On this date in 1889, old west gunslinger Frank “Buckskin” Leslie murders Tombstone prostitute Blonde Mollie Williams. Leslie was an ill-tempered and violent man, especially when he drank. He told conflicting stories about his early life. At times, he said he was from Texas, at other times from Kentucky. He sometimes claimed he had been trained in medicine and pharmacy, and he even boasted that he had studied in Europe. Supposedly, he earned the nickname “Buckskin” while working as an Army Scout in the Plains Indian Wars. None of his assertions can be confirmed in the historical record. The record does tell us that in 1880, Leslie opened the Cosmopolitan Hotel in the mining town of Tombstone, Arizona. Shortly thereafter, he committed his first known murder, shooting Mike Killeen in a dispute over the man’s wife. The killing was officially ruled to have been in self-defense, but suspicion of foul play arose when Leslie married Killeen’s widow two months later. Two years later, after Leslie badly pistol-whipped a man outside the Oriental Saloon, many Tombstone citizens began to suspect Leslie was a dangerous man. When the famous Tombstone gunslinger John Ringo was found murdered, suspicions again focused on Leslie, though law officers were unable to prove his guilt. Billy Claiborne, a friend of Ringo’s, was so certain Leslie was the murderer that he called him out. Leslie shot the inexperienced young man dead.

Even among the notorious rabble of gunslingers and killers in Tombstone, Leslie was unusually violent. The people of Tombstone finally had their chance to get rid of him in 1889. Two years earlier, Leslie had divorced his wife and taken up with a Tombstone prostitute named Blonde Mollie Williams. The relationship eventually soured, and in a drunken fit of rage, Leslie shot the defenseless woman dead. With testimony from a ranch hand that had witnessed the killing, a Tombstone jury convicted Leslie of murder and sentenced him to 25 years. Seven years later, Leslie won parole with the aid of a young divorcee named Belle Stowell. He soon married Stowell and seems to have made an effort to live a more peaceful life. He even reportedly made a small fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush. He moved to San Francisco in 1904. His fortunes thereafter quickly declined, and he disappeared from the historical record. He may have eventually committed suicide, but the true manner and date of his death remain unconfirmed.

On this date in 1925, the so-called “Monkey Trial” begins with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. The law, which had been passed in March, made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” With local businessman George Rappalyea, Scopes had conspired to get charged with this violation, and after his arrest the pair enlisted the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to organize a defense. Hearing of this coordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history. On July 10, the Monkey Trial got underway, and within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton as preachers set up revival tents along the city’s main street to keep the faithful stirred up. Inside the Rhea County Courthouse, the defense suffered early setbacks when Judge John Raulston ruled against their attempt to prove the law unconstitutional and then refused to end his practice of opening each day’s proceeding with prayer.

Outside, Dayton took on a carnival like atmosphere as an exhibit featuring two chimpanzees and a supposed “missing link” opened in town, and vendors sold Bibles, toy monkeys, hot dogs, and lemonade. The missing link was in fact Jo Viens of Burlington, Vermont, a 51-year-old man who was of short stature and possessed a receding forehead and a protruding jaw. One of the chimpanzees wore a plaid suit, brown fedora, white spats, and entertained Dayton’s citizens by playing around on the courthouse lawn. In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defense’s strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible, on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. The next day, Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn, fearing that the weight of the crowd inside was in danger of collapsing the floor.

In front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and died. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

On this date in 1992, the Alaska court of appeals overturns the conviction of Joseph Hazelwood, the former captain of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez. Hazelwood, who was found guilty of negligence for his role in the massive oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, successfully argued that he was entitled to immunity from prosecution because he had reported the oil spill to authorities 20 minutes after the ship ran aground. The Exxon Valdez accident on the Alaskan coast was one of the largest environmental disasters in American history and resulted in the deaths of 250,000 sea birds, thousands of sea otters and seals, hundreds of bald eagles and countless salmon and herring eggs. The ship, 1,000 feet long and carrying 1.3 million barrels of oil, ran aground on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989, after failing to return to the shipping lanes, which it had maneuvered out of to avoid icebergs. It later came to light that several officers, including Captain Hazelwood, had been drinking at a bar the night the Exxon Valdez left port. However, there wasn’t enough evidence to support the notion that alcohol impairment had been responsible for the oil spill. Rather, poor weather conditions and preparation, combined with several incompetent maneuvers by the men steering the tanker, were deemed responsible for the disaster. Captain Hazelwood, who had prior drunk driving arrests, had a spotless record as a tanker captain before the Valdez accident. Exxon compounded the environmental problems caused by the spill by not beginning the cleanup effort right away. In 1991, a civil suit resulted in a billion-dollar judgment against them. However, years later, while their appeal remained backlogged in the court system, Exxon still hadn’t paid the damages. The Exxon Valdez was repaired and had a series of different owners before being bought by a Hong Kong-based company, which renamed it the Dong Fang Ocean. It once again made headlines in November 2010 when it collided with another cargo ship off of China.

On this date in 1865, Mary Surratt and three others are executed by the U.S. government for their role as conspirators in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Surratt, who owned a tavern in Surrattsville (now Clinton), Maryland, had to convert her row house in Washington D.C., into a boardinghouse as a result of financial difficulties. Located a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was murdered, this house served as the place where a group of Confederate supporters, including John Wilkes Booth, conspired to assassinate the president. It was Surratt’s association with Booth that ultimately led to her conviction, though debate continues as to the extent of her involvement and whether it really warranted so harsh a sentence. On the day of the assassination, Booth asked Surratt to deliver a package, which was later discovered to contain firearms, to her old tavern in Maryland. On her way home, Surratt ran into John Lloyd, a former Washington police officer who currently leased the tavern. When authorities first questioned Lloyd about their encounter, he did not mention anything significant and denied that Booth and David Herold had visited his tavern. Yet when questioned later, he claimed that Surratt had told him to have whiskey and weapons ready for Booth and Herold, who would be stopping by that night.

Louis Weichmann, one of the alleged conspirators who delivered the package with Surratt, was released after he testified against her. He later claimed that the government had forced him to testify, and that it plagued his conscience for the rest of his life. Furthermore, Lewis Powell, a conspirator who was hanged with Surratt, proclaimed her innocence to his executioner minutes before his death. Many expected President Andrew Johnson to pardon Surratt because the U.S. government had never hanged a woman. The execution was delayed until the afternoon, and soldiers were stationed on every block between the White House and Fort McNair, the execution site, to relay the expected pardon. But the order never came. Ever since her death, numerous sightings of Mary Surratt’s ghost and other strange occurrences have been reported around Fort McNair. A hooded figure in black, bound at the hands and feet as Surratt had been at the time of her execution, has allegedly been seen moving about. Several children of soldiers have reported a “lady in black” who plays with them.

On this date in 1946, FBI agents arrest George “Bugs” Moran, along with fellow crooks Virgil Summers and Albert Fouts, in Kentucky. Moran once one of the biggest organized crime figures in America, he had been reduced to small bank robberies by this time. He died in prison 11 years later. Bugs Moran’s criminal career took an abrupt downturn after the infamous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, in which his top gunmen were slaughtered by rival Al Capone’s henchmen (a lasting feud had been established after Capone’s men killed Moran’s friend and mentor, Dean O’Banion, in 1924). Moran, who just missed the massacre by a couple of minutes, was visibly shaken when reporters talked to him days later. He shouted at them, “Only Capone kills like that!” Al “Scarface” Capone established his alibi by vacationing in Florida at the time of the Valentine’s Day murders. Sitting poolside, he mocked Moran, chuckling as he told reporters, “The only man who kills like that is Bugs Moran.” Later, while Capone was serving time for tax evasion, Moran may have earned a measure of revenge by killing Jack McGurn, one of the men who had carried out the massacre. A bank robbery charge conviction eventually landed Moran in Leavenworth federal prison. He was released in 1956, but was then re-arrested for an earlier bank robbery. He died in prison of lung cancer on February 2, 1957.

On this date in 1921, Judge Hugo Friend denies a motion to quash the indictments against eight members of the Chicago White Sox who were accused of throwing the 1919 World Series and the trial begins with jury selection. The Chicago White Sox players, including stars Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte and Claude Lefty Williams, subsequently became known as the “Black Sox” after the scandal was revealed. The White Sox, who were heavily favored at the start of the World Series, had been seriously underpaid and mistreated by owner Charles Comiskey. The conspiracy to fix the games was most likely initiated by first baseman Chick Gindil and small-time gambler Josep Sullivan. Later, New York gambler Arnold Rothstein reluctantly endorsed it. The schemers used the team’s discontent to their advantage: Through intermediaries, Rothstein offered relatively small sums of money for the players to lose some of the games intentionally. The scandal came to light when the gamblers did not pay the players as promised, thinking that they had no recourse. But when the players openly complained, the story became public and authorities were forced to prosecute them.

The trial against the players was actually just for show. After a tacit agreement whereby the players assented not to denigrate major league baseball or Comiskey in return for an acquittal, the signed confessions from some of the players mysteriously disappeared from police custody. The jury acquitted all of the accused players and then celebrated with them at a nearby restaurant. But the height of the hypocrisy surrounding the entire matter came when Shoeless Joe was forced to sue Comiskey for unpaid salary. During this trial, Comiskey’s lawyers suddenly produced the confessions that had disappeared during the criminal trial, with no explanation as to how they had been obtained. Arnold Rothstein never faced trial, and Comiskey hoped to go back to business as usual. However, all did not end well for everyone. Other baseball owners, hoping to remove any hint that the games were illegitimate, hired Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis to be the new commissioner of baseball. Landis was a hard-liner who then permanently banned the implicated Black Sox players from baseball. Landis’ decision has come under considerable criticism for its unfairness to a few of the players. Buck Weaver, by all accounts, had refused to take any money offered by the gamblers. He was purportedly banned from baseball for refusing to turn his teammates in. And although Shoeless Joe Jackson probably accepted some money, his statistics show that he never truly participated in throwing the games—he had the best batting average of either team in the series.

On this day in 1962, actor Tom Cruise is born in Syracuse, New York. After his breakout role in the 1983 film Risky Business, Cruise went on to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, appearing in a long list of critically acclaimed dramas and blockbuster action movies. At age 18, Cruise made his feature film debut in Endless Love (1981), which was followed by Taps (1981) and The Outsiders (1983). He first won international fame for his role as fighter pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in 1986’s Top Gun. Cruise received his first Academy Award nomination for his star turn as Vietnam vet and anti-war activist Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989). His second Oscar nomination for Best Actor came for his portrayal as a sports agent in Jerry Maguire (1996); a third nomination followed, in the Best Supporting Actor category, for Cruise’s performance as a self-help guru in Paul Thomas Anderson’s quirky ensemble drama Magnolia (1999).

Cruise’s numerous film credits also include The Color of Money (1986) with Paul Newman; Rain Man (1988) with Dustin Hoffman; A Few Good Men (1992) with Jack Nicholson; The Firm (1993) and Interview with the Vampire: the Vampire Chronicles (1994). He starred as superspy Ethan Hunt in 1996’s Mission: Impossible, and reprised his role in the hit 2000 and 2006 sequels. Cruise acted in three films with Nicole Kidman, to whom he was married from 1990 to 2001: Days of Thunder (1990), Far and Away (1992) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Other Cruise movies include Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005), both of which were directed by Steven Spielberg.

In the spring of 2005, Cruise and actress Katie Holmes, who co-starred in the television drama Dawson’s Creek (1998-2003), embarked on a whirlwind, high-profile romance. That May, Cruise went on The Oprah Winfrey Show and generated headlines by jumping on the host’s couch and expressing his love for Holmes, who is 16 years, his junior. The following month, the two actors were engaged in Paris. Around the same time, Cruise sparked controversy for his impassioned advocacy of Scientology and his criticism of anti-depressant drugs and psychiatry. On November 18, 2006, following the birth of their daughter Suri in April of that same year, Cruise and Holmes were wed in Italy, an event that received huge media coverage. In May 2008, Cruise returned to The Oprah Winfrey Show for a retrospective of his 25 years in film, beginning with his breakout in Risky Business. This past week Katie Holmes filed for divorce.

On this date in 1989, Martha Ann Johnson is arrested in Georgia for the 1982 murder of her oldest child, Jennyann Wright, after an Atlanta newspaper initiated a new investigation into her suspicious death. Johnson’s three other children had also mysteriously died between 1977 and 1982. Back in September 1977, Johnson (who was only 21 at the time) and her third husband, Earl Bowen, lived with Johnson’s kids, Jennyann Wright and James Taylor, from her previous marriages. Shortly after a dispute in which Bowen walked out on Johnson, two-year-old James was brought to the hospital and pronounced dead. The doctors ruled the cause of death to be sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

In the wake of the tragedy, Bowen returned home and the couple reconciled, having two additional children, Earl Jr. and Tibitha. But in 1980, after Bowen took off again, three-month-old Tibitha was found dead–reportedly the result of SIDS once again. Although Bowen was suspicious, he returned home, where he remained until another fight separated the couple. This time, little Earl was stricken with an unknown seizure disorder and died. Jennyann told social workers that she was afraid of her mother, but the authorities sent her home anyway. A year later, she was dead too–asphyxiated from an undetermined cause.

In 1989, after she split from Bowen for good and married her fourth husband, Johnson was arrested. She quickly confessed that she had smothered Jennyann and James as they slept by sitting on them (she weighed more than 250 pounds), but denied responsibility for the other two deaths. She admitted that her motive was to reunite with Bowen. At her trial, which began in 1990, she recanted her confession, but the jury was able to watch it on videotape nevertheless. They convicted Johnson of first-degree murder. Johnson’s case initiated a trend in the 1990s in which authorities looked more closely into the sudden deaths of young children. Many doctors have insisted that SIDS has been misdiagnosed in a multitude of cases.

On this date in 1881, President James A. Garfield is shot as he walks through a railroad waiting room in Washington, D.C. Garfield’s assassin was an attorney and political office-seeker named Charles Guiteau. He was a relative stranger to the president and his administration in an era when federal positions were doled out on a “who you know” basis. When his requests for an appointment were ignored, a furious Guiteau stalked the president, vowing revenge. On the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield headed for the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station on his way to a short vacation. As he walked through the station toward the waiting train, Guiteau stepped behind the president and fired two shots. The first bullet grazed Garfield’s arm; the second lodged below his pancreas. Doctors made several unsuccessful attempts to remove the bullet while Garfield lay in his White House bedroom, awake and in pain. Alexander Graham Bell, who was one of Garfield’s physicians, tried to use an early version of a metal detector to find the second bullet, but also failed.

Historical accounts vary as to the exact cause of Garfield’s death. Some believe that the physicians’ treatments—which included the administration of quinine, morphine, brandy and calomel and feeding him through the rectum–may have hastened his demise. Others insist Garfield died from an already advanced case of heart disease. By early September, Garfield, was recuperating at a seaside retreat at Elberon, New Jersey. He died on September 19, 1881. Autopsy reports at the time said that pressure from the festering internal wound had created an aneurism that was the likely cause of death. Upon Garfield’s demise, Vice President Chester A. Arthur was inaugurated as the 20th President of the United States. Garfield had three funerals: one in Elberon; another in Washington, where his body rested in state in the Capitol for three days; and a third in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was buried. Charles Guiteau’s murder trial began in November, and in January 1882 he was found guilty and sentenced to death. On June 30, 1882, he was hanged at his jail in Washington.

On this date in 1967, Blonde bombshell actress Jayne Mansfield is killed when the car in which she is riding strikes the rear of a trailer truck on Interstate-90 east of New Orleans, Louisiana. Mansfield had been on her way to New Orleans from Biloxi, Mississippi, where she had been performing a standing engagement at a local nightclub; she had a television appearance scheduled the following day. Ronald B. Harrison, a driver for the Gus Stevens Dinner Club, was driving Mansfield and her lawyer and companion, Samuel S. Brody, along with three of Mansfield’s children with her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, in Stevens’ 1966 Buick Electra. On a dark stretch of road, just as the truck was approaching a machine emitting a thick white fog used to spray mosquitoes (which may have obscured it from Harrison’s view), the Electra hit the trailer-truck from behind. Mansfield, Harrison and Brody were all killed in the accident. Eight-year-old Mickey, six-year-old Zoltan and three-year-old Marie, or Mariska, had apparently been sleeping on the rear seat; they were injured but survived.

Born Vera Jayne Palmer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Mansfield arrived in Hollywood as a young wife and mother (to daughter Jayne Marie) in 1954, determined to become an actress. From the beginning, she wasn’t afraid to make the most of her assets, particularly her curvaceous figure, flowing platinum blonde hair and dazzling smile. Cast in the Broadway comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?”, she turned heads as a voluptuous, dumb blonde movie star; in one famous scene she appeared in nothing but a white towel. She famously appeared nude in the 1963 comedy “Promises! Promises!”, and stills from the set appeared in Playboy magazine, but her best performance was generally believed to have been in 1957’s “The Wayward Bus,” based on the John Steinbeck novel and costarring Joan Collins. While her screen career amounted to about a dozen less-than-memorable films, off screen she played the movie star role to perfection, and became one of the most visible glamour girls of the era. In 1958, after her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Hargitay, a former Mr. Universe; they divorced in 1963, and Mansfield was married once more, to Matt Climber, in 1964. That marriage also ended in divorce and she was awarded custody of their child, Octabiano. Mariska Hargitay, injured in the accident that killed her mother, later launched her own acting career, most memorably starring in the long-running television drama “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

On this date in 2003, Katharine Hepburn, a four-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress and one of the greatest screen legends of Hollywood’s golden era, dies of natural causes at the age of 96, at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Hepburn was born into a well-to-do New England family, the daughter of a prominent surgeon, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, and his wife, Katharine Houghton, a suffragist and birth control advocate. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1928 and became a stage actress; her role in the 1932 Broadway production The Warrior’s Husband led to a Hollywood screen test and a contract with RKO studios. In Hepburn’s debut film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), she starred opposite John Barrymore and was directed by George Cukor, who would become her close friend and helm many of her films (including 1933’s Little Women, 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, 1938’s Holiday and 1949’s Adam’s Rib).

Heralded as a fresh, unconventional beauty and a talented actress, Hepburn won her first Best Actress Oscar for only her third film, Morning Glory (1933). A string of films made with RKO had mixed degrees of success, and Hepburn began earning a reputation as arrogant and self-absorbed on set, though she was always meticulously prepared for her roles. She also refused to play by the rules governing typical Hollywood starlets at the time, appearing publicly in pantsuits and without makeup and refusing to sign autographs or grant interviews. After modest successes with Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), Hepburn decided to buy out her contract with RKO, a move that gave her unusual control over her career for that time. Her faltering image was revived by the success of The Philadelphia Story, which had originally been written for Hepburn to play on Broadway and was then adapted into a hit 1940 movie co-starring Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Several years later, Hepburn met the actor Spencer Tracy while co-starring with him in Woman of the Year (1942). Though Tracy, a devout Catholic, remained married, the two began a romantic relationship that would last until Tracy’s death nearly three decades later (Hepburn had divorced her husband of six years, Ludlow Ogden Smith, in 1934). On-screen, they acted in nine films together, including Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Tracy died just weeks after shooting was completed on the last film, for which Hepburn would win her second Best Actress Oscar.

Hepburn was awarded her third Oscar for her starring turn in A Lion in Winter (1968). She continued to appear in films and on television (including an Emmy-winning performance in 1976’s Love Among the Ruins) throughout the next three decades, winning a fourth Best Actress statuette for 1981’s On Golden Pond. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards in her lifetime (a record that would stand until 2003, when Meryl Streep received her 13th nomination), Hepburn never attended the awards show to collect her honors in person. In 1986, she broke her longtime silence about her relationship with Tracy (his widow had died in 1983) in a televised tribute to the actor. She read aloud a poignant letter she had written to him about his drinking and about their last years together. She later included the letter in her best-selling 1991 autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. In her final screen appearance, in 1994’s Love Affair (a remake of the classic 1939 film), Hepburn appeared frail but composed as ever in her portrayal of the aristocratic aunt of Warren Beatty’s character. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) named Hepburn as the greatest female actress in the history of American cinema. When she died on June 29, 2003, the lights on Broadway were dimmed for an hour to mark the passing of one of entertainment’s brightest stars.

On this date in 1844, Joseph Smith, the founder and leader of the Mormon religion, is murdered along with his brother Hyrum when an anti-Mormon mob breaks into a jail where they are being held in Carthage, Illinois. Born in Vermont in 1805, Smith claimed in 1823 that he had been visited by a Christian angel named Moroni who spoke to him of an ancient Hebrew text that had been lost for 1,500 years. The holy text, supposedly engraved on gold plates by a Native American historian in the fourth century, related the story of Israelite peoples who had lived in America in ancient times. During the next six years, Smith dictated an English translation of this text to his wife and other scribes, and in 1830 The Book of Mormon was published. In the same year, Smith founded the Church of Christ–later known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–in Fayette Township.

The religion rapidly gained converts, and Smith set up Mormon communities in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. However, the Christian sect was also heavily criticized for its unorthodox practices, such as polygamy. In 1844, Smith announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States. Although he did not have great enough appeal to win, the idea of Smith as president increased anti-Mormon sentiment. A group of dissenting Mormons began publishing a newspaper that was highly critical of the practice of polygamy and of Smith’s leadership; Smith had the press destroyed. The ensuing threat of violence prompted Smith to call out a militia in the Mormon town of Nauvoo, Illinois. He was charged with treason and conspiracy by Illinois authorities and imprisoned with his brother Hyrum in the Carthage city jail. On June 27, 1844, an anti-Mormon mob stormed in and murdered the brothers.

Two years later, Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, led an exodus of persecuted Mormons from Nauvoo along the western wagon trails in search of religious and political freedom. In July 1847, the 148 initial Mormon pioneers reached Utah’s Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Upon viewing the valley, Young declared, “This is the place,” and the pioneers began preparations for the tens of thousands of Mormon migrants who would follow them to settle there.

On this date in 1910, Congress passes the Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. This legislation was ostensibly aimed at keeping innocent girls from being lured into prostitution, but really offered a way to make a crime out of many kinds of consensual sexual activity. The outrage over “white slavery” began with a commission appointed in 1907 to investigate the problem of immigrant prostitutes. Allegedly, women were brought to America for the purpose of being forced into sexual slavery; likewise, immigrant men were allegedly luring American girls into prostitution.

The Congressional committees that debated the Mann Act did not believe that a girl would ever choose to be a prostitute unless she was drugged and held hostage. The law made it illegal to “transport any woman or girl” across state lines “for any immoral purpose.” In 1917, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of two married California men, Drew Caminetti and Maury Diggs, who had gone on a romantic weekend getaway with their girlfriends to Reno,Nevada, and had been arrested. Following this decision, the Mann Act was used in all types of cases: someone was charged with violating the Mann Act for bringing a woman from one state to another in order to work as a chorus girl in a theater; wives began using the Mann Act against girls who ran off with their husbands. The law was also used for racist purposes: Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world, was prosecuted for bringing a prostitute from Pittsburgh to Chicago, but the motivation for his arrest was public outrage over his marriages to white women.

The most famous prosecutions under the law were those of Charlie Chaplin in 1944 and Chuck Berry in 1959 and 1961, who took unmarried women across state lines for “immoral purposes.” Berry was convicted and spent two years in the prime of his musical career in jail. After Berry’s conviction, the Mann Act was enforced only sparingly, but it was never repealed. It was amended in 1978 and again in 1986; most notably, the 1986 amendments replaced the phrase “any other immoral purpose” with “any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense.”