-
Chronological Timeline of the Old West
Although the “Wild West” was generally defined from 1865 to 1895,
many events shaped the American West as a region from ancient times until 1916.
But still, the Old West lives on..... -
Early Beginnings of Old West
50,000 - 5000 B.C -::- Paleo-Siberians migrated to North America from Asia via the Bering Strait land bridge.
1500 B.C. - 1000 A.D -::- Ancient Puebloan culture thrived in the Southwest.
1540 -::- Feb 23 - Spanish conquistador, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, embarks on an expedition into the unexplored territory north of colonized Mexico to search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold. The voyage lasts more than two years, during which Coronado travels through much of the American Southwest and as far north as present-day Kansas. His party is the first to document the geography and indigenous peoples of significant portions of the West
-- The Hernando de Soto expedition went as far as Oklahoma.
1541 -::- -- Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was the first white man to visit the pueblos in New Mexico.
-- Coronado’s party crossed the Arkansas River and went as far as the Kansas/Nebraska border.
1542 -::- -- Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo landed in San Diego, California.
1548 -::- -- Captain James Cook, seeking the Northwest Passage, charted part of the Oregon coastline.
1549 -::- -- Naval Officer Sir Francis Drake claimed California for Britain.
1579 -::- -- June 17 - English explorer Francis Drake lands his expedition on the Pacific coast of North America in present-day Drakes Bay, California, claiming all of the land not already under Spanish control for the English Crown.
1598 -::- -- Spanish explorer Juan de Oñate establishes Nuevo México in the region around the upper Rio Grande as the northernmost province of New Spain, serving as its first colonial governor. Notably established San Gabriel in New Mexico. -
Sixteen Hundreds
1607 -::- -- Spanish colonists establish the city of Santa Fe in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México.
1610 -::- -- Don Pedro de Peralta founded Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Palace of the Governors is built in Santa Fe, the new capital of Nuevo México. Today it is the oldest continuously occupied public building in the United States.
1680 -::- August 10 - An alliance of Puebloans coordinated by Popé initiates a mass revolt against Spanish colonists occupying what is now northern New Mexico in an effort to abolish European influence in the area. More than 400 people are killed and the Spanish are unable to reconquer Santa Fe for another 12 years. Northern New Mexico Pueblo Indians, outraged by atrocities committed by Spanish explorers and colonists, resisted the Pueblo Revolt. Many settlers were killed, and the rest were driven south.
1682 -::- -- The Spanish established the first permanent settlement in Texas at Ysleta, near present-day El Paso.
1685 -::- -- A short-lived French colony was founded at Matagorda Bay, Texas.
1692 to 1696 -::- -- Santa Fe is formally repossessed by the Spanish after Diego de Vargas negotiates a peace with the Pueblo Indians. The following six years witness a difficult reinstatement of Spanish and Franciscan rule over the Pueblos, including another revolt in 1696, which is successfully countered by De Vargas and his forces. Diego de Vargas re-conquered New Mexico. -
Seventeen Hundreds
1706 -::- March 12 - The city of Albuquerque is founded in Santa Fe de Nuevo México as La Villa Real de San Francisco de Alburquerque by provincial governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdés.
-- Juan de Ulibarri claimed Colorado for Spain.
1718 -::- May 1 - The Misión San Antonio de Valero, later known as The Alamo, is founded in Spanish Texas to undermine French claims in the area. Four days later, the Presidio San Antonio de Béxar is established nearby to protect the new town of San Antonio de Béxar.
1743 -::- March 30 - François and Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye, on expedition west from Quebec, explored South Dakota, seeking a water route to the Pacific Ocean, buried an inscribed lead plate near present-day Fort Pierre, South Dakota, claiming the area for France.
1759 -::- October 7 - A Spanish attack on a fortified Indian village along the Red River in what is now Texas is repulsed and defeated by allied Wichita, Comanche, and Tonkawa tribes.
1762 -::- November 13 - France transfers all of its territory west of the Appalachian Mountains to Spain in a secret treaty just months prior to the negotiations that end the French and Indian War.
1769 -::- July 16 - Spanish Franciscans, led by friar Junípero Serra, establish Mission San Diego de Alcalá in Las Californias. By 1823, the missionaries successfully plant a series of 20 more missions along the coast of what becomes the Spanish province of Alta California. These missions bring European culture to the indigenous peoples of California, but also enable a serious decline of from one-third to one-half of the indigenous population there during the Mission period.
1775 -::- August 20 - A company of Spanish soldiers establishes a site for the Presidio San Agustín del Tucsón in what is now Tucson, Arizona
1776 -::- July 29 - Two Franciscan priests lead the Domínguez–Escalante expedition west from Santa Fe in an attempt to find an overland route to the Spanish Catholic mission in Monterey. Though they fail to reach Las Californias, they explore previously unknown areas of the Colorado Plateau, become the first Europeans to enter the Great Basin, and establish the eastern section of what will later become the Old Spanish Trail.
-- Fort Tucson was established in Arizona.
-- Franciscan friars Escalante and Dominguez explored Utah.
-- The Presidio was established in San Francisco, California.
1779 -::- September 3 - Comanche Indian leader Cuerno Verde is killed in combat with Spanish forces led by Juan Bautista de Anza in what is now Pueblo County, Colorado. 1781 -::- -- Los Angeles, California, was founded. 1783 -::- September 3 - The Treaty of Paris is signed by Great Britain and the United States of America, ending the American Revolutionary War and establishing the United States as an independent country.
1792 - 1804 -::- May 19 - Captain George Vancouver's expedition drops anchor near present-day Seattle and proceeds to name Puget Sound, Mount Rainier, Vashon Island, and Restoration Point. Vancouver and his expedition are the first Europeans to explore the area, claiming it for the British Crown, along with much of the Pacific Northwest coast, including Vancouver Island and the Columbia River. -
Early Eighteen Hundreds
1800 -::- October 1 - Under pressure from Napoléon Bonaparte, the Kingdom of Spain transfers the colony of Louisiana back to the French Republic with the secret Third Treaty of San Ildefonso.
1803 -::- April 1 – The United States agrees to buy the colony of La Louisiane from the French Republic for the price of $15 million. The Louisiana Purchase added the United States territory from the Gulf of Mexico to the Northwest. The price of the purchase was $15,000,000. The agreement was signed on May 2.
December 20 - The United States officially takes control of Louisiana, an enormous area of imprecise boundaries extending from the Mississippi River west to the Rocky Mountains, more than doubling the land area of the new nation.
1804 -::- May 14 – The Lewis and Clark expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, began its exploration of the West. This expedition, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory following the Louisiana Purchase on April 1, 1803… A year and a month later, the party canoes up the Missouri River from Saint Charles, spending the winter at Fort Mandan on Indian territory in what is now North Dakota to find a practical route to the Pacific Ocean. The journey lasted until September 23, 1806.
1805 -::- October 10 - Lewis and Clark met the Nez Perce.
November 7 - Lewis and Clark sight the Pacific Ocean for the first time, near the mouth of the Columbia River. The expedition winters at Fort Clatsop on the south side of the river, near present-day Astoria, Oregon.
-- Lewis and Clark explored Oregon and Washington.
-- Zebulon Pike’s expedition explored the American Southwest.
1806 -::- July 15 - A U.S. Army reconnaissance expedition under the command of Lieutenant Zebulon Pike departs Fort Bellefontaine near Saint Louis to explore the southern Louisiana Territory.
September 23 - Lewis and Clark return to Saint Louis after a journey of nearly 6,000 total miles; in the past two and a half years, the party has made contact with over 70 Indian tribes and produced 140 maps, as well as documented more than 200 new plant and animal species.
1807 -::- February 26 - Spanish cavalrymen arrest the Pike Expedition in the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (now southern Colorado).
-- Fur trapper John Colter explored the Yellowstone area in Wyoming.
1808 -::- April 6 - German immigrant John Jacob Astor incorporates his American Fur Company
November 10 - The Treaty of Fort Clark is signed, in which the Osage Nation cedes all of its territory east of Fort Clark and north of the Arkansas River to the United States.
1809 -::- November 9 - Welsh-Canadian explorer David Thompson establishes Saleesh House as a fur-trading post of the North West Company in what is now Montana. -
Eighteen Tens
1810 -::- September 16 -- Mexican priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla proclaims the independence of Mexico from the Kingdom of Spain. Mexico revolted against Spanish rule.
-- The North West Company established Spokane House, the first fur-trading post in Washington.
1811 -::- May - Fort Astoria is established by John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company at the mouth of the Columbia River. It is the first American settlement on the Pacific coast.
June 15 - 16 -Most of the crew of the Tonquin, one of Astor's ships trading on Vancouver Island, are massacred by Tla-o-qui-aht Indians after the captain insults a chief. The ship is scuttled the following day in a magazine explosion that kills at least 100 natives.
1812 -::- March - The Russians built Fort Ross, 50 miles north of San Francisco by Russian traders on the California coast as the hub of the southernmost colony in Russian America.
April 30 -Louisiana is admitted as the 18th U.S. state, and the first to include land west of the Mississippi River. It is also the first state organized from the Louisiana Purchase territory, the rest of which is soon renamed the Missouri Territory.
June 4 - Missouri Territory was organized.
September 4 - Scottish and Irish settlers led by Miles Macdonell formally take possession of the Red River Colony. They construct Fort Daer near present-day Pembina, North Dakota, which becomes the first permanent European-American settlement in the Dakotas.
October 21 -- Carrying word of the fate of the Tonquin to Saint Louis, seven men of the Pacific Fur Company, led by Robert Stuart, become the first European Americans to cross the Continental Divide at South Pass, in present-day Wyoming. Later in the century, the pass will be used by half a million westward migrants as part of the main route of several emigrant trails.
1813 -::- March 29 - During the Mexican War of Independence, a joint expedition of Mexican and American filibusters penetrates deep into Spanish Texas and defeats a Royalist army outside San Antonio de Béxar at the Battle of Rosillo Creek. Provincial governor Manuel María de Salcedo is executed five days later.
1817 -::- December 25 -- Construction begins on a frontier military post known as Fort Smith in what is now Arkansas.
- Fort Pierre was established in what would later become South Dakota.
1818 -::- October 20 – The Treaty of 1818 establishes the 49th parallel from Lake of the Woods west to the Rocky Mountains as the boundary between the United States and British North America
-- The United States obtained the northeast part of North Dakota in a treaty with Britain.
1819 -::- March 2 - Arkansas Territory was organized.
September 17 - Intending to build forts along the Missouri River, a U.S. Army expedition led by Colonel Henry Atkinson and Major Stephen Harriman Long arrives by paddle steamer at Council Bluff on the river's west bank, in present-day Nebraska. It establishes what later becomes Fort Atkinson, the first Army outpost in the region, but the expedition stalls there over the winter and collapses entirely in the spring. -
Eighteen Twenties
1820 -::- March 5 - Congress passes the Missouri Compromise, which primarily regulated slavery in the western territories. It prohibited slavery for all new states north of Arkansas except for Missouri; basically the unorganized territory north of parallel 36°30′ N and west of the Mississippi River, except within the boundaries of the proposed state of Missouri, while permitting the admission of Maine as a free state. Largely devised by Henry Clay, it is a landmark agreement in the debate over slavery in the West.
March 9 - The Land Act of 1820 was enacted, eliminating the purchase of public land in the United States on credit, reduced the tract’s minimum size from 160 to 80 acres, reduced the price per acre, and paved the way for westward expansion.
May - Major Stephen H. Long leads a scientific expedition up the Platte River, along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, south to the Arkansas and Canadian rivers, and finally east to present-day Fort Smith, Arkansas. Among the first expeditions to bring American artists and scientists into the West, the party includes painter Samuel Seymour, artist-naturalist Titian Peale, and physician Edwin James, who leads the first recorded ascent of Pikes Peak. Long's report, published in 1823, promotes the idea of the Great Plains as the "Great American Desert".
-- Daniel Boone died at a relative’s home on the Missouri frontier at age 85.
-- The first American traders arrived via the Santa Fe Trail in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
-- By this time, more than 20,000 Native Americans lived in virtual slavery at the California missions.
1821 -::- February 22 – The Adams–Onís Treaty takes effect exactly two years after its initial signing, defining a new border between the territory of New Spain and the United States and further securing American claims to the Louisiana Purchase and the Oregon Country
August 10 – Missouri is admitted as the 24th U.S. state
August 24 – The Kingdom of Spain finally recognizes the independence of Mexico with the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba, ending the Mexican War of Independence
September 1 - William Becknell and a party of frontier traders leave New Franklin, Missouri bound for Santa Fe. The Becknell route will become the Santa Fe Trail
-- Led by Stephen Austin, the first Americans settled in Texas.
-- The Hudson Bay Company established Fort Vancouver in what would become Washington state.
-- The U.S. government began moving the “Five Civilized Tribes” of southeast America (Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw) to lands west of the Mississippi River.
1822 -::- March 6 - William Henry Ashley and Andrew Henry place an advertisement in the Missouri Republican for one hundred "enterprising young men" to join a trapping expedition to the upper Missouri River. The respondents comprise "Ashley's Hundred", many of whom, including Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Hugh Glass, and Jim Beckwourth, earn reputations as famous explorers and mountain men.
-- Mountain man James Bridger made the first expedition into the Rocky Mountains.
-- Missouri Lieutenant Governor William Ashley placed an ad for fur traders for the new Rocky Mountain Trading Company.
-- The first permanent settlement in Nebraska was established at Bellevue.
1823 -::- June 2 - Arikara warriors attack trappers working for Ashley's Rocky Mountain Fur Company on the banks of the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota, beginning the Arikara War. An expedition of American soldiers and their Sioux allies led by Lieutenant Colonel Henry Leavenworth retaliates against the Arikara several weeks later, marking the first armed conflict between the U.S. Army and Native Americans in the West.
August - A force of 500 Sioux and 200 American soldiers led by Colonel Henry Leavenworth retaliated by attacking the Arikara.
October 4 - Mexico became a republic.
1824 -::- April 17 - The Russo-American Treaty of 1824 is signed, formally transferring Russian claims in the Pacific Northwest south of parallel 54°40′ north to the United States
April 21 - Fort Gibson is established near the confluence of the Grand River and the Arkansas River in present-day Oklahoma.
July 7 - The first of 297 pioneer families and partnerships known as the "Old Three Hundred" are granted land titles in American empresario Stephen F. Austin's colony in Coahuila y Tejas. They are the first American settlers of Mexican Texas under a recently reformed Mexican law.
-- James Bridger discovered the Great Salt Lake.
-- Congress created the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
1825 -::- February 23 - The first mountain man’s rendezvous occurred on Henry’s Fork of the Green River in present-day Wyoming. The large fur companies put together teamster-driven mule trains that packed in whiskey and supplies and set up a trading fair called the “rendezvous.” These events were lively, festival-like affairs open to free trappers, Indians, and families alike. Not only was the Rendezvous a place where the trappers could sell and trade their furs for all sorts of commodities, such as clothing, saddles, bridles, tobacco, and whiskey – – but it was a place to meet traders who might wish to engage their services for the coming year. Famous mountain man, Jim Beckwourth, described them as: “Mirth, songs, dancing, shouting, trading, running, jumping, singing, racing, target-shooting, yarns, frolic, with all sorts of extravagances that white men or Indians could invent.”
1826 -::- January 24 - The Creek Tribe agreed to cede their land in Georgia and move west. It was the first of a series of removal treaties.
December 16 - Benjamin Edwards rode into Mexican-controlled Nacogdoches, Texas, and proclaimed himself the ruler of the Republic of Fredonia. Edwards negotiated an agreement with the Cherokee people, offering to share Texas in exchange for their help in defense against the Mexican soldiers. Six weeks later, Edwards’ ill-planned revolution disintegrated, and he fled to the United States for sanctuary.
1827 -::- March 29 - The town of Independence, Missouri is founded. In later years it becomes a common point of departure for pioneers journeying west on the emigrant trails
May 8 - Colonel Henry Leavenworth founds a U.S. Army cantonment later known as Fort Leavenworth above the confluence of the Little Platte and the Missouri River in present-day Kansas to protect travelers on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails.
-- Dr. John McLoughlin built the first sawmill in the Pacific Northwest, which would later become Oregon.
1828 -::- October 31 to December 2 - Presidential elections were held in the United States. Just as in the 1824 election, President John Quincy Adams of the National Republican Party faced Andrew Jackson of the Democratic Party, making the election the second rematch in presidential history. Both parties were new organizations, and this was the first presidential election their nominees contested. The eventual winner was Andrew Jackson.
1829 -::- April 6 – Jonathan Adams Claridge, Businessman, born in Charlestown, South Carolina;
July 14 - Trapper, explorer, and mountain man Jedediah Smith and his party are attacked by Umpqua Indians in the Oregon Country. Smith and three others are the only survivors.
November 7 - A merchant caravan led by Antonio Armijo embarks from Abiquiú, New Mexico and successfully reaches San Gabriel, California 86 days later, becoming the first to travel the length of the Old Spanish Trail. -
Eighteen Thirties
1830 -::- April 6 - The Law of April 6, 1830 is passed by the Mexican government, which increases tariffs on American goods entering Mexico, cancels unfulfilled colonization contracts, and bans any further immigration from the United States to Mexican Texas
May 28 - The Indian Removal Act is signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, authorizing the U.S. government to negotiate the removal of Native American tribes of the southeastern United States to federal territory in what is now Oklahoma
-- George Catlin became the first significant artist to paint the American Indians.
1831 -::- February 24 - The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the first removal treaty under the Indian Removal Act, was proclaimed. The Choctaw in Mississippi ceded land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the West.
May 27 - Trapper-explorer Jedediah Smith was killed by Comanche Indians on the Santa Fe Trail.
June 19 - On her maiden voyage, the steamboat Yellowstone arrives at what is now Pierre, South Dakota, hundreds of miles farther than any steam-powered vessel traveling up the Missouri River has yet reached, demonstrating the practicality of navigating large watercraft on the Upper Missouri
December 5 - In the Battle of Cahuenga Pass, an alliance of wealthy landowners in Los Angeles compels the unpopular Manuel Victoria, Governor of Alta California, to resign from office.
-- Mexico ratifies the boundaries with the United States originally established by the Adams–Onís Treaty
-- The First Missouri steamboat reached Pierre, South Dakota.
-- James Bowie invented the Bowie knife.
1832 -::- April 6 - The Black Hawk War began when the Sac and Fox people tried to plant their cornfields and were repulsed by whites. The Indians were forced to leave Illinois.
May - The Bonneville Expedition departs Missouri with 110 men. Over the next two years, the party explores several major river systems in present-day Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington, and establishes an overland route to California that will later become the California Trail.
June 25 - 26 - Texian insurgents under John Austin capture Fort Velasco from Mexican infantry under Colonel Domingo de Ugartechea at the Battle of Velasco, the first true military conflict between Anglo-American settlers of Mexican Texas and the Mexican federal government.
July 17 - Attendees of the annual fur trapper's rendezvous, the largest yet of its kind, clash with local Indians at the Battle of Pierre's Hole
August 2 - Texas settlers refused an order to surrender their arms to José de las Piedras, commander of the Mexican battalion in Nacogdoches. The ensuing Battle of Nacogdoches was sometimes called the opening gun of the Texas Revolution.
October 20 - In the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek, the Chickasaw Nation ceded northern Mississippi and moved west of the Mississippi River.
1833 -::- January 12 - a law was passed that made it unlawful for any native person to remain within the boundaries of Florida.
June 9 - Alexander "Sasha" Baranov, rancher, born in Saint Petersburg, Russia;
Summer - William and Charles Bent, in partnership with Ceran St. Vrain, establish Fort William, later known as Bent's Fort, as a frontier trading post on the north bank of the Arkansas River, along the Santa Fe Trail, in what is now southeastern Colorado.
September 26 - Potawatomi of Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois signed the Treaty of Chicago, assuring their relocation to reservations west of the Mississippi River in Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas.
-- Samuel Colt invented and began producing the revolver.
-- After Joseph Smith founded the Church of Latter-Day Saints community of Zion in present-day Kansas City, Missouri, area residents vehemently resisted and demanded that they leave.
1834 -::- June 30 - the Indian Intercourse Act created Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The territory also included parts of Kansas and Nebraska, but these lands were taken back when the Kansas and Nebraska territories were created in 1854.
July 31 - Fort Hall is established on the Snake River in present-day Idaho.
-- Fort Laramie is founded by William Sublette in what is now eastern Wyoming as a private fur-trading post named Fort William.
1835 -::- June 25 - James Bedford “Deacon” Strahan, pistoleer, born in Fort Smith, Arkansas;
October 2 - The Texas Revolution begins when a Texian militia successfully defends against the confiscation of a cannon by Mexican soldiers at the Battle of Gonzales. U.S. settlers defeated a Mexican cavalry near the Guadalupe River.
October 23 - The Mexican Constitution of 1824 is repealed, abolishing the former federalist system of government and replacing it with a provisional centralist system under President-General Antonio López de Santa Anna. The move further alienates Anglo-American settlers in Mexican Texas
November 13 - Texans officially proclaimed independence from Mexico, calling itself the Lone Star Republic.
December 10 - The two-month Siege of Béxar culminates in the surrender of the last remaining Mexican garrison in Texas, under Martín Perfecto de Cos, to the Texian Army under Edward Burleson. Santa Anna immediately prepares to march overland to recapture San Antonio
-- Frontier traders Louis Vasquez and Andrew Sublette establish Fort Vasquez on the South Platte River, 35 miles northeast of present-day Denver, Colorado.
1836 -::- February 24 - Mexican forces attacked the Alamo
February 25 - Samuel Colt is granted a patent for his invention of a "revolving gun". Colt firearms eventually become widely used in the West
March 2 – Texas became a Republic.
March 6 - Following a 13-day siege, Mexican troops under Santa Anna storm the Alamo Mission in San Antonio, killing all but a handful of its more than 200 Texian defenders, including William Travis, Jim Bowie, and Davy Crockett.
March 27 - More than 450 captured Texian soldiers are executed by the Mexican army at the Goliad massacre
April 21 - Texians under General Sam Houston surprise and defeat the Mexican army at the Battle of San Jacinto, ending the Texas Revolution.
May 2 - Texians declare the independence of the Republic of Texas from Mexico. On May 14, they force captured General Antonio López de Santa Anna to sign the Treaties of Velasco, though Mexico never ratifies these treaties.
June 15 - Arkansas is admitted as the 25th U.S. state.
1837 -::- February 15 - The Platte Purchase is approved, adding more than 3,000 square miles of former Indian lands to the northwest corner of the state of Missouri in direct violation of the Missouri Compromise.
April - May - A steamboat traveling up the Missouri River to Fort Union triggers an epidemic of smallpox that kills at least 17,000 indigenous people across the Great Plains over the next three years, dramatically reducing the populations of numerous tribes in the United States and Canada, including the Arikara, Assiniboine, and Pawnee, and causing the near-total extinction of the Mandan.
August - November - Rural landowners clash with immigrant Mormons near Kansas City, Missouri in a series of violent episodes later called the Mormon War, eventually forcing their complete expulsion from the state.
July 15 - 16 - Militia forces of the Republic of Texas win a decisive victory over Cherokee and Delaware Indians at the Battle of the Neches, the main engagement of the Cherokee War of 1838–1839.
1838 -::- April 23 - Jacob Thomas Bonham, Engineer / Surveyor / Railroad Policeman, born in Somerset, Pennsylvania;
June 17 - the Cherokee began the Trail of Tears, a 1,200-mile forced march from the East to present-day Oklahoma.
-- A smallpox epidemic north of San Francisco killed over 60,000 natives.
1839 -::- December 8 - Adam Lord Carrington, gambler and bounty hunter born, location unknown;
-- Missourians near Far West, Missouri, were no happier about the Mormons than those near Zion, some five years earlier. As Far West had grown to some 5,000 people, anti-Mormon hysteria increased, and the Mormons formed their own Army. After several skirmishes between the two factions, Missouri ordered the Mormons from the state. -
Eighteen Forties
1840 -::- March 19 - the Republic of Texas soldiers, while attempting to negotiate the return of captive white settlers at a peace conference in San Antonio, killed some 30 Penateka Comanche chiefs and warriors, as well as five women and children in the Council House Fight
April 1 - Political rivalries in the river town of Bellevue, Iowa Territory culminate in a shootout in front of the town hotel that leaves seven people dead
May 10 - Mormon leader Joseph Smith moved his band of followers to Illinois to escape the hostilities they experienced in Missouri
August 11 - After the Council House Fight in San Antonio, Texas, the Comanche retaliated by raiding villages throughout the Guadalupe Valley. When the Texas army and Rangers pursued them, the Battle of Plum Creek was fought, resulting in a decisive defeat of the Comanche.
1841 -::- March 22 - Markus Blaine, gunfighter, born in Rutherfordton, North Carolina;
May 15 - The first covered wagons to travel the Oregon Trail arrived in Sacramento, California
June 18 - Swiss pioneer John Sutter receives title to nearly 50,000 acres of land surrounding the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers in the Mexican province of Alta California, upon which he founds a colony he names "New Helvetia". In December, Sutter purchases the Russian settlement at Fort Ross and uses its building materials to construct a fort on the site of present-day Sacramento
September 24 - At the request of Catholic Salish Indians, Jesuit priests led by Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet establish St. Mary's Mission in the Bitterroot Valley, the first permanent settlement built by Europeans in what is now Montana.
1842 -::- March 2 - John Tyrone “JT” Wesley, Deputy US Marshal, born in Herrin, Illinois;
March 5 - Mexican troops led by Ráfael Vásquez invade Texas and occupy San Antonio, but are chased back across the Rio Grande two days later.
June 19 - Elizabeth Marie-Louise "Biatta" (nee Stanley) Baranov, rancher, born in England;
August 14 – The Second Seminole War ended; natives were removed from Florida and moved to Oklahoma.
September 17 - After a five-day journey down the coast, pioneers from the Oregon Country sail the Star of Oregon, a hand-built wooden schooner, into San Francisco Bay, where they trade the ship for cattle to drive overland back to the Willamette Valley
September 18 - Texas Rangers under Matthew Caldwell repulse the final Mexican invasion of the Republic of Texas, under Adrián Woll, in the Battle of Salado Creek. Simultaneously, a separate Texian company approaching Woll's army from the rear is overwhelmed and massacred.
-- December 26 – 26 - The Battle of Mier results when a Texan militia invades the Mexican border town of Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas. The heavily outnumbered Texans are forced to surrender and more than 200 men are taken prisoner.
-- John C. Fremont began his exploration of the West with guide Kit Carson.
1843 -::- March 25 - Seventeen Texan prisoners of war are executed by the Mexican army after drawing beans in a random lottery, as punishment for their participation in a raid on the town of Ciudad Mier several months earlier
May 2 - The Champoeg Meetings culminate with a motion to organize what will become the Provisional Government of Oregon, the first locally administered European-American body of government in the Oregon Country
May 22 - The first of over 120 wagons and 800 immigrants depart Elm Grove, Missouri for the Oregon Country, accompanied by missionary and trail guide Marcus Whitman. The expedition travels overland for more than six months on a route pioneered by Whitman and arrive in the Willamette Valley in November, becoming the first major wagon train to travel the Oregon Trail and establishing the viability of the route for later immigrants
-- The California Trail opened.
1844 -::- November 25 – The Stephens-Townsend-Murphy Party pioneers the first wagon route across the Sierra Nevada on the California Trail
-- Oregon City, the western terminus of the Oregon Trail, becomes the first incorporated U.S. city west of the Rocky Mountains
-- Miles Goodyear established Fort Buenaventura, the first town in Utah, on the site of present-day Ogden.
1845 -::- June 1 - John C. Frémont's third expedition with 55 men and Kit Carson as guide leaves St. Louis to "map the source of the Arkansas River" but continues to the Sacramento Valley.
June 22 - Marc Troussilon, merchant, born in Saint Jean, a small fishing village on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario;
June 23 - The Republic of Texas accepts a joint resolution of the U.S. Congress to annex Texas to the United States. Mexico does not recognize the annexation.
July - August - The phrase "manifest destiny" first appears in the Democratic Review in an essay by John L. O'Sullivan urging the annexation of Texas and spread to the Pacific Ocean. The concept does not become widely popular until O'Sullivan later uses the same phrase while addressing the subject of the Oregon Country.
December 19 - The "Lash Law" bans blacks from living in the Oregon Territory
December 29 - The United States admits the Republic of Texas to the Union as the slave state of the State of Texas. The boundaries of the state remain undefined
-- Texas banned saloons, but the law was never enforced and was repealed in 1856.
1846 -::- February 4 - Brigham Young and 3,000 Mormons set out for Utah
February 5 - The Oregon Spectator becomes the first American newspaper published west of the Rocky Mountains.
April 15 – The Donner Party journey begins in Springfield, Illinois. The travelers are George Donner, his brother Jacob, and James F. Reed, with their families. (The Donner Party Incident Timeline)
April 25 – The first skirmish of the Mexican–American War takes place on the Rio Grande near present-day Brownsville, Texas.
May 8 - The first major battle of the Mexican War was fought at Palo Alto, Texas, and General Zachary Taylor’s forces won.
May 13 - The United States under President James K. Polk declares war on Mexico, formally commencing the Mexican–American War.
June 14 - In the Bear Flag Revolt, American insurgents led by William B. Ide seize the Sonoma Barracks from Mexican officers and declare their intention to found an independent republic in northern Alta California. The so-called "Bear Flag Republic" lasts just 25 days, after which it is subsumed into American military efforts to control California
June 15 - The Oregon Treaty resolves a decades-long dispute over possession of the Oregon Country by extending the original boundary between the United States and British North America further west to the Pacific Ocean, with Vancouver Island being retained in its entirety by the British
July 7 - The American flag was raised in Monterey, California.
August 15 - Troops under the command of General Stephen W. Kearny seize the territorial capital of Santa Fe for the United States with little resistance.
August 22 - 30 - The Donner Party enters the Salt Lake Valley via what will be known as Emigration Canyon having departed the Weber River using East Canyon. With just a month of summer remaining, there are still 600 miles (970 kilometers) to go; then stay in camp collecting as much water and grass as possible for the drive ahead; and The Donner Party reaches Redlum Spring, the last source of water before the dry drive begins, then sets out to cross the Great Salt Lake Desert.
December 6 - 7 - Kearny's Army of the West engages Mexican lancers east of San Diego at the Battle of San Pasqual
December 25 - American forces under Colonel Alexander W. Doniphan defeat Mexican regulars at the Battle of El Brazito
December 28 - Iowa is admitted as the 29th U.S. state.
November 1846 – April 1847 – The Donner Party was trapped in the Sierra Nevada when winter descended. There were 87 emigrants in the Donner Party, plus Luis and Salvador, two California Indians who joined them in Nevada, for a total of 89 people. Of the 89, a net of 81 people were trapped in the mountains, due to additions and departures from the group during the journey. Of the total 89 people, 41 died and 48 survived; of the original 87 emigrants, 39 died and 48 survived; of the 81 people trapped in the mountains, 36 died and 45 survived. About two-thirds of the women and children survived, while about two-thirds of the men died. All four Donner adults (the couples George & Tamsen Donner and Jacob & Elizabeth Donner) died; most of the Reeds and all the Breens survived.
1847 -::- January 13 – the Treaty of Cahuenga ended the Mexican-American War in California.
January 19 - The Pueblo people of Taos, New Mexico, struck back, attacking a Taos home that Governor Charles Bent was visiting, murdering his guards, and then scalping and killing him. Fifteen more white settlers were killed before Colonel Sterling Price quelled the Taos Revolt
February 15 - The first of three relief missions arrives to rescue survivors of the Donner Party, who have been snowbound in California's Sierra Nevada mountains for more than three months.
April 23 - Mercedes de Soto-Troussilon, Cartographer/Explorer/Botanist, born in Nuevo Spain, now Mexico;
May - Fort Lewis, an American Fur Company trading post built the previous year, is moved 15 miles downstream of its original location to a site that will later be renamed Fort Benton. Near the furthest navigable point on the Missouri River, it is the last stop for steamboats traveling upstream from St. Louis, by which it soon becomes an important river port for mountain men and pioneers, as well as the oldest continuously inhabited European-American settlement in what is now Montana.
July 24 - Brigham Young and his vanguard company of Mormons first arrive in the Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.
November 29 - Fifteen Oregon missionaries, including mission founders, Dr. Marcus Whitman, his wife, Narcissa, and 12 others, are murdered and 54 others taken hostage by a party of Cayuse and Umatilla Indians (near the present-day town of Walla Walla, Washington), who accuse Whitman of deliberately poisoning Indians in his medical care during an outbreak of measles. The massacre sparks the Cayuse War
-- Samuel Colt, with Texas Ranger Captain Sam Walker, developed the revolver.
1848 -::- January 24 - James W. Marshall discovers gold at Sutter's Mill near Coloma, California, precipitating the California Gold Rush
February 2 - The United States and Mexico sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican–American War. The agreement results in the cession of nearly all of the present-day Southwest, including California, to the U.S., as well as the designation of the Rio Grande as the boundary between Texas and Mexico. (what became the states of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. )
Spring - The Army relocates Fort Kearny from its original location near Nebraska City to a new site more than 200 miles to the west, along the Platte River and the major emigrant trails.
December - John Sutter, Jr. and Samuel Brannan begin platting Sacramento City, California, at a site two miles south of Sutter's Fort
-- A Mormon trading post at Genoa was the first permanent settlement in Nevada.
-- Oregon was organized as a territory.
-- The State of Deseret, incorporated by the Mormons, includes Utah, most of Nevada and Arizona, and parts of Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Colorado.
1849 -::- January - Old Dry Diggings, California, was unofficially renamed Hangtown when a mob ran down three men who reportedly tried to rob a local gambler. The men were flogged and hanged on Main Street.
February 28 - Regular steamboat service between the east and west coasts of the United States begins with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco
March 3 - The Minnesota Territory is organized from portions of the Wisconsin and Iowa Territories
-- 80,000 forty-niners make their way to California in search of gold.
-- At Chinese Camp, California, the first outbreak of anti-Chinese violence erupted due to a depression in the mining industry when white miners attempted to rid the Chinese miners from the community.
-- When outlaw Joaquin Murrieta and his brother were arrested in Murphys, California, for robbery, Joaquin was tied to a tree and brutally beaten, his brother was hanged, and his wife was raped. Afterward, when he tried to file charges, he was told that it was not illegal for whites to rape Mexican women or for whites to kill Mexicans. Murrieta would retaliate by beginning a series of raids and criminal activities throughout the state. -
Eighteen Fifties
1850 -::- January 29 – Responding to questions of how to accommodate slavery in the western territories, Henry Clay proposes a series of measures to preserve the Union that come to be called the Compromise of 1850.
February – The Pinkerton National Detective Agency is founded
February 8 - 10 – The Nauvoo Legion, under orders from Brigham Young, attacks Timpanogos Indians over land disputes near Fort Utah
April 4 – The city of Los Angeles, California is incorporated
April 15 – The city of San Francisco, California is incorporated
April 16 – The California territorial government sends a military expedition to attack hostile Yuma Indians along the Colorado River in retaliation for the Glanton Massacre earlier in the year, sparking the Yuma War.
June 1 – The town of Kansas, later Kansas City, is incorporated in the state of Missouri
June 3 – Five Cayuse tribesmen are hanged in Oregon City for their participation in the Whitman massacre
September 9 – California is admitted as the 31st U.S. state
September 9 – The New Mexico Territory and Utah Territory are organized by order of Congress
September 27 – The Donation Land Claim Act takes effect to promote homestead settlement in the Oregon Territory
September 29 – President Millard Fillmore appoints Brigham Young the first governor of the Utah Territory.
November 29 – the San Francisco Grand Jury condemned gambling as “a crying evil” and urged that something must be done about prizefighting as well as numerous houses of ill-repute.
-- Levi Strauss began manufacturing heavyweight trousers for gold miners, made of the twilled cotton cloth known as “genes” in France. Strauss had intended to make tents but, finding no market made a fortune in pants.
-- In the 1850s, the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance executed ten people for murder, 12 for conspiracy to commit murder, and nine for kidnapping.
1851 -::- January 23 – The flip of a coin determines whether a new city in Oregon is named after Boston, Massachusetts, or Portland, Maine, with Portland winning.
February 18 – A family of Brewsterite pioneers traveling a southern route to California is massacred by Indians on the banks of the Gila River in what is now Arizona. Thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her eight-year-old sister Mary Ann are abducted and enslaved
February 27 – Congress passes the Appropriation Bill for Indian Affairs, which allocates funds to move western Native American tribes on to permanent reservations enclosed and protected by the federal government. The act sets the precedent for modern reservations in the United States
March 27 – Mariposa Battalion, led by James D. Savage, are the first reported non-natives to enter California's Yosemite Valley
May 2 – Gold is discovered along the Rogue River in Oregon, triggering a gold rush
July 26 – Fort Union is established in the New Mexico Territory
September 17 – The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1851) is negotiated between the United States government and representatives of ten Native American tribes of the Great Plains, including the Lakota, Crow, and Cheyenne. The tribes agree to provide safe passage for westward migrants and permit the construction of roads and forts in their territories in return for an annuity of $50,000 for fifty years
November 13 – The Denny Party lands at Alki Point, the first settlers of what will become Seattle, Washington
July 5 – “Pretty Juanita,” convicted of murder after stabbing a man who had tried to rape her, became the first person hanged in the California mining camps.
July 13 – “Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country” is attributed to Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune,
-- Western Union is founded as The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company.
1852 -::- March 18 – The Wells Fargo company is founded to provide express and banking services to California
April 23 – Rosalind Olivia Weston, unemployed, born in Southampton, in Southern England;
-- The Mormon Church in Utah officially acknowledges that the practice of polygamy was part of its religion.
1853 -::- March – Levi Strauss arrives in San Francisco and opens a store supplying goods and clothing to Gold Rush miners.
March 2 – The Washington Territory is organized from a portion of the Oregon Territory.
June 27 – Fort Riley is established in what is now Kansas.
July 13 – In the case of Holmes v. Ford, a decision of the Oregon Territorial Supreme Court reaffirms that slavery is illegal in the Oregon Territory, concluding the last challenge of abolitionist law by pro-slavery elements living in Oregon
July 23 – Encouraged by pioneer ferryman William D. Brown, the Council Bluffs & Nebraska Ferry Company is chartered by the State of Iowa to transport settlers across the Missouri River to a proposed townsite that will later be named Omaha City.
July 25 – In a macabre instance of rough frontier justice, California Rangers claimed a $6000 reward by bringing in the severed head of outlaw Joaquin Murrieta, preserved in whiskey.
October 26 – Paiute Indians attack U.S. Army Captain John W. Gunnison and his party of 37 soldiers and railroad surveyors near Sevier Lake, Utah. Gunnison and seven other men were killed.
December 30 – The United States and Mexico agree to the Gadsden Purchase, transferring portions of southern Arizona and New Mexico to the U.S.
1854 -::- February 13 – The Mexican army forces would-be conqueror William Walker and his mercenary troops to retreat to Sonora
February 14 – Texas is linked by telegraph with the rest of the country when a connection between New Orleans and Marshall, Texas is completed
May 30 – The Kansas–Nebraska Act becomes law, creating the Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory. A provision that settlers will vote on the legality of slavery in the new territories effectively rescinds the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and touches off an epidemic of violence and electoral fraud beginning the next year.
June 24 – Fort Tejon is established at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley in California.
July 4 – Omaha City is founded in the Nebraska Territory.
August 19 – An argument over a stray cow precipitates the Grattan massacre, in which 30 U.S. Army soldiers and an interpreter are killed in retaliation for the shooting of Chief Conquering Bear of the Lakota Sioux occurred near Fort Laramie, Wyoming.
December 19 – Jonathan R. Davis, a veteran of the Mexican–American War and a gold rush prospector, single-handedly kills eleven armed immigrant outlaws near Sacramento, California using two revolvers and a Bowie knife.
-- White settlers in Del Norte County, California, ambushed and killed 30 Tolowa people at the Etculet village on Lake Earl.
1855 -::- January 23 – The first permanent bridge across the Mississippi River opens for traffic in Minneapolis, Minnesota
September 2 -3 – U.S. Army detachments under Brigadier General William S. Harney defeat a band of Brulé Lakota led by Little Thunder at the Battle of Ash Hollow in present-day Garden County, Nebraska, a punitive expedition for the Grattan massacre; General Harney and 700 soldiers took revenge for the Grattan Massacre with a brutal attack on a Sioux village in Nebraska that left 100 men, women, and children dead.
September 25 – Bureau of Indian Affairs agent Andrew Bolon is murdered by renegade Yakama people in the Washington Territory, precipitating the Yakima War
October 4 – Kamiakan, chief of the Yakama, defeated forces under Major Haller in the first engagement of the Yakama War in Washington Territory.
-- The Lecompton government was established in Kansas, starting the Kansas/Missouri Border War between pro-slavery and Free State forces.
1856 -::- January 26 – In the Puget Sound War, the Battle of Seattle is fought when an alliance of local Indians attacks pioneer settlements in the Washington Territory
February 2 – The city of Dallas is incorporated in Texas
May 14 – James King of William, editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, is shot in the streets of San Francisco by James P. Casey, editor of The Sunday Times and a member of the city's Board of Supervisors, whose corruption and criminal record King had criticized in an editorial. King dies six days later.
May 21 – The predominantly abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas is ransacked and looted by a pro-slavery militia of Border Ruffians and other pro-slavery supporters
May 22 –The assassination of James King of William incites the re-establishment of the San Francisco Committee of Vigilance, which storms the city jail and publicly hangs James P. Casey along with convicted murderer Charles Cora
May 24 – 25 – Outraged at the sacking of Lawrence, abolitionist John Brown and a party of Free-Staters murder five pro-slavery activists in rural Kansas Territory in the Pottawatomie massacre. In the three months of retaliatory raids and murders that follow, more than two dozen people are killed, marking the bloodiest episode of the next four years, where raids, skirmishes, and massacres continued in what became known as “Bleeding Kansas.”
June – Fort Randall is established by General William S. Harney on the upper Missouri River in what is now South Dakota
Elizabeth "Els" Ainsley-Baranov, horse trainer, born in a Convent to Elizabeth Stanley in France;
1857 -::- March 3 –Fort Abercrombie is established by order of Congress on the Red River of the North, the first permanent U.S. military settlement in what is now North Dakota.
March 8 – 12 – At least 35 pioneers are killed and four young women are taken captive in northwestern Iowa by a renegade band of Santee Sioux in the Spirit Lake massacre
March 26 – Robert J. Walker is appointed governor of the Kansas Territory by President James Buchanan, but quickly resigns in opposition to the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution
March 30 –In his letter of resignation from the Utah Territorial Supreme Court, justice William W. Drummond accuses Mormons of subverting the U.S. Constitution and openly defying federal law, and insists that Brigham Young be replaced as Territorial Governor by a non-Mormon, heightening fears of an imminent Mormon rebellion
April 1 – 8 – In the midst of Mexico's Reform War, former California Senator Henry A. Crabb leads a filibustering expedition into Sonora to aid Mexican rebels fighting government forces. The rebels turn on the Americans after they cross the border and Crabb's entire army is executed
July 9 – U.S. cavalry charge and scatter a Cheyenne war party on the banks of the Solomon River in north-central Kansas Territory
September 1 –The Battle of Pima Butte, in what is now Arizona, is the last major battle fought solely between indigenous peoples in North America
September 11 – Nearly 120 men, women, and children in a wagon train from Arkansas, emigrants passing through the Utah Territory are massacred by a combined force of Mormon militiamen and Paiute Indians set on a holy vengeance during the hysteria of the Utah War. Known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the history of this event continues to generate fierce controversy and deep emotions even to this day.
September 14 – Mormon leader Brigham Young tried to prevent U.S. troops from entering the territory of Utah when President James Buchanan sent them to impose federal law during the Utah War. The Mormons attacked the federal troops’ supply lines, burning Fort Bridger and setting fire to the plains to deprive the advancing Army of forage for its horses. At the same time, he readied a plan to evacuate and destroy Salt Lake City, should the federal troops get through.
1858 -::- February 19 – Chief Leschi, a leader of the Nisqually people, is hanged by the territorial government of Washington after being wrongfully convicted of killing a colonel during the Puget Sound War.
April 19 –The Yankton Treaty, signed by the Yankton Sioux, cedes most of what is now eastern South Dakota to the United States
May 11 – Minnesota is admitted as the 32nd U.S. state.
May 12 – An army of Texas Rangers and Indian allies under the command of John Salmon Ford engages Comanche warriors in a series of battles after attacking villages in the Canadian River valley, the final actions of the Antelope Hills expedition
July – Gold is discovered in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. The resulting gold rush draws nearly 100,000 people to the Pike's Peak Country of present-day Colorado over the next three years
8 October – The first nonstop stagecoach departed from St. Louis, Missouri on September 15, expecting a 25 day journey, arriving in Los Angeles, California, completing the 2,795-mile trip across the Southwest in 23 days, and 4 hours, with mail and 6 passengers.
November 17 – The town of Denver City is platted in what is now the state of Colorado.
1859 -::- January – Gold was discovered in Boulder Canyon, Colorado, sparking the Pikes Peak gold rush. This rush brought an estimated 100,000 fortune-hunters to the Rockies under the banner “Pikes Peak or Bust.”
February 14 – Oregon is admitted as the 33rd U.S. state.
Spring – The Comstock Lode, the first major discovery of silver ore in the country, provokes a silver rush in present-day Nevada that funds boomtowns including Virginia City and Gold Hill. Over the next 30 years, hundreds of mines extract more than $320 million in gold and silver from the region, making millionaires of investors such as George Hearst and the Bonanza Kings
September 28 – 30 – Mexican folk hero Juan Cortina and a large posse seize control of Brownsville, Texas in one of the major actions of the First Cortina War. His motivation is the legal abuses perpetrated by Texan authorities against ethnic Mexicans. The occupation only lasts two days, but the Cortina Troubles continue for another two years
October 4 – The Kansas Territorial legislature ratifies the anti-slavery Wyandotte Constitution by a huge margin
-- Albert Bierstadt made his first trip to the West traveled in the company of Frederick W. Lander, a land surveyor for the U.S. government, to see those western American landscapes for his work.. Albert Bierstadt a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them.
-- The first steamboat, The Chippewa, from St. Louis arrived in Fort Benton, Montana, establishing it as the farthest-inland port in the world; accessible by steamboat on the Missouri River. -
Eighteen Sixties
1860 -::- February 26 - Hundreds of Wiyot people are massacred by white settlers along the coast of what is now Humboldt County, California
April 3 - The Pony Express's inaugural delivery, which began on April 3, 1860, involved riders traveling 1,966 miles from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in approximately 10 days
May 6 - The kidnapping of two Paiute children by the white owners of a Pony Express station in what is now Nevada provokes a retaliatory raid in which five people are killed, beginning the Pyramid Lake War
May 29 - A frontier Army outpost on the Pawnee River in western Kansas Territory is rebuilt three miles upstream of its original location and renamed Fort Larned
July 20 - Construction begins on Fort Churchill in what is now western Nevada
December 18 - Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross attack a Comanche camp at the Battle of Pease River, where they discover Cynthia Ann Parker 24 years after her kidnapping.
-- E.D. Pierce made a significant gold discovery on Oro Fino Creek in Clearwater County, approximately 60 miles east of Lewiston, Idaho.
1861 -::- January 29 - Kansas is admitted to the Union as the 34th U.S. state, and a free state.
February - A series of hostilities involving U.S. Army Lt. George Nicholas Bascom and Chiricahua Apache chief Cochise triggers the Chiricahua Wars, which remain a central conflict in Arizona and New Mexico for the next 25 years.
February 1 - A convention of the Texas legislature votes to secede from the Union
February 28 - Colorado is organized as a U.S. territory
March 2 - The Nevada Territory and Dakota Territory are organized
March 16 - Governor of Texas, Sam Houston, is evicted from office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederate States of America
March 28 - The southern half of the New Mexico Territory nominally joins the Confederacy as the Provisional Confederate Territory of Arizona
April 12 - The Civil War began when Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.
July 25 - 250 Confederate troops led by John R. Baylor engage Union forces under Isaac Lynde at Mesilla, New Mexico, resulting in Lynde's troops retreating into the Organ Mountains, toward Fort Stanton. Lynde is relieved of duty after abandoning his post.
September 2 - A small Confederate patrol from Fort Stanton is ambushed by Mescalero Apache warriors in New Mexico's Gallinas Mountains
October 24 - The first transcontinental telegraph line is completed near Fort Bridger in in Utah Territory, the result of an effort by Hiram Sibley and Western Union to connect California to the telegraph networks of the east. The first transcontinental telegram, transmitted from Sacramento to Washington, carries a message from the state’s Chief Justice to President Lincoln. The ability to instantaneously send messages from coast to coast immediately makes the Pony Express obsolete.
November 7 - Denver, Colorado, was incorporated as a city.
-- Henry Griffin discovered gold near the Powder River in Oregon.
-- The Kansas Jayhawkers, a supposedly pro-Union guerrilla band organized by Charles J. Jennison, begin marauding across the Missouri border. In December, they attack and occupy Independence, Missouri, burning much of the city and killing many citizens;
1862 -::- Winter - Months of record precipitation in the far west culminate in the Great Flood of 1862, which turns California's Central Valley into an inland sea and causes millions of dollars in property damage
February - Confederate forces under Henry Hopkins Sibley and Thomas Green undertake one of the most ambitious military operations of the American Civil War when they begin the New Mexico Campaign. Their goals include seizing the Colorado gold fields and securing roads by which to invade California and Mexico.
February 20 - 21 - The Battle of Valverde is fought at a ford of Valverde Creek in present-day New Mexico, resulting in a Confederate victory.
March 26–28 - The Battle of Glorieta Pass is fought in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains between Confederate cavalry forces and Union volunteers from Colorado and New Mexico. It marks a turning point in the New Mexico Campaign in favor of the Union.
March 30 - The Battle of Stanwix Station is fought at a Butterfield Overland Mail stagecoach stop 80 miles east of Yuma, Arizona between Capt. William P. Calloway of the California Column and Confederate 2nd Lt. Jack Swilling.
April - The Battle of Picacho Pass is fought between the 1st California Cavalry under Union Lt. James Barrett and a detachment of Arizona Confederates led by Sgt. Henry Holmes. It is often cited as the westernmost battle of the American Civil War, occurring 50 miles northwest of Tucson.
April 15 - Confederate Sgt. Sam Ford and his men are ambushed by Apache warriors led by Cochise in the Dragoon Mountains, near present-day Benson, Arizona, at the First Battle of Dragoon Springs
May 5 -The Second Battle of Dragoon Springs is fought in retaliation for the deaths of the four Confederates killed at the Apache ambush four days earlier. Rebels under Capt. Sherod Hunter take back the cattle stolen by Cochise and his warriors and kill five Apaches
May 20 - The Homestead Act of 1862 is signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. It aims to encourage settlement in the West by simplifying the process of land acquisition: homesteaders need only claim, occupy for five years, and improve a minimum of 160 acres of unappropriated land to be granted full ownership. Alternatively, settlers have the option of purchasing the land outright after six months of residency.
July 1:
-- The first of the Pacific Railroad Acts is signed into law by President Lincoln, authorizing the issuance of land grants, government bonds, and rights-of-way to two newly incorporated railroad companies, Union Pacific and Central Pacific, for the purpose of constructing the western half of the nation's first transcontinental railroad. The proposed route spans nearly 2,000 miles across the country's interior, connecting to existing rail networks at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Sacramento, California
-- President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act into law, sponsored by Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont, which outlawed bigamy in federal territories and limited church and non-profit ownership in any territory of the United States to $50,000. The law is ignored in Utah;
July 15 - 16 - 140 Union troops from the California Column are ambushed by 500 Apaches under Mangas Coloradas and Cochise at the Battle of Apache Pass in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains igniting a war that lasted the next ten years. It is one of the first battles in which the United States Army is able to effectively use artillery against Indians. Fort Bowie is built near the site following the battle.
July 28 - A short way to the west of Dillon on Grasshopper Creek, Montana's first gold discovery of note was made, giving birth to Bannack.
August 10 - More than 30 people are killed when a group of Unionist German Texan settlers fleeing the Texas Hill Country for Mexico is attacked by a Confederate detachment along the Nueces River
August 17 - The Dakota War of 1862 begins when Little Crow’s Sioux hunting party slaughters five white settlers and the tribal council decides to attack white settlements throughout the Minnesota River valley.
November 5 - More than 300 Santee Sioux in Minnesota are sentenced to hang for the rape and murder of white settlers.
-- The Civil War divides the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole), who brought slaves west with them when they were forced from their homelands in the South. Most side at once with the Confederacy, contributing a brigade to the cause. But the Creek Nation splits into pro-Union and pro-Confederate factions, who battle against one another throughout the war. Some tribes and factions supporting the Confederacy and others supporting the Union, leading to a "civil war within a civil war";
1863 -::- January 1 - Daniel Freeman submits the first claim under the Homestead Act of 1862 for land near Beatrice, Nebraska
January18 - Chiricahua Apache leader Mangas Coloradas is captured, tortured, and killed by U.S. Army sentries after meeting with Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West to call for peace.
January 29 - Soldiers under Patrick Edward Connor attack an encampment of Shoshone Indians in present-day Idaho, resulting in the Bear River Massacre, killing more than 250 Shoshone Indians near Logan.
February 24 - The Arizona Territory is organized from a portion of the New Mexico Territory
March 4 - Idaho is organized as a U.S. territory.
May - Montana's most prominent gold find happened in Alder Gulch, about 30 miles as the eagle flies to the east of this now seat of Beaverhead County. Virginia City quickly grew to a gold camp of 10,000 people.
August 21 - Confederate guerrillas led by William Quantrill set fire to the pro-Union town of Lawrence, Kansas and kill nearly 200 civilians in the Lawrence massacre. Quantrill claims his motive was revenge for the Sacking of Osceola several years earlier.
August 25 - In the aftermath of the Lawrence massacre, Union General Thomas Ewing Jr. issues General Order No. 11, which forces the expulsion of all residents who cannot prove their allegiance to the Union from four counties in rural western Missouri
-- Charles Crocker, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Collis Huntington invested in the proposed Central Pacific Railroad, making them California’s Big Four.
-- John Bozeman leads a group of about 2,000 settlers along the Bozeman Trail, a new cutoff route connecting the Oregon Trail with the gold fields of southwestern Montana, which he and John Jacobs had blazed the previous year.
1864 -::- January – Kit Carson accepts the surrender of most of the Navajo nation after the final two years of the bloody Navajo Wars. Sent to punish Navajo raiding parties in northwest New Mexico, Colonel Kit Carson leads a campaign of destruction through their villages, burning crops and killing livestock. When the Navajo surrender, he marches 8,000 of the tribe on a grueling "Long Walk" across New Mexico to a parched reservation near Fort Sumner on the Pecos River, where they are held as prisoners of war until 1868;
January 10 – Henry Plummer, the elected sheriff of Bannack, Montana, is arrested and summarily hanged by a vigilance committee on charges of leading a gang of road agents preying on traders from Virginia City
May 26 – Congress organizes the Montana Territory and admits Nevada into the union, completing the political organization of the West under local governments loyal to the Union;
July – Outlaw Jim Reynolds and his gang plunder and rob settlements in the South Park Basin of the Colorado Territory in an attempt to loot the gold mines of the region to support the fledgling Confederacy
July 2 – A second Pacific Railroad Act, which amended the original 1862 act, is passed by Congress, one that aims to stimulate investment in the enterprise by doubling the size of the land grants and improving the subsidies offered for every mile of track laid. The increased financial incentives for the construction of the transcontinental railroad, including doubling land grants and allowing railroads to issue their own bonds.
September 27 – Pro-Confederate bushwhackers led by William "Bloody Bill" Anderson capture and execute 24 unarmed Union soldiers at a rail depot in Centralia, Missouri
October 23 – Union General Samuel R. Curtis' Army of the Border decisively defeats Confederate General Sterling Price's Army of Missouri at the Battle of Westport, near Kansas City. The battle ends the last major Confederate offensive west of the Mississippi River. The largest engagement in the Trans-Mississippi Theater, with over 30,000 men involved, it is sometimes called the "Gettysburg of the West"
October 25 – In consecutive engagements only hours apart, Union cavalry under Alfred Pleasonton pursue and defeat Confederate forces under Sterling Price at Marais des Cygnes, Mine Creek, and Marmiton River as they retreat through Kansas and Missouri
October 31 – Nevada is admitted as the 36th U.S. state.
November 29 – Meeting with army officers at Fort Weld outside Denver, the Cheyenne chief, Black Kettle, agrees to lead his people back to their Sand Creek reservation in order to restore peace after Indian raids on ranches in the area. He is attacked there by a volunteer force led by John M. Chivington, the "Fighting Parson" of Glorietta Pass, which sweeps down on the Cheyenne encampment at dawn and massacres nearly 200 men, women and children. Later Congressional and military investigations condemn the slaughter;
1865 -::- January 7 - An alliance of more than 1,000 Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho warriors attack and plunder the town of Julesburg, Colorado, defeating the U.S. Army soldiers and civilians defending it. They proceed to burn stagecoach stations and destroy telegraph lines throughout the South Platte valley over the next few weeks.
January 8 - The Union Pacific Railroad begins moving westward, laying track at an average rate of one mile per day.
February - In California, Chinese laborers join the Central Pacific work gangs, providing the strength, organization and persistence needed to break through the mountains;
February 4 – 6 - Colorado War: The Battle of Mud Springs is fought in the Nebraska Territory.
February 8 – 9 - Colorado War: The Battle of Rush Creek is fought in the Nebraska Territory.
February 17 - Fort Buchanan is overrun and destroyed by Chiricahua warriors in the Arizona Territory
April 1 - The steamboat Bertrand sinks after snagging on a submerged log in the Missouri River north of Omaha, Nebraska.
April 12 - The Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, brings an end to the Civil War;
May 12 - 13 - The Battle of Palmito Ranch is fought near Brownsville, Texas. It is the final armed engagement of the American Civil War
June 23 - Stand Watie, a Cherokee cavalry commander in the Confederate Army, becomes the last Confederate general to surrender to Union forces, at Doaksville in the Indian Territory
July 21 - "Wild Bill" Hickok kills gambler Davis Tutt in a shootout in Springfield, Missouri. The confrontation is sensationalized in Harper's Magazine, making Hickok a household name. It is often considered the archetypal one-on-one quick-draw duel, which later becomes a popular image of the Old West.
November 18 - Mark Twain publishes "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," a tall tale set in a boisterous California mining camp which brings the Western experience into the mainstream of American literature;
-- A cholera epidemic struck many American cities.
-- Jesse Chisholm, a trader, cut the Chisholm Trail by carting a heavy load of buffalo hides from Oklahoma to Kansas.
-- Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving blazed the first cattle trail, and 2000 head of cattle were moved from Texas to New Mexico.
1866 -::- February 13 - Jesse and Frank James, veterans of Quantrill's Raiders, rob their first bank, the Clay County Savings Association, Liberty, Missouri, launching their legendary criminal career;
Spring - The period of the great cattle drives begins when Texas ranchers drive more than 260,000 head of cattle to assorted markets. Some travel east to Louisiana, where the animals are shipped to Cairo, Illinois and St. Louis; others travel west to Fort Sumner, New Mexico and Denver, inaugurating the Goodnight-Loving Trail. But the vast majority follow the Shawnee Trail north to Kansas City or Sedalia, Missouri.
June 15 - The U.S. Army selects a site for Fort Buford in the Dakota Territory, which is immediately and repeatedly attacked by Lakota Indians during the fort's construction.
November 3 - William Judd Fetterman arrived at Fort Phil Kearny, as the Indian attacks were peaking.
December 21 - Seven weeks later, a Lakota war party led by Chief Red Cloud attacks a wagon train bringing supplies to newly-constructed Fort Phil Kearny on the Powder River in northern Wyoming. The Lakota see the fort, situated to protect travel to Montana mining country along the Bozeman Trail, as a threat to their territory. When a patrol led by Captain William J. Fetterman rides out to drive off the war party, it is lured far from the fort and destroyed to the last man. Fetterman and 80 soldiers of the U.S. 2nd Cavalry and 18th Infantry regiments, and civilians were killed by Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors in a lopsided battle that was soon mythologized as the Fetterman Massacre. A fort built the next year, Fort Fetterman, is named in his honor.
-- General Philip H. Sheridan takes command of U.S. forces in the West, proposing to bring peace to the plains by exterminating the herds of buffalo that support the Indians' way of life: "Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians," he says;
-- Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving blaze the first cattle trail, driving a herd of 2,000 longhorns from Texas to New Mexico in what will become an annual tradition across the southern plains;
TSOC Cattle and Trade Company, was organized by Thomas Jensen Tims, Markus Turco Sorensen, Andrew O' Connor, and Jonathan Adams Claridge to form a monopoly on the cattle and merchant trade in the area and furthered plans to gain control over the eco
-- Jesse and Frank James, veterans of Quantrill's Raiders, launch their legendary criminal career with a bank robbery at Liberty, Missouri;
TSOC Cattle and Trade Company, was organized by Thomas Jensen Tims, Markus Turco Sorensen, Andrew O' Connor, and Jonathan Adams Claridge to form a monopoly on the cattle and merchant trade in the area and furthered plans to gain control over the economy of the Laramie District, including a monopoly on filling profitable contracts from the military at Forts Laramie, Fort Lumas, Camp Brown, and Fort Sanders;
1867 -::- March 1 - Nebraska is admitted as the 37th U.S. state.
March 30 - The United States purchases Alaska from the Russian Empire for 2 cents per acre, $7.2 million
April 20 - While traveling along the Yellowstone River to Fort C. F. Smith, trailblazer John Bozeman is murdered under mysterious circumstances
June 25 - Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio is issued the first patent for barbed wire fencing, an invention which revolutionizes cattle ranching on the open prairies of the West.
August - The first cattle drive from Texas up the Chisholm Trail arrived at the rail yards of Abilene, Kansas
August 1 - In the Hayfield Fight, a civilian haycutting crew and a small U.S. Army detachment from nearby Fort C. F. Smith, armed with new rapid-fire breech-loading rifles, manage to hold off an attack from several hundred Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota warriors.
August 2 - In the Wagon Box Fight, three miles from Fort C.F. Smith, Montana, near Fort Phil Kearny, pitting a determined stand of a small party of 31 U.S. Army soldiers and civilians, well-armed and encircled by a wall of wagon boxes, manages to hold off 700 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Red Cloud and Crazy Horse; the combined soldier/civilian force withstood six hours of attacks before relief finally arrived to disperse the warriors.
August 7 - Cheyenne Indians derail a westbound Union Pacific train on the unfinished transcontinental railroad near Plum Creek, Nebraska, killing three railroad workers, then burn and loot the boxcars
August 27 - Fort Ellis is established near Bozeman
October 18 - At a ceremony in Sitka, Alaska, Russian soldiers officially transfer Alaska to the U.S. Army on Castle Hill. It is organized on the same day into the Department of Alaska, to be administered by the Army.
October 21 - 28 - The United States and representatives of the Comanche, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho and other southern Plains tribes sign the Medicine Lodge Treaty, intended to remove Indians from the path of white settlement. The treaty marks the end of the era in which federal policymakers saw the Plains as "one big reservation" to be divided up among various tribes. Instead, the treaty establishes reservations for each tribe in the western part of present-day Oklahoma and requires them to give up their traditional lands elsewhere. In exchange, the government pledges to establish reservation schools and to provide resident farmers who will teach the Indians agriculture. This same principle of restricting the Plains tribes to reservations will help shape the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868. In both cases, the tribes' refusal to give up their free-ranging traditions and remain confined within the territory assigned to them leads to devastating warfare;
1868 -::- April 29 – Chief Red Cloud, representing several bands of Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho Indians, and General William Tecumseh Sherman for the United States, sign the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which brings an end to Red Cloud's War along the Bozeman Trail. Under terms of the treaty, the United States agrees to abandon its forts and military outposts along the Bozeman Trail, the indefinite closure of the Powder River Country and western South Dakota to white settlement, and grant enormous parts of the Wyoming, Montana and Dakota Territories, including the Black Hills area, to the Lakota people as their exclusive territory.
July 25 – Congress organizes the Wyoming Territory;
September 17 - 19 – U.S. cavalry under George A. Forsyth are surrounded and besieged by hundreds of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota on a small sandbar in the Arikaree River, but their superior armaments hold the position until scouts can escape to Fort Wallace, more than 70 miles to the east, to summon reinforcements. Famed Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose is killed during the battle.
November 27 – General Philip Sheridan sends Colonel George Armstrong Custer against the Cheyenne, with a plan to attack them during the winter when they are most vulnerable. Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment troops locate a winter encampment of Southern Cheyenne Indians on the Washita River in present-day Oklahoma. By a cruel coincidence, the village is home to Black Kettle and his people, the victims of the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864. In the Battle of Washita River, Custer's cavalry attacks at dawn, killing more than 100 men, women and children, including Black Kettle;
TSOC Cattle and Trade Companychanged its name to the Tims, Sorensen, and Claridge (TSC) Trading Company;
-- The Wyoming Tradesmen Association (WTA) derived from valiant efforts of Jon Claridge and his associates of the TSC Trading Company, an American cattle and trade organization started among Wyoming cattle ranchers and businessmen to standardize and organize the cattle and trade industry but quickly grew into a political force that is often referred to as the "de facto territorial government" of Wyoming toward statehood, and wields great influence throughout the western states and territories;
-- The Senate approves a treaty permitting unrestricted immigration from China;
-- The Chinese rail-builders of the Central Pacific finally break out of the High Sierras;
-- The Navajo Indian Reservation, the largest reservation in the country covering over 27,000 square miles, was established in northeast Arizona, overlapping the four corners into Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico.
-- Under the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, the Kiowa were moved to the Oklahoma reservation.
-- Under the Second Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Crow Indians, also known as the Apsáalooke, were moved to a Montana reservation.
1869 -::- January 8 – Fort Sill is established by General Philip H. Sheridan in the Indian Territory, near present-day Lawton, Oklahoma
May 10 - Leland Stanford drives the Golden Spike to join the rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads at a special ceremony in Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, completing the First transcontinental railroad
May 24 - John Wesley Powell, a veteran of the Civil War who lost part of his right arm at Shiloh and a self-taught expert on mountain geology, and nine others embark a scientific expedition that charts more than 930 mi (1,500 km) of the Green River and Colorado River through the canyon country of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. Powell and his crew become the first recorded white men to travel the length of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado winning national acclaim and setting the stage for government funded scientific study of the West; They reach the mouth of the Virgin River in present-day Nevada on August 30.
July 4 - The world's first documented competitive rodeo is held in the town of Deer Trail in the Colorado Territory.
July 11 - The Battle of Summit Springs is fought in the Colorado Territory between elements of the U.S. Army under Eugene A. Carr and a band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers led by Chief Tall Bull.
August 23 - Wild Bill Hickok served as the sheriff of Hays City (Ellis County) and after being elected in a special election becomes city marshal in Hays, Kansas;
December 10 - Wyoming becomes the first U.S. territory to grant women the right to vote. [/columns -
Eighteen Seventies
1870 -::- January - Shortly after leaving the post of sheriff of Ellis County, Kansas, "Wild Bill" Hickok travels to Missouri and eventually resumes his duties as a U.S. Marshal.
January 23 - More than 200 men, women, and children belonging to a friendly band of Piegan Blackfeet Indians are mistakenly attacked and massacred by a U.S. Army command on the Marias River in the Montana Territory
March 30 -Texas is readmitted to the Union following the Civil War
Spring - With the emergence of Abilene, Kansas as a major stopover for cattle ranchers, the town trustees attempt to curb the violence brought by the beginning of the cattle season by banning guns within town limits. This proves extremely unpopular and unenforceable, as Texas cowboys make a habit of shooting up ordinance posters and tear down the city's first jailhouse; violence continues in the city until the appointment of Tom "Bear River" Smith as city marshal on June 4
June 4 - Thomas James Smith, also known as Tom "Bear River" Smith, (June 12, 1830 – November 2, 1870) is appointed as city marshal of Abilene, Kansas. Briefly the marshal of cattle town Abilene, Kansas until he was killed on November 2 while serving an arrest warrant near the town and nearly decapitated in the line of duty.
July 7 - Circle Bar M massacre left six dead (4 men suspected to be ranch hands, a woman and her daughter), the bunkhouse and barn ablaze as the desperadoes in yellow sashes rode off with about 35 head of cattle;
July 17 -"Wild Bill" Hickok is involved in a shootout with several members of the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment in Hays City after killing one trooper and wounding another
September 6 - Louisa Ann Swain, a 70-year-old woman, became the first woman in America to vote in a public election at Laramie, Wyoming.
-- John K. "King" Fisher is hired by settlers of the Pendencia River country in Dimmit County, Texas to protect their livestock and other property. It is during this time that Fisher becomes known as a skilled gunfighter
-- Bret Harte publishes The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches, a collection of stories based on his years as a San Francisco journalist, which offers a sentimental and humorous view of "uncouth" frontier characters, establishing a set of stereotypes that will remain an important part of the myth of the American West;
-- William "Hurricane Bill" Martin, a notorious outlaw in Kansas, begins rustling cattle southeast of Abilene before he and his gang are driven off by a posse from Marion.
-- Settling in the New Mexico Territory, gunfighter Robert Clay Allison purchases a ranch in Colfax County. According to local newspapers, Allison is reported to have killed as many as fifteen men in gunfights during this time
-- Railroad companies begin massive advertising campaigns to attract settlers to their land grants in the West, sending agents to rural areas in the eastern states and throughout Europe to distribute handbills, posters and pamphlets that tout the rich soil and favorable climate of the region. But the higher costs of railroad land compared to public lands, and the fact that railroads pay no taxes on their lands, soon stirs charges of extortion, leading to state laws controlling railroad rates and land sale practices by the decade's end;
-- With the growing railroad industry and cattle boom, buffalo hunters begin moving onto the Great Plains, brought there by the expanding railroads and the growing market for hides and meat back east.. In less than ten years, the buffalo population is dramatically reduced, and the animal remains an endangered species for much of the next century.
-- The Utah Territorial Assembly, supported by Brigham Young, grants women the right to vote. Over the next several decades, this provides Mormons with an added margin of political power
-- A California court rules in White vs. Flood that a black child may not attend a white school, setting the legal precedent for school segregation;
-- The Union Pacific in Wyoming hires Chinese laborers for $32.50 a month rather than pay $52.00 a month to whites. From incidents like this one, white laborers across the West develop the opinion that Chinese immigrants are competing unfairly for jobs, a feeling that will lead to violent racial conflict and labor unrest in years to come;
-- The Osage Indians were moved to a reservation in northeast Oklahoma.
-- The Ghost Dance movement appeared among the Paiute on reservations in Nevada. Participants believed in the imminent return of the dead and the buffalo, the white man’s disappearance, and the land’s return to the natives. This led to the Paiute Massacre of 1870, in which over half of the tribe was killed by settlers paranoid about the results.
-- Major General George Crook, arguably the Army’s best Indian fighter and one of the few government officials who treated all natives with respectful understanding … drove most of the Arizona Apache onto reservations. However, Warfare with the Apache persisted, led by Chief Geronimo.
1871 -::- January 1 - After a long illness, U.S. Army Captain John Barry is forced into retirement. While stationed at Fort Ord, Barry attempts to improve relations between the United States and the Apaches, as well as encourages the enlistment of scouts to combat renegade Apaches.
February 16 - John Younger kills Captain S.W. Nichols in a gunfight in Dallas, Texas
February 23 - While heading an Apache-hunting force near present-day Clifton, Arizona, John M. Bullard is shot and killed when he approaches a wounded Apache warrior.
February 28 - "Handsome Jack" John Ledford, an outlaw-turned-hotel-owner involved in counterfeiting and horse theft in Kansas and the Indian Territory, is killed in a shootout with a group of U.S. Army soldiers led by scout Lee Stewart and U.S. Marshal Jack Bridges, who claimed to have a warrant for his arrest
March 16 - Death of Navajo chieftain Barboncito (Hastin Daagii)
April 15 - "Wild Bill" Hickok succeeds Tom "Bear River" Smith as city marshal of Abilene, Kansas and remains in the position until December 13
April 28 - In what becomes known as the Camp Grant Massacre, More than 100 Apache -- most of them women and children -- are murdered outside Camp Grant, Arizona, where they had been given asylum, when members of the Tucson Committee of Public Safety arrive with a force of Mexicans and Papago Indians, the Apache’s long-time enemies, led by the committee members of several Tucson businessmen, including D.A. Bennett and Sam Hughes. Bennett and several others are indicted in December, though all are acquitted; claiming they acted in retaliation for raids by various Apache bands at distant points across the region… but public opinion, particularly in the East, links the event to the recently investigated Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 as further evidence of Westerners' deep-seated hatred for Indians.
June 14 - Thomas Carson, reportedly a nephew of Kit Carson, is appointed to the Abilene police force under City Marshal "Wild Bill" Hickok. After an incident with gunfighter John Wesley Hardin over Hardin's insistence on wearing his gun in public, Carson is hired briefly as deputy in Newton, Kansas before returning to Abilene in November. Carson and Deputy John W. "Brocky Jack" Norton are fired from the police force on November 27 after assaulting a bartender.0
June 30 - Shortly after robbing a nearby bank, Jesse James addresses a crowd at a political rally in Corydon, Iowa
October 5 - Professional gambler Phil Coe is involved in a shootout with Abilene City Marshal "Wild Bill" Hickok after Hickok attempts to censor a painting of a bull with abnormally large genitals in Coe's saloon. Deputy Mike Williams is killed when Hickok accidentally shoots him, and Coe dies from his wounds four days later
-- Following the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad across the border of the Colorado Territory, the use of the Santa Fe Trail begins to decline, although Dodge City remains a major cattle town for the next decade. The Santa Fe Railroad also completes a rail line at Wichita, Kansas, causing a major population boom in the town over the next several years.
-- Congress approves the Indian Appropriations Act, which ends the practice of treating Indian tribes as sovereign nations by directing that all Indians be treated as individuals and legally designated "wards" of the federal government. The act is justified as a way to avoid further misunderstandings in treaty negotiations, where whites have too often wrongly assumed that a tribal chief is also that tribe's chief of state. In effect, however, the act is another step toward dismantling the tribal structure of Native American life;
-- Federal judge James B. McKean, seeking to break the alliance between church and state in Utah, orders the arrest of Brigham Young and other Mormon leaders on charges of polygamy. Federal prosecutors also charge John D. Lee and others with murder for the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857;
-- A quarrel over a woman between two Chinese men in Los Angeles escalates into a city-wide anti-Chinese riot, ending in the murder of at least 23 of the city's 200 Chinese residents;
-- Cochise, the Apache chief who led a decade-long guerilla war against whites in Arizona, surrenders to General George Crook but escapes back to his mountain stronghold rather than let his people be sent to a New Mexico reservation. General Otis Howard finally makes peace with Cochise the next year, agreeing to establish an Apache reservation in Arizona;
1872 -::- January 18 - “Buffalo Bill” Cody, General Sheridan, General Custer, Chief Spotted Tail, Chief Two Lance, and Grand Duke Alexis go on a buffalo hunt near North Platte, Nebraska.
March 1 - Yellowstone is designated America's first national park by President Ulysses S. Grant
April 10 - Arbor Day is celebrated for the first time in near-treeless Nebraska;
June - Fort McKeen, later renamed Fort Abraham Lincoln, is built in the Dakota Territory
November 29 - The Battle of Lost River results when the U.S. 1st Cavalry Regiment tries to force a band of Modoc Indians under Captain Jack to return to the Klamath Reservation in southern Oregon. In the subsequent Modoc War, a party of 53 Modoc warriors entrenched in the Lava Beds of northern California manages to hold off hundreds of U.S. soldiers for more than five months.
December 28 - U.S. Army cavalry under George Crook begin a campaign into Arizona's Tonto Basin by defeating the occupants of a Yavapai stronghold at the Battle of Salt River Canyon, part of the Yavapai War
-- The Colt Single Action Army revolver is first manufactured. It later becomes known as "The Gun That Won the West"
-- Mark Twain publishes Roughing It, a humorous account of his adventures as a budding journalist in the West, which adds a self-conscious depth to the entertaining Western myth pioneered by Twain's one-time mentor, Bret Harte;
-- The Yellowstone Act sets aside more than 2 million acres in northwest Wyoming as a public "pleasuring-ground" for the "preservation... of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities or wonders... and their retention in their natural condition." It marks the first time any national government has set aside public lands to preserve their natural beauties and sets a precedent later followed in countries around the world. Much of the impetus for establishing the park can be traced to William H. Jackson's photographs of its natural wonders, taken when he traveled there with the Hayden expedition of 1871;
-- "Buffalo Bill" Cody is awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service as a scout in General Philip Sheridan's four-year campaign against the Cheyenne. The same year Cody begins his theatrical career, appearing as "Buffalo Bill" in Ned Buntline's The Scouts of the Plains;
-- The first formal rodeo was held in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
-- The Sioux War began, dispersing the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. General George Custer was continually outwitted by the native leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, but it was draining on their tribes. Native attacks became less frequent as Sitting Bull and others retreated into Canada.
-- The Modoc War raged in southern Oregon and northern California. The conflict, also known as the Lava Beds War, was the last of the Indian Wars in these two states.
-- The Big Bonanza, the Comstock’s richest ore body, was discovered in Nevada.
-- Ellsworth succeeded Abilene as the northern stopping point on the Old Texas cattle trail.
1873 -::- March 3 - Designed to encourage the cultivation of timber on the treeless Great Plains, the Timber Culture Act is signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant. A follow-up to the Homestead Act of 1862, it permits homesteaders to claim 160 acres of public land on which they have planted and maintained at least 40 acres of timber for a minimum of 10 years.
March 27 - A combined force of U.S. Army soldiers and Apache Scouts wins another major victory over Yavapai and Tonto Apache warriors at the Battle of Turret Peak in central Arizona
April 1 - The Coinage Act of 1873 takes effect, prohibiting the minting of silver bullion into legal tender and establishing a federal gold standard by default. The controversial law provokes a debate about national monetary policy that lasts the rest of the century, with proponents of "free silver" and bimetallism, including many silver-mining interests in the West, arguing for the unlimited coinage of silver into money.
July 21 - The James–Younger Gang commits the first train robbery in the history of the West by derailing a locomotive of the Rock Island Line west of Adair, Iowa and stealing $3,000 from the express safe and passengers on board
December - "My Western Home", a poem by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, is first published in an issue of the Smith County Pioneer. It is set to music by Daniel E. Kelley and evolves into the classic western folk song "Home on the Range", which is later adopted as the state song of Kansas
December 26 - Californio bandido Tiburcio Vásquez and his gang loot the town of Kingston in Fresno County, California
-- The railroad arrived in South Dakota.
-- Cable cars were introduced in San Francisco, California.
-- Although federal authorities estimated hunters were killing buffalo at a rate of three million per year, President Grant vetoed a law protecting the herd from extermination.
-- The Modoc Indian War ended in California.
-- The double-action revolver was developed.
-- The James Gang pulls its first train robbery at Adair, Iowa.
-- Outlaws Ceberiano and Reymundo Aguilar are killed during the Harrold War of Lincoln County, New Mexico
1874 -::- March 17 - John Younger is killed when he and his brother Jim assault two undercover Pinkerton detectives and a local sheriff in St. Clair County, Missouri
June 8 - George Armstrong Custer announces the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of Dakota, setting off a stampede of fortune-hunters into this most sacred part of Lakota territory. Although the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty requires the government to protect Lakota lands from white intruders, federal authorities work instead to protect the miners already crowding along the path Custer blazed for them, which they call "Freedom's Trail" and the Lakota call "Thieves’ Road."
June 27 - While occupying an old trading post in the Texas panhandle, 28 bison hunters including 21-year-old Bat Masterson are besieged by 700 Comanche warriors at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls.
July - August - An expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer embarks from Fort Abraham Lincoln to explore the previously uncharted Black Hills of present-day South Dakota. The expedition discovers placer gold, prompting a gold rush which draws thousands of settlers to the region over the next few years and thereby antagonizes the native Sioux inhabitants
September 28 - The 4th U.S. Cavalry under Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie routs a large camp of Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa Indians taking refuge in Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle
November 24 - Joseph Glidden patents a type of barbed wire, he calls "The Winner", is an inexpensive, durable, and effective fencing material, which becomes one of the most popular types in the country. His design is modified from a version patented by Henry B. Rose that was displayed at a county fair in Glidden's hometown of DeKalb, Illinois. Destroying the buffalo will open the plains to more efficient agriculture and ranching.
December 8 - The James–Younger Gang robs a train on the Kansas Pacific Railroad near Muncie, Kansas, stealing $30,000
-- Fort Sill was established in southwestern Oklahoma as a base of operations of the Indian Wars.
-- Mennonite immigrants from Russia arrive in Kansas with drought-resistant "Turkey Red" wheat, which will help turn the one-time "Great American Desert" into the nation's breadbasket;
-- William H. Jackson discovers and photographs the centuries-old Anasazi cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado;
1875 -::- January 26 - a posse representing the Pinkerton Detective Agency fire-bomb the James family farm in Kearney, Missouri, in an unsuccessful attempt to kill the notorious outlaws, Frank and Jesse. The incendiary device killed James' 9-year-old half-brother, Archie Peyton Samuel, and badly wounded his mother. The incident stirs widespread sympathy for the James Gang, who are seen as populist enemies of the banks and railroads who "rob" the common man;
March 17 - The city of Fargo is incorporated in the Dakota Territory
June 23 - Jermin Aguirre is killed near the San Augin Ranch in the New Mexico Territory
November 19 - 21 - The Las Cuevas War is fought when Texas Rangers commanded by Leander McNelly engage Mexican militia in Tamaulipas in an attempt to return stolen cattle to U.S. territory
Late 1875 – Federal authorities order the Lakota chiefs to report to their reservations by January 31, 1876. The ultimatum was issued by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in late 1875, essentially stating that any Lakota not on a reservation by that date would be considered hostile. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and others defiant of the American government refuse;
November – General Philip Sheridan orders General George Crook, General Alfred Terry and Colonel John Gibbon to drive Sitting Bull and the other chiefs onto the reservation through a combined assault.
-- After being wounded in the hip during a gunfight in Sweetwater, Texas, Bat Masterson agrees to become assistant city marshal of Dodge City, Kansas
-- “Hanging Judge” Isaac Parker arrived in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He shortly began his 21-year stint as Judge, handing out 88 death sentences, with 79 hanged.
-- Wyatt Earp began his career as a law officer in Wichita, Kansas.
-- The U.S. Government ordered all Indians in the Black Hills and Wyoming to report to reservations or face military action.
-- Prospectors find lead carbonate ores, rich in silver, near present-day Leadville, Colorado.
-- Deadwood, soon to be one of the wildest towns in the West, springs into existence when Black Hills miners find gold on Deadwood Creek. Within a year, the legendary gunfighter "Wild Bill" Hickock will be murdered here while holding aces and eights -- the dead man's hand -- in a game of poker;
-- THE LAKOTA WAR: A Senate commission meeting with Red Cloud and other Lakota chiefs to negotiate legal access for the miners rushing to the Black Hills offers to buy the region for $6 million. But the Lakota refuse to alter the terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, and declare they will protect their lands from intruders if the government won't;
1876 -::- January 10 - “Texas Joe” Horner, Tom Wagman, and Bill Redding hold up the Martin and Company Bank in Comanche, Texas. As they fled the bank, one shouted: “Charge this to the James boys!”
March 17 - When Sioux leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse refuse to comply with the United States government's order to leave the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory, an expeditionary force commanded by General George Crook directs Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds to attack a Cheyenne encampment at the Battle of Powder River, thereby beginning the Great Sioux War. The Battle of the Powder River occurred in southeastern Montana. This battle between Colonel Joseph J. Reynolds’ troops and the combined forces of the Cheyenne and Oglala Sioux was a loss for the U.S. Army and contributed to the defeats of General Crook at the Rosebud and Custer at Little Bighorn because it caused the Indians to form a massive nation for self-preservation.
June 17 - Crazy Horse and 500 warriors surprise General Crook's troops on the Rosebud River, forcing them to retreat. The Battle of the Rosebud occurred between the U.S. Army and the Lakota and Cheyenne Indians in Montana Territory. After six hours and many lead shots, the Indians called off the fight after the braves had fought Crook’s men to a standstill. The defeat convinces Crook to withdraw from his planned offensive and await reinforcements.
June 25 - George Armstrong Custer, part of General Terry's force, discovers Sitting Bull's encampment on the Little Bighorn River. Terry had ordered Custer to drive the enemy down the Little Bighorn toward Gibbon's forces, who were waiting at its mouth, but when he charges the village Custer discovers that he is outnumbered four-to-one. Hundreds of Lakota warriors overwhelm his troops, killing them to the last man, in a battle later called Custer's Last Stand. News of the massacre shocks the nation, and Sheridan floods the region with troops who methodically hunt down the Lakota and force them to surrender. Sitting Bull, however, eludes capture by leading his band to safety in Canada;
June 26 - While leading an attack into a Sioux village in the Montana Territory, the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer is ambushed and massacred by over 2,000 Lakota and Cheyenne warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse at the Battle of the Little Bighorn
August 1 - Colorado is admitted as the 38th U.S. state.
August 2 - "Wild Bill" Hickok is shot and killed (murdered) by Jack McCall during a poker game in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, holding Aces and Eights, the dead man’s hand, in a game of poker.
September 7 - A bloody battle ensues in Northfield, Minnesota when the James Younger gang tries to rob the First National Bank. Two members died; Cole Younger was shot 11 times but survived. Frank and Jesse James, and four others escaped. Several members of the James–Younger Gang, including Cole Younger, are captured after the failed robbery of the First National Bank leads to a gunfight with bank employees and local residents in Northfield, Minnesota
September 9 - 10 - In the first U.S. Army victory since the disaster at the Little Bighorn, a punitive expedition led by George Crook destroys an Oglala Lakota village led by Chief American Horse at the Battle of Slim Buttes in present-day South Dakota
September 30 - Twenty-three-year-old David ‘Davy’ Crockett, related to the famous Crockett of the Alamo, but a “bad guy” rather than a “good guy” was gunned down by Sheriff Rinehart and two others in the streets of Cimarron, New Mexico.
-- Bat Masterson became a deputy marshal of Dodge City, Kansas, serving alongside his brother Jim.
1877 -::- March 23 -- John D. Lee is brought to trial for the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, but Mormon loyalty to one of their own leads to a hung jury. The national outcry at this result persuades Mormon leaders to withdraw their support for Lee, and in a second trial he is convicted by an all-Mormon jury. John D. Lee is executed by firing squad at the site of the massacre, after denouncing Brigham Young for abandoning him. His last words are for his executioners: "Center my heart, boys. Don't mangle my body." ;
April -- The Homestake lode is discovered in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory. The claim is later sold to George Hearst, who expands and develops it into the largest and most productive gold mine in North America.
May 5 -- Crazy Horse finally surrenders to General George Crook at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, having received assurances that he and his followers will be permitted to settle in the Powder River country of Montana. Defiant even in defeat, Crazy Horse arrives with a band of 800 warriors, all brandishing weapons and chanting songs of war.
June 17 -- Anticipating retaliation for recent crimes against white settlers and reluctant to move to a reservation, about 600 Nez Perce Indians led by Chief Joseph, Ollokot, and White Bird begin a long retreat from western Idaho with the U.S. Army in pursuit. They defeat their pursuers at the Battle of White Bird Canyon, and the Nez Perce War begins.
June 25 -- Fort Missoula is established in the Montana Territory.
August 9-10 -- The Battle of the Big Hole is fought in the Montana Territory between the Nez Perce and U.S. soldiers under Col. John Gibbon.
August 17 -- At 17 years old, Henry McCarty, later known as "Billy the Kid", shoots his first man, Frank "Windy" Cahill, after Cahill wrestles him to the ground at a saloon near Fort Grant, Arizona. Cahill dies the following day.
August 29 --, Brigham Young, the Mormon leader who built a prosperous community and a vigorous church in a seeming wasteland, dies at age 76;
September 5 -- By late summer, four months after his surrender, there are rumors that Oglala war leader, Crazy Horse, is planning a return to battle, and on September 5 he is arrested and brought back to Fort Robinson, where, when he resists being jailed, he is held by an Indian guard and is fatally stabbed with a bayonet by a U.S. Army soldier while allegedly resisting imprisonment at Fort Robinson;
September 18 -- A gang led by Sam Bass robs a Union Pacific train of more than $60,000 while it is stopped at a remote water station near present-day Big Springs, Nebraska .
September 21 -- Prospector Ed Schieffelin files his first mining claim after discovering silver ore on a high plateau between the San Pedro River and the Dragoon Mountains in southeastern Arizona Territory. He names his stake "Tombstone".
October 5 -- Cornered at the Battle of Bear Paw, just 40 miles south of the Canadian border in the Montana Territory, Chief Joseph, leader of the Nez Percé, and his dwindling band of Nez Perce surrenders to General Oliver Howard and Nelson A. Miles, bringing to an end his four-month-long circuitous retreat from the Wallowa Valley in eastern Oregon toward Sitting Bull’s encampment in Canada -- one of the most remarkable military feats of the Indian Wars. Eluding or defeating army troops at every turn, Joseph and a band of fewer than 200 warriors bring nearly 500 women and children over 1,500 miles of mountainous terrain to within forty miles of the border before they are finally stopped by a force of 500 troopers led by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. Reduced by this time to just 87 men, Joseph still holds out for five days in a pitiless snowstorm, and then surrenders only because his people have no food or blankets and will soon die of cold and starvation. "I am tired of fighting," he declares as he holds out his rifle to General Howard. "I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." ;
December 17 -- In the San Elizario Salt War, years of legal conflict over the application of individual mineral rights to traditionally community-held salt lakes near the Guadalupe Mountains reach a climax when a detachment of Texas Rangers surrenders to a popular army of Tejano citizens following a four-day siege in the town of San Elizario, Texas. More than a dozen people are killed in the exchange.
-- The United States violated its treaty with the Dakota Sioux by seizing the Black Hills with Congress voting to repeal the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and take back the Black Hills, along with 40 million more acres of Lakota land;
-- With the threat of Indian attack removed, mining camps and boom towns -- French Creek, Whitewood Gulch, Black Tail Gulch -- crowd the Black Hills;
-- John Wesley Hardin, a Texas gunfighter who claims to have killed more than 40 men, is sentenced to 25 years in the Texas State Prison for the murder of a deputy sheriff. "I take no sass but sarsaparilla," he once said, explaining his deadly disposition;
-- Congress passes the Desert Land Act, which permits settlers to purchase up to 640 acres of public land at 25¢ per acre in areas where the arid climate requires large-scale farming, provided they irrigate the land;
-- The last Federal troops withdraw from the South, bringing the Reconstruction era to an end;
Bat Masterson was the Sheriff of Dodge City, Kansas.
1878 -::- January 27 - Dave Rudabaugh, Mike Roarke, Dan Dement, and three other masked men attempt to rob the Santa Fe train station near Kinsley, Kansas. One man was killed. Rudabaugh is captured the next day by Bat Masterson and a posse including John Joshua Webb.
February 18
-- New Mexico rancher John Tunstall is killed by a posse led by Lincoln County Sheriff William J. Brady, sent to seize attached property after Tunstall fails to pay a debt to rival cattlemen, beginning the Lincoln County War.
-- The town of Leadville is incorporated in Colorado.
March – Jim and John were involved in a shoot-out near Roscoe, Missouri, with Pinkerton Agents. When the smoke cleared, John Younger, St. Clair County Deputy Edwin Daniels, and Pinkerton Agent Louis J. Lull were killed, but Jim managed to escape.
June 18 - Nick Worthington, a well-known outlaw throughout New Mexico and Colorado, is killed by residents of Cimarron, New Mexico after killing several men and stealing horses.
July 15 - 19 - The Battle of Lincoln takes place over five days in Lincoln, New Mexico. Alexander McSween, former partner of John Tunstall, is shot and killed on July 19, along with gunman Francisco Zamora. Billy the Kid made a name for himself as a killer in the Lincoln County War in New Mexico.
August 31 - Fort Meade is established in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory to protect against the illegal encroachment of white settlers onto reservation lands.
November 27 - Homesteaders Ami Ketchum and Luther Mitchell shot and killed cattleman Bob Olive in Nebraska. Olive’s brother led a vigilante group that hung Mitchell and Ketchum and burned their bodies. After that, Nebraska became known as the “Man Burner State.”
-- With racial discrimination on the rise in the post-Reconstruction South, an estimated 40,000 African Americans begin to migrate from the former slave states into Kansas. Many of these so-called Exodusters answer the call of Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, a land speculator with a vision of establishing independent black communities across the state;
-- The Bannock Indian War took place in Oregon.
1879 -::- January 13 - Captain Marcus Reno, the highest-ranking officer to have survived the Battle of the Little Bighorn, is brought before a general court-martial for cowardice. Responding to charges of cowardice and drunkenness at the Little Bighorn, Reno demanded and was granted a court of inquiry. The court convened in Chicago and called as witnesses most of the surviving officers who had been in the fight.
February 18 - Outlaw Jesse Evans allegedly holds Billy the Kid and Tom O'Folliard at gunpoint as he murders attorney Huston Chapman in Lincoln, New Mexico.
February 21 - After 26 days of testimony, Judge Advocate General W. M. Dunn submitted his opinion and recommendations to the Secretary of War George W. McCrary on February 21, 1879. He concluded, "I concur with the court in its exoneration of Major Reno from the charges of cowardice which have been brought against him." He added, "The suspicion or accusation that Gen. Custer owed his death and the destruction of his command to the failure of Major Reno, through incompetency or cowardice, to go to his relief, is considered as set to rest...."
March 17 - New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace meets with Billy the Kid in Lincoln, promising him amnesty for his previous crimes in exchange for his testimony regarding Chapman's murder. The Kid is taken into custody on March 21 and later testifies as agreed, but is not released from jail.
March 19 - Acting family patriarch Maurice Barrymore and fellow thespian Ben Porter, who had been dining in the White House Saloon in Marshall, Texas, after a performance, were shot following a confrontation with notorious gunfighter and bully, Jim Currie. Porter died. The two had won some money off Currie earlier in the night in a card game and a drunken Currie insulted their actress companion Ellen Cummins and goaded them into a fight. Despite both men being unarmed, Currie, whose brother was the influential Shreveport Mayor, was found not guilty. Barrymore vowed to never return to Texas.
April 5 - Gambler Frank Loving kills Levi Richardson in a gunfight at the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City, Kansas
June 17 - Concluding that Governor Wallace has deceived him, Billy the Kid escapes from jail in Lincoln, New Mexico.
September 26 - A fire devastates Deadwood, South Dakota, destroying most of the town's original buildings. Sawmill owner John Hunter supplied enough lumber to rebuild nearly all Main and Sherman Streets.
September 29 - In the White River War, Nathan Meeker and ten employees of the White River Indian Agency in western Colorado are massacred by Ute Indians when Meeker wires for military assistance in suppressing a perceived uprising. The Utes besiege a U.S. Army detachment in the Battle of Milk Creek until it is relieved by troops under Col. Wesley Merritt on October 5
-- Ike and Billy Clanton enlist William "Curly Bill" Brocius and Johnny Ringo as they begin cattle rustling in the New Mexico and Arizona Territories.
-- The Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of anti-polygamy laws, denying Mormon arguments that plural marriage is protected under the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom and giving federal authorities the weapon they have hoped for in their efforts to break the alliance between church and state in Utah;
-- At the urging of John Wesley Powell and others, Congress creates the United States Geological Survey to coordinate the many independent survey projects it has funded since army surveyors first charted potential routes for a transcontinental railroad in the 1850s. Under Powell's direction beginning in 1881, the USGS expands its focus beyond mineral resources and geological formations to include study of the potential for irrigating the West's arid lands and the selection of suitable sites for dams and reservoirs. This pioneering work eventually bears fruit with passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act in 1902;
-- To complete its consolidation of federally-funded scientific exploration in the West, Congress creates the United States Bureau of Ethnology to coordinate study of the region's native peoples and complete a record of their cultures before they vanish under the pressure of expanding white settlement. Directed by John Wesley Powell, the Bureau of Ethnology launches an ambitious program to document the culture and society of Native Americans, sending one of its first field teams to Zuni Pueblo, where ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing anticipates the methods of 20th century anthropology by becoming a member of the Zuni community.
-- The first students, a group of 84 Lakota children, arrive at the newly established United States Indian Training and Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a boarding school founded by former Indian-fighter Captain Richard Henry Pratt to remove young Indians from their native culture and refashion them as members of mainstream American society. Over the next two decades, twenty-four more schools on the Carlisle model will be established outside the reservations, along with 81 boarding schools and nearly 150 day schools on the Indians’ own land;
-- Wyatt Earp was a deputy U.S. Marshal for the Arizona Territory.
-- Dull Knife escapes from Fort Robinson, Nebraska.
-- The Meeker Massacre occurs at the White River Ute Reservation in Colorado. -
Eighteen Eighties
1880 -::- March 2 - James Allen kills James Moorehead after ordering eggs in a tavern in Las Vegas, New Mexico and, after escaping from prison for Moorehead's murder, is killed by a posse.
April 15 -The first widely popular incarnation of the Farmers' Alliance, an agrarian reform movement, is founded in Chicago by George Milton through his periodical Western Rural and quickly builds a membership across the Midwest and Plains.
May 1 -The Tombstone Epitaph prints its first issue in Tombstone, Arizona. It remains the oldest continuously published newspaper in the state
May 11 - A dispute over land titles between settlers of California's San Joaquin Valley and the Southern Pacific Railroad leaves seven people dead in what is later called the Mussel Slough Tragedy.
October 30 - Marshal Fred White dies in Tombstone, Arizona after being accidentally shot in the groin two days earlier, attempting to disarm 'Curly' Bill Brocius.
December 19 - Tom O'Folliard, best friend of Billy the Kid, is shot and killed by members of Pat Garrett's posse in Fort Sumner, New Mexico
December 23 - Charlie Bowdre, a member of Billy the Kid's gang, is shot and killed by members of Pat Garrett's posse at Stinking Springs, New Mexico.
December 4 - Abran Baca kills A.M. Conklin in Socorro, New Mexico with several other outlaws, though he is acquitted the following year.
-- George Alford is sentenced to five years imprisonment for murdering a sheriff in Fort Worth, Texas.
-- The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad reached Santa Fe, marking the death of the Santa Fe Trail.
-- Apache leader Victorio was slain in Mexico.
-- Hide hunters have shot the buffalo to near extinction.
1881 -::- February 5 - The city of Phoenix is incorporated in the Arizona Territory.
April 14 - A gunfight involving El Paso, Texas Marshal Dallas Stoudenmire results in what witnesses recall as "four dead in five seconds".
July 14 - Legendary outlaw Billy the Kid, charged with more than 21 murders in a brief lifetime of crime, was finally brought to justice by Sheriff Pat Garrett, who trailed the Kid for more than six months before killing him with a single shot at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He is buried the next day between his friends Tom O'Folliard and Charlie Bowdre in the town's old military cemetery.
August 5 - Crow Dog, a Lakota subchief on the Great Sioux Reservation, shoots and kills Chief Spotted Tail. Though the matter is settled by tribal custom, Crow Dog is sentenced to death under the laws of the Dakota Territory, only to be freed by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.
October 26 - The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place in the street behind a saloon in Tombstone, Arizona, pitting the Earps and Doc Holliday against Ike and Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and Billy Claiborne. Billy Clanton and the McLaurys are killed, and Virgil and Morgan Earp, along with Holliday, are wounded.
December 13 - San Jose, California becomes the first city west of the Rocky Mountains with civic electric lighting when a 237-foot-tall moonlight tower is illuminated downtown.
-- Sitting Bull surrendered
-- Helen Hunt Jackson published A Century of Dishonor, the first detailed examination of the federal government’s treatment of Native Americans in the West. Her findings shocked the nation with proof that empty promises, broken treaties, and brutality helped pave the way for white pioneers.
-- Late summer brought the last big cattle drive to Dodge City, Kansas. With livestock plentiful on the plains, the long trek up the Western Trail was no longer profitable, and most states began to prohibit driving out-of-state cattle across their borders. In the 15 years since Texas cowboys first hit the trail, as many as two million longhorns were driven to market in Dodge City, Kansas.
1882 -::- March 18 - Morgan Earp is shot and killed while playing billiards in Tombstone, Arizona. His assassination is linked to his involvement in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
March 20 – April 15 – The Earp Vendetta Ride, the federal posse searched southeast Cochise County, Arizona Territory for the men they believed were responsible for the attacks on Virgil and Morgan.
March 23 - In retaliation for the attacks on his brothers Virgil and Morgan, Wyatt Earp shoots and kills Frank Stilwell in a railyard in Tucson, Arizona Territory.
March 24 - Outlaw William "Curly Bill" Brocius is shot and killed by Wyatt Earp at Iron Springs in southeastern Arizona
April 3 - Jesse James is shot in the back of the head by Robert Ford, a new recruit to his gang, at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri.
April 15 - The Earps and some of their associates rode out of Arizona Territory, headed for New Mexico Territory.
April 16 - John Allen mortally wounds Frank Loving during a shootout in Trinidad, Colorado
May 6 - President Chester A. Arthur signs the Chinese Exclusion Act, which effects a near-complete ban on Chinese immigration and naturalization in the United States. The law is especially significant for the burgeoning railroad and mining industries in the West, which had previously relied largely on low-wage Chinese labor. Though the original act is set to expire in ten years, it is renewed in 1892 and again in 1902
June 20 - A band of Teton Lakota travels east from Fort Yates to begin a three-day hunt of a large herd of bison on reservation lands near what is now Hettinger, North Dakota, in what is later called the "Last Great Buffalo Hunt".
July 17 - U.S. cavalry under Adna R. Chaffee and Andrew W. Evans pursue and defeat warriors of the White Mountain Apache tribe at the Battle of Big Dry Wash in the Arizona Territory.
November 14 - "Buckskin" Frank Leslie shoots and kills outlaw Billy Claiborne while bartending at the Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, Arizona
-- Stagecoach bandit Black Bart was captured in California.
-- Adolph Bandelier began his exploration of the Ancient Puebloan ruins in New Mexico.
-- Judge Roy Bean opened the Jersey Lily saloon in Langtry, Texas
-- Free Chinese immigration ended.
-- Annie Oakley made her first public appearance at a sharpshooting show.
1883 -::- January 12 - The Southern section of the second transcontinental railroad line is completed.
September 8 - The Northern Pacific Railroad is completed near Independence Creek in western Montana Territory, connecting St. Paul, Minnesota with the Washington Territory
December 8 - In the Bisbee massacre, five outlaws rob a general store in Bisbee, Arizona and kill four people in the process
-- Theodore Roosevelt arrived in North Dakota to hunt buffalo and bought a ranch.
Swiss artist Karl Bodmer toured the West.
-- Texas purchased the Alamo from the Catholic Church to preserve it as a historic shrine.
-- The Northern Pacific Railroad, connecting the northwestern states to points east, was finally completed after a 19-year struggle against treacherous terrain and intermittent financing. Along the line, crews blasted a 3,850-foot tunnel through solid granite and constructed a 1,800-foot trestle. As a result, the round trip to the Columbia River that took Lewis and Clark two and a half years in 1803 took just nine days.
-- Buffalo Bill Cody started his Wild West Show
1884 -::- Feb 23 -
March 11 - Former lawmen Ben Thompson and John King Fisher are ambushed and killed by enemies of Thompson at the Jack Harris Vaudeville Saloon and Theater in San Antonio, Texas
April 10 - Lawman William "Bill" Tilghman is appointed city marshal of Dodge City, Kansas.
May 17 - The Department of Alaska is organized into the District of Alaska.
August 19 - John H. ‘Doc’ Holliday shot bartender Billy Allen in the arm over $5 at Leadville, Colorado.
December 1 - A 36-hour standoff begins in the town of Reserve, New Mexico when a posse of Texan cowboys confronts lawman Elfego Baca for having arrested an intoxicated cowboy.
1885 -::- September 2 - Years of racial tension, aggravated by labor unrest over the preferential hiring of Chinese immigrants for very low wages, come to a head in the Rock Springs massacre, which leaves at least 28 Chinese coal miners dead at the hands of white miners in the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming. The riot touches off a wave of anti-Chinese violence across the country 1886 -::- February 18 - Dave Rudabaugh, a former member of Billy the Kid's Dodge City Gang, is reportedly captured and decapitated by townspeople after terrorizing the village of Parral, Mexico.
March 21 - The "Big Fight" takes place in Tascosa, Texas, when three ex-members of Pat Garrett's "Home Rangers" are killed by rival ranch hands and gunmen
August 7 - Fort Fred Steele, used to protect railroads from local Native American tribes in the Wyoming Territory, is closed.
August 20 - Fort Duchesne is officially opened by Major Frederick William Benteen in the Utah Territory.
September 4 - Apache renegade Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles in Skeleton Canyon, after more than a decade of guerilla warfare against American and Mexican settlers in the Southwest, and held prisoner at Fort Grant, Arizona. The terms of surrender required Geronimo and his tribe to settle in Florida, where the Army hoped he could be contained. His surrender is often considered the end of the Apache Wars.
Winter - The extremely harsh winter of 1886–87 devastates the American cattle industry, leading to the end of the open range era. As a result, cattle ranching is completely reorganized and the period of the great cattle drives is over.
December 1 - Brothers Jim and Rube Burrow rob their first train in Bellevue, Texas.
-- Jack Langrishe, a popular western entertainer, is elected justice in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.
1887 -::- February 8 – The General Allotment, or Dawes Act is signed into law by President Grover Cleveland, permitting the federal government to divide communal Native American lands into privately owned allotments and to grant United States citizenship to individual allottees. Intended as a way to modernize the reservation system and assimilate Native Americans into mainstream society, the act forces the sale and redistribution of nearly 90 million acres of Indian lands in the West to white settlers and commercial interests over the next five decades. Under its provisions, tribal landholdings and tribal leaders were effectively dissolved. While it was in effect (1887-1934), about 60% of the remaining Indian land base, over 86 million acres, passed out of Indian ownership.
April 4 – Susanna M. Salter becomes mayor of Argonia, Kansas, the first woman to be elected to mayoral office anywhere in the United States.
November 8 – Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
-- Luke Short kills former Fort Worth, Texas Marshal Jim Courtright in a gunfight on the streets of Fort Worth. The shooting is ruled self-defense, since Courtright drew his pistol first.
-- Silver was discovered in Leadville, Colorado.
1888 -::- January 12 - 13 – A severe winter storm known as the Schoolhouse Blizzard kills more than 235 people across a vast area of the Great Plains including the Dakota Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas
December 18 – Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law discover the Cliff Palace of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado
1889 -::- January 12 - During the Gray County War, a shootout erupts in Cimarron, Kansas when a party led by Bill Tilghman raids the Old Gray County Courthouse in an attempt to bring the county records to the neighboring town of Ingalls
February 3 - Belle Starr was shot down in cold blood from behind (murdered) near her Oklahoma territory home. Her killer was never found.
April 22 - An estimated 50,000 homesteaders rush to claim nearly two million acres of unoccupied land appropriated for public settlement from ceded Native American territory in what is now central Oklahoma. It is the first of several major land runs in the region
May 11 - U.S. Army paymaster Joseph W. Wham and his escort of eleven Buffalo Soldiers are ambushed and robbed of more than $28,000 in gold and silver coins by a posse of bandits on the road to Fort Thomas, Arizona Territory. The bandits are never captured
June 6 - The Great Seattle Fire destroys the entire central business district in Seattle, Washington Territory, eventually burning 25 city blocks and costing the city nearly $20 million.
June 24 - Outlaw Butch Cassidy robs his first bank in Telluride, Colorado for $10,000 before fleeing to the remote hideout of Robbers Roost.
August 25 - Sylvestro "Pedro" Morales murders San Juan Capistrano rancher Henry Charles.
November 2 - Eight imprisoned Apache renegades, including the Apache Kid, murder two sheriffs and escape into the desert during a prisoner transfer near Globe, Arizona
November 8 - Montana is admitted as the 41st U.S. state
November 11 - Washington is admitted as the 42nd U.S. state.
-- North Dakota and South Dakota are admitted as the 39th and 40th U.S. states. -
Eighteen Nineties
1890 -::- June –Data collected for the Eleventh United States Census indicate that the spread of the population into unsettled areas has resulted in the disappearance of the American frontier. The U.S. Census Bureau declares that it will no longer monitor westward migration in the country
July 3 –Idaho is admitted as the 43rd U.S. state.
July 10 –Wyoming is admitted as the 44th U.S. state.
October 1 –Yosemite and Sequoia are established as the second and third U.S. National Parks.
December 29 –More than 200 men, women, and children of the Lakota Sioux are killed at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota when the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment under Colonel James W. Forsyth attempts to confiscate their weapons
-- Oklahoma was organized as a territory.
-- Idaho and Wyoming were admitted to the Union.
-- The massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, ended the Indian Wars.
-- Sitting Bull was murdered in a confrontation at the Standing Rock Reservation.
-- The U.S. Department of the Interior announced that the frontier was officially closed.
1891 -::- March 3 – The Forest Reserve Act is signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison, repealing previous policies such as the Timber Culture Act of 1873 and authorizing the creation of the nation's first "forest reserves" in an effort to protect timber and mineral resources from overexploitation. The law serves as a catalyst to a series of federal land reform legislation over the next three decades which greatly expand government-administered public lands and restrict private development. It also heralds changing attitudes toward land management in the West, with federal priorities gradually shifting from selling public land to conserving public resources, and federal regulations becoming a permanent fixture on the once unregulated frontier.
1892 -::- April 8–13 – In the most violent episode of the Johnson County War, wealthy cattle barons of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and hired mercenaries invade the Powder River Country to persecute local ranchers on allegations of cattle rustling. A series of deadly stand-offs ensues before President Benjamin Harrison orders the 6th Cavalry Regiment to intervene. The conflict forces a reorganization of the cattle industry in Wyoming and becomes one of the most well-known range wars in the history of the West
April 20 –Edward L. Doheny and Charles A. Canfield drill into a massive oilfield beneath present-day downtown Los Angeles, precipitating the Southern California oil boom.
August 2 – Tom Graham, the last male member of the Graham family, is killed by Edwin Tewksbury in Tempe, Arizona, concluding the Pleasant Valley War.
October 5 – The Dalton Gang raided Coffeyville, Kansas. Emmett was wounded, Grat and John were killed in a shootout with townspeople while trying to rob two banks at the same time. Emmett was sent to prison.
November 1 – The Doolin-Dalton Gang rob a bank in Spearville, Kansas.
-- A cattlemen’s Army invaded Johnson County, Wyoming, in an incident known as the Johnson County War.
1893 -::- January 6 – The last spike is driven in the Great Northern Railway near Scenic, Washington, completing a transcontinental route between Seattle and Saint Paul, Minnesota.
May 15 – Provoked by the previous year's strike in Coeur d'Alene, coal miners establish the Western Federation of Miners in Butte, Montana
June 11 - 12 – Following a ten-month manhunt, local train robbers John Sontag and Chris Evans are wounded during a shootout with a posse of lawmen on a ranch north of Visalia, California. Both outlaws are eventually captured, and Sontag dies of his wounds three weeks later
June 30 – Captain Frank Jones is killed when he and a party of Texas Rangers searching for a gang of Mexican cattle rustlers are ambushed near the border town of Tres Jacales
September 1 –Three deputy U.S. Marshals and two civilians are killed in a shootout with members of the Doolin–Dalton Gang in the town of Ingalls, Oklahoma Territory. All of the outlaws manage to escape
November 7 - Women in Colorado are granted the right to vote
-- Repeal of the Sherman Act demonetized silver. Many silver boomtowns went bust overnight.
1894 -::- February 7 - When mine owners in Cripple Creek, Colorado extend the standard workday from eight hours to ten hours without a corresponding raise in wages, newly unionized miners of the Western Federation of Miners go on strike, setting off a labor dispute that immediately stymies mining operations throughout the region.
November 1 - The Southern Pacific passenger train Sunset Limited begins regular service on the second transcontinental railroad route.
1895 -::- August 19 - Outlaw John Wesley Hardin is shot and killed by John Selman at the Acme Saloon in El Paso, Texas.
December 18 - A gang of bandits led by Augustine Chacon robs a general store in Morenci, Arizona Territory. In a shootout the following day, several people are killed and Chacon is captured.
1896 -::- January 4 - Utah is admitted to the Union as the 45th U.S. state.
January 15 - Bill Tilghman single-handedly captures wanted gang leader Bill Doolin at a bathhouse in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and returns him to the Oklahoma Territory.
July 5 - Doolin escapes from prison.
August 12 - An uprising of Yaqui Indians and Mexican revolutionaries, angered by the policies of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, storms the customhouse in Nogales, Sonora on the U.S.–Mexico border. Detachments of both federal armies manage to disperse the rebels over the next several days.
August 13 – Butch Cassidy, Elzy Lay, Harvey "Kid Curry" Logan, and Bob Meeks rob a bank in Montpelier, Idaho.
September 15 - A staged train wreck designed as a publicity stunt for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad unexpectedly causes simultaneous boiler explosions that kill at least two spectators and result in numerous other injuries.
-- Butch Cassidy formed the “Wild Bunch,” which consisted of 15 men and four women.
1897 -::- April 15 - Crude oil is discovered for the first time in the Indian Territory, near present-day Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
July 8 - The Shootout on Juneau Wharf occurs in Skagway, District of Alaska when crime boss Soapy Smith and Frank H. Reid are shot during an argument. Smith is killed immediately and Reid dies 12 days later.
1898 -::- Aug – Oct - At least 500 members of 35 different American Indian tribes attend the Indian Congress in Omaha, Nebraska, the largest gathering of its kind to date.
1899 -::- May 30 - Pearl Hart and a companion rob a stagecoach traveling between Globe and Florence in the Arizona Territory. The pair is tracked down and arrested a few days later.
June 2 - Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch rob an Overland Flyer passenger train near Wilcox, Wyoming, resulting in a massive but ultimately futile manhunt. -
The Finale of the Old West
1900 -::- May 1 – A dust explosion at the Winter Quarters Mine near Scofield, Utah kills at least 200 coal miners in the Scofield Mine disaster, the deadliest mining accident in American history to date.
May 19 - Jim Butler discovers silver near what will soon become the town of Tonopah, Nevada launching a boom.
September 19 - The First National Bank of Winnemucca, Nevada is robbed by three men of more than $30,000 in gold coins. The robbers are never captured or identified.
-- Galveston, Texas, was hit by a hurricane, killing some 6,000 residents.
1901 -::- Feb 23 -
January 10 - An oil well on the Spindletop dome near Beaumont, Texas strikes crude oil, “Black gold” becoming the first major gusher in the state and triggering the Texas oil boom.
February 20 - Butch Cassidy, Harry Longabaugh, and Etta Place depart the United States for Buenos Aires, Argentina aboard a British steamer.
April 26 - Black Jack Ketchum was hanged in Clayton, New Mexico. He was the only person ever hanged for train robbery in the state.
1902 -::- November 21 - Mexican bandit Augustine Chacon is hanged in Solomonville, Arizona Territory.
1903 -::- May 23 - Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker depart San Francisco in a two-cylinder Winton motor car. They arrive in New York City on July 26, becoming the first people to cross the continent in an automobile
November 20 - Legendary gunman Tom Horn is hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming for the disputed killing of 14-year-old sheepherder Willie Nickell in 1901. His trial and hanging mark the waning of the power of the cattle barons in Wyoming
1905 -::- May 15 - The city of Las Vegas is founded in Nevada.
December 30 - Former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg is wounded by a bomb in his home in Caldwell, Idaho and dies a short time later. An investigation suggests the assassination was motivated by prior labor unrest in Idaho's mining communities.
1906 -::- April 18 - An earthquake and resulting fires devastate the city of San Francisco and neighboring communities, killing at least 3,000 people and leaving nearly three-fourths of the Bay Area's population homeless (?? 700 people and left 225,000 homeless).
1907 -::- November 16 - Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory were joined to create the state of Oklahoma, the 46th U.S. state.
-- Tribal governments were abolished in Oklahoma.
1908 -::- February 29 - Pat Garrett is murdered under mysterious circumstances near Las Cruces, New Mexico Territory
November 7 - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reportedly found dead following a shootout with police in the town of San Vicente, Bolivia.
1911 -::- August 28 - Ishi, called "the last wild Indian", surrenders near Oroville, California.
1912 -::- January 6 - New Mexico is admitted as the 47th U.S. state.
February 14 - Arizona is admitted as the 48th U.S. state. It is the last state to be admitted to the Union during the Old West era.
August 24 - The District of Alaska is organized into the Territory of Alaska.
1916 -::- December 5 - The last stagecoach robbery in American history occurs at Jarbidge Canyon, Nevada, when three robbers hold up a U.S. Post Office Department stagecoach, shoot the driver, and steal $4,000 in cash. The criminals are captured without incident soon after.
