June 1901

June 1, 1901 (Saturday)

• Oil multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller announced the establishment of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
• The first Indian Motorcycle prototype was demonstrated in Springfield, Massachusetts at 12:00 noon.
• Born: John Van Druten, English playwright; in London

  June 2, 1901 (Sunday)

• General Katsura Tarō became the new Prime Minister of Japan, succeeding Itō Hirobumi. The protege and former Minister of the Army during the administration of Premier for Yamagata Aritomo had been selected after Ito and his cabinet had resigned.
• Captain Frederick Russell Burnham, an American soldier of fortune who had joined the Second Boer War to fight with the British Army, found himself surrounded by enemy soldiers while attempting to dynamite the Boer railroad line connecting Pretoria to Delagoa Bay, fled on horseback, and was presumed dead after his horse was hit by a bullet fell on top of him. The next day, "when he came to, both his friends and foes had departed", but Burnham returned to the tracks and set off the dynamite charges to destroy the tracks, then took refuge in an empty kraal for another two days. When he heard the sound of distant gunfire, he managed to locate a patrol of men under Major-General John Baillie Dickson's brigade, and survived. For his heroism, Burnham would be awarded the Distinguished Service Order.
• Boer General P. H. Kritzinger captured the small city of Jamestown in Britain's Cape Colony. Pete Bester, a deserter from the British Army who had gone over to fight with the Boers, rode in to town and looted shops, the local hotel, and the city armory, then kept supplies from being delivered to the area for four months. Bester would eventually be captured and executed by the British for treason on November 24.
• Following up on the May 19 elections for the lower house of the Cortes, voters in Spain cast their votes for half of the seats in the Senate, with the Liberal Party winning 117 seats, the Conservatives 56, and the other 24 members being drawn from other parties.
• One of the first arrests in America for driving a car too fast was made on 35th Street in Chicago. A lawyer for American Steel and Wire was charged with driving in an zone. After initially being fined ten dollars, Grant protested that he would appeal, and the fine was increased to forty dollars.
• Born:
• * Bert Andrews, American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter; in Colorado Springs, Colorado
• Died:
• * James A. Herne, 60, American actor and playwright
• * George Leslie Mackay, 56, Canadian Presbyterian missionary to Taiwan who established a clinic, a hospital and numerous schools

  June 3, 1901 (Monday)

• Nine companies of the 9th U.S. Infantry Regiment arrived in Manila after being withdrawn from China. General Chaffee arrived in Manila two days later.
• Count Alfred von Waldersee, the commanding general of Germany's occupation troops in China, departed Beijing in an elaborate ceremony.
• The British Cape Colony was invaded by 700 Boer troops under the command of Commandant Scheeper, in attack on Willowmore. British forces drove the Boers away after a nine-hour battle.
• Born:
• * Marshal Zhang Xueliang, Chinese military leader, kept under house arrest from 1937 to 1990; in Tai'an, Liaoning
• * Verner W. Clapp, South African-American librarian and writer; in Johannesburg
• * José Lins do Rego, Brazilian novelist; in Pilar, Paraíba
• Died: Joseph H. Jordan, 59, former slave who founded the first African-American Universalist Church

  June 4, 1901 (Tuesday)

• The United States Department of the Treasury issued an order prohibiting the entry of any immigrants who were afflicted with pulmonary tuberculosis, with directions to turn them back at Ellis Island.
• Russia's State Council approved a proposal by Interior Minister Dmitry Sipyagin to ease censorship restrictions on periodicals. Although a newspaper or magazine could be shut down if it got three warnings, a first warning would expire if a second did not follow within a year; and two warnings in a year meant probation for a two-year period, after which the record would be clear. "No longer would the threat of preliminary censorship... hover indefinitely over a twice-warned periodical," an author would later note.
• Eight iron miners were killed in an explosion at the Chapin mine at Iron Mountain, Michigan.
• Died: Georg Vierling, 81, German composer

  June 5, 1901 (Wednesday)

• The Epsom Derby, England's premier horse racing event, was won by Volodyovski, an American-trained horse leased by William Collins Whitney.
• A bolt of lightning struck the local schoolhouse in Littleton, Iowa, reportedly "injuring all of the school children, many of them seriously".
• Born:
• * Carl Joachim Friedrich, German-American political scientist; in Leipzig
• * B. R. Lakin, American Baptist preacher and evangelist, and mentor of Jerry Falwell; in Wayne County, West Virginia
• Died: Dagny Juel, 33, Norwegian writer, shot in the back of the head by an admirer, Wladyslaw Emeryk, in a murder-suicide

  June 6, 1901 (Thursday)

• Despite being outnumbered, 240 British troops under the command of Colonel Wilson surprised and routed a 400-man force led by General Beyer, in a battle west of Warm Baths, South Africa. The British casualties were limited to three deaths and 15 wounded. On the same day, Britain's General Elliot fought with the Boer forces of General Christiaan de Wet at Reitz, with high casualties on both sides.
• During a hunting trip in what would later become Coconino National Forest to collect specimens for the Smithsonian Institution, John McCarty, Commissioner of the Arizona Game and Fish Department, was killed when a shotgun shell accidentally exploded in the barrel, fatally wounding him in the face. McCarty's body would not be located until August 19.
• Born: Sukarno, Indonesian state leader, first President of Indonesia; in Surabaya, Dutch East Indies
• Died: Dr. Thomas Bond, 59, British surgeon, pioneer in offender profiling during the investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders; suicide by jumping

  June 7, 1901 (Friday)

• Philanthropist and multimillionaire Andrew Carnegie transferred $10,000,000 worth of his bonds from U.S. Steel to improve universities in his native Scotland, with half of the money going to a scholarship fund.
• The British Governor of the Gambia, Sir George Denton, signed a lease with King Musa Molloh of Fuladu, whose territory lay in both British Gambia and French Senegal. In return for £500 per year, Musa Molloh agreed to a British protectorate.
• Pennsylvania Governor William A. Stone signed a new law paving the way for a rapid transit system.
• Born: Joseph Wenger, American naval officer and cryptanalyst; in Patterson, Louisiana

  June 8, 1901 (Saturday)

• Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov began demonstrating his experiments in classical conditioning to two physiologists sent by the Nobel Committee, Professor J.E. Johansson of Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and Johansson's assistant, fellow physiology professor Robert Tigerstedt. Over the next ten days, Dr. Pavlov showed the two men his results in using a buzzer to trigger a salivation response with dogs. The two Swedish delegates were favorably impressed, and Pavlov would become the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize, being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904.
• Lorenzo Snow, the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, directed a second drive to send missionaries to Mexico, appointing Ammon M. Tenney for that purpose.

  June 9, 1901 (Sunday)

• Charles de Foucauld, who would be declared a martyr of the Roman Catholic Church after his assassination in 1916, was ordained as a priest at the age of 43, and set about to become the first priest to serve the Sahara. He would write later, "In Morocco, as big as France, with 10,000,000 inhabitants, not a single priest in the interior; in the Sahara, seven or eight times as big as France, and much more inhabited than was thought earlier, a mere dozen missionaries. No people seemed to be more abandoned than these."
• The New York Giants baseball team set a modern-day record of 31 hits and 25 runs in a nine-inning game against the Cincinnati Reds. A crowd of 17,000 fans came to the game in Cincinnati's League Park, which only had seating for 3,000 people. As a result, "the overflow crowd ringed the outfield and crowded close behind the infield". The final score would have been New York 25, Cincinnati 13, in front of a crowd of 17,000, but umpire Bob Emslie finally declared the game a 9–0 forfeit because so many of the baseballs were lost in the crowd, leading to a record for the number of automatic doubles in a game, something that would normally "occur only once in 700,000 non-extra-inning games". The Giants' record of 31 hits remains a record in nine-inning game, and would be tied on August 29, 1992, by the Milwaukee Brewers in a 22–2 win over the Toronto Blue Jays. On July 10, 1932, the Cleveland Indians would get 32 hits in 18 innings, in an 18–17 loss to the Philadelphia Athletics. The event proved to be the final game for Cincinnati pitcher Amos Rusie, who would later be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• Born: Marion Gering, Russian-born American film director, producer and actor; in Rostov-on-Don, Russian Empire
• Died:
• * Walter Besant, 63, English novelist
• * Adolf Bötticher, 58, German art historian
• * Edward Moran, 72, English painter

  June 10, 1901 (Monday)

• Sixteen men were killed in an explosion of the Pittsburgh Coal Company coal mine at Port Royal, Pennsylvania. The dead included an assistant mine superintendent identified as a second cousin of President William McKinley, and a mine superintendent. A party of safety inspectors entered the mine the next morning and was injured in a second explosion.
• Despite the surrender of most of the Filipino insurgents, American occupation troops were attacked on the island of Luzon, near Lipa. Three officers were killed.
• Born: Frederick Loewe, German-born American composer who collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner in writing numerous musicals, including My Fair Lady and Camelot; in Berlin
• Died:
• * Robert Williams Buchanan, 60, English poet, critic and novelist. A biographer would write later that "Although his literary and dramatic profits were substantial, Buchanan, who was generous in his gifts to less successful writers, was always improvident, and he lost late in life all his fortune in disastrous speculation. In 1900 he was made bankrupt. An attack of paralysis disabled him late in that year, and he died in poverty at Streatham..."
• * Robert Loyd-Lindsay, 69, British general, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest landowners within the United Kingdom