The decade of the 1870s in film involved some significant events.
Thomas "Tom" Horn, Jr. (November 21, 1860 – November 20, 1903) was an American Old West lawman, scout, soldier, hired gunman, detective, outlaw and assassin. On the day before his 43rd birthday, he was hanged in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for the murder of Willie Nickell.
Born to Thomas S. Horn, Sr. and Mary Ann Maricha (née Miller), in rural northeastern Scotland County, Missouri, on the family farm of 600 acres (bisected by the South Wyaconda River) between the towns of Granger and Etna, he was the fifth of twelve children.
At sixteen, he headed to the American Southwest, where he was hired by the U.S. Cavalry as a civilian scout under Al Sieber and became involved in the Apache Wars, aiding in the capture of warriors such as Geronimo. On January 11, 1886, Tom Horn was involved in an expedition into Mexican territory in the pursuit of Geronimo as a packer and interpreter. During the operation, Horn's camp was attacked by Mexican militia and he was wounded in the arm. Horn allegedly killed his first man in a duel-a second lieutenant in the Mexican Army Horn was present at Geronimo's final surrender, acting as an interpreter under Charles B. Gatewood.
André Charles Prosper Messager (30 December 1853 – 24 February 1929) was a French composer, organist, pianist, conductor and administrator. His stage compositions included ballets and 30 opéra comiques and operettas, among which Véronique had lasting success, with Les p'tites Michu and Monsieur Beaucaire also enjoying international success.
Despite financial obstacles, Messager pursued studies in piano and composition, with teachers including Camille Saint-Saëns and Gabriel Fauré. He became a major figure in the musical life of London as well as Paris, both as a conductor and a composer. Most of his Parisian works were produced in London, where several of them had long runs and numerous revivals, and he wrote two operatic works in English. He was the only French composer to write an original Savoy opera. Towards the end of his career, he composed musical comedies for Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps.
As a conductor, Messager held prominent positions in Paris and London, at the head of the Opéra-Comique, the Paris Opéra, the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, and of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Although as a composer he is known chiefly for his light works, as a conductor he presented a wide range of operas, from Mozart to Richard Strauss, and he acquired a reputation as a conductor of Wagner. In Paris he conducted the world premieres of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, Massenet's Grisélidis and Charpentier's Louise. At Covent Garden, he gave the British premieres of operas by Saint-Saëns and Massenet.
John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life".[citation needed] He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf.
London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.
Jack London's mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Eleanor Garrett Jones. Marshall Wellman was a great-great-great-grandson of Puritan Thomas Wellman. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died. In San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist claiming to channel the spirit of an Indian chief.
John Alden Carpenter (February 28, 1876 - April 26, 1951) was an American composer.
Born in Park Ridge, Illinois, Carpenter was raised in a musical household. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied under John Knowles Paine, and was president of the Glee Club and wrote music for the Hasty-Pudding Club. Showing great promise as a composer, he journeyed to London to study under Sir Edward Elgar, later returning to the United States to study under Bernhard Ziehn in Chicago. It was there he earned a comfortable living as vice-president of the family business, a mill supply company. He was a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia music fraternity.
Carpenter composed many works meant to encompass the spirit of America, including the patriotic, The Home Road, and several jazz-inspired works. He composed several ballets, including one based on the Krazy Kat comics, and one in 1926, possibly his best-known, titled Skyscrapers set in New York (and which was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera), but equally inspired by his native Chicago. One of his most famous works was 1914's impressionistic orchestral suite Adventures in a Perambulator. In 1932 he completed The Song of Faith for the George Washington bicentennial. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1933.