The Lakota traded tanned buffalo robes here for a variety of manufactured goods. Each spring caravans arrived with trade goods at the fort. In the fall, tons of buffalo hides and other furs were shipped east. Throughout the 1840’s, however, the take of buffalo robes declined and Fort John’s role changed. In 1841, the first of many westward-bound emigrants arrived at Fort John.
Tens of thousands of emigrants bound for Oregon, California, and the Salt Lake Valley would eventually stop at the fort. The traders at Fort John did a brisk seasonal business catering to the needs of emigrants.

In 1849, the U.S. Army purchased Fort John as part of a plan to establish a military presence along the emigrant trails. The post was officially renamed Fort Laramie, and it began its tenure as a military post. The Army quickly constructed new buildings for stables, officers’ and soldiers’ quarters, a bakery, a guardhouse, and a powder magazine to house and support the fort garrison.

As the years went by, the post continued to grow in size and importance. Fort Laramie soon became the principal military outpost on the Northern Plains. Fort Laramie also became the primary hub for transportation and communication through the central Rocky Mountain region as emigrant trails, stage lines, the Pony Express, and the transcontinental telegraph all passed through the post.

Fort Laramie played an important role hosting several treaty negotiations with the Northern Plains Indian Nations, the most famous of which were the Horse Creek Treaty of 1851 and the still contested Treaty of 1868.

When the Indian Wars came to a close Fort Laramie’s importance diminished. The post was abandoned and sold at public auction in 1890. Over the next 48 years, it nearly succumbed to the ravages of time. Preservation of the site was finally secured, however, when Fort Laramie became part of the National Park System.

The Confederacy wasn’t officially organized until February 1861 in Montgomery, Ala., so there was no Confederate navy, and an attack seemed unlikely, but by April of 1861, the Confederacy had become more organized.

At 4:30 a.m. on April 12. Confederate General P.T.G. Beauregard, began bombarding Fort Sumter

Captain Abner Doubleday (who was later credited with inventing baseball) waited until shortly before 7 a.m. for the advantage of daylight; then aimed a 32-pounder at the Ironclad Battery on Cumming’s Point, stepped back and yelled “Fire!” The Union’s reply, including Doubleday’s first shot, had little effect. For 34 hours, the Confederates directed more than 3,000 shells at Fort Sumter.

“The crashing of the shot, the bursting of the shells, the falling of the walls, and the roar of the flames, made a pandemonium of the fort,” Doubleday wrote the following day.

Miraculously, no one was killed or seriously wounded on either side. Anderson surrendered on April 13 and, the next day, Beauregard allowed Anderson to evacuate, rather than take Union prisoners.

The Battle of Fort Sumter was relatively brief, full of glory and mercifully bloodless. Everyone thought that the squabble between the States would be over soon.

It was only after considerable success in the law and government affairs, and many years of renting quarters about town, that Hamilton finally built a home of his own.

It was never as grand as Mt Vernon or Monticello, but it stood on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River in a part of northern Manhattan long since known as Hamilton Heights. It takes a bit of imagination today to envision the house standing alone atop a plot of land — a little over 32 acres — with expansive views of both the Hudson and Harlem Rivers from the house’s capacious windows and from the long piazzas that stretch along its sides, which lend its Federalist-style solidity a faint hint of the West Indies.

The Grange might have been Hamilton’s rivalrous answer to Jefferson, for though he was not the designer of his own home as Jefferson was, he was involved in every detail with John McComb Jr., who was also the architect for both Gracie Mansion and New York’s City Hall.

The house has been moved twice, first in 1889 as the Manhattan street grid was creeping north. Over time it became hemmed in by other buildings. Stripped of its porches and in disrepair; the National Park Service was given the house in 1962 on the condition that it be moved and renovated. Neighborhood opposition delayed the move until finally, in 2008, the house was mounted on hydraulic lifts and rolled on dollies around the corner to the north end of St. Nicholas Park, where it now sits.

Hamilton enjoyed his brief time at the Grange greatly. “A garden, you know,” he wrote in 1802 when the house was completed “is a very usual refuge of a disappointed politician.”

In 1861, Olmsted took a leave from his duties at Central Park to serve as the Executive Secretary of the United States Sanitary Commission, aiding the wounded soldiers of the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1863, he headed west and took a position as manager of the Mariposa Estate in California, a gold mining venture north of San Francisco.

He returned to New York when the project failed, and joined Vaux in designing Prospect Park, Chicago’s Riverside subdivision, Buffalo’s park system, and the Niagara Reservation at Niagara Falls, and he served as the first head of the commission in charge of preserving Yosemite Valley..

In 1883, he relocated to Brookline, Massachusetts where he designed an extensive park system for the City of Boston known as the Emerald Necklace. Between 1872 and 1895 Olmsted’s firm carried out 550 projects. Besides Central and Prospect Parks, and the Emerald Necklace, Olmstead designed the Grounds to the US Capitol, The Biltmore Estate in Asheville NC, Stanford University’s campus, and the grounds to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

In 1895, due to failing health Olmsted turned the firm over to his partners, and senility forced him to be confined in the McLean Hospital at Waverly, Massachusetts, where he must have felt at home – Olmsted had designed the grounds of the institution.

Frederick Law Olmsted died on August 28, 1903. The landscape architecture firm he founded was continued by his sons and their successors until 1980. His home and office were purchased by the National Park Service and opened to the public as museum. His papers are now housed in the Library of Congress, while the Olmsted National Historic site preserves the drawings and plans for much of Olmsted and his firm’s body of work.

“It was late in the evening when I reached the place. I heard one or two shots in the bar-room as I came up, and I disliked going in. But there was nowhere else to go, and it was a cold night. Inside the room were several men, who, including the bartender, were wearing the kind of smile worn by men who are making believe to like what they don’t like. A shabby individual in a broad hat with a cocked gun in each hand was walking up and down the floor talking with strident profanity. He had evidently been shooting at the clock, which had two or three holes in its face.

…As soon as he saw me he hailed me as ‘Four Eyes,’ in reference to my spectacles, and said, ‘Four Eyes is going to treat.’ I joined in the laugh and got behind the stove and sat down, thinking to escape notice. He followed me, however, and though I tried to pass it off as a jest this merely made him more offensive, and he stood leaning over me, a gun in each hand, using very foul language… In response to his reiterated command that I should set up the drinks, I said, ‘Well, if I’ve got to, I’ve got to,’ and rose, looking past him.

As I rose, I struck quick and hard with my right just to one side of the point of his jaw, hitting with my left as I straightened out, and then again with my right. He fired the guns, but I do not know whether this was merely a convulsive action of his hands, or whether he was trying to shoot at me. When he went down he struck the corner of the bar with his head… if he had moved I was about to drop on my knees; but he was senseless. I took away his guns, and the other people in the room, who were now loud in their denunciation of him, hustled him out and put him in the shed.”

All in vain. In spite of the sure sore punishments that followed like shadows, the natural inherited wildness in our blood ran true on its glorious course as invincible and unstoppable as stars.

My earliest recollections of the country were gained on short walks with my grandfather when I was perhaps not over three years old. On one of these walks grandfather took me to Lord Lauderdale’s gardens, where I saw figs growing against a sunny wall and tasted some of them, and got as many apples to eat as I wished. On another memorable walk in a hayfield, when we sat down to rest on one of the haycocks I heard a sharp, prickly, stinging cry, and, jumping up eagerly, called grandfather’s attention to it. He said he heard only the wind, but I insisted on digging into the hay and turning it over until we discovered the source of the strange exciting sound–a mother field mouse with half a dozen naked young hanging to her teats. This to me was a wonderful discovery. No hunter could have been more excited on discovering a bear and her cubs in a wilderness den.

The apprehensions I expressed during the winter, of the moral condition of the Army of Northern Virginia, have been realized. The operations which occurred while the troops were in the entrenchments in front of Richmond and Petersburg were not marked by the boldness and decision which formerly characterized them. Except in particular instances, they were feeble; and a want of confidence seemed to possess officers and men. This condition, I think, was produced by the state of feeling in the country, and the communications received by the men from their homes, urging their return and the abandonment of the field.

The movement of the enemy on the 30th March to Dinwiddie Court House was consequently not as strongly met as similar ones had been. Advantages were gained by him which discouraged the troops, so that on the morning of the 2d April, when our lines between the Appomattox and Hatcher’s Run were assaulted, the resistance was not effectual: several points were penetrated and large captures made. At the commencement of the withdrawal of the army from the lines on the night of the 2d, it began to disintegrate, and straggling from the ranks increased up to the surrender on the 9th. On that day, as previously reported, there were only seven thousand eight hundred and ninety-two (7892) effective infantry. During the night, when the surrender became known, more than ten thousand men came in, as reported to me by the Chief Commissary of the Army. During the succeeding days stragglers continued to give themselves up, so that on the 12th April, according to the rolls of those paroled, twenty-six thousand and eighteen (26,018) officers and men had surrendered. Men who had left the ranks on the march, and crossed James River, returned and gave themselves up, and many have since come to Richmond and surrendered.

I have given these details that Your Excellency might know the state of feeling which existed in the army, and judge of that in the country. From what I have seen and learned, I believe an army cannot be organized or supported in Virginia, and as far as I know the condition of affairs, the country east of the Mississippi is morally and physically unable to maintain the contest unaided with any hope of ultimate success. A partisan war may be continued, and hostilities protracted, causing individual suffering and the devastation of the country, but I see no prospect by that means of achieving a separate independence.

It is for Your Excellency to decide, should you agree with me in opinion, what is proper to be done. To save useless effusion of blood, I would recommend measures be taken for suspension of hostilities and the restoration of peace.

I am with great respect, yr obdt svt

R. E. Lee
Genl

With the assistance of Boston businessman Herbert H. Holton, various routes were plotted out. A measured distance of 24.5 miles from Metcalf’s Mill in Ashland to the Irvington Oval in Boston was finally selected. The race was called the “American Marathon” and scheduled for Patriot’s Day (April 19th) as the final event of the 1897 Boston Athletic Association Games.

Fifteen runners started the race but only 10 made it to the finish line. John J. McDermott, representing the Pastime Athletic Club of New York City, took the lead from Harvard athlete Dick Grant over the hills in Newton. Exhausted by the extended distance of the race McDermott slowed to a walk several times during the last miles, but he still won by almost seven minutes, in two hours, fifty-five minutes and ten seconds.

It took Larry Brignola, Harry Franklin, and AT Howe over four hours to complete the course – but they finished the race!

1. John J. McDermott (NY) 2:55:10
2. James J. Kiernan (NY) 3:02:02
3. Edward P. Rhell (MA) 3:06:02
4. Hamilton Gray (NY) 3:11:37
5. H. D. Eggleston (NY) 3:17:50
6. John Mason (NY) 3:31:00
7. W. Ryan (MA) 3:41:25
8. Lawrence Brignolia (MA) 4:06:12
9. Harry Franklin (MA) 4:08:00
10. A. T. Howe (MA) 4:10:00