1814 - A young lawyer, Francis Scott Key, pens a poem after watching the British bomb nearby Fort McHenry in Baltimore with military rockets. As dawn broke, he was amazed to find not the Union Jack, but rather the American flag flying above the fort, tattered but intact. The poem would become the national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner”.
1862 - Confederate and Union troops in the Civil War clash near Maryland’s Antietam Creek in the bloodiest single day in American military history - 23,000 casualties.
1947 - The U.S. Air Force officially became a separate branch of the military. Before, the Army, Navy and Marines shared responsibility for military aviation.
1964 - The Kellogg’s Company placed two pieces of dough with filling into a toaster to create a quick and easy breakfast snack, “Fruit Scones”. The snack would soon be renamed “Pop-Tarts”.
2008 - Wall Street brokerage firm Lehman Brothers seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, becoming the largest victim of the subprime mortgage crisis that would devastate financial markets and contribute to the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Largest Land Run In History
At 12:00pm on September 16, 1893, a single pistol shot into the air started the largest land rush in history.
Explorers in the early 1800s considered Oklahoma as a worthless desert. The land was very arid and treeless. The U.S. government saw it a perfect place to resettle Native Americans as more white settlers were moving into the more fertile southeastern States.
Cherokee and Choctaw tribes were encouraged and forced to move out to Oklahoma 1817. More than 4,000 died on the “Trail of Tears”. However, it wasn’t long before the white settlers set their eyes on the West. As new farming methods developed and the railroad extended, white settlers were set to find new land out west. This would push the Native American tribes further west and out of eastern Oklahoma.
President Benjamin Harrison threw open large areas of unoccupied lands in Oklahoma in 1889. This started many land rushes but none like the rush of 1893. With that single pistol shot, 100,000 people poured into the Cherokee Strip by horse and wagon to claim valuable land. Almost overnight, Oklahoma City and other towns were established. Economic pressures plus poor planning and inadequate enforcement by federal agencies made this land rush more chaotic than earlier runs, resulting in massive fraud, widespread suffering, and a number of deaths.
