 95 men; near Mindoro, another crashed into a freighter heavily laden with ammunition, the SS Lewis L Dyche, with 71 lives lost.

1954: A US Navy P2V-5 Neptune, with the call sign 3 Cape Cod, went down in the Yellow Sea off the North Korea/China coast; two bodies were later recovered but eight crew members were never accounted for.

1955: The US agreed to pay Japan $2 million for damages from atomic testing in the Marshall Islands.

1986: James Neil Harrison was killed by an explosion of hot uranium hexafluoride at the Sequoyah Fuels plant in Gore, OK, while 35 workers suffered kidney damage and a 300-foot plume of contamination escaped into the atmosphere.

2002: Green Beret Sgt Nathan Ross Chapman was the first American soldier lost in combat during the war in Afghanistan, in an ambush near Khost.

Egghead 2:06 PM - [Link]
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