Samurai and cowboys were contemporaries: the samurai's last stand at Shiroyama came in September 1877, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral just four years later, in 1881.
The events
- Meiji Restoration1868 · Kyoto. In 1868 the Tokugawa shogunate was abolished and power formally returned to Emperor Meiji. Japan, until recently closed to the outside world, carried out Western-style reforms and within decades became an industrial and military power.
- Gunfight at the O.K. Corral1881 · Tombstone, Arizona. On 26 October 1881 the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday faced a gang of Cowboys in Tombstone. About thirty shots were fired in thirty seconds, and not at the O.K. Corral at all but in a narrow lot by a photo studio, six doors from its rear entrance.
More amazing facts
- 1875 Mendeleev corrected the discoverer of an element he had never seen.
- 1876 · 1877 Bell wanted people to answer the telephone with a sailor's 'Ahoy!'. What stuck was 'Hello!', suggested by Thomas Edison in 1877.
- 1876 The telephone and the end of samurai swords arrived together: Bell patented the telephone in March 1876, and on 28 March Japan banned carrying swords in public.
- 1876 On the very day Custer died at the Little Bighorn, Bell was showing off the telephone.
- 1876 The telephone was invented twice on the same day. On 14 February 1876 both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed papers for similar devices at the patent office, and who came first was fought over in court for years.
- 1877 · 1894 An Arizona observatory was built to study Martian canals.