October 1 · This Day in America
An act of Congress, signed by President Benjamin Harrison, draws a line around more than 1,500 square miles of California high country — Half Dome, the great granite domes, the giant sequoias older than the Republic — and declares it off-limits to the saw and the sheep. It is the nation's third national park. The naturalist John Muir had spent years writing about this place as if it were a cathedral, because to him it was. He had watched the meadows above Yosemite Valley chewed bare by grazing flocks and decided the country needed to be argued into protecting beauty for its own sake. The argument worked. A young nation, still busy fencing and felling, paused long enough to say: some things are not for sale. The trees Muir defended are still standing. Some of them will outlive everyone reading this.
Source: www.history.com
Also on this day · 1961
In the final game of the year at Yankee Stadium, in the fourth inning against Boston rookie Tracy Stallard, Roger Maris turns on a waist-high fastball and sends it into the right-field seats. Home run number 61 — one past Babe Ruth's 1927 mark, set under a glare of pressure that had thinned his hair. The crowd would not let him sit down until he stepped back out and tipped his cap.
Source: www.loc.gov
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”John Muir, 1873