April 6 · This Day in America
After more than twenty years of failed attempts, frostbite, and starvation, Robert Peary stands on shifting sea ice near the top of the world and writes in his diary that he has reached the Pole. With him are Matthew Henson — a Black explorer who broke trail the whole way and planted the flag — and four Inuit men, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah, without whom no one survives the Arctic. Whether they stood exactly on 90 north has been argued for a century; they came closer than anyone yet had. Strip away the controversy and a harder truth remains: human beings willed themselves across a frozen ocean to a place with no land, no warmth, and no reason but the wanting. Henson said it plainly — he had been there. America had reached the end of the map.
Source: www.visitthecapitol.gov
Also on this day · 1830
In a small farmhouse in Fayette, New York, a 24-year-old named Joseph Smith and a handful of followers formally organize the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is a wholly American faith, born on the burned-over frontier of revival and seeking. Persecution would drive its people west across a continent, where they would build a society in the desert and change the map of the American West.
Source: www.churchofjesuschrist.org