Lewis and Clark Timeline
Post Expedition 1861 - 1870

1861

Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as the sixteenth President of the United States.

Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas join South Carolina in seceding from the Union. These seven states form a new southern union, setting up a provisional government called the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi is elected President for a six year term.

Confederate forces open fire on U.S. Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, which surrenders on April 14.

President Lincoln calls for a 75,000 man militia to suppress the "insurrection;" this move provokes the remaining southern states, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, to secede and join the Confederacy.

In the first Battle of Bull Run at Manassas, Virginia, Union troops retreat to Washington, D.C.

Miners coming into Colorado in large numbers provoke a conflict with native Indian people in the Cheyenne-Arapaho War.

The first transcontinental telegraph line is completed, bringing to an end the pony express.

Kansas is admitted as the thirty-fourth state in the Union; Kansas is admitted as a free state.

1862

Confederate Gen. Henry H. Sibley defeats Union forces at Valverde, New Mexico and takes Santa Fe. Pushing northeastward toward Fort Union, he is met and defeated at the Battle of Glorietta Pass March 26-28.

Adm. David G. Farragut captures New Orleans for the Union in April.

The Homestead Act is passed, entitling any citizen or person who intends to acquire citizenship, who is twenty one years old or older and the head of a household, to acquire 160 acres of land in the public domain by settling on them for five years and paying a small filing fee. The law takes effect January 1, 1863.

General Lee's invasion of the North is halted by General McClellan at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland. In the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, Union casualties are 2,108 killed and 9,549 wounded; Confederate casualties are 2,700 killed and 9,029 wounded.

Chief Little Crow leads a Dakota (Sioux) uprising in Minnesota, during which more than 350 whites are killed. Federal Gen. Henry Hastings Sibley defeats the Dakota forces at Wood Lake. Thirty-eight Dakota chiefs are hanged at Mankato, Minnesota.

President Lincoln signs a bill incorporating the Union Pacific Railroad Company and subsidizing it with federal funds so that it can construct a line from Nebraska to Utah. This line will meet the Central Pacific coming east from California, and thus form a transcontinental railroad.

1863

President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, which states that "All slaves in areas still in rebellion are freed." The proclamation also enables the recruitment of federal regiments of African-American volunteer soldiers.

The greatest battle of the Civil War is fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Following a major Confederate defeat, Gen. Robert E. Lee, after sustaining 20,400 casualties, retreats into Virginia. Union Gen. George Gordon Meade, his army exhausted, fails to capitalize upon victory, and the Confederates escape.

Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Mississippi surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant, opening the entire Mississippi River to Union control.

Congress passes the first National Conscription Act, which calls for the enrollment of all male citizens and aliens who have declared an intention of becoming citizens between the ages of 20 and 45. Conscripts can be exempted from military service by the payment of $300 or by hiring a substitute. The payment provision is especially objectionable to working-class men, for whom $300 is about 2/3 of an average annual income.

The first draft drawings precipitate riots in New York City. Rioters burn, loot, and kill. Irish immigrant laborers, the lowest paid of all, attack African Americans and lynch several of them. Order is restored only after the arrival of regular Army troops from Gettysburg.

West Virginia is admitted as the thirty-fifth state in the Union.

1864

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant is named as the overall commander of all federal armies.

In the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant's army of 100,000 meets Lee's army of 60,000. The indecisive battle rages for two days. Union casualties far exceed Confederate casualties.

Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, with an army of 60,000, leaves Atlanta in flames and begins a march through Georgia on 60 mile front, destroying everything that might be of use to the Confederacy. Sherman's army reaches Savannah, which surrenders, on December 22. The estimated destruction of Georgia property is $100 million.

Col. John M. Chivington's Colorado volunteers attack Black Kettle's peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho village and kill 150 Indian men, women, and children in the Sand Creek Massacre.

Navajo Indian people make the "Long Walk" after their defeat in Canyon de Chelly to a reservation in the New Mexico Territory.

The California Geological Survey maps the Sierra Mountains, and urges President Lincoln to preserve Yosemite. The "Yo-Semite Valley" and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove of Giant Sequoias are granted to the State of California by President Lincoln to be held "inalienable and for all time" for "public use, resort and recreation."

Nevada is admitted as the thirty-sixth state in the Union.

1865

Gen. Robert E. Lee surrenders to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, signalling the end of the Civil War.

Abraham Lincoln is shot at Ford's Theatre. The first President to be assassinated, Lincoln dies on April 15, at the age of fifty-six. He is buried at Springfield, Illinois.

Andrew Johnson is inaugurated as the seventeenth President of the United States.

The steamer Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River with 2,300 on board, 2,134 of whom are Union soldiers returning from Confederate prison camps. Seventeen hundred die in the worst ship disaster in U.S. history.

Civil War casualty totals are released: The Union - 359,000 dead, 100,000 wounded; The Confederacy - 280,000 dead, 100,000 wounded. The war has cost the Union $5 billion and the Confederacy $3 billion.

The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, abolishing slavery in the United States.

The Union Stockyards are built where nine railways converge in Chicago, and open for business on Christmas Day.

The U.S. gives a contract to Protestant missionary societies to operate Indian schools.

1866

Two hundred fifty thousand head of cattle are driven from Goliad, Texas to the railhead in Sedalia, Missouri in the first great overland cattle drive.

Jesse Chisholm opens the Chisholm Trail.

Congress passes a Civil Rights Act over President Johnson's veto. It grants the same rights to all natural-born Americans, including African Americans, but excepts American Indian people.

The steamship Great Eastern reaches the U.S., completing the second trans-Atlantic cable between Great Britain and the U.S.

"Red Cloud's War" is precipitated by Lakota (Sioux) opposition to the construction of a road from southern Wyoming to Montana along the Bozeman Trail by U.S. troops.

The sharecropping system in the southern states results from a lack of success in attracting European immigrants and Chinese laborers to replace slave labor, and from a lack of cash for wages to former slaves. The system keeps African Americans in a virtual slave state, or "peonage."

Four African-American regiments are established in the peacetime U.S. Army, and designated as the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. The units eventually acquire the nickname "Buffalo Soldiers" from the American Indians.

1867

Comanches, Kiowas, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapahos sign a treaty with the U.S. government at Medicine Lodge, Kansas. The Indians will withdraw opposition to the construction of a railroad and will be settled on one great reservation south of the Arkansas River.

A Congressional Peace Commission is created, which initiates a new round of treaties with American Indians, providing for district reservations, education, isolation from casual contact with whites, annuities of clothing and useful articles, and allotments of land to individual Indians who seek it.

Joseph G. McCoy, an Illinois cattle buyer, travels to Abilene, Kansas, "to establish a market whereat the southern drover and the northern buyer can meet upon equal footing."

The National Grange (Order of the Patrons of Husbandry) is organized in Washington, D.C.. Women and men are admitted as members on an equal basis.

The First Reconstruction Act imposes martial law on the southern states and provides for the restoration of civil government when those states are reorganized into the Union. Each of the former Confederate states must ratify the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

The U.S. purchases Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000.

The British North American Act establishes the Confederation of Canada.

Clarence King heads the first of the four great federal surveys established to "erase the last unexplored labels from the maps of western America."

Nebraska is admitted as the thirty-seventh state in the Union.

1868

Unqualified amnesty is granted to all who participated in the "insurrection or rebellion" against the U.S. by presidential proclamation.

The Treaty of Ft. Laramie is signed by the U.S. and Red Cloud of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). No whites are to be permitted to settle, occupy or pass through the Black Hills without the consent of the Lakota people.

Gen. George A. Custer attacks the sleeping Cheyenne village of Black Kettle on the Washita River. One hundred and three Cheyenne people are killed, fifty-three women and children are captured. The camp is destroyed and 900 ponies are shot.

The U.S. House of Representatives passes a resolution impeaching President Johnson. Impeachment proceedings close with an acquittal.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, establishing the rights of citizenship for African Americans, is ratified.

Susan B. Anthony founds the Suffrage newspaper, The Revolution. The motto of the newspaper is: "The true Republic - men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less!"

1869

Ulysses S. Grant is inaugurated as the eighteenth President of the United States.

The Union Pacific Railroad, building west from Nebraska, joins the Central Pacific building east from California at Promontory, Utah. The junction completes the first transcontinental railroad link.

William Tecumseh Sherman takes command of the entire U.S. Army in the West, composed of fourteen thousand soldiers deployed from Texas to North Dakota, from Kansas to California. Sherman's headquarters is established in St. Louis.

A financial panic known as "Black Friday" occurs after Jay Gould and James (Jubilee Jim) Fisk conspire to corner all the gold on the money market, hold it until the price soars, then sell.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first all-professional U.S. baseball team, is founded in Cincinnati, Ohio.

John Wesley Powell descends the Colorado River with nine men in four special boats with watertight compartments. They run the rapids of the Green River Canyon, Glen Canyon, Marble Canyon and the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The Suez Canal is opened in Egypt, facilitating world travel and trade.

1870

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, establishing the right to vote by all male citizens regardless of "race, color or previous condition of servitude," is ratified.

The last four southern states, Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia, are readmitted to the Union after ratifying the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and framing constitutions satisfactory to the Congress.

The Justice Department is created by an act of Congress.

The U.S. Weather Bureau is established by Congress as part of the Signal Corps.

Standard Oil Company of Ohio, with a capitalization of $1 million, is formed by John D. Rockefeller. The company makes special low-rate agreements with the railroads and gains control of pipelines, thus virtually monopolizing oil refining in the U.S.

Nathaniel P. Langford, Gen. Henry D. Washburn, and Lt. Gustavus C. Doane mount a civilian-sponsored expedition in the Yellowstone region of Wyoming. All of the nineteen explorers (save one) decide that thoughts of personal exploitation of the area should be abandoned, and at the suggestion of Cornelius Hedges, to work together in an effort to persuade the U.S. Government to set aside the region as a national park.

John Wesley Powell explores the plateaus north of the Grand Canyon and the Zion area of Utah.

Ninth census: U.S. population - 39,818,000.