1871 | Exploration, Colonization
Exploration, Colonization
Dodge City, Kansas, has its beginnings in a sod house built on the Santa Fe Trail five miles west of Fort Dodge to serve buffalo hunters. The settlement will grow within a year into a town with a general store, three dance halls, and six saloons, and it will soon be shipping hundreds of thousands of buffalo hides, buffalo tongues, and buffalo hindquarters to market via the Santa Fe Railroad that will reach Dodge City next year (see 1868).
Birmingham, Alabama, is incorporated at a site surrounded by iron ore, coal, and limestone deposits that were exploited in the Civil War to produce Confederate cannonballs and rifles. The town takes its name from Birmingham, England.
An Arctic expedition financed by Congress and commanded by explorer Charles Francis Hall sails from New York June 29 with 33 people (including eight Eskimo men, women, and children) aboard the naval steamer Polaris (see 1864). Perhaps the world's first icebreaker, the ship passes through two channels separating northwestern Greenland from the northeastern Canadian Arctic and reaches 82°11' North before turning south and anchoring off Greenland at 81°37' N. After charting both coasts, Hall establishes a base camp, proceeds by sledge to 83° N., returns after 2 weeks, and dies at Thank God Harbor, Greenland, November 8 at age 51, possibly having been poisoned with arsenic by the ship's Prussian medical officer Emil Bessels. Some survivors will be rescued by a sealer off Labrador in late April 1873, 14 others by a whaler thereafter.
Kimberley is founded in South Africa and is soon the center of a great diamond industry (see 1867).
New York Herald correspondent Henry M. Stanley finds David Livingstone in late October at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika (see 1869). "Dr. Livingstone, I presume," says Stanley (or so he will later claim), and he joins Livingstone in exploring the northern end of the lake, proving conclusively that the Rusizi River runs into the lake and not out of it (see 1874; Livingstone, 1873).