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Show 1(D Years Ag Trnrilay .fclM Slow boat from China is picking up steam hy Itt'ttina Munich Doolcv Indian visitations, lynch-ings, lynch-ings, cattle rustling. These were the everyday happenings hap-penings that became the headlines in newspapers across the country 100 years ago. In Park City, publisher and editor Sam Raddon and his staff awaited the dispatches dis-patches that tap-tap-tapped their way across the telegraph lines to fill the pages of the Park Record. Of import on February 9, 1884 was the news from the Philadelphia Ledger that a letter had reached a resident there from China in record time: one month. The letter had steamed across the ocean on the ship Mogora Mara to San Francisco, where it was then transferred trans-ferred to a train bound for the East Coast. "We used to think ourselves fortunate to get China letters in five weeks," said an impressed Ledger reporter. From the nation's capital came the news that a visiting Apache chieftain had offered to trade 25 ponies for one of the women clerks in the Treasury Department. "This noble red man should go to Mr. Christiancy and be wise," advised the dispatch, dispatch. With the Civil War just 20 years in the past, news from the South included this editorial comment: "The signs of new life are apparent ap-parent in every section of the South. All its latent energies are roused to activity, and the desolation of two decades ago is just disappearing in the wake of regeneration. The North will do all in its power to enlarge the prosperity, and we congratulate our Southern neighbors on their timely recuperative force, which though numbed for a time, is now bending every impulse to rise to that plane of progress in keeping with the spirit of a gifted people." From Omaha, Nebraska came the news that Conductor Conduc-tor Phinney had found a man hanging from a whistle post while driving an eastbound freight train. The man had been identified as the infamous in-famous Kid Wade, leader of a notorious band of outlaws and horse theives. The Kid had been arrested, but was snatched away from the sheriff by an outraged vigilante group. The sheriff managed to reclaim his prisoner once, but the vigilantes managed to recapture him, and hang him for the world to see. "The terrible earnestness of the vigilantes and the mystery of their ways causes men to shudder when their doings are mentioned," wrote the Record. From Galveston, Texas came the dispatch that a, special meeting of the' legislature had been called, and it was determined that fence cutting would be deemed a felony. Barbed wire had been introduced in the 1860s, and by 1874 the machinery for manufacturing manufac-turing it in quantity had been perfected. Since then, cattle drivers had declared war on land owners who fenced in their pastures. In Park City, a bear was spotted roaming in the upper part of town. Wrote a wry Record reporter: "Nobody seems to have lost an animal of that description, as no effort ef-fort was made to capture it." Heavy snowstorms during the past week had dumped more than three feet on the roads, making travel difficult dif-ficult for the mules hauling ore from the mines, and the carriages and stagecoaches traveling to Salt Lake. "A great many roofs in the city had to be shoveled off to relieve them of the great weight," informed the Record. Perhaps the most gratifying gratify-ing news to the entire town, however, was that the "Park City charter to-day passed its second reading in the Legislature, and was ordered or-dered printed." In just a matter of weeks, the Park would become a ( city. |