June 2
1835: P. T. Barnum began his first circus tour of the United States.
1953: Queen Elizabeth II was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Her Other Realms and Territories & Head of the Commonwealth. The coronation was the first major international event to be televised.
2017: “Wonder Woman” directed by Patty Jenkins released, earns over $100 million in North American in its opening weekend – a domestic record for a female director.
June 3
1889: The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States was
completed, running 14 miles between a
generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Ore.
1936: Born this day: Jim Gentile, U.S. baseball player and manager, and Larry McMurtry, U.S. author and screenwriter (Lonesome Dove).
1988: Theodore Farabee, 43, of Libby, Mont., published his book A.D. 30: The Historian’s
Account in which challenged many Christian traditions.
June 4
1783: The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrated their montgolfière (hot air balloon) in Paris.
1876: An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco, Calif., via the first transcontinental railroad, 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.
1896: Henry Ford completed the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gave it a successful test run.
June 5
1837: The city of Houston was incorporated
in the Republic of Texas.
2012: The governor of Wisconsin, Scott
Walker, became the first U.S. governor to
survive a recall election. The last transit of
Venus of the 21st century began.
2018: Miss America pageant announces an end to its swimsuit competition.
2019: Average person ingests 50,000 pieces of microplastic a year and breathes in similar amount according to first-ever such study
published in journal “Environmental Science and Technology”.
June 6
1816: The first of several summer snowstorms hit the northeastern United States, bringing the “Year Without a Summer.”
1833: President Andrew Jackson became the first president to ride on a train.
1933: The first drive-in theater opened, in Camden, N.J.
2018: French man announced to have won France’s €1 million My Lottery for the second time in 2 years, with odds of 1 in 16 trillion.
June 7
1892: Benjamin Harrison became the first president of the United States to attend a baseball game.
1977: Five hundred million people watched the first day of the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II on television.
2018: Mars Curiosity Rover finds organic matter, including methane, on Mars in studies published in journal “Science”.
June 8
1968: Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral was held
at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in
New York City.
1982: President Ronald Reagan became the first American chief executive to address a
joint session of the British Parliament.
2018: World’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, can process 200K trillion calculations per second, launched at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, by IBM and Nvidia.
Rick O’Shay and Hipshot Cartoon
by Stan Lynde, 1975,
Montana Historical Society
(2012.34.210)
Growing up during the Great Depression on a sheep ranch near Lodge Grass, Stan Lynde (1931–2013) was
familiar with both Montana’s natural beauty and its harsh realities.
Inspired by the cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s,
Lynde began drawing comics in elementary school, and
during the Korean War, he developed strips for U.S. Navy publications.
He created his most famous work, the nationally
syndicated Rick O’Shay, from 1958–1977. Rick O’Shay
attracted commercial and critical acclaim for its humor
and ability to reflect the Old West while satirizing
romanticized stereotypes of it; some estimate the strip
attracted 15 million daily readers at its peak.
In 2012, the Stan and Lynda Lynde Trust donated
nearly 1,000 artifacts spanning Lynde’s career—including many Rick O’Shay strips—to the Montana Historical
Society’s collections. These artifacts provide a glimpse
into the creative process of a gifted artist who was deeply influenced by his Montanan roots.
Read more at http://digitalvault.mhs.mt.gov/
National (Daniel) Boone Day
June 7
Did you know?
Daniel Boone’s family came to America to escape religious persecution.
In 1713, Daniel Boone’s father, a weaver and blacksmith, journeyed from his hometown of Bradninch, England, to the colony of Pennsylvania, established by William Penn in 1681 as a haven for religious tolerance. Like Penn, Squire Boone belonged to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a group whose members faced persecution in
England for their beliefs.
In 1720, Squire married fellow Quaker Sarah Morgan and Daniel, the sixth of the couple’s 11 children, was born in 1734 in present-day Berks County, Pennsylvania.
In the 1740s, two of the oldest Boone children wed “worldlings,” or non-Quakers, and were disowned by the local Quaker
community. After Squire Boone refused to
publicly apologize for the second of these two marriages, he too was kicked out of the Quakers. He subsequently left Pennsylvania with his family in 1750 and traveled by
wagon to the colony of North Carolina, where in 1753 he purchased two tracts of land near present-day Mocksville.
Boone didn’t wear coonskin caps.
Boone has often been portrayed sporting a hat made from the skin and fur of a raccoon, but in fact the frontiersman thought this type of headgear was unstylish and instead donned hats made from beaver. According to Boone biographer John Mack Faragher, the myth of the coonskin cap can be traced to a full-length portrait of Boone made in 1820 by Chester Harding, who authentically depicted the frontiersman wearing leggings, moccasins and a fringed hunting shirt and holding a beaver hat. The painting was displayed in the Kentucky capitol for several decades until it deteriorated. Harding later cut out Boone’s head and pasted it onto a different background; however, a record of Boone’s outfit was preserved thanks to artist James Otto Lewis, who had produced an engraving of Harding’s original painting. Lewis hired an actor, Noah Ludlow, to help sell prints made from the engraving, and when Ludlow later performed a show that required him to dress like a frontiersman he modeled his costume after Boone’s wardrobe in the engraving. Unable to find a beaver hat, he substituted it with a coonskin cap. Ludlow’s performances were a success and the coonskin cap’s association with Boone stuck.
Read more little known Boone facts at:
www.history.com