November 8, 1889: Montana Is Admitted As the 41st State

November 8, 1889: Montana is admitted to the Union as the 41st State.

Montana is in the Rocky Mountain States. The eastern part of it had been acquired as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the western part through the Oregon Treaty of 1846. It has become known for mining, cattle ranching, and fishing. While still a Territory, the Battle of the Little Bighorn was fought on June 25, 1876, in what is now the town of Crow Agency.

Montana has usually elected conservatives, even when they've been Democrats. But not always: Their most famous politician has been the liberal Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader from 1961 to 1977, the longest-serving Senator floor leader either major Party has ever had.

Montana is over 550 miles from east to west, and nearly 400 miles from north to south. Despite this vast size, Montana has only 1.1 million people, and has no city large enough to host a major league sports team. Only Alaska, Texas and California are larger States by area; but only Wyoming and Alaska are less densely populated States.

As a result, Montana's conservatism has always had a traditional Western style, with a libertarian "Leave me alone" edge. And all that empty space has allowed shady people a place to hide. In 1971, mathematics professor Theodore Kaczynski moved to a cabin without electric power or running water, near Lincoln, and became the terrorist known to the public as the Unabomber, mailing bombs to big-tech targets.

The "Montana Freemen" were a "Christian Patriot" militia group, based outside Jordan, calling their land "Justus Township" (as in, "Just us," not "Justice"). They considered themselves "sovereign citizens," and printed their own money -- making them guilty of counterfeiting and bank fraud. The FBI arrested both the Unabomber and the Freemen in 1996.

While Montana doesn't have major league teams, there are 4 minor-league baseball teams there, all in the Pioneer League, an independent but major-league-connected league, at roughly Class A, 3 levels below the majors. Those teams are the Billings Mustangs, the Glacier Range Riders of Kalispell, the Great Falls Voyagers, and the Missoula PaddleHeads.

The University of Montana is in Billings, and Montana State University is in Bozeman. Both teams compete in the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision (FCS, formerly known as Division I-AA), and while nobody outside the State cares about their rivalry, they are about it, a lot. The capital is Helena.

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November 8, 1889 was a Tuesday. There were no games on this historic day: Baseball was out of season, football was in midweek, hockey barely existed, and basketball didn't, as it wouldn't be invented for another 2 years.

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn

June 25, 1876: The Battle of the Little Bighorn is fought in the Montana Territory. The 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army fights several tribes of Native Americans. The tribes win.

The main group of Natives was the Lakota Sioux, led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The Cavalry was led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. He had graduated 35th and last in his class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1861. Because the Civil War was raging, he rose fast, and had the brevet (temporary) rank of Major General. After the war, his questionable actions led the Army to drop him back down to Lieutenant Colonel.

Custer had managed some victories against Natives in the intervening 11 years, and began to believe he was invincible. But on the Little Bighorn River, he found out otherwise. The legend that there were no U.S. Army survivors isn't even close to being true, but of the 700 men under Custer's command, 274, including Custer himself, a 36-year-old Ohioan, died. The Natives lost about half that many, out of around 2,500.

Reports of the battle began to reach the Eastern United States on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876. The anger of "the white man" toward "the red man" was stronger than ever. A year later, Crazy Horse was captured and executed. Sitting Bull, too, would eventually face what the white man would call "justice," in 1890, at Standing Rock, South Dakota, not long before the last major battle with the Natives, called Wounded Knee.

The most familiar photograph of Sitting Bull.

There is no known photograph of Crazy Horse,

due to a Native superstition about a camera "capturing the soul."

The battle was nicknamed Custer's Last Stand, and Custer was seen as a hero. In truth, he was an unearned egomaniac, and deserves to be ridiculed by history.

The site of the battle is now part of the Crow Indian Reservation, in the southeastern part of the State of Montana. The closest city is Billings, 60 miles to the northwest. The closest major league city is Denver, nearly 500 miles south -- unless you consider the Canadian Football League to be a "major league," in which case the closest is Regina, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, 460 miles northeast.

In 1960, novelty singer Larry Verne had a Number 1 hit with "Mr. Custer." Even by the standards of that time, in which Westerns dominated television and were still big in movies, it was racist as hell toward Natives. It also perpetuated the myth of the cavalry charge order, "Forward, ho!" No such order has ever existed in the U.S. Army.

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June 25, 1876 was a Sunday. As a result, even though this was the 1st season of baseball's National League, there were no games, because the NL forbid Sunday ball until 1892. Football was in its infancy, hockey was a newborn sport even at the most mildly organized level, and basketball wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. So there were no scores on this historic day.

May 10, 1876: The Centennial Exhibition

Memorial Hall

May 10, 1876: The Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, the first official World's Fair to be held in the United States, opens in Philadelphia, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the city, on July 4, 1776.

Officially named the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures, and Products of the Soil and Mine, it was held in Fairmount Park, along the Schuylkill (SKOOL-kill) River, northwest of what's now known as Center City, on fairgrounds designed by Herman J. Schwarzmann. Nearly 10 million visitors attended the exposition, and 37 countries participated in it. It ran until November 10, when colder weather made keeping it going impractical.

A 1,000-foot Centennial Tower was proposed, but never built. (World's Fairs that did build towers have included the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris with the Eiffel Tower, the 1939 New York World's Fair with the Trylon, and the 1962 Century 21 Exposition in Seattle with the Space Needle.) But the right arm and torch of the still-incomplete Statue of Liberty were on display, and fees collected to stand in the torch and view the fair helped raise money for the Statue's completion.

There was an Agricultural Hall, a Horticultural Hall, a Machinery Hall, a Women's Pavilion, and a few other themed exhibition areas. Among the new products shown for the first time at this fair were Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, the Remington No. 1 typewriter, Heinz ketchup and Hires root beer.

The Exhibition was intended not only to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of American independence, but to show that America was coming out of the economic depression that had been caused by the stock market's Panic of 1873. The celebrations were meant to peak on Centennial Day, July 4, 1876. Unfortunately, that was the day that word reached Philadelphia by telegraph of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Native American tribes routed the U.S. Army's 7th Cavalry, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer in the Montana Territory, putting a damper on the big day.

The fair was a mixture of the Gilded Age and the pain of the depression brought about by the Panic of 1873, and the strain that the Wild West was putting on the nation.

One of the few remaining buildings from the Exhibition is Memorial Hall. Since 2005, it has housed the Please Touch Museum, an interactive museum for children.

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May 10, 1876 was a Wednesday. Baseball was America's only professional team sport at the time, and the National League had just begun its 1st season. Only one games was played: The Chicago White Stockings beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-0 at the State Street Grounds in Chicago.

The White Stockings went on to win the NL's 1st Pennant. They went through some name changes until, by 1903, they were known as the Chicago Cubs, and the American League team founded in 1901 had become the Chicago White Sox.

But the team they beat on this day went out of business after the 1879 season. The team known today as the Cincinnati Reds started play in 1882, and has no connection to the earlier Reds, or to the Cincinnati Red Stockings who, in 1869 and 1870, were the first openly professional baseball team. So, when today's Reds claim to be "the oldest professional baseball team," they are lying: The Cubs are, having been established in 1870.