June 1901


The following events occurred in June 1901:

June 1, 1901 (Saturday)

June 2, 1901 (Sunday)

  • General Katsura Tarō became the new Prime Minister of Japan, succeeding Itō Hirobumi. The protege and former Minister of the Army during the administration of Premier for Yamagata Aritomo had been selected after Ito and his cabinet had resigned.
  • Captain Frederick Russell Burnham, an American soldier of fortune who had joined the Second Boer War to fight with the British Army, found himself surrounded by enemy soldiers while attempting to dynamite the Boer railroad line connecting Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, fled on horseback, and was presumed dead after his horse was hit by a bullet fell on top of him. The next day, "when he came to, both his friends and foes had departed", but Burnham returned to the tracks and set off the dynamite charges to destroy the tracks, then took refuge in an empty kraal for another two days. When he heard the sound of distant gunfire, he managed to locate a patrol of men under Major-General John Baillie Dickson's brigade, and survived. For his heroism, Burnham would be awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
  • Boer General P. H. Kritzinger captured the small city of Jamestown in Britain's Cape Colony. Pete Bester, a deserter from the British Army who had gone over to fight with the Boers, rode in to town and looted shops, the local hotel, and the city armory, then kept supplies from being delivered to the area for four months. Bester would eventually be captured and executed by the British for treason on November 24.
  • Following up on the May 19 elections for the lower house of the Cortes, voters in Spain cast their votes for half of the seats in the Senate, with the Liberal Party winning 117 seats, the Conservatives 56, and the other 24 members being drawn from other parties.
  • One of the first arrests in America for driving a car too fast was made on 35th Street in Chicago. A lawyer for American Steel and Wire was charged with driving in an zone. After initially being fined ten dollars, Grant protested that he would appeal, and the fine was increased to forty dollars.Born:
  • * Bert Andrews, American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter; in Colorado Springs, Colorado Died:
  • * James A. Herne, 60, American actor and playwright
  • * George Leslie Mackay, 56, Canadian Presbyterian missionary to Taiwan who established a clinic, a hospital and numerous schools

June 3, 1901 (Monday)

June 4, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • The United States Department of the Treasury issued an order prohibiting the entry of any immigrants who were afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, with directions to turn them back at Ellis Island.
  • Russia's State Council approved a proposal by Interior Minister Dmitry Sipyagin to ease censorship restrictions on periodicals. Although a newspaper or magazine could be shut down if it got three warnings, a first warning would expire if a second did not follow within a year; and two warnings in a year meant probation for a two-year period, after which the record would be clear. "No longer would the threat of preliminary censorship... hover indefinitely over a twice-warned periodical," an author would later note.
  • Eight iron miners were killed in an explosion at the Chapin mine at Iron Mountain, Michigan.Died: Georg Vierling, 81, German composer

June 5, 1901 (Wednesday)

June 6, 1901 (Thursday)

June 7, 1901 (Friday)

June 8, 1901 (Saturday)

June 9, 1901 (Sunday)

June 10, 1901 (Monday)

  • Sixteen men were killed in an explosion of the Pittsburgh Coal Company coal mine at Port Royal, Pennsylvania. The dead included an assistant mine superintendent identified as a second cousin of President William McKinley, and a mine superintendent. A party of safety inspectors entered the mine the next morning and was injured in a second explosion.
  • Despite the surrender of most of the Filipino insurgents, American occupation troops were attacked on the island of Luzon, near Lipa. Three officers were killed.Born: Frederick Loewe, German-born American composer who collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner in writing numerous musicals, including My Fair Lady and Camelot; in Berlin Died:
  • * Robert Williams Buchanan, 60, English poet, critic and novelist. A biographer would write later that "Although his literary and dramatic profits were substantial, Buchanan, who was generous in his gifts to less successful writers, was always improvident, and he lost late in life all his fortune in disastrous speculation. In 1900 he was made bankrupt. An attack of paralysis disabled him late in that year, and he died in poverty at Streatham..."
  • * Robert Loyd-Lindsay, 69, British general, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest landowners within the United Kingdom

June 11, 1901 (Tuesday)

June 12, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • Eighteen Australian soldiers were killed, and 42 wounded, in the Commonwealth's biggest loss of life during the Second Boer War. The members of the 5th Victorian Mounted Rifles were encamped at Steenkoolspruit, near Wilmansrust, when they became victims of an attack by 140 men.
  • Cuba became a United States protectorate as the Cuban Constitutional Convention voted, 16–11, to accept the Platt Amendment without any changes. Earlier, the convention had voted 16–15 for the American-imposed legislation with qualifications, which was unacceptable to the United States.
  • The Fulton, a prototype for the Holland-class submarine created by the American Electric Boat Company, was launched from the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in preparation for trials for observers from various nations. The experimental submarine was long and displaced 103 tons.
  • Gregorio Cortez, a Mexican-American tenant farmer living in Karnes County, Texas, shot and killed County Sheriff W. T. "Brack" Morris, after a gunfight erupted from a mistranslation of an interrogation between the two men over a missing horse. Cortez was able to flee on foot, and eluded pursuit from two deputies. Two days later, Cortez killed Gonzales County Sheriff Robert M. Glover and Posseman Henry J. Schnabel when a posse tracked him down to another ranch, then escaped again through the desert, prompting the largest manhunt in Texas history up to that time. Cortez would become a folk hero among his fellow tejanos of Mexican descent. After his capture, he would be sentenced to life imprisonment, with some of the convictions reversed on appeal. He would eventually be pardoned in 1913. In 1983, his story would be dramatized in a film, The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.Born: Arnold Kirkeby, American hotelier, art collector, and real estate investor who owned Chartwell Mansion; in Chicago

June 13, 1901 (Thursday)

June 14, 1901 (Friday)

June 15, 1901 (Saturday)

  • RMS Lucania became the first ocean liner in the Cunard Line, and only the second overall, to be equipped with wireless radio.
  • The city of Norwalk, Iowa, was incorporated. Although it would have a population of only 315 people in 1910, it would triple in size during the 1950s, and double again in the 1980s. One hundred years after its founding, it would have almost 7,000 people, and over 10,000 by 2015.

June 16, 1901 (Sunday)

June 17, 1901 (Monday)

  • A motion in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, condemning the British Army's incarceration of Boer civilians in concentration camps in South Africa, failed to pass by a margin of 154 to 253. The resolution had been made by MP David Lloyd George; almost 50 of Lloyd George's fellow Liberal Party members abstained from the vote.
  • Frank Russell, a member of the House of Lords, was arrested for bigamy in London on charges that he had married an American woman while still undivorced from his English wife, Countess Russell.
  • Students and teachers at the Forrestville Junior High School in Chicago reported seeing the mirage in Lake Michigan of Michigan City, Indiana, some distant across the water. Despite the distance, the skyline of the Indiana city "was upside down in the lake but it was recognized by several teachers familiar with the buildings of the town", and students watched the unusual image for 90 minutes from 1:00 until it faded by 2:30.
  • The Klamath Indians deeded 621,824 acres of land in Oregon to the United States in exchange for $537,007.20 payment.
  • Well-known American stagecoach robber Bill Miner was released from prison in California after nearly 20 years behind bars. Although he discovered upon his release that "stagecoaches rarely carried great treasure anymore", Miner had learned techniques from new prisoners about how to rob trains. A little more than two years later, Miner would begin a new criminal career, partnering with two fellow convicts in holding up a train in Oregon. The "elder statesman of crime" would finally be put back in prison, at the age of 64, in 1911.Born: F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, English World War II hero and intelligence agent; in London Died:
  • *Louis Aldrich, 58, American stage actor
  • *Bill Craver, 57, American baseball player who was banned for life from the National League, in 1878, for participating in the Louisville Grays scandal

June 18, 1901 (Tuesday)

June 19, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • In celebration of the birth of his new daughter, Tsar Nicholas issued a general pardon to all students arrested during the student riots earlier in the year in Russia.
  • Germany enacted its first copyright law.
  • In Switzerland, it was announced that most of the original signatories to the Geneva Convention, including the United States, had accepted an invitation to confer on revisions to the international agreement on conduct of war.
  • Samuel Langley and Charles M. Manly made a successful test of an unmanned one-quarter scale model of Langley's flying machine, the "Langley Aerodrome", keeping it balanced in several straight-line flights of up to along a remote stretch by the Potomac River. However, the aircraft's engine overheated on each occasion and could not keep a sustained flight.
  • The government of Nicaragua closed all three of its national universities and accepted the resignations of their directors.Born: Piero Gobetti, Italian journalist and publisher who campaigned against the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and was forced to flee the country; in Turin

June 20, 1901 (Thursday)

June 21, 1901 (Friday)

  • Seventeen people were killed in Paterson, New Jersey, after fireworks and dynamite exploded in a cellar beneath in the Walker Building at 440 Main Street. The blast, which happened at 12:30 in the afternoon, blew out the front of the A. M. Rittenberg store and set fire to the building, which included apartments for 12 families. The disaster might have been even worse, because Paterson's Public School Number 3 was adjacent to the apartment building, and wreckage was hurled into the school, but most of the several hundred students had gone home for lunch.
  • President McKinley issued an Executive Order establishing a civil government in the Philippines to succeed the American military government, and appointed future U.S. President William Howard Taft as the first civilian governor.
  • Japanese statesman Hoshi Tōru, formerly the Speaker of Japan's House of Representatives and the Japanese Minister to the United States in the late 19th century, was stabbed to death by Iba Shotaro, a bank manager and former college dean. Hoshi was sitting at a meeting of the Tokyo Municipal Council when Shotaro entered the chamber, armed with a sword, and stabbed him twice. Shotaro wrote a letter afterward and said that Hoshi's "arbitrary and dishonest dealing and behavior" as chairman of the Tokyo City Educational Society had dishonored the office and had led him to resign from the organization; an historian would write later that "In this case, as in others which were to follow, much of the press and public sentiment was more generous to the assassin than to his victim."
  • The first waters from the Colorado River arrived in the Imperial Valley in the southern California desert, 38 days after the diversion project had started on May 14, it what seemed at first to be a triumph for Canadian-born engineer George Chaffey and investor Charles R. Rockwood. who had invested in the construction of irrigation canals. Thousands of settlers would pour into the area to work on the farms that were created, and soon, "where open desert once stood, the new towns of Heber, Holtville, El Centro, Brawley, and Westmorland took root." However, Chaffey and Rockwood "had not reckoned with the inexorable tendency of a river to keep on doing what it has always done" and within three years, the canals were clogged with silt and many of the original farms were destroyed. Rockwood's California Development Company would go bankrupt, and the problem of converting the desert would not be solved until the damming of the Colorado River more than 30 years later.Died: Admiral Anthony Hoskins, 72, three time First Naval Lord in the United Kingdom

June 22, 1901 (Saturday)

June 23, 1901 (Sunday)

June 24, 1901 (Monday)

  • Shortly before midnight, drillers struck oil in the Oklahoma Territory, at Red Fork within the Creek Indian nation, only 30 days after the Creek National Council had ratified an agreement to cede its lands to the federal government. The Sue A. Bland Number 1 well was a gusher, and transformed Tulsa, Oklahoma, from a rural frontier community into a center for oil production in the United States.
  • General Juan Cailles, who had continued the Philippine resistance after the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo, surrendered to the United States along with 650 of his men. General Cailles and his army appeared at Santa Cruz in Laguna Province and, at 9:00 a.m., surrendered to U.S. Army General Samuel S. Sumner. General Cailles then led the group in taking the oath of allegiance to the United States.
  • The Brighton & Hove professional soccer football team was founded by athletes meeting at the Seven Stars Pub in Brighton, England.
  • Clara Maass, an American nurse at the Las Animas Hospital in Havana, Cuba, volunteered to be bitten by a mosquito infected with yellow fever in order to further the search for a vaccine to prevent the fatal disease. "Having nursed hundreds of men successfully," a biographer would note, "she appears to have believed that she was immune," but would eventually die of the disease at only 25 years old. The hospital would be renamed for her, and she would be honored decades later as a martyr to the cause of medicine, on postage stamps issued in Cuba in 1951, and in the United States in 1979.Born:
  • * Marcel Mule, French saxophonist; in Aube, Orne département;
  • * Harry Partch, American composer

June 25, 1901 (Tuesday)

  • Germán Riesco, a Liberal Party member, was elected as the new President of Chile, defeating Conservative Party challenger Pedro Monet.
  • Boer armies invaded the Cape Colony and attacked the British settlement of Richmond for a day, then retreated as British forces approached.

June 26, 1901 (Wednesday)

  • After a two-day trial by the French Senate, Count Eugène de Lur-Saluces was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to five years' banishment from France. The next day, two of the Senators, Louis Aucoin and Louis Le Prevost du Launay, faced off in a duel over de Launay's remark to a friend that Aucoin "c'est un grotesque". The two men met for the duel, which featured gunshots "being exchanged without result", and a declaration "that the honor of the participants had been satisfied."The Inheritors, a "quasi-science fiction novel" by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, was published. Despite the fame of both authors, their first collaborative effort was a critical and commercial failure.
  • Born:
  • * Jean Boyer, French film director; in Paris
  • * Stuart Symington, American businessman and U.S. Senator for Missouri, 1953–1976; in Amherst, Massachusetts

June 28, 1901 (Friday)

June 29, 1901 (Saturday)

  • The world's first six-masted schooner, the George W. Wells, and the only other six-master in the world, the Eleanor Percy, collided off the coast of Cape Cod in the Atlantic Ocean during fair weather. Describing the event as "an astonishing coincidence", author Ingrid Grenon would later write, "One wonders what forces of nature contributed to this chance meeting. Whether it was the temperament of the evening wind, the alignment of the moon and stars or just plain happenstance, the two wooden ships crashed into each other." Both had to be repaired in the Boston Harbor.
  • HMS Maine was presented by the Atlantic Transport Line to the Royal Navy to become Britain's first permanent hospital ship. Before that time, such ships were outfitted solely for wartime use.
  • Henri Fournier won the three day automobile race from Paris to Berlin, covering 743 miles in 17 hours.
  • Tsar Nicholas followed the suggestion of his minister of war, Aleksey Kuropatkin, and confirmed a law incorporating residents of the Grand Duchy of Finland into the Russian Army.Born: Nelson Eddy, American singer and actor; in Olneyville, Rhode Island Died:
  • * Albery Allson Whitman, 50, African-American poet acclaimed as "The Poet Laureate of the Negro Race", of pneumonia
  • * Francis J. Birtwell, a 20-year-old ornithologist and an author of numerous articles about species of birds, was killed in a freak accident while working on writing a book titled The Ornithology of New Mexico. Birtwell was on his honeymoon at the Rio Pecos Forest Reserve near Glorieta, New Mexico, and had used lineman's spurs and a rope to climb 75 up a tree to observe a bird's nest. As he descended, he got caught in a loop from the rope and was strangled to death in front of his wife and two witnesses.

June 30, 1901 (Sunday)