July 14 in History

Pat Garrett shoots dead the notorious outlaw Billy the Kid outside Fort Sumner, ending a reign of terror that had kept New Mexico's frontier in constant chaos. This decisive act finally allows local authorities to assert control over the region, effectively closing the book on one of the Wild West's most infamous gunfights.

The emperor who'd ruled for forty-four years abandoned 1.2 million people in Chang'an with just hours' warning. Xuanzong fled west on July 14th, 756, as An Lushan's rebel army closed in—taking his favorite concubine Yang Guifei, his guards, and his legitimacy. His own troops mutinied twenty miles out, strangling Yang and leaving her body roadside. They blamed her family for the war. The Tang Dynasty survived another 150 years, but China's golden age ended the moment that convoy left the capital gates.

The Burgundians hand Joan of Arc to Bishop Pierre Cauchon, transferring her from military captors to an ecclesiastical court eager for a conviction. This transaction seals her fate, leading directly to the trial that ends in her execution by fire on May 30, 1431.

Scotland gambled a quarter of its entire liquid capital—roughly £400,000—on five ships heading to Panama's fever coast. The Caledonia, St. Andrew, Unicorn, Dolphin, and Endeavour carried 1,200 colonists from Leith in July 1698, convinced they'd build a trading empire at Darién. Within eight months, 400 were dead from disease and starvation. The survivors abandoned New Edinburgh before year's end. The financial catastrophe bankrupted Scottish nobles and merchants alike, making union with England seven years later not just politically convenient but economically necessary. Sometimes an empire dies before it's born.

Sixty-four men marched 650 miles up the California coast searching for a harbor their orders described as "sheltered and magnificent." They walked right past it. Twice. Gaspar de Portolà's expedition spent months hunting for Monterey Bay in 1769, but Sebastián Vizcaíno's 1602 description had been so exaggerated that when Portolà found the actual crescent-shaped inlet, he didn't recognize it. Too small, too exposed. They kept walking north and accidentally discovered San Francisco Bay instead. The Spanish empire's first permanent settlements in Alta California began because explorers couldn't match reality to a 167-year-old travel brochure.

Junípero Serra sang the Salve Regina while hanging bells from an oak tree, hoping the sound would attract Salinan people to his third California mission. July 14, 1771. The nearest Spanish settlement sat 25 miles away—he wanted isolation. Within months, 158 Salinans arrived for baptism, trading their seasonal migration patterns for fixed agricultural labor. The mission eventually claimed 165,000 acres of their ancestral land. By 1834, when Mexico secularized the missions, disease had reduced the Salinan population by 95 percent. Serra called it conversion. The Salinans had no written language to record what they called it.

Parisian revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, shattering royal authority and transforming local unrest into a full-scale national uprising. This violent seizure of the fortress ignited the French Revolution and established July 14 as an enduring symbol of liberty that France celebrates every year.

The mob burned fourteen buildings in three days, targeting homes and meeting houses of anyone who'd toasted the French Revolution's second anniversary. Joseph Priestley—discoverer of oxygen, inventor, theologian—watched his laboratory, library, and life's work turn to ash on July 14th. He'd written pamphlets defending the revolutionaries. Birmingham's establishment had noticed. The rioters carried lists of addresses. Priestley fled to London, then America, never returning to England. His friends stayed quiet. The scientist who'd isolated eight gases couldn't breathe free in his own country for supporting liberty across the Channel.

Mobs stormed Joseph Priestley's home and laboratory, destroying his library and scientific instruments while he fled for safety. This violence shattered Birmingham's reputation as a tolerant hub of Enlightenment thought, driving radical thinkers to flee or retreat from public life in Britain.