Head of the Class

Two stories that both feature elements way ahead of their time. And in each case, that makes them more than a little curious.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. As countries grow and change, they often put
laws on the books that don't age well. That's even
more evident at the state and local levels. For example,
in Arizona, there's a law that makes it illegal for

(00:47):
donkeys to sleep in bathtubs. Now, how could such a
thing ever come to be, you might ask, Well, despite
the silliness of the law today, it's origin is based
in a tragic disaster back in nineteen a damn burst
that released devastating floodwaters into the town of Kingman. A
donkey had taken to sleeping in an abandoned bathtub, and

(01:08):
it floated away in the flood, prompting the town to
have to step in and save the donkey from drowning.
But the rescue effort was costly and dangerous, and so
Kingman residents voted to outlaw donkeys from sleeping in bathtubs. Ever, again,
to clarify, donkeys were still allowed to stand in bathtubs,
but sleeping in them was strictly forbidden. Go even further back, though,

(01:29):
in the laws of the past make even our wildest
legislation look like the Ten Commandments. Take, for example, the
town of Halifax in West Yorkshire and England. Several hundred
years ago, there was a law on the Halifax books
known as the Halifax Gibbit Law. It allowed the Lord
of the Manner to execute thieves caught in town by
way of a swift and speedy trial, and the threshold

(01:51):
for killing them was pretty low. If what they stole
was worth thirteen and a halfpence or about ten dollars today,
they were eligible for the death penalty. Suspected felons were
held by the Lord of the manners bailiff along with
the property in question, but the aggrieved party wasn't allowed
to recover the stolen goods, even if they had captured

(02:11):
the thief in the act, until the bailiff had taken
possession of it first. Once the suspect was apprehended, the
bailiff would survey the richest and most well respected men
from the nearby towns and select sixteen of them to
sit on a jury, you know, a jury of peers. Everyone,
including the defendant, the accuser, and the jury then gathered

(02:32):
at the bailiff's home. There was no courtroom or even
a judge to preside over the trial, and the accused
wasn't allowed their own defense counsel. The rules were simple,
though both parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, told their
sides of the story. If the jury of wealthy men
who would never have stolen anything believe they accused thief
was innocent, they were released. But if the person was

(02:54):
declared guilty, then they were sentenced to death. And Halifax
had a unique way of punishing its criminals was called
the Halifax gibbet. Their gibbet was a device made of
two fifteen foot tall wooden posts set parallel to each other.
Grooves were carved into one side of each beam to
allow the vertical movement of a four ft long wooden

(03:14):
block between them. Then on the underside of that block
a seven pound axe head. The whole thing sat on
a stone platform and even required a small staircase to reach.
The axe head was then raised by pulling a rope
and securing it with a pin to the stone base.
The prisoner was then lowered so his or her neck
was just underneath the blade, at which point the pin

(03:36):
was removed and the axe head was released. The rest well,
I'm sure you can use your imagination, and if the
guilty party had been accused of stealing cattle or a horse,
then a length of rope was attached to that pin,
while the other end was tied to these stolen animal
or one of the same species. The beast was then
set loose to run and pull the pin out, sealing

(03:59):
the criminal his fate. But there was a loophole in
the system. If the thief somehow managed to escape the
gibbets and the forest in which it had been erected,
then they were free to go. Only two men, ever,
managed to make it out alive, though one man was
smart and never came back. The other tried his luck
seven years later by returning to Halifax, only to find

(04:21):
himself once again under the Gibbet's blade. It turns out
he wasn't so lucky after all. The thing about the
Halifax Gibbet was that it was simultaneously ahead of its
time and antiquated. Other towns had already moved on from
using the gibbet for their executions by the seventeenth century,
but Halifax kept up the tradition until sixteen fifty, having

(04:43):
started it all the way back in twelve eighties, six
five years before France introduced their own version and took
credit for the invention. The name for that same device,
the guillotine. M The Old West in America actually isn't

(05:13):
as old as we think. Despite the common belief that
it ended toward the close of the nineteenth century, the
Old West actually lasted until about nineteen twenty. But it
wasn't all outlaws and gun slingers everywhere. Real progress was
being made in places all over the country. Take Wyoming,
for example. On May eleventh of nineteen twenty, three months
before the United States would grant women the right to vote,

(05:36):
a historic election took place in the small town of Jackson. Now,
early on, Jackson had garnered a reputation for itself as
a haven for the criminal element. Cattle thieves and murderers
had often hid there due to its relatively remote location
in the mountains, But in nineteen twenty, the town's residents
had other matters to attend to an election. Up for

(05:56):
grabs was the position of mayor, as well as a
few seats for a council men. Well, councilmen were what
most people expected. Instead, the town went in a different direction.
Grace Miller, Rose Crabtree, Genevieve van Vleck, May Deloni, and
Faustina Height had put their names on the ballot that year.
Each of them were up against a rival male candidate. Then,

(06:18):
in the case of Mrs Crabtree, her opponent was actually
her husband, and much to everyone's surprise, each of the
women won their respective roles, with Grace Miller becoming Mayor
of Jackson, while all the rest joined the council. From there,
they appointed several other women to serve underneath them in
various positions within the local government. One such woman was

(06:39):
Pearl Williams. At only twenty two years old, Pearl had
been tasked with the daunting job of town Marshall. The
job was exactly what you might think it was too.
She was responsible for apprehending the unsavory characters in town
and putting them in jail, a building by the way
that lacked doors at the time, In a role that
would have given anyone pause, she stepped up to the task. Thankfully,

(07:02):
there weren't many outlaws to deal with. Despite Jackson's early reputation,
it hadn't been a criminal heightout for some time, but
the few bandits that she did come across treated her
with respect and followed her orders. The press, of course,
wrote numerous articles about the town run entirely by women,
including one in the Jackson Hole Courier titled women now

(07:23):
rule Bad Men's Town. And the thing they had an
especially hard time believing was that it had a woman marshal.
But Pearl proved all of them wrong. She got so
sick of answering the same question from the media that
one day she finally told them that she had earned
the job by killing three men and burying them herself.
It wasn't true, of course, but it certainly shut the

(07:44):
reporters up. It took almost no time for the new
console to get to work improving Jackson. They noticed that
very little had gotten done while the men were in charge,
and their new strong arm tactics earned them the nickname
the Petticoat Rulers. First on their dockets taxes. When Grace
and her colleagues took office, They found that only two
d dollars were in the town's coffers. It wasn't nearly

(08:06):
enough to push through their new agenda, so they started
collecting taxes from everyone in town. The money was put
toward a variety of expansive projects, including graded roads, a
new cemetery, and the installation of electric wiring. In two weeks,
they had over two thousand dollars available. They had also
passed ordinances meant to beautify the town and reduced the

(08:28):
noise pollution caused by fireworks. The women had been placed
in their roles thanks to progress, and in turn, they
were going to bring progress back to Jackson. But if
the Nineteenth Amendment wasn't ratified until August of nineteen twenty,
how were a group of women elected to run a
small western town once besieged by criminals. That's because states
and towns all across the country had already been giving

(08:50):
women the right to vote, and Wyoming, the equality state,
accomplished it in eighteen sixty nine. Grace Miller and her
counsel did a great job. They were elected again for
a second term. Some even stayed on for longer. They
had proven that women had every right to serve in
politics right alongside men, and more importantly, they proved that

(09:13):
women get the job done. I hope you've enjoyed today's
guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I

(09:35):
make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
book series, and television show, and you can learn all
about it over at the World of Lore dot com.
And until next time, stay curious.