Historical July, part 2

Also in 1825, the Cherokees were being kicked off their homeland and being shipped west. On July 15 that year the Cherokee Phoenix, the 1st Indian newspaper in the country, expressed the attitude of the tribes toward leaving their lands: “. . . coercion alone will remove them to the western country allotted for the Indians.”

July events were still moving west by 1836 when missionaries Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Hart Spalding became the first women to journey clear across the continent. They celebrated July 4th at Independence Rock.

In July of 1845, John L. O’Sullivan, editor of U.S. Magazine and Democratic Revue “espoused the divine right, or ‘manifest destiny,’ “ of the United States to occupy and govern the whole North American continent and the westward movement across the Great American Plains was on. The following year, on July 20, a party moving west, headed by George Donner and James Frazier Reed decided to separate its 20 wagons from the rest of the wagon train heading over the regular route west. Lansford W. Hastings, explorer, wagon-train guide, author, and promoter had suggested the emigrants take a new route, some 400 miles shorter—or so he claimed and promised to meet them at Fort Bridger and guide them over this new trail. But Hastings left without them and they wound up getting trapped in the Sierras by early snows. It certainly was no July picnic they experienced. The Donners and the Reeds may have been making their fateful decision at the same instance, on July 4, when Congress voted to bring Texas into the fold.

The Mormons started west and in 1847 they entered the Great Salt Lake Valley on July 21, where they could at last practice the religious freedom that the constitution promised them. The year after that, in 1848, the nations’ women were starting to edge towards some independence when, in July of course, the first women’s rights movement met at Seneca Falls, New York. They had quite a fight on their hands for a few years. But on July 18 of 1861 there was another big fight. This one occurred at Bull Run, Virginia when the Confederate Army defeated the Union while Washington society, with their picnic baskets, watched the fireworks.

Go To Page: 1 2