The first reinforcements from the Department of Texas for the Great Sioux War arrived on the Northern Plains.
The units were two companies under Captain Sanderson who assumed command at the Cheyenne River Agency, Dakota Territory (Fort Bennett).
Sanderson retired retired early on April 2, 1892, and died less than a year later in 1893. He's not a well known frontier Army officer, but he must have been in ill health.
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The Horsemeat March began as Gen. Crook left the Powder River for the Little Missouri with only fifteen days rations for his command of 1,500 cavalry, 450 infantry, and 300 Indian and white scouts.
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Treaty No. 6 was signed between the the Crown and the Plains and Woods Cree, Assiniboine, and other band governments at Fort Carlton and Fort Pitt. The first signatures were today.
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The city of St. Louis voted to secede from St. Louis County and become an independent city.
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Andrews County, Martin County, and King County, Texas were created.
Henry Weston Smith, “Preacher Smith”, was shot and killed by an unknown assailant outside of Deadwood S.D.
We discussed him here:
Supposedly the first Christian sermon in the Black Hills was preached at Custer City, South Dakota by Methodist layman Henry Weston Smith.
He would be murdered that following August.
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Grant expanded Colorado's Ute reservation.
August 17, 1876
Executive Mansion
It is hereby ordered that all that portion of country in the State of Colorado lying within the following-described boundaries, and forming a part of the Uncompahgre Park, viz: Commencing at the fifty-third mile-post on the north line of the survey of the boundaries of the Ute cession, executed by James W. Miller in 1875; thence south 4 miles; thence east 4 miles; thence north 4 miles, to the said north line; thence west to the place of beginning, be, and the same hereby is, withdrawn from the public domain and set apart as a part of the Ute Indian Reservation, in accordance with the first article of an agreement made with said Indians and ratified by Congress April 29, 1874 (Stats, at Large, vol. 18, p. 36).
U. S. Grant
Judge Amherst Stone of Golden, Colorado, was kidnapped at Rocky Flats by a gang of men opposed to a railroad reorganization he was presiding over.
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Congress passed the Indian Appropriations Act of 1876 cutting off all rations for the Sioux until they terminated hostilities and ceded the Black Hills to the United States.
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Alexander Graham Bell placed a telephone call between two Ontario towns, fourteen miles distant. It was the first long distance telephone call.
Long distance telephone calls were a big deal when I was growing up, and indeed were expensive and frankly a big deal. People waited for certain times of the day or night to make them, when the price was reduced. I'm guessing in an average year we had or placed maybe one or two long distance calls.
I dimly recalled that still being the case when I was first practicing law, and it was. Indeed, I recall we had to be careful about how we logged the time to recapture the cost. The revenue from long distance calls peaked in 2000, but cell phones made inroads shortly thereafter and by 2004 most long distance pricing had ended and it continued to decline throughout that decade.
Crook and Terry joined forces at the Rosebud.
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The reconstituted 7th Cavalry and the 5th Infantry, under Terry's overall command moved up Rosebud Creek in pursuit of the Sioux. Crook's command had also moved to the Rosebud, where it was awaiting the 5th Cavalry as reinforcements.
Crawford was an extremely entertaining character and was known for his storytelling and poetry. He also served as a newspaper correspondent during this period.
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Frisian Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was born in Leeuwarden to a then well to do family, the eldest child of Antje and Adam Zelle. The family's fortunes would decline before she was a teen.
She'd become the famous/infamous Mata Hari, in some ways an early, well, Sydney Sweeney, but also with scandalous romance attached. Those escapades ultimately lead to charges of espionage, based on what she was acquiring from her French male associates.
Frankly, she was not unattractive, but was never the great beauty of legend. She was a surprisingly old 41 years of age when she was executed in 1917, and the mother of two.
Her daughter Nonnie would die two years later age age 21.
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The lesson of history is rarely learned by the actors themselves.
Hon. (R-19th D. Ohio) James A. Garfield, House of Representatives, August 6, 1876.
Pvt. Thomas W. Stivers, 7th Cavalry, having completed almost five years of service, was discharged.
What's unusual about this?
Well, he's later be awarded the Medal of Honor for his service at Little Bighorn.
Voluntarily brought water to the wounded under fire.
And he was discharged in the field, at the mouth of the Rosebud. He was from Kentucky, and returned home, somehow.
And he was dead by the time he was awarded the medal.
He was from Kentucky, and went back there, where he died at age 26 the next year.
Oddly, he was almost the exact same age as William M. Harris who was also from Kentucky and also returned home, although I don't know when he was discharged.. He'd die at age 34 in 1885.
Harris also won the Medal of Honor for the battle.
Typical frontier soldiers life. Five years, still a private, discharged in the field to make his way home. HE seems to have never married, and was given a notable headstone. Harris' was basically lost.
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Henry Mike Reeve Carroll, who went by Henry Reeve, died in combat against Spanish troops in Cuba at age 26, where he had gone from revolutionary volunteer in 1869 to the rank of general in a Cuban revolutionary army. He was a prior child soldier in the Civil War, in which he's served as a drummer.
The Ten Years War was the cause he died in, which lasted from 1868 to 1878. The Cuban revolutionaries would lose the war and Cuban independence would come about, instead, as a result of the later Spanish American War, which up until the current war with Iran stood as the war fought by the US on the least justifiable grounds.
The 5th Cavalry arrived at Goose Creek in Wyoming to reinforce a resting up Crook's command.
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Congress approved a joint resolution prohibiting the supply of metallic cartridges to "hostile" Indians, appreciating already that the Battle of Little Bighorn had featured effective native use of cartridge arms.
Frankly, this is appalling. Native Americans were defending their home grounds and this is the very basis of the Second Amendment. Of course, natives were not citizens at the time.
We can't help but note, however, that freedom's brave sentinel, the National Rifle Association, has been fascism's craven lap dog since 2016. I'm confident that if Donald Trump asked us to surrender our arms, the NRA would demand it.
A funeral notice appeared in Deadwood.
Died in Deadwood, Black Hills, August 2, 1876, from the effects of a pistol shot, J. B. Hickock [sic] (Wild Bill) formerly of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Funeral services will be held at Charlie Utter's Camp, on Thursday afternoon, August 3, 1876, at 3 o'clock P. M. All are respectfully invited to attend.
Notice placed by Charlie Utter in the Black Hills Pioneer.
Almost the entire community attended the funeral.
Utter was a close, and even doting, companion of Hickock's. He was an unusual frontiersman, being a family man (he had married his wife when she was only 15 years old) and at 5'6" tall he was meticulous in his appearance, sporting long black hair, a moustache (as any real man would) and wearing hand-tailored, fringed buckskins, fine linen shirts, beaded moccasins, and a large, silver belt buckle. He carried a pair of gold, silver, and pearl ornamented pistols.
He would not allow anyone into his tent, under pain of death.
Most unusual, he bathed daily.
He later lived contemporaneously in Leadville when my great grandfather and great grandmother lived there. Following that, he went to Durango, after having sadly divorced his wife. He ultimately moved to Panama, where he died blind, and remarried, in 1913.
It's really odd to think that my great grandparents, and hence my grandmother on my father's side, whom I knew and loved dearly, where part of all of this in some extended way.
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James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok was murdered in Deadwood by Jack McCall in Saloon No. 10.
Hickock normally sat with his back to the wall so that he could observe the room, but had been unable to. He twice asked a person he was playing cards with to switch seats, but his fellow would not exchange.
McCall had been leant money by Hickock the day prior.
McCall would be tried twice for the murder and was executed by hanging in March, 1877.
I realized in posting this that my view of this matter has been heavily colored by the movie Little Big Man, which is an excellent movie, and an outstanding book, but it's very inaccurate as to this event, which features in it. For one thing, I had no idea that the murder was after the Battle of Little Bighorn, and indeed was close in time to it, which shows how rapidly Deadwood was growing as a town and have quickly white settlement was encroaching on the Black Hills. In the film, the murder occurs before Little Bighorn, which I had not previously given much thought to.
Additionally, the killing was somewhat random. McCall had only met Hickock the day prior.
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Colorado was admitted into the union as a state. It was the 38th state.
My own family has a long association with Colorado. My father's grandfather moved to Leadville area to work as a miner right about this time. He switched to shopkeeping shortly thereafter. My grandmother and her siblings were born in Victor. My own father was born in Denver, which the family left shortly after he was of school age.
The story of its admission:
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