1873 | Sports
Sports
The Preakness has its first running May 23 at Baltimore's Pimlico racetrack, where the 1 3/16 mile stakes race for 3-year-olds has been named for the son of Lexington, the horse that won the Dinner Party stakes on the day the track opened in October 1870. The 3-year-old bay colt Survivor wins the first Preakness by 10 lengths, its owner wins a bouquet of blackeyed susans and gains possession for 1 year of the Woodlawn Vase created in 1860 by New York's Tiffany & Company. The race's namesake will be shipped to England, the duke of Hamilton will buy the horse, and he will shoot Preakness dead in a pique (see Belmont Stakes, 1867; Kentucky Derby, 1875).
Mountain climbers scale California's highest peak for the first time August 18. Named for state geologist Josiah Dwight Whitney Jr., now 53, the 14,496-foot mountain dwarfs any other in North America outside Alaska.
The Royal Montreal Golf Club is founded in Quebec. Members who belong to the first permanent club of its kind in the Western Hemisphere play initially on Fletcher's Fields in the center of the city but urban development will soon force them to move some miles away (see Quebec, 1874).
Former world bareknuckle heavyweight boxing champion John C. Heenan dies at Green River Station in Wyoming Territory October 28 at age 40.