western corner of the State, and from Centralia, one hundred and twelve miles above Cairo, to Chicago, a total length of road of seven hundred and four miles, was also completed. The construction of this road was undertaken prior to the financial crisis of 1837, and about three and-one half millions of dollars spent on it; but then bankruptcy prostrated the State, and work on the road was stopped. The road remained in that condition until the year 1851, when, with the aid of a valuable landgrant, it was pushed on to completion.

The initial steps i transatlantic telegraphic communica tion were made this year. Mr. Cyrus W. Field, of New York, having been applied to for aid to complete a telegraphic line between St. John's and Cape Ray, across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which had been commenced, while investigating the subject considered the practicability of establishing telegraphic communication between Europe and America by a submarine cable stretching from Newfoundland to Ireland. Believing in the success of the project, he obtained in the early part of this year a charter from the Legislature of Newfoundland, granting an exclusive right for fifty years to establish a telegraph from the continent of America to Newfoundland, and thence to Europe. He now looked about him for coadjutors in the work. The first interested was Mr. Peter Cooper, the next Mr. Moses Taylor, and then Mr. Marshall O. Roberts and Chandler White, all wealthy capitalists of New York. On the 8th of May, these five gentlemen met and organized a company under the name of the "New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company," and subscribed a million and a half of dollars with which to begin the undertaking. Mr. Field thenceforth devoted himself almost exclusively to the execution of this project.

The steamer Arctic, during her return voyage from Liverpool, was struck by the Vesta, an iron propeller, on the 27th of September, about sixty-five miles from Cape Race, a few feet forward of her paddle-boxes, and was so seriously injured that in about three hours she filled with water and went down stern foremost, engulfing in her ruin all her passengers but about twentyfive and some of her crew. She was running through a dense fog at the time, and when the collision first occurred the shock was so slight that any serious injury to her hull was not apprehended. Of the more than four hundred persons who left Liverpool, many of whom were returning from a European tour of pleasure, less than fifty were saved.

A terrific tornado struck Louisville on the 27th of August, causing great damage. A church was demolished while the congregation were at worship, and twenty-five persons were killed and sixty-seven injured, many seriously.

There were throughout the country this year, one hundred and ninety-three railroad accidents, killing one hundred and eighty-six persons and wounding five hundred and eighty-nine; there were forty-eight steamboat accidents, in which five hundred and eighty-seven persons were killed, and two hundred and twenty-five wounded. There were also one hundred and

1855

seventy lives lost by means of eighty-three fires, and the total loss of property by fire was twenty-five millions of dollars.

Confusion and anarchy still prevailed in Kansas. Early in the autumn, and while the exasperation of both parties in that Territory was at its height, the Free-State men held a convention, and nominated Governor Reeder, who had been removed from office in July, as a delegate to Congress, in place of General Whitefield, who, it was alleged, had been chosen at a previous election, not by the votes of actual settlers, but by those of people from Missouri. Reeder was elected in October, and when in February following Whitfield was admitted provisionally to a seat in the House of Representatives, he contested it with him. In the mean while violence reigned in Kansas. On the 1st of December, Governor Shannon telegraphed the President for United States forces to preserve the peace of the territory; stating that an armed force of one thousand insurgents was at Leavenworth; that a prisoner had been rescued from the sheriff, houses burned, and the lives of citizens were threatened.

About this time public attention was largely directed to an emigrating expedition to a portion of the territory of the Mosquito coast. Two British subjects claimed to have obtained a grant of that territory from the king of the Mosquito Indians, and under that grant Colonel H. L. Kinney fitted out an expedition to settle upon and improve the lands. As the Government of Nicaragua claimed jurisdiction over the whole Mosquito country, it protested against this emigration scheme as a violation of the neutrality laws of the United States. The President of the United States being convinced that this movement involved more than emigration for settlements, caused the arrest in June of Colonel. Kinney on a charge of violating the neutrality laws. He was admitted to bail, and proceeding secretly to Nicaragua with a few followers, he soon after published a card, calling upon those who had enlisted to join him as soon as possible, by whatever conveyance they might obtain. In the mean while the Government of Nicaragua had issued a decree prohibiting Kinney and his companions from entering the territory, and directing them to be immediately seized and conducted to the seat of government. Another phase of the emigration scheme was now developed. Colonel William Walker, who with a few followers had invaded Sonora from California the year before, was invited by Kinney to join him in improving his grant on Lake Nicaragua. Walker left San Francisco in August, with three hundred armed men, ostensibly to join Kinney, but really to invade Nicaragua. Taking advantage of revolutionary movements in that distracted State, he was successful, and in October marched upon and captured Granada, its capital. He established a Nicaraguan as President, and proceeded to strengthen his government, which was recognized by the British consul, and favorably regarded by the resident minister of the United States. The new government asserted its claim to the Mosquito territory, and Colonel Kinney, who had

been elected its governor by the white inhabitants, was arrested on a charge of treasonable practices, and ordered to leave the country.

The settlers in Oregon and Washington Territory were much disturbed by depredations of the Indians, and many of the inhabitants were murdered. Major Haller, while on an exploring expedition, was, with his company, surrounded by a body of Indians, in Yakima County, Oregon, and kept without food or water for several days. Reinforcements were sent to his aid, but before they reached him, as his position was becoming desperate, his troops fought for fifty hours against an overwhelming force of savages. They then charged through the horde, sustaining a loss of one fifth of the company, and all the animals, provisions, and camp equipage belonging to the expedition. A general uprising of the Indians now took place; whole families were massacred, and the utmost consternation was felt in unprotected parts of the country. General Wool was dispatched from San Francisco to Oregon to organize a movement against the savages.

General Kearney attacked a camp of Sioux Indians in Nebraska, and killed eighty-six, and captured seventy of them.

An expedition, consisting of the bark Release, and the steam propeller Arctic, under the command of Lieutenant Hartstein of the United States Navy, set sail on the 31st of May, in search of Dr. Kane and his associates, who were supposed to be icebound in the Northern seas. On the 11th of October the expedition returned, bringing Dr. Kane and the entire party, with the exception of three, who had died. Dr. Kane sailed from New York on the 31st of May, 1853. On the 12th of September his party were frozen in on the coast of Greenland at the most northerly point ever reached. Here they passed the winter. The next summer was spent in exploring the shores, their vessel remaining all the while fast in the ice. The winter of 1854-55, was of unexampled severity, and their stock of fuel was exhausted. In May, it was decided to abandon the vessel and return home. They set out in open boats, and reached the Danish settlements on the 6th of August, having performed a journey of thirteen hundred miles in eighty-one days. Here they were on the point of taking passage for England, when they were fallen in with by the expedition sent for their relief.

The winter of this year was one of great distress among the poor of New York. Work was scarce and laborers were plenty. Thousands of suffering men gathered in the City Hall Park and elsewhere, and proclaimed their destitution, or paraded the streets with banners and mottoes appealing for aid. Measures for relieving the needy were devised both by private individuals and the municipal authorities; relief associations were formed; soup-kitchens were established, and a system of visitation was organized. In one ward of the city and in one day in the month of January, nine thousand persons were fed by public charity.

The yellow-fever ravaged the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth, Va., in the summer. Soon after its arrival at Norfolk a panic seized the citizens, and as many took refuge in flight as were able to do so. The population of sixteen thousand was reduced within a short time to five thousand, and that of Portsmouth from eleven to four thousand. Portsmouth was speedily almost deserted. Whole streets had only two or three families remaining. Hotels and stores, and even drug-shops, were closed; the great thoroughfares were empty: grass grew up between the bricks, and weeds over the roadside. The entire duration of the epidemic was one hundred and thirty-seven days, during which period the mortality in the two cities was about four thousand-almost one half the number of those who had not fled.

The cholera attacked the passengers on the Pacific steamer Uncle Sam, while on her passage from San Juan to San Francisco, in the early part of September, destroying one hundred and eleven persons, besides those who died in hospital after their arrival in port. The same disease appeared on the steamer Sierra Nevada of the Nicaragua line, which left New York on the 5th of September, and carried off ninety-five of her passengers.

A financial revulsion occurred in San Francisco, creating a panic, and causing the failure, among others, of two of the most eminent of the banking houses largely engaged in the transaction of business between San Francisco and the Atlantic States.

Castle Garden, in New York, ceased as a theatre, and was transformed into a depot for the reception of emigrants. It was formerly named Castle Clinton, and was granted to the city of New York in 1790. After the war of 1812, it being no longer needed for military purposes, it was used as a place of amusement, and continued as such until this period, when it became too distant from the resident part of the city from the continual removal of families to up-town streets.

Mdlle. Rachel, the eminent tragedienne, made her first appearance on the stage in this country, on the 3d of September, at the Metropolitan Theatre, in New York. The operatic company, composed in part of the popular singers Brignoli, Amodio, Rocco, Quinto, and Signorinas Vestvali and Steffone, appeared at the New York Academy of Music.

The banks of Boston established a Clearing-house Association similar to the one formed in New York in 1853.

The first bridge of any kind erected across the Mississippi River was completed in January, at Minneapolis, Minn.

The suspension-bridge across the Niagara River, two miles below the Falls, was completed in March. Operations were commenced in its construction in 1852, and in 1854 the lower floor was opened for travel.

The first Hebrew temple in the Mississippi Valley was consecrated at St. Louis on the 7th of September.

On January 1st, the cities of Brooklyn and Williamsburg,

1856

and the township of Bushwick, were consolidated under the name of Brooklyn, with a population of two hundred and five thousand inhabitants. The first city directory of Indianapolis was issued this year, and the system of numbering the houses commenced.

An attempt made in August to lay the submarine cable across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a distance of sixty miles, as the initiatory step in ocean-telegraph enterprise, resulted in failure. The cable was made in England, and on the 24th of August, one end of it was fastened on the shore at Cape Ray, and a steamer towed the bark which had the cable on board out to sea. The labor of paying it out was successfully prosecuted for over thirty hours, but at the end of that time a very heavy gale arose, which threatened the vessel with destruction, broke two of the three copper wires of which the cable was composed, and rendered the situation of the vessel so exceedingly hazardous that no alternative was left but to cut the cable and abandon the undertaking. This was accordingly done, and forty miles of the cable were sunk in the sea.

An excursion train consisting of eleven cars left St. Louis on the 1st of November, to celebrate the opening of the Pacific Railroad of Missouri, at Jefferson City. While the train was crossing a bridge, about one hundred miles from St. Louis, the structure fell, precipitating the cars a distance of thirty feet into the water, by which disaster twenty persons were killed and forty badly wounded. Twenty-one persons were killed and a still larger number injured by a train being thrown from the track on the Camden and Amboy Railroad, on the 29th of August. Thirty-five persons lost their lives by the explosion of the boilers belonging to the steamboat Lexington, on the Ohio River, about ninety miles below Louisville.

Violence and bloodshed continued to prevail in Kansas. On the 11th of February the President issued a proclamation, stating that combinations within the Territory had been formed to resist the laws, and that persons without the Territory contemplated armed intervention in its affairs, and declaring that the execution of such plans from within would constitute insurrection, and from without invasion. He concluded by ordering all such persons to disperse immediately. The accounts from Kansas continuing to be alarming and very contradictory, the House of Representatives, on the 19th of March, appointed a committee to proceed thither to investigate the whole matter, and report. They returned to Washington in June, and on the 1st of July the majority of the committee presented their report, in which was stated that each election in the Territory had been carried by organized invasions from the State of Missouri, by which the people of the Territory had been prevented from exercising the rights secured to them by the organic law; that the alleged Territorial legislature was an illegally constituted body, and had no power to pass valid laws, and their enactments were therefore null and void; that those laws had not, as a general thing, been used to protect persons and

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