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Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
‘Deadwood' Review: Outlaw Capital
The city of Deadwood, in present-day South Dakota, was a raucous icon of the Wild West, rife with gamblers and gunslingers, prospectors and prostitutes, robbers and rustlers. In his rollicking yet nuanced book 'Deadwood,' Peter Cozzens pans the gold-mining boomtown's history while sifting out some popular misconceptions. An 1874 expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer confirmed rumors of gold in the Black Hills. By late summer of the following year, some 800 hopefuls were working claims. The prospectors would eventually congregate around Deadwood Gulch, named for its profusion of fallen timber. When diggings there proved especially fruitful, the area emerged as the center of Black Hills gold mining. Mr. Cozzens, the author of previous histories of the Civil War and the American West, shows how the rush to the goldfields was spurred by events far from the Dakota Territory. Since the fall of 1873 the U.S. had suffered a crippling financial depression, with the collapse of banks, railroads and thousands of other businesses. Because Congress had recently voted to transition to a gold standard, credit and currency were limited by the amount of gold held in the U.S. Treasury. 'The nation ached for a bonanza that would offer the chance for renewed prosperity,' Mr. Cozzens writes. Desperate, unemployed men stampeded into the Black Hills guided by 'hope, greed, and the chance for a fresh start.' The prospectors overlooked the inconvenient truth that, under the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the Black Hills formed part of the Great Sioux Reservation and belonged to the Lakota people, who had long held the mountains sacred. When several Lakota leaders, notably Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, refused to cede their bands' claims, President Ulysses S. Grant launched the Great Sioux War in February 1876. The following year's spring, after the loss of hundreds of lives on both sides (including the annihilation of Custer's Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn on June 25-26, 1876), the U.S. forces prevailed. A wide strip of territory, including the Black Hills, reverted to federal ownership, and the Native Americans were removed to smaller reservations.
Chicago Tribune
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
Today in History: Federal minimum wage set
Today is Wednesday, June 25, the 176th day of 2025. There are 189 days left in the year. Today in history: On June 25, 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set a minimum wage, guaranteed overtime pay and banned 'oppressive child labor,' was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Also on this date: In 1876, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand, began in southeastern Montana Territory. As many as 100 Native Americans were killed in the battle, as were 268 people attached to the 7th Cavalry Regiment, including George Armstrong Custer and Mark Kellogg, the first Associated Press reporter to die in the line of duty. In 1947, 'The Diary of a Young Girl,' the personal journal of Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl hiding with her family from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II, was first published. In 1950, war broke out in Korea as forces from the communist North invaded the South. The conflict would last for over three years and would be responsible for an estimated 4 million deaths, an estimated 3 million of whom were civilians. In 1973, former White House Counsel John Dean began testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee, implicating top administration officials, including President Richard Nixon as well as himself, in the Watergate scandal and cover-up. In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, its first 'right-to-die' decision, ruled 5-4 that family members could be barred from ending the lives of persistently comatose relatives who had not made their wishes known conclusively. In 1993, Kim Campbell was sworn in as Canada's 19th prime minister, the first woman to hold the post. In 1996, a truck bomb killed 19 Americans and injured hundreds at a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia. In 2015, in the case of King v. Burwell, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld nationwide tax subsidies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul in a 6-3 ruling that preserved health insurance for millions of Americans. In 2021, former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, whose death led to the biggest outcry against racial injustice in the U.S. in generations. Today's Birthdays: Actor June Lockhart is 100. Civil rights activist James Meredith is 92. Singer Carly Simon is 82. Actor-comedian Jimmie Walker is 78. Musician Tim Finn is 73. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is 71. Actor-writer-comedian Ricky Gervais is 64. Hockey Hall of Famer Doug Gilmour is 62. Author Yann Martel ('Life of Pi') is 62. Actor Angela Kinsey ('The Office') is 54. Actor Linda Cardellini is 50. Actor Busy Philipps is 46.
