1841
Vinnie is born; the first wagon train arrives in California.
1847
Mormons arrive in Utah.
The issue of polygamy, specifically as outlined by the Mormon faith, was nearly as big an issue as slavery in antebellum America. The Mormon leader Brigham Young was a figure of much interest as well as controversy; Vinnie met him on her Western tour, and made no attempt to hide her disgust at the practice of polygamy and the paternalistic society of the Mormons in Utah.
1858
Vinnie begins her career on the Mississippi; the first transatlantic telegraph is received in New York City.
1859
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.
1861
The Civil War begins.
2011 marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, a defining moment that shaped the identity of America forever. Vinnie’s public life was played out against this epic backdrop; she was in Mississippi on the very eve of secession, saw at least two brothers go off to war, visited the troops outside of Washington when she and Charles were on their honeymoon tour. Soon after the war was over, she was in the battle-scarred South, seeing firsthand the ravages of war and even glimpsing the Ku Klux Klan in its infancy.
1863
Vinnie and Charles Stratton marry in the most celebrated wedding ceremony of the age; Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation; the General Tom Thumb Company, on its way to perform in Canada, is on one of the last trains to leave New York before the Draft Riots destroy the train tracks into the city.
1865
The Civil War ends.
1869
Vinnie and the General Tom Thumb Company travel the new Transcontinental Railroad months after the Golden Spike, signaling its completion, is driven; General Philip Sheridan reportedly says, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”
Perhaps no single event was more responsible for both settling and destroying the West than the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Point, Utah, on May 10, 1869. Suddenly you could cross the entire continent by railroad. The route from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, only took four days, four hours, and forty minutes for a journey that had taken wagon trains months to travel. New towns sprang up along the route; lawlessness moved west with the population; and the Indian Wars truly began. Vinnie and the General Tom Thumb Company were among the first passengers, commencing their world tour in July 1869 by traveling west on the new railroad.
1871
Lewis Carroll publishes Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.
Vinnie and company return home from their world tour.
1876
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone; National League baseball is founded; the Battle of the Little Big Horn is fought.
Everyone knows of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, one of the great disasters in United States army history, precipitated by General George Armstrong Custer—who first came to prominence during the Civil War. The Indian Wars were a tragic part of our country’s history, beginning in the early 1600s with the Anglo-Powhatan Wars, a twelve-year conflict in Virginia that left many colonists and Indians dead, and ending in 1890 with the Massacre at Wounded Knee, when the last fighting band of the Lakota was destroyed by the U.S. Army. In Vinnie’s time, the saying “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” was accepted as a matter of fact; she wrote about her few encounters with Native Americans, on her Western trip, with undisguised distaste. Unfortunately, the damaging stereotype of the brave U.S. settler/soldier and the evil, often drunk, Indian persisted well into the twentieth century, in movies and television. Now, however, we have a better understanding of our nation’s ugly treatment of the original inhabitants of North America.
1878
Vinnie’s sister Minnie dies; Edison patents the phonograph.
Thomas Alva Edison, born in 1847—a contemporary of Vinnie—was of course the greatest inventor of his time. From the phonograph to the light bulb, even to his ideas for a talking book—predating the audiobook by generations!—he single-handedly changed America during Vinnie’s lifetime.
1879
Edison invents the incandescent light bulb.
1881
Charles and Vinnie tour with Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth; President Garfield is assassinated.
1883
Charles Stratton dies; the first telephone line connects New York City and Chicago.
1885
Vinnie remarries.
1894
The first motion picture is made in the United States (Fred Ott’s Sneeze).
1906
Vinnie publishes a few articles, intended to foreshadow her autobiography (which is never published in her lifetime), in the New York Tribune; the San Francisco earthquake occurs.
1909
General Electric patents the electric toaster.
1914
World War I begins.
1915
Vinnie appears in her only motion picture.
Vinnie dies.