Isadora Duncan, Part 1

Duncan, often called the mother of modern dance, had an unconventional upbringing, and a VERY unconventional life. Her early life was full of struggle but seemed overall quite happy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, how
much do you know about A. Zadora Duncan Well? Uh,

(00:23):
very influential in the modern dance movement. Horrifying accidental death, right,
that horrifying accidental death is what most people know about. Um. But,
as you said, like she was very influential in dance,
her life was also really full and rich and full

(00:46):
of ups and downs and completely fascinating in my opinion,
and all of that gets lost because her story tends
to get reduced to that freak accident that took her life.
So I thought this would be a good time to
talk about the woman who was often all the mother
of modern dance. You'll also see Martha Graham get that title. Um,
but Isadora was really the first doing some of the

(01:07):
things that she did. She had an unconventional upbringing, she
had a very unconventional life. She is in some ways
hilarious and sometimes very enchanting, occasionally frustrating, but she is
someone that's a little bit admirable because she really did
live entirely according to her own compass. She did not

(01:28):
care about social morai's in the least, and she also
was just immensely resilient. And I got so deep into
researching her and reading her memoir in particular, that this
became an accidental two parter. So in this first episode,
we're going to talk about Isadora Duncan's early life, which
was full of struggle but seemed overall to be really

(01:48):
quite happy. Uh. And the second part we will get
into her life after she became famous, and that's when
things start to become plagued with tragedy. Well before that
famous end of her life, that is usually what people
know her for. So Duncan was born Angela Isadora Duncan
in San Francisco, California, in the late eighteen seventies. Her

(02:12):
actual date of birth can be found listed two different
ways a year apart. One of these is May eighteen
seventy seven, that's what's listed on her baptism certificate, and
the other is May eighteen seventy eight, and that one
is largely believed to be her actual date of birth,
which Holly and I had a whole conversation about before

(02:33):
coming in here. Yeah, I mean, I just chalked it
up to like a priest with bad handwriting, or being
a little sloppy on the on the details. Um. Her mother,
Mary is Adora Grant, who went by Dora, was a
music teacher and had three other children. She was raising
them on her own, so this was not a lavish life.

(02:56):
Things had been different before Dora left her husband, Joseph Duncan.
Joseph was a cashier at the Bank of California, but
in his heart he was a poet. He knew a
great deal about art and music and literature, and the
home that their children were born into was one that
was filled with beautiful and valuable works of art chosen
by Joseph, who was a collector, was such a good

(03:17):
eye that he was often consulted by wealthy friends to
help them develop their own collections. So is it. Dora
wrote in her autobiography that her mother Dora, had been
ill during her pregnancy and could only eat oysters and
ice champagne. This fanciful story is uh. Something she theorized

(03:38):
was what made her a dancer. She said that it
probably made her dance in the womb, just the thought
of a pregnant woman being like only oysters and ice
champagne for me. Um. But there were two things that
ultimately led to the breakup of the Duncan home, which
happened when Isadora was still just a baby. For one,

(03:59):
there was a bit of a financial scandal with Joseph.
He was allegedly using bank money for his own investing.
For another, he fell in love with an older woman
and he had an affair which became public knowledge. That
older woman, incidentally was anah coolbrith who went on to
become California's Poet Laureate, and at this time of a scandal,
though she was a librarian. So Dora was embarrassed and

(04:23):
furious over her husband's behavior. She promptly divorced him and
took the children to Oakland. This change meant that the
family went from a life of comfort to one of poverty.
Dora was not shy about demonizing Joseph to his children.
They regularly heard about what a terrible man he was
and is it or a later quoted her mother was saying, quote,

(04:45):
your father was a demon who ruined your mother's life. Yeah.
And to be clear, Um, this was not a case
where like he was withholding some sort of settlement money
in the divorce. He was broke after that whole scandal broke,
so nobody in the family had any money. When Isadora
was seven, her father came to the family house and

(05:06):
she essentially met him for the first time. At that point,
she told him that the family was busy and could
not receive him. She basically was the one who greeted
him at the door, but she did agree to go
for a walk with him. Of course, this sounds terrifying
to modern ears, like a strange man comes to the
door says I'm your dad, and it's like, will you
go for a walk with me? No one would let

(05:27):
their child do that, But this is a different time.
Isadora took this walk with her dad. She found him
to be warm and gentle and kind, and this was
a little shocking because he was not at all the
demon that she had imagined based on her mother's descriptions.
Several years later, Joseph had regained enough of his fortune
that he actually bought a house for Dora and the

(05:49):
children to live in. All of this had a profound
effect on Isadora. At the age of twelve, she'd seen
her mother's anguish, heard her mother's angry descriptions of her father,
but then she'd also seen her father as a fundamentally
kind man, and she really struggled how to reconcile how
two people could love each other and then hate each other.

(06:11):
While she asked questions of the adults in her life
about what had happened between her parents, she never really
got any real answers, and she came to view marriage
as the most awful concept imaginable. She made a vow
at that young age that she was open to love,
but quote, I would never lower myself to this degrading state. Yeah.

(06:32):
She basically came to the conclusion, since no adult would
help her figure out what had happened, that marriage must
ruin love. Um, there are plenty of people alive today
that would concur with a Lampton Googe agreed with that, right. Uh.
And this divorce had led to a total disillusionment on

(06:52):
her mother, Dora's part about what she thought her life was,
who she thought her husband was, and this led to
another very a significant change. While Dora had been a
very devout Catholic up to that point in her life,
after the divorce, she became an atheist. Rather abruptly, she
also became a follower of Bob Ingersoll, who was often

(07:13):
called the Great Agnostic, and she read Anger Sall's work
to her children, and she taught them that not only
was everything in the Bible of fantasy, but that so
were all of the trappings of childhood that were often
told to children, such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.
This home education would sometimes get Isadora into trouble at
school because she would announced during holiday parties, for example,

(07:36):
that the whole thing was based on falsehood. When she
relayed one such instance to her mother, where she had
been sent home for yelling there is no Santa Claus
during a Christmas party over and over, Dora told her
there is no Santa Claus and there is no God,
only your own spirit to help you. So Dora and
her children, that was Augustine, Raymond, Elizabeth, and Isadora, did

(07:57):
not have a lot of money, but Dora did in
sure that they had as much exposure to the arts
as possible. Since she was a music teacher, they all
had plenty of access to singing and playing themselves, but
they were also encouraged to put on plays and to
dance and to read. Journalists Sam Dixon once wrote that quote,
Isadora Duncan danced as soon as she could walk, and

(08:19):
despite the strain of poverty and having to frequently move
before her father bought them that house because they were
often evicted for failure to pay rent. Isadora would later
write of her childhood quote, I have to be thankful
that when we were young, my mother was poor. She
could not afford servants or governesses for her children. And
it is to this fact that I owe the spontaneous

(08:40):
life which I had the opportunity to express as a
child and never lost. Is a Dora, who was also
apparently a completely fearless child, had absolutely no problem doing
things like cajoling the local butcher or baker into giving
her free food to take home to the family when
times were tight, and she even sold her mother's hand
knitted ats and gloves door to door, and she made

(09:01):
quite a bit of money doing this, better than she
would have made if Dora had sold those to a
shop to then be sold. Several years after the public
humiliation that had led to her parents divorce, Isadora visited
the Oakland Public Library and asked the librarian for a
book recommendation. That librarian turned out to be Ana cool Breath.

(09:23):
She would go on to become a huge influence on
the girl's life due to all kinds of foundational books
that she recommended, which ignited Duncan's imagination. Is it or it?
Did not know for quite some time that Aina had
been her father's paramore. She later wrote, quote, she was
evidently the great passion of his life, and it was

(09:44):
probably by the invisible thread of circumstance that I was
drawn to her. Yeah, she uh Ainah and Joseph had
broken up before Isadora had met her in this way,
but it is a strange coincidence, to be sure. By
the time she was a e teen, Isidora was already
quite skilled as a dancer. Not only had she practiced

(10:05):
a great deal, but she had also read a great
deal about the art and about art in general, from
ancient Greece right up through her own time. She created
new steps, informed by romantic visions of history and intending
to replicate, for example, the style of Greek art, and
she and her sister claimed to have invented what she
called quote a new system of dancing, but in reality

(10:27):
there was no system. Still, this incorporation of gesture and
movement in reaction and relation to music or poetry, aligned
with these historical ideals, led her to being sought after
by younger children before she was even a teenager to
take dance lessons that had actually started years earlier. She

(10:48):
wrote that when she was six years old, quote, my
mother came home one day and found that I had
collected half a dozen babies of the neighborhood, all of
them too young to walk, and had them sitting for
me on the floor while I was teaching them to
wave their arms. When she asked the explanation of this,
I informed her that it was my school of the dance.

(11:09):
She was amused, and placing herself at the piano, she
began to play for me. The school continued and became
very popular. Later on, little girls of the neighborhood came
and their parents paid me a small sum to teach them.
This was the beginning of what afterwards proved to be
a very lucrative occupation. Yeah, she really never stopped teaching
dance from the time she was six until the end

(11:31):
of her life. I'm imagining how she gathered up all
these babies. Did she just go take them out of
their cribs? Like, can I have your child? I would
like to teach it to dance. I don't. I don't know.
But as we said, she was fearless. She would go
door to door and ask people for stuff. We are
going to talk a little bit more about Isadora and
her sister Elizabeth's dance classes in just a moment, but

(11:52):
first we will pause for a sponsor break. So that
teaching situation that Isidora had established that she was still
pretty young, pretty quickly evolved. Things became even more formalized
when there was enough of a demand in San Francisco

(12:14):
that she and her sister Elizabeth rented a house there
that was the Castle Mansion at Sutter and van Ness
Avenue so that they could give lessons across the Bay
as well as in Oakland. So the two teenagers at
this point, maybe we'll talk about that in a second,
took the ferry over to San Francisco each day, walked
from the ferry dock to their rented space, and then
taught the kids of the city to dance in exchange

(12:37):
for teaching fees that they collected from their parents. Uh
the name castle mansion makes this whole thing sound fancy.
It was not. It was an old, falling apart building.
That's why they were able to rent it. There have
even been some theorizations over the years that the Duncan
sisters and their students may have even used wood from
inside the building, like from decorative mantle pieces and whatnot,

(12:59):
to start years in the fireplaces, just so they could
stay warm as they danced, because they apparently didn't have
heat or power. When exactly she made the switch to
teaching full time as a little bit blurry. In her
own account, she stopped going to school at ten and
focused exclusively on her little dance school, But she also
admits that she lied about her age regularly so parents

(13:22):
and students would take her more seriously. So other versions
of this story have her ending her formal education anywhere
between the ages of ten and sixteen. Isadora Duncan is
always consistently characterized as a woman who bucked tradition, and
this was already very much the case in these classes.
We had said that she made up her own steps,
but she was really teaching students early forms of modern

(13:44):
dance way before that concept was introduced in any sort
of professional dance room. She found the idea of ballet's
rules and point shoes far too restricting for her taste.
So she had developed her own technique and she danced barefoot,
which was a completely new concept. And she was also
ready to basically make a way for herself. She read

(14:05):
about so many other places and ways of life in
the books that she continued to just devour that. Being
stuck poor and hustling to teach enough dance students to
keep food on the table living in Oakland, all of
this was just not enough for her. She may have
appreciated that her mother's lack of money had given her
a foundation for creativity, but she dreamed of more, and

(14:28):
she started plotting ways to make that dream a reality.
One thing that's interesting here, too, is that she dreamed
of more not just for herself. She always wanted her
mother and siblings with her in this, and to that end,
she convinced her mother to take a trip to Chicago.
She thought, if she could just audition for the theaters there,
it would offer a fresh start in a new, exciting place,

(14:50):
and then she could plot her next move. And somehow
she and Dora made this trip happen. A little bit
of money was pulled together, and soon Isadora being escorted
across the country by her mother in the hopes of
starting a professional performing career. So things did not go
quite as planned, is it. Dora auditioned for various theaters.

(15:12):
They all told her that she was lovely and that
her dancing was quite good, but also that it was
kind of weird. She was still doing her own thing.
She was not doing the standardized styles and steps that
most young women who had their eyes on the theater
would have gotten through more formalized training. Isadora was even
encouraged to go back home and to keep on loving dance,

(15:33):
but to select a more appropriate career for a young woman.
She didn't give up on her dreams, but things were
getting kind of desperate. Dora and Isadora pond personal belongings
like her grandmother's jewelry and even bits of lace from
their garments, just to get money so that they could eat. Finally,
Isadora booked a gig, but it was far from what

(15:54):
she imagined. She was to dance in a music hall,
so like the theater managers that she had already auditioned for,
this was not her audience. She was still doing her
dance style that was inspired by ancient Greece, and the
clientele is said to have mostly wanted her to finish
and get off the stage so they could see more
alluring acts. She was paid fifty dollars a week and

(16:17):
performed under an assumed name, but she later wrote of
all this quote, we were saved from starvation. But I
had enough of trying to amuse the public with something
which was against my ideals, and that was the first
and last time I ever did sue. Yeah, she only
did that for a week, and they asked if she
wanted to do the next week. She was like, I'm out.

(16:37):
But again, she still had not given up on her
dreams by any means. She decided after this experience that
what she needed to do was move on to New York,
but she couldn't afford to make that trip. Eventually, she
kind of got her break, really, she made it. She
read that Augustine Daily was going to be in Chicago
with a touring show, so she went to the stage

(16:58):
door of the theater and asked to be allowed to
see him many many days in a row. Augustine Daily
could also be a show topic. He was a North
Carolina born theater man who worked as a playwright, a manager,
a critic, and a producer, and he became incredibly influential
in the East Coast US theater scene. And when Isadora

(17:20):
Duncan was finally allowed to see him after multiple attempts,
she basically launched into a monologue. She said, quote, I
have a great idea to put before you, Mr Daley,
and you are probably the only man in this country
who can understand it. I have discovered the dance. I
have discovered the art which has been lost for two

(17:41):
thousand years. You are a supreme theater artist, but there
is one thing lacking in your theater which made the
old Greek theater great, and this is the art of
the dance, the tragic chorus. Without this, it is a
head and body without legs to carry it on. I
bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that

(18:02):
is going to revolutionize our entire epoch. Where have I
discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, by the waving pine
forests of Sierra Nevada. I have seen the ideal figure
of youthful America dancing over the top of the Rockies
the supreme poet of our country, as Walt Whitman. I
have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem

(18:24):
of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of
Walt Whitman. For the children of America, I will create
a new dance that will express America. I will bring
your theater the vital soul it lacks, the soul of
the dancer. That's a lot. Is so much. I wanted
to put it all in there, because can you imagine

(18:46):
a theater producer having some complete stranger come in and
just like like throw all of this word salad. I mean,
it's pretty pretentious words. Sally, Oh yeah, and she actually
had more, there is more to it, but Daily kept
interrupting her and telling her it was quite enough. Uh.

(19:09):
He didn't need to hear any more of her spiel.
But clearly he did see something in her that he
thought was different and new, and he actually thought she
had potential and also just you know, so much bravado.
So he replied, quote, well, I have a little part
in a pantomime that I am putting on in New York.
You can report for rehearsals the first of October and

(19:29):
if you suit, you are engaged. So Bailey cast Duncan
in this pantomime show he was doing. She hated pantomime
and thought it was ridiculous, but she also wanted to work.
Her siblings had already moved out to New York and
she wanted to keep the family afloat. The show started touring,
and she would send half of her fifteen dollars a

(19:50):
week to her mother and would skip staying in hotels
with the rest of the cast and opt to go
to a less costly boarding house for the night to
save money. Yeah, she has description of some of those
boarding houses and they are a little bit scary in
many instances, but to her, she was like, I'm just
gonna pinch all my pennies. And to keep her working,

(20:10):
Daily continued to find bit parts for her and other shows,
so she was able to start a modest but consistent
career in his New York productions. He cast her as
a dancing ferry in A Midsummer Night's Dream and she
was allowed to dance solo in a setup to the
entrance of Titania and Oberon, and although audiences reacted really

(20:30):
really positively to this solo, Daily wasn't particularly thrilled. He
hadn't intended for her dancing to be anything but sort
of an ambiance cetter. He actually said something to her like,
this isn't a dance hall. But still when the company
went on tour, he included her and she got paid
twenty five dollars a week. This time. Not long after, though,

(20:51):
while she was complaining to Daily about her general dissatisfaction
about the kinds of shows that theater did and the
lack of art in them, he made a ascid at her,
and she resigned two days later and never saw him again.
The family had found a studio apartment that they all
shared but didn't furnish. Isadora wanted the space for dancing,

(21:11):
so they had mattresses only, and they stood them on
end against the wall during the day. In addition to
using the apartment as her own dance studio, they often
left for the day so they could rent the space
out to other dance and music teachers to use. The
family was struggling along this way for a while. They
were only having that sort of day rental income. And

(21:33):
we're going to talk about a brief bit of good
fortune that befell Isadora in just a moment when she
ended up collaborating with a composer who was initially very
much against combining his music with dance. But before we
get into that story, we will pause for a sponsor break.

(21:55):
Isadora's next break, and this was a fairly big one,
came when she was dancing one evening to a piece
of music written by American pianist and composer Ethelbert Nevan.
She was still unemployed at this time. She was just
dancing in her home and kind of making up her
own dances. But Nevin got wind of this and he
was not pleased. He found her apartment, he barged in,

(22:17):
and he told her that dancing to his music was forbidden.
So she asked him to just please watch her dance
to his piece that he had written titled Narcissus, and
he did, and when she finished, he said to her,
you are an angel. You are a divinatris those very
movements I saw when I was composing the music. For him,

(22:39):
this whole interaction was a revelation. He saw his music
interpreted through dance in a completely new way, and he
saw in Isadora a star. At this point, Nevin was
important enough that when he talked up the dancer he
had seen putting new steps to his work as a wonder,
it really ignited the New York arts scene wanted to

(23:00):
find out who this Isadora Duncan was. He set up
concerts for the two of them, where he played piano
and she danced. She was booked in private salons and
small exclusive venues so the elite of the city could
come marvel at her. But ever, in search of new wonders,
they mostly moved on rather than rebooking her. They had

(23:22):
thought her kind of a novelty, and any hopes that
she may have had that these engagements would lead to
bigger opportunities just never came to fruition. She realized that
the people of New York society really just viewed artists
as what she called quote, a sort of upper servant.
Perhaps because this rapid ascension and false stung, or perhaps

(23:44):
because she had just given the U. S. East Coast
a chance and it had not gone as expected, Isadora
was ready to move on, and this sentiment ballooned when
the building that she and her family had been staying
in the Windsor hotel burned down, so at that point
they and know where to live. So she borrowed money
from some of her new admirers and friends to finance

(24:05):
another move, this time across the Atlantic to London. She
tells stories in her book about going to like various
rich women that she had performed for and telling them
this sad story. She would get so excited when they
brought out their check book, and then they would write
a fairly small sum and she'd be like, I gotta
go to another house and do this all over again.
Her brother Augustine did not join them once she had

(24:27):
gotten this money together. He had gotten engaged and stayed
in New York. This actually caused some strife. His mother
felt a little betrayed by the whole thing. Money was
still pretty tight, so is A Dora. Dora, Elizabeth, and
Raymond made the two week voyage to England on a
cattle boat. So the family spent their first several days
in London literally on the street. They were moving from

(24:49):
place to place as the police chased them off of benches.
Isadora eventually went to nice neighborhoods and started knocking on doors,
offering to dance as entertained at any kind of social
events they might be hosting. And this worked, which shocks
me a little bit. I am forever amazed by all
of her. I just started knocking on doors and like

(25:11):
seeing if I could get money or or food, And
it works every time for her. Yeah, the whole family
joined in with her on these entertainment ventures. Dora would
play the piano, Elizabeth would recite poetry, and Raymond would
offer thoughts on art and humanity. Yeah. See, you would
get a combo package. You would get a dancer, a

(25:32):
piano player, a poetry recital, and someone expounding uh. And
Isadora was able to book some engagements this way through
word of mouth, Like she would do one party, someone
would find the whole thing kind of interesting and book
it for their party down the road. But it still
really was not enough to keep the family above the

(25:53):
bare minimum for survival. They spent their nights performing and
then they would spend their days wandering around the British Museum.
This is something they would do all the time. But
once again, good fortune in the form of complete happenstance,
smiled upon Isadora and the right person saw her dance.
So this story is even more quaint than the previous

(26:13):
two times that someone discovered her because she wasn't performing.
She and her brother Raymond, are said to have been
dancing in the garden of the house they were staying
in when a woman walked up and started watching them.
It turned out that woman was Mrs Patrick Campbell, who
was known to her many fans as Mrs Pat. She
was one of the biggest stars of London theater. She

(26:35):
said to have been moved to tears while watching Isadora dance,
and Mrs Pat and the Duncans struck up a conversation
with the opener quote, where on Earth did you people
come from? Soon there was just mutual adoration flowing between them. Yes,
She apparently took him back to her house. She was like,
I'm gonna play piano and I'll do some monologues for you,

(26:57):
and you dance again, and they had just a great physit.
So for all of the difficulty that Isidora had in
the United States getting people to understand her dancing and
its nods to ancient Greece, London had no such problem,
and once Mrs Pat introduced Miss Duncan and her family
to London's social scene and arts community, her star rose

(27:18):
incredibly rapidly. Even the royal family embraced her new different style.
She was introduced to several members at various events, and
in short, Europe loved her, although there were always we
should point out, many older, more conservative patrons of the
arts who kind of found her scandalous. Suoned with some
positive buzz to bolster her bookings, Duncan started touring. Raymond

(27:43):
had gone to Paris, and he wrote letters to Dora
and Isadora. Elizabeth had gone back to New York to
start teaching again, and so Raymond's letters would tell Dora
and Isadora that they simply had to come to France.
Paris audiences found Isadora just enchanting. She met a flurry
of her down artists and writers and important members of
French society. And just as they had visited the British

(28:05):
Museum almost every day while they were in London, in Paris,
the Duncans went to the Louver day after day, occasionally
switching to a different museum now and again, but the
loop was really where it was at for them. They
also happened to have timed this whole thing just right
that they were able to see the Exposition Universal in
nineteen hundred. Isadora described this time in Paris as being

(28:27):
quote about as happy as anyone could be, despite their
money situation being perpetually precarious. According to her memoir, quote,
neither the appreciation of princes nor my growing fame brought
us enough to eat. Soon, Raymond also left for home,
and then Isadora and Dora were alone together, as they
had been when they first left San Francisco for Chicago.

(28:51):
Isadora traveled to Berlin at the invitation of actress Loie Fuller,
who thought that Duncan and Japanese geisha actress and danced
or Sada Yako would make a really excellent double bill.
Germany was particularly enthralled with Duncan. There are stories of
her in Munich, where she was carried through the streets

(29:11):
by students to a cafe where she danced on the tables.
From there she went to Vienna and to Budapest. It
seemed like in every city somebody would see her perform
and then invite her onto the next destination with the
promise of a booking. Her month long contract in Budapest
marked the first time that she was actually contracted to

(29:32):
perform for a ticket buying public instead of its sort
of a private one off event. Yeah. Prior to that,
she's just been like a gig performer, and this time
they were like, no, we we want to actually bill
you in a theater and the public will come and
watch you. And it was in Budapest in nWo the
Duncan is said to have truly come into her own

(29:54):
as a dancer and a performer. It was there, in
her month long booking that she debuted her own core
geography on the stage for the public, and her show
was sold out for the entire months she was in residence.
Also in Budapest, she had her first sexual experience. This
was a man that she referred to in her memoir
as Romeo because he was playing that role at the

(30:16):
Royal National Theater at the time. The two of them
became serious pretty quickly, but as soon as Romeo started
talking about marriage, Isadora's affections cooled, unsurprisingly based on her
earlier pronouncements on that matter. They eventually broke off their romance.
Isadora moved next to Vienna, but when she got sick there,

(30:37):
Romeo came to stay at her bedside. She was ill
for quite some time, and he did not leave, but
they didn't rekindle their romance. Once she was better again,
she put her disillusionment with love into her art, she
later said, and that way of dealing with loss or
misfortune would just be a recurring theme throughout her life.

(30:58):
And we're actually gonna pause here and leave Isadora in
a pretty good place for this episode. At this point,
she had gotten over her illness. She was the beloved
star of Hungary and the rest of Europe. Uh, And
we're going to leave it here because the rest of
her life is less a brilliant So in part two,
we're going to talk about the loves and tragedies that
dominated her world after she had become famous. Do you

(31:21):
also ask some listener mail? I do, because there's exciting
stuff that everyone has been talking about. Uh. Several people
wrote in about it. So if you were one of
the people and this isn't your note, please know that
I still appreciate it. I just didn't want to read
them all. This is our listener Kiki, who writes, I
love your podcast. I'm always happy on Mondays when I
get to work and get to listen to your Saturday

(31:43):
classic and the new episode it makes my busy day.
It works so much better. I was very excited to
hear that scientists have used the movie Frozen to have
new insights into the diatlof past event. Please see the
link to the article I found below. Your episode about
this was on October. If you'd like to do a
utty classic of that, hint hint uh. And she links

(32:03):
the article and says, I feel so close to both
of you and I wish you all the best. Attached,
please find a picture of my coworker Lou, who also
listens with me when he is in the office. Thanks
in your devoted fan Kiki. Lou is an adorable brindle
pup who is so cute. But the article she linked
to is one that I had seen. It's from the
Smithsonian Um and it is very very interesting because obviously,

(32:25):
like that lead of Frozen, Uh, we're going to come
back to But I want to talk about this as
a reminder in case anyone didn't listen to it. The
Hadla Past incident was when some very experienced hikers were
in the Dead Lave Past. They were later found dead.
Things were very mysterious and no one has ever figured
out exactly what happened. UM. So, one thing that I

(32:45):
wanted to make very clear, and that is quoted in
that article, is that the lead author of the paper
that came out about this, Johann gom had said, we
do not claim to have solved the dead Ala of
Pass mystery, as no one survived to tell the story,
but we showed the plausibility of the avalanche hypothesis for
the first time. So he and his co author, who

(33:07):
is Alexander and push Ran I hope I'm pronouncing these
names correctly, compiled historical records and they recreated the mountains
environment on the night that this incident happened to try
to figure out what had gone on. UM they simulated,
using this data a slab avalanche, drawing on snow friction
data and local topography. One of the revelations here was

(33:29):
that the slope had been thought to be more shallow
than it actually was, and they used this to kind
of give some weight to the possibility that a small
snowslide could have swept through the area, leaving very few
other traces behind, but causing some of the things that
happened that we talked about in that show. There was
a lot of a lot of mystery around the The

(33:51):
hikers had run out of their tents without their clothes,
which people were like, no experienced tiker would do that. Um.
There has been a theory based on some of this
work that they had done that and then it was
still snowing, so they couldn't find their way back like
they had done it because they knew if they didn't
just basically jump out that second, they would not survive. Um.
But here's the fun part. If you're wondering how Frozen

(34:14):
fits him. Uh So the researchers actually had some interesting
assists from this because they got in touch with Disney,
having noted the way that they depicted snow and how
realistic it was, and they actually shared their animation code

(34:35):
with these researchers and that helped them build that um
that recreation computer generated model that that helped them established
that this could have been a slab what's called the
slab avalanche, which is just basically like one thin section
of snow that falls all at once, almost like a
knife cutting through. Uh. Their theory at this point is

(34:57):
that the cut that they made into the slope as
they were digging out their camp gave enough empty space
that the gravity of the snow slab was able to
release and drop and create the events that happened. Uh,
we don't know if this is true. We'll probably never
know for sure, but um, it's a really cool idea
and I do I do love that somehow Disney got
involved the whole thing. So thank you Kiki and everyone

(35:21):
else who wrote to us about it. It is uh forever.
I love that story and I love any information that
comes to light about it. Now. If you would like
to write to us, you can do so at History
podcast at i heart radio dot com. You can also
find us on social media as Missed in History and
subscribe to the podcast is super duper easy. You can
do that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcasts,

(35:42):
or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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