September 16 · This Day in America
There were supposed to be two ships. The Speedwell leaked so badly it twice limped back to port, until finally the plan was abandoned and one small vessel went on without it. On this day the Mayflower clears Plymouth, England, alone — about 102 passengers crammed below decks, half of them religious separatists seeking a place to worship as they chose, the rest seeking a living. Ninety feet of ship against the North Atlantic in autumn. The crossing would take 66 storm-battered days and blow them far north of where they were bound, to a cold Cape Cod shore with winter coming. Many would not survive that first season. But before they landed they would write and sign a compact agreeing to govern themselves by laws of their own making — a small, stubborn act of self-rule that the country it helped seed has been arguing toward ever since.
Source: www.britannica.com
Also on this day · 1893
At noon on this day, a gun fires and roughly 100,000 people surge across a line into the Cherokee Outlet — six million acres of Oklahoma, bought by the federal government from the Cherokee Nation, opened in a single afternoon's mad dash for free homesteads. It was the largest land run in American history: wagons overturning, horses dying, "Sooners" who had crept in early already squatting the best claims. A frantic, dust-choked spectacle of American hunger for land — and a reminder of whose land it had been.
Source: www.okhistory.org