Western silver interests scored a big victory in 1890 when Congress passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. It required the U.S. Treasury to buy 4½ million ounces of domestic silver every month. Much of this went into making Morgan dollars.

In other news of 1890:

• The last major American Indian resistance to white settlement ended with the massacre at Wound ed Knee. About 500 U.S. cavalrymen killed an estimated 300 Sioux men, women and children in the South Dakota encampment.
• Cy Young pitched and won his first Major League baseball game. He would win 510 more before retiring in 1911.
• New York introduced the electric chair as a new way to impose capital punishment.
• The Mormon Church outlawed polygamy.
• Newspaper reporter Nellie Bly circled the globe in 72 days and 6 hours in a well-publicized – and successful – attempt to beat the mark set by Phileas Fogg in the Jules Verne novel, Around the World in 80 Days.
• Peanut butter was introduced by a St. Louis physician who developed it as a health food.
• Army and Navy met in a football game for the first time. Navy prevailed, 24-to-0, at West
Point, New York.
• Ellis Island in New York Harbor became a reception center for immigrants arriving in America.
• The 1890 Census placed the nation’s population at slightly more than 62.6 million. About
two-thirds lived in rural areas.

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