July 24 in History

The Ostrogoths fled the Siege of Ariminum when a massive Byzantine fleet appeared unexpectedly, compelling them to abandon their campaign entirely. This sudden retreat allowed Belisarius to secure Rimini without further bloodshed and opened the path for his subsequent advance toward Rome.

King Edward I's siege engines, including the massive trebuchet known as War Wolf, smashed through Stirling Castle's defenses on July 24, 1304. This brutal capture ended Scottish resistance for a decade and forced the remaining nobility to submit to English rule.

The Iroquois chief Donnacona watched from shore as Cartier's men erected a 30-foot cross bearing the words "Long Live the King of France." July 24, 1534. Cartier claimed the land belonged to Francis I—except 200 Iroquois already lived there, fished there, buried their dead there. Donnacona confronted the French immediately, gesturing that all the land around them was his. Cartier lied, said it was just a navigation marker. Then he kidnapped Donnacona's two sons to bring back to France. The sons returned. Donnacona never did.

The French officer chose the narrowest point of the strait—*le détroit*—between Lake Erie and Lake Huron. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac landed with fifty soldiers and fifty settlers on July 24, 1701, building Fort Pontchartrain to control fur trade and block British expansion. Within three years, six thousand Native Americans lived near the fort, trading beaver pelts that funded New France. The settlement nearly disappeared twice before 1760. Today, three million people live where Cadillac planted his trading post, though few know it started as a corporate blockade dressed up as a fort.

Marshal Villars crushes Eugene of Savoy's forces at Denain, shattering Habsburg hopes of conquering France. This crushing defeat forces the Allies to abandon their offensive and accelerates negotiations that end the War of the Spanish Succession.

A Spanish treasure fleet of ten ships departed Havana laden with gold, silver, and emeralds, only to be destroyed by a hurricane off Florida's coast seven days later. Nine of the ten vessels sank, drowning over a thousand sailors and scattering a fortune across the ocean floor. The 1715 Fleet wrecks have yielded millions of dollars in recovered treasure and remain active salvage sites three centuries later.

General Phineas Riall spotted dust clouds rising from American positions and assumed he faced militia—the kind that broke and ran at Queenston Heights two years earlier. Wrong. Jacob Brown had drilled 3,500 regulars through a brutal winter at Buffalo, transforming farmhands into soldiers who held formation under artillery fire. At Chippawa on July 5th, Riall's redcoats marched into volleys from troops in grey uniforms who didn't scatter. "Those are regulars, by God!" he reportedly shouted, ordering retreat. The U.S. Military Academy would later adopt grey dress uniforms. Because of a supply shortage that forced Brown's men to wear grey cloth instead of blue.

Admiral José Prudencio Padilla had eleven ships against Spain's fifteen, but he knew Lake Maracaibo's shallow waters better than any European captain. July 24, 1823. The Spanish fleet couldn't maneuver their deeper-hulled vessels effectively. Padilla's smaller schooners darted between them for three hours, capturing the flagship and forcing the rest to surrender. Not a single Spanish vessel escaped. Gran Colombia—spanning modern Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador—secured its independence that afternoon. The son of enslaved parents had ended three centuries of Spanish naval dominance in the Caribbean with borrowed boats and local knowledge.

Benjamin Bonneville hauled twenty wagons through South Pass in July 1832, proving wheels could cross the Rockies. Not pack animals. Wagons. Each carried 1,000 pounds of trade goods across Wyoming's gentle 7,550-foot grade—the only route where families wouldn't have to abandon everything they owned. The U.S. Army captain opened a 20-mile-wide gateway that half a million emigrants would follow to Oregon and California within two decades. And he did it on a leave of absence, technically as a private fur trader, mapping the West for Washington while pretending not to.

Confederate General Jubal Early routed Union forces under George Crook at the Second Battle of Kernstown, extending his audacious Shenandoah Valley campaign that had already threatened Washington, D.C. The victory bought the Confederacy several more weeks of control over the valley's critical agricultural resources and rail lines. Grant responded by dispatching Philip Sheridan with overwhelming force to end Early's campaign permanently.