April 16, 2012 • 27 mins
Although Lucas and Spielberg claim Indiana Jones was only inspired by adventure movies and pulp fiction, people have still suggested real-life inspirations. Tune in to learn more about several contenders, including Roy Chapman Andrews and Otto Rahn.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Weill and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to believe Chok Rebording, and
I think it's really fun to talk about the real
life people behind fictional characters that we know really well.
(00:22):
We've done it with Sherlock Holmes. That was a great one,
Robinson Crusoe, it's fun to talk about. And even Candice
and I talked about some famous philosophers behind the characters
and lost. It's neat to do this because you get
to see what fits and what's true to life, and
then what's just pure fiction. You know what, the creators,
the writers disinvented one of these real life matchups. Listeners
(00:45):
like to suggest a lot is Indiana Jones, the dashing,
brave and perfectly deadpan archaeologist from the George Lucas and
Steven Spielberg films, played by, of course, Harrison Ford. Here's
the funny thing, though, each suggestion that we get for
the real Indie is almost always different from the next,
always always different. So it seems that the whole argument
(01:07):
could be settled pretty quickly with just a word from
Lucas or Spielberg, but each has insisted that there really
is no real Indiana Jones, no direct inspiration other than
countless matinee serial movies from the nineteen thirties and forties,
pulp action books by writers like h Writer Haggard that
they read when they were kids, kind of broader inspirations.
(01:29):
But that hasn't stopped a lot of folks from putting
forward countless contenders. And if you go researching, just if
you do a basic search for the real Indiana Jones,
you'll find plenty of articles about one particular Indiana Jones
candidate that make no mention that there are possible others.
You know, it's like, this guy is the real Indiana Jones.
(01:50):
But we thought it would be a little more fun
to round up a gang of these possible Indiana Jones,
really only a small selection from a pretty massive group,
and discussed their lives, discussed their adventures and their differences.
And you'll find by looking at a few of them
at least that some have the right quest, you know,
that sort of fits with the characters. Some have the
(02:11):
right hat. Yeah, it's kind of like Indie has taken
little pieces of all of them exactly, but the best
hat award definitely goes to naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews. Not
exactly Indies Fedora that he's got, but pretty close. Chapman
Andrews also had the ego, bravery and the charisma of
a fictional character, plus an attraction to, of course, the ladies,
(02:35):
strong ladies, yes, strong ladies. In particular. A picture of
his first wife, for example, shows her feeding a bear
cub so. Chapman Andrews was born in eighteen eighty four
in Wisconsin and was given a shotgun for his ninth birthday,
and after that really took to hunting. Eventually, though, he
moved on to taxidermy as a way to earn a
little extra money for his family, and in nineteen o six,
(02:58):
after attending college, he got a job at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City in the
taxidermy department. He apparently spent a lot of times cleaning
floors and and doing that kind of work, so not
exactly an Indiana Jones start, but eventually the museum began
to send him out on research trips. His first trip
was to Alaska. He studied aquatic animals, particularly whales and
(03:22):
really helped to build the museum's collection to become one
of the best in the world. I distinctly remember when
I visited New York and went to that museum, the
Aquatic mammal collection. It's still pretty prom pretty vast. He
also visited the Dutch East Indies in Northern Korea, but
it was his research in China and Mongolia that really
made him famous. The museum's president, Henry Fairfield Osborne, believed
(03:46):
Man originated somewhere in the Central Asian Plateau, so in
n Chapman Andrews proposed that he made an expedition to
the Gobi Desert to search for archaeological evidence of this.
Osborne agreed. He agreed to a fi of your expedition
as long as Andrews could raise most of the money
for this expedition himself. So he quickly became a New
(04:08):
York City dinner party regular, securing fifty thousand dollars from
JP Morgan, fifty thousand from John D. Rockefeller Jr. We
even heard from a listener whose grandmother had been one
of Chapman Andrew's donors, which was pretty cool. Well, and
he even had letters that Andrews had written to his
grandmother telling him, telling her rather about how the expedition
(04:29):
was going. What they were seeing pretty neat stuff. So papers,
of course we're interested in this expedition and build the
whole thing as the Missing Link expedition, something that really
bothered Chapman Andrews because he also planned to conduct research
in paleontology and botany and zoology and geology, topography, you know,
(04:49):
all sorts of sciences. He even brought along a cinematographer
named J. B. Shackelford who produced real almost modern nature
show like footage and the moles running across the Gobi Desert,
stuff that you could see on TV today potentially. Now,
the Gobi Desert was a really dangerous place. There were
extreme temperatures to deal with, also, bandits who would kill travelers,
(05:13):
divided political control in Mongolia, and sandstorms. According to a
Tom huntington All article in American History, here's how he
described one quote almost instantly, A thousand shrieking demons seemed
to be pelting my face with sand and gravel. Breathing
was difficult, seeing impossible. I can just see that as
(05:33):
a little stage direction or something in a script que
thousands screaming demons exactly. So the party traveled by cam
all through the sandy rocky terrain. But Chapman Andrews also
brought along a fleet of dodges, and usually that turns
up poorly in these expeditions we talked about when somebody
(05:55):
decides to bring a car. It worked out pretty well
here the dodges performed adequately. But strangely enough, even though
he was the expedition leader, Chapman Andrews didn't really do
that much excavation work himself. His second in command, who
was chief palontologist Walter Granger, had really forbidden him from
personal excavations since he thought he worked too fast and
(06:18):
would damage things. So instead Chapman Andrews would hunt for
food for the party, collect animal specimens for the museum,
and offer a certain amount of protection to from those bandits. Still,
other members of the expedition, which was very diverse about
equal parts Chinese, Mongolian, and American, they made some amazing fines.
(06:38):
The expedition, for example, produced an ancestor of the modern rhinoceros.
The expedition uncovered the first known dinosaur eggs and nest
of twenty five two of which were broken open to
reveal tiny dinos. Andrews later said, quote, we tried our
best to think of any geological phenomena that could have
(06:59):
produced a similar result, but try as we would, we
could never get away from the fact that eggs as
eggs and that these were laid by a dinosaur. I
really loved that quote. And after the eggs as Eggs coup,
the museum director Osborne decided to extend the whole project,
give it an extra lease on life. But Chapman Andrews
(07:19):
had to again raise more money first, and he decided
that to help with the fundraising, he'd auction off one
of these eggs back at home, something that did bring
in five thousand dollars but really changed the Chinese government's
opinion about the scientists, that they were stealing eggs and
selling them back home for money. Still, though, the party
(07:40):
continued working through the late nineteen twenties, even though bandits
were getting more and more dangerous each year. There was
another danger too, though, one that I think will seem
very familiar to Indiana Jones fans out there, and that is,
of course snakes. So during the trip, desert vipers would
swarm the amp side at night when the temperatures dropped,
(08:02):
and miraculously only one member of the party was ever bitten.
Yeah it was Andrew's dog who survived, thank goodness. But
for someone with an intense sphere of snakes, it was
complete torture to be out there, and so Andrews ended
up naming the place of viper Camp and moved on
from it pretty quickly too. By the way, so the
last expedition took place in nineteen thirty, after which American
(08:25):
scientists were barred from the region for many decades. But
by that point new theories had emerged to counter Osborne's
that this was the birth of man sit sort of,
and no early human bones were even found in the area,
even though the party did bring back more eggs, fossils
of mastodons, and The New York Times even suggested that
(08:46):
after the Chapman Andrew's expedition, quote, paleontology should now become
almost an exact science. So it really helped transform the
modern study of dinosaurs and other ancient and well. Indiana Jones,
despite his glasses and patched chalkboards back in the classroom,
(09:06):
is often called a pretty poor archeologist in the field.
He's rarely seen with a tiny brush and a gridded
dig site. A lot of stuff gets broken. Still, he's
really popular with some archaeologists, and in fact, the Archaeological
Institute of America elected Harrison Ford to its board since
he as Indiana Jones Quote, played a significant role in
(09:27):
stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration. According to the
president of the ai A, so our next, real Indiana
Jones is much less popular than Harrison Ford, though in
this situation or I guess the fictional character of Indie.
There's even a book on him called Quote the Giant
archaeologists love to hate. He's Giovanni Batista bell Zoni, who
(09:49):
was born in seventeen seventy eight in Padua and planned
to join a religious order, but instead studied hydraulics. He
again detoured after that change in plan, He moved to
England and worked as a circus strong man. He was
six ft seven, so thus that giant title, and he'd
performed their under names like the Italian Hercules or Jack
(10:11):
the Giant Killer, according to Chris Emodio and Geographical. In
eighteen fifteen, though he made another career change. He left
the circus business and took his hydraulic inventions to Egypt
to present them before Muhammad Ali Pasha. Uh the Egyptian ruler,
was pretty unimpressed by these hydraulic irrigation systems that Bill
(10:32):
Zoni was showing him. But Bill Zoni did meet somebody
who later influenced his career. That was Henry Salt, who
was the British consul general in Egypt, and Henry Salt
sent him on a little looting expedition essentially to excavate
a colossal head in thieves that turned out to be
(10:52):
the bust of Ramsey's the Second the Great King, and
even though it had been damaged by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt,
something We've done an earlier couple podcasts on bell Zoni,
managed to bring it back to the British Museum, where
it inspired Percy Shelley to write Azymandia is one of
my favorite Shelley poems. That about you. So two years later,
(11:14):
bell Zoni started excavating Egyptian tombs for treasure. According to
Encyclopedia Britannica, though much like Indiana Jones or so we
mentioned earlier, he didn't much care what got damaged as
long as the valuable stuff that he was looking for
came out okay, and those hasty excavations were made even
more so by French rivals. He was competing against a bandit.
(11:34):
Bill Zoni eventually doubled the number of known royal tombs
in the Valley of the Kings. He discovered the tomb
of Seti the first, and even took an entire obelisk
from an island in the Nile before French rivals stole
it from him at gunpoint. He also explored a temple,
he found the entrance to one of the pyramids at Geeza,
and he really added a huge amount to the British
(11:57):
museum store. He did die eventually, dison Terry just a
few years after while preparing for an expedition to Timbuktu.
So there you go, not a popular archaeologist. Well. As
we mentioned earlier, Lucas and Spielberg both sites Saturday matinee
movies from the thirties and forties as inspiration for their films.
These serial films are quest stories, and they often feature
(12:20):
an indie like hero. The look of Raiders of the
Lost Arc, however, is at least partly inspired by the
nineteen fifties six film Secret of the Incas. According to
the costume designer, that film, in turn, was partly inspired
by the life of Hiram Bingham, the third who's credited
with rediscovery Machu Pichu. While many scholars believe that German
(12:40):
Augusto Burns visited Machu Pichu in eighteen sixty seven and
local people certainly never really lost the site in any way,
Encyclopedia Britannica says it was quote Bingham and his work
that were the key catalyst for the archaeological investigation of
sites in the Andes and other parts of South America.
He also managed at excavations and publicized the site. A
(13:02):
Wired article by Randy Alfred actually notes that the entire
April nineteen thirteen issue of National Geographic was devoted to this.
I mean, imagine if suddenly you knew about Machi Picchu
and you had not before. So. Bingham, who was born
in Honolulu in eighteen seventy five, learned mountaineering as a boy,
obviously a skill that would come in handy down the road,
(13:24):
and he married the heiress of the Tiffany and Company
fortune also something could also come the handy down the road,
useful because he was the poor son of a missionary.
So in nineteen o six, by that point a Professor
Bingham traveled to South America and took the Andean route
taken by our former podcast subject again Simon Boulevard, from
(13:46):
Venezuela to Columbia. Then in nineteen o eight he traced
another route, this time a Spanish trade route from Buenos
Aires to Lima, just trying to get a sense of
the continent, it almost seemed to me, and trying to
branch out from his academic work and get a little
bit more into traveling and exploration. So in nineteen o
nine he went to work for Yale as a professor
(14:07):
of Latin American history and also started to meet and
mingle with Peruvian scholars, having only really studied South American
history from a European perspective before. He became really fascinated
at this point by indigenous history and started working with
Peruvian excavators who were exploring choke A Corral. He was
amazed by the site, but he didn't buy the idea
(14:28):
that it was the fabled last city of the Incas
known as Vilka Bamba and when I came across that name,
it rang a bell because I used to play the
game Amazon Trail, which was a spinoff of Oregon Trail,
and you would have to try to get to the
city and present this endless list of stuff to the
Inca king. He was always he was never happy with
(14:50):
like the medicine that you were bringing him, and wanted
you to bring more and more and more. So, yeah,
it was a familiar name, but it was what Bingham
was hoping he could find. So after some research, Bingham
figured that this lost city of bilk Obama would be
near Cuzco, Peru, and he traveled from there through the
Sacred Valley, which was prime state territory for the Inca
(15:14):
emperors back in the day, and then, according to a
lecture given by historian Christopher Heeney with National Geographic Live,
his party eventually sought to ask a local innkeeper if
there were any ruins in the area. The innkeeper, whose
name was Milture Artaga, pointed up and said Machu Buchu.
So on July nineteen eleven, Artaga led the party across
(15:38):
this narrow bridge, over a raging river and then up
a mountain side covered in vipers and Casey weren't thinking
this sounded Indiana Jones like enough, and then finally came
to a family that I was living on the slopes,
and the family sent their five year old son to
lead Bingham and the rest of the party up to
(15:59):
the fantastic stone terraces of Machu Pichu. So the next year,
he and his team excavated human remains, a silver head dress,
and many signs of everyday living. Bingham was convinced that
Machu Pichi was vic Obamba, though it actually turned out
to be another site that he exposed, something that wasn't
definitely realized until the nineteen sixties. Bingham went on to
(16:21):
become the governor of Connecticut and a U S Senator,
and he wrote a book called The Lost City of
the Incas. Three years after its publication, a film idea
was submitted to Paramount, featuring a Yale trained archaeologist and
Machu Pichu excavator. Ultimately, the whole story was flipped around,
given a new title and a new type of leading man,
one very unlike Bingham, but very much like Indiana Jones.
(16:44):
You have this sort of loose connection there between the
two and as a side note to just before we
move on from Bingham. According to the terms of the
original Matchu Pichu dig, the Peruvian government gave Yale access
to all of the artifacts found there, with the condition
that they could be returned at any time. And in
two thousand and eight the proving government stud Yell for
(17:05):
their return and Yale agreed to it, and I think
by the end of this year, by the end of twelve,
they are supposed to return all of the Machu Pichi stuff. Well,
so far we've talked about a gun toting, snake fearing naturalist,
eluding Egyptologist, and an academic in search of a lost city.
But there's one thing that really defines the character of
(17:27):
Indiana Jones, his search for supernatural objects like the Arc
or the Holy Grail, and his desire to keep them
out of the hands of people who want them for evil,
usually not usually Nazis. So this last entry on our
list had a very strong academic bent, but also an
all consuming interest in the Holy Grail, plus a very
(17:49):
unfortunate connection with the Nazis. Born in Germany and nineteen
o four, Otto Ron was fascinated, of course by the
legend of the Holy Grail, uh the copy by Christ
at the Last Supper, and also the cup used to
catch his blood, which is said to have supernatural powers
and is connected to King Arthur and Camelot and all that.
(18:09):
I'm sure most of you know the whole Holy Grail,
part of the Holy Grail, but att Iron became a medievalist.
He was so interested in the Grail, and he used
the Pars of All, which is a thirteenth century German romance,
as his jumping off point for his search for the Grail.
He ultimately came to believe that the Grail was connected
to a castle in the French Pyrenees and Walt Sigur.
(18:32):
According to a Smithsonian documentary, the castle had been the
last refuge of the Cathars, a Christian sect that had
been nearly wiped out by crusaders. Survivors banded together inside
and managed to withstand a month long siege before they
finally fell in the mid thirteenth century. They asked for
a fifteen days stay of execution before being burned alive inside,
(18:53):
but before that happened, a small band of Nights supposedly
snuck outside of the walls climbed on a cliff and
hid for several days under the castle and fled with
a bag, a very mysterious bag, possibly containing the Holy Grail.
So in nineteen thirty two, Ron visited the castle and
wound up at a cave system about twenty miles away
(19:16):
from it, believing that this had been the first hiding
place of the Holy Grail. He explored what had been
an underground Cathar cathedral with a Senegalese attendant and was
really nearly killed when an underground flood rushed through the cave. Suddenly,
I think they were exploring the caves kind of Indiana
Jones style, and then they heard this distant, rushing noise
(19:38):
and realized that there was a wall of water coming
their way. They had to run for their lives out
of the cave. Ron ultimately wrote a book about all
of his experiences, academic and adventurous for the Grail, and
called it Crusade against the Grail. Then in nineteen thirty
three he got kind of a strange piece of fan mail. Yeah,
(20:00):
it was this mysterious unsigned telegram offering him a monthly
salary to write a sequel to his book. So when
he showed up at the Berlin address, given on the telegram,
he found Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the s S
and a super fan who had practically memorized his first
book and had a castle ready for the Grail, an
(20:21):
SS camelot of a sort with a Grail room. Himmler
wanted Ron to work for the s S searching for
the Grail, of course, and while Ron wasn't particularly interested,
he really felt that there was no way out of
the situation. Understandably, according to an article by John Preston
and the Telegraph, he told a friend, quote, what was
I supposed to do? Turn Himler down? He also figured
(20:42):
it would be pretty good money for his expeditions. It
wasn't long there before Ron realized that he had gotten
himself into a pretty dicey situation. So Himmler loved his
next book that he wrote, Lucifer's Court, a Heretic's Journey
in search of the Lightbringers, and even ordered up five
thousand special copies to distribute to Nazi officials. But when
(21:06):
Ron looked over his latest work, he started to find
things that he hadn't written, including some anti Semitic passages.
So it's worth mentioning here that Ron was openly gay,
which was something Himmler chose to ignore, but he may
have also been part Jewish or had some Jewish ancestors
and not even known that himself. He also, increasingly dissatisfied
(21:29):
with working for the FS, began running in anti Nazi
circles pretty discreetly, but still sort of playing with fire
there regardless. In seven, Ron fell from Himler's good grace
after a drunken incident. He was punished with three months
as a duck out guard, where he was appalled by
what he saw. According to the Smithsonian, he told a
friend it had become quote impossible for a tolerant liberal
(21:52):
man like me to live in a nation that my
native country has become. So he wrote to Himler resigning
from the s S. And it's unclear exactly what happened
after that, but it's likely that he was told that
he would be killed if he didn't do it himself first,
so he committed suicide at thirty four, looking at his
favorite mountain. So that's a sad end to one of
(22:12):
these Indiana Jones stories. But of course these four are
just a small sampling of the possible indie contenders out there.
You'll sometimes hear Vendal Jones mentioned as a likely candidate.
He was an American biblical scholar who searched for the
Ark of the Covenant. He suggested himself that if you
take the V and the L off of his first name,
(22:34):
you get Indeed Jones. But according to The Vancouver Son,
Lucas and Spielberg say that the name Indiana actually came
from Lucas's dog's name, which the dog coincidentally was also
the inspiration for the look of Chewbacca. And um, I
watched the third film again last night sort of a
(22:54):
research to say this, yeah, and um, there's there's a
mention of the dog and how Indiana Jones, who is
a junior, takes his nickname from the family dog. Spielberg
supposedly suggested the name Jones, and the original name idea
was supposed to be Smith. Indiana Smith does not doesn't
have the same ring to it. It really doesn't. I'm
(23:15):
glad they decided on Jones. So other possibilities as Indiana
Jones inspirations include a few that could easily make nice
full length podcast in the future, which is why we
didn't want to try to condense them to include on
This list t E. Lawrence, for example if who was
better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Percy Fawcett, who disappeared
in the Amazon in the nineteen twenties and was the
(23:36):
subject of the great book The Lost City of z
also f A. Mitchell Hedges, a British traveler who got
into fistfights and searched for the Crystal Skull. Then there's
James Henry Breasted, who was an American who knew Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew,
and Arabic and was the first US professor of Egyptology.
And then William Montgomery McGovern, who was a professor at
(23:58):
Northwestern across the Himalayas and disguise and shot at twenty
eight foot anaconda that charged his boat while he was
in the Amazon. Also the grandfather of the actress Elizabeth
McGovern of Downtown Abbey Um. When I was getting near
the time when we needed to go into the studio
and record, I started reading more about these guys and
(24:19):
getting like really agitated, just because I wanted to find
out more about them. They're so interesting. I mean, anaconda
charging your boat. That sounds pretty cool, Pure Indiana Jones.
So it was a very fun one to research, and certainly,
like you said, a lot of these could be full
length episodes. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the promising
part about it. For your little Research Jones that you
(24:41):
were on, we will get to cover to people, hopefully
in the future. So just a final thought, there's a
Vanity Fair interview with Steven Spielberg that helps explain a
bit why Indiana Jones is apparently such a universal character.
He said, quote, Indiana Jones was never a machine. I
think one of the things we brought to the genre
was the willingness to allow our leading man to get
(25:02):
hurt and to express his pain, and to get his
mad out, and to take prep falls and sometimes be
the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones
is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think
make the audience feel that with a little more exercise
and a little more courage, they could be just like him.
So he's not the terminator. He's not so far away
(25:22):
from the people who go to see the movies that
he's inaccessible to their own dreams and aspirations, and he's
not so far removed from real life people that these
comparisons to admittedly extraordinary men. These adventures who lead extraordinary lives,
um still don't seem too far fetched. He can have
a little piece of each of the mama. Yeah, so
(25:44):
even if they're not directing inspiration, it still makes exploring
their lives a little more fun. It was certainly fun.
So if you have any suggestions for Indiana Jones, is
that we missed or that you just want to throw
out there. I know there are still more even without
a brief ate at least we did at the end.
There are a lot that I did not include, but
if you have an absolute favorite, feel free to email
(26:07):
us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
on Twitter at Misston History and we're on Facebook and
if you want to learn a little bit more about
the topics we discussed on this podcast, we have a
great article called how Archaeology Works, and I think it's
written by our own Seren Doity. Is it not is?
And actually I definitely use Indiana Jones as the zero art.
(26:29):
So I think if you go to it, you will
find Indiana Jones with his whip and his fedora. And
you can find that by visiting our homepage at www
dot How Stuff Works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
(26:49):
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone
up has a ride down about it today on iTunes.
Eat even the NAT
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Weill and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm to believe Chok Rebording, and
I think it's really fun to talk about the real
life people behind fictional characters that we know really well.
(00:22):
We've done it with Sherlock Holmes. That was a great one,
Robinson Crusoe, it's fun to talk about. And even Candice
and I talked about some famous philosophers behind the characters
and lost. It's neat to do this because you get
to see what fits and what's true to life, and
then what's just pure fiction. You know what, the creators,
the writers disinvented one of these real life matchups. Listeners
(00:45):
like to suggest a lot is Indiana Jones, the dashing,
brave and perfectly deadpan archaeologist from the George Lucas and
Steven Spielberg films, played by, of course, Harrison Ford. Here's
the funny thing, though, each suggestion that we get for
the real Indie is almost always different from the next,
always always different. So it seems that the whole argument
(01:07):
could be settled pretty quickly with just a word from
Lucas or Spielberg, but each has insisted that there really
is no real Indiana Jones, no direct inspiration other than
countless matinee serial movies from the nineteen thirties and forties,
pulp action books by writers like h Writer Haggard that
they read when they were kids, kind of broader inspirations.
(01:29):
But that hasn't stopped a lot of folks from putting
forward countless contenders. And if you go researching, just if
you do a basic search for the real Indiana Jones,
you'll find plenty of articles about one particular Indiana Jones
candidate that make no mention that there are possible others.
You know, it's like, this guy is the real Indiana Jones.
(01:50):
But we thought it would be a little more fun
to round up a gang of these possible Indiana Jones,
really only a small selection from a pretty massive group,
and discussed their lives, discussed their adventures and their differences.
And you'll find by looking at a few of them
at least that some have the right quest, you know,
that sort of fits with the characters. Some have the
(02:11):
right hat. Yeah, it's kind of like Indie has taken
little pieces of all of them exactly, but the best
hat award definitely goes to naturalist Roy Chapman Andrews. Not
exactly Indies Fedora that he's got, but pretty close. Chapman
Andrews also had the ego, bravery and the charisma of
a fictional character, plus an attraction to, of course, the ladies,
(02:35):
strong ladies, yes, strong ladies. In particular. A picture of
his first wife, for example, shows her feeding a bear
cub so. Chapman Andrews was born in eighteen eighty four
in Wisconsin and was given a shotgun for his ninth birthday,
and after that really took to hunting. Eventually, though, he
moved on to taxidermy as a way to earn a
little extra money for his family, and in nineteen o six,
(02:58):
after attending college, he got a job at the American
Museum of Natural History in New York City in the
taxidermy department. He apparently spent a lot of times cleaning
floors and and doing that kind of work, so not
exactly an Indiana Jones start, but eventually the museum began
to send him out on research trips. His first trip
was to Alaska. He studied aquatic animals, particularly whales and
(03:22):
really helped to build the museum's collection to become one
of the best in the world. I distinctly remember when
I visited New York and went to that museum, the
Aquatic mammal collection. It's still pretty prom pretty vast. He
also visited the Dutch East Indies in Northern Korea, but
it was his research in China and Mongolia that really
made him famous. The museum's president, Henry Fairfield Osborne, believed
(03:46):
Man originated somewhere in the Central Asian Plateau, so in
n Chapman Andrews proposed that he made an expedition to
the Gobi Desert to search for archaeological evidence of this.
Osborne agreed. He agreed to a fi of your expedition
as long as Andrews could raise most of the money
for this expedition himself. So he quickly became a New
(04:08):
York City dinner party regular, securing fifty thousand dollars from
JP Morgan, fifty thousand from John D. Rockefeller Jr. We
even heard from a listener whose grandmother had been one
of Chapman Andrew's donors, which was pretty cool. Well, and
he even had letters that Andrews had written to his
grandmother telling him, telling her rather about how the expedition
(04:29):
was going. What they were seeing pretty neat stuff. So papers,
of course we're interested in this expedition and build the
whole thing as the Missing Link expedition, something that really
bothered Chapman Andrews because he also planned to conduct research
in paleontology and botany and zoology and geology, topography, you know,
(04:49):
all sorts of sciences. He even brought along a cinematographer
named J. B. Shackelford who produced real almost modern nature
show like footage and the moles running across the Gobi Desert,
stuff that you could see on TV today potentially. Now,
the Gobi Desert was a really dangerous place. There were
extreme temperatures to deal with, also, bandits who would kill travelers,
(05:13):
divided political control in Mongolia, and sandstorms. According to a
Tom huntington All article in American History, here's how he
described one quote almost instantly, A thousand shrieking demons seemed
to be pelting my face with sand and gravel. Breathing
was difficult, seeing impossible. I can just see that as
(05:33):
a little stage direction or something in a script que
thousands screaming demons exactly. So the party traveled by cam
all through the sandy rocky terrain. But Chapman Andrews also
brought along a fleet of dodges, and usually that turns
up poorly in these expeditions we talked about when somebody
(05:55):
decides to bring a car. It worked out pretty well
here the dodges performed adequately. But strangely enough, even though
he was the expedition leader, Chapman Andrews didn't really do
that much excavation work himself. His second in command, who
was chief palontologist Walter Granger, had really forbidden him from
personal excavations since he thought he worked too fast and
(06:18):
would damage things. So instead Chapman Andrews would hunt for
food for the party, collect animal specimens for the museum,
and offer a certain amount of protection to from those bandits. Still,
other members of the expedition, which was very diverse about
equal parts Chinese, Mongolian, and American, they made some amazing fines.
(06:38):
The expedition, for example, produced an ancestor of the modern rhinoceros.
The expedition uncovered the first known dinosaur eggs and nest
of twenty five two of which were broken open to
reveal tiny dinos. Andrews later said, quote, we tried our
best to think of any geological phenomena that could have
(06:59):
produced a similar result, but try as we would, we
could never get away from the fact that eggs as
eggs and that these were laid by a dinosaur. I
really loved that quote. And after the eggs as Eggs coup,
the museum director Osborne decided to extend the whole project,
give it an extra lease on life. But Chapman Andrews
(07:19):
had to again raise more money first, and he decided
that to help with the fundraising, he'd auction off one
of these eggs back at home, something that did bring
in five thousand dollars but really changed the Chinese government's
opinion about the scientists, that they were stealing eggs and
selling them back home for money. Still, though, the party
(07:40):
continued working through the late nineteen twenties, even though bandits
were getting more and more dangerous each year. There was
another danger too, though, one that I think will seem
very familiar to Indiana Jones fans out there, and that is,
of course snakes. So during the trip, desert vipers would
swarm the amp side at night when the temperatures dropped,
(08:02):
and miraculously only one member of the party was ever bitten.
Yeah it was Andrew's dog who survived, thank goodness. But
for someone with an intense sphere of snakes, it was
complete torture to be out there, and so Andrews ended
up naming the place of viper Camp and moved on
from it pretty quickly too. By the way, so the
last expedition took place in nineteen thirty, after which American
(08:25):
scientists were barred from the region for many decades. But
by that point new theories had emerged to counter Osborne's
that this was the birth of man sit sort of,
and no early human bones were even found in the area,
even though the party did bring back more eggs, fossils
of mastodons, and The New York Times even suggested that
(08:46):
after the Chapman Andrew's expedition, quote, paleontology should now become
almost an exact science. So it really helped transform the
modern study of dinosaurs and other ancient and well. Indiana Jones,
despite his glasses and patched chalkboards back in the classroom,
(09:06):
is often called a pretty poor archeologist in the field.
He's rarely seen with a tiny brush and a gridded
dig site. A lot of stuff gets broken. Still, he's
really popular with some archaeologists, and in fact, the Archaeological
Institute of America elected Harrison Ford to its board since
he as Indiana Jones Quote, played a significant role in
(09:27):
stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration. According to the
president of the ai A, so our next, real Indiana
Jones is much less popular than Harrison Ford, though in
this situation or I guess the fictional character of Indie.
There's even a book on him called Quote the Giant
archaeologists love to hate. He's Giovanni Batista bell Zoni, who
(09:49):
was born in seventeen seventy eight in Padua and planned
to join a religious order, but instead studied hydraulics. He
again detoured after that change in plan, He moved to
England and worked as a circus strong man. He was
six ft seven, so thus that giant title, and he'd
performed their under names like the Italian Hercules or Jack
(10:11):
the Giant Killer, according to Chris Emodio and Geographical. In
eighteen fifteen, though he made another career change. He left
the circus business and took his hydraulic inventions to Egypt
to present them before Muhammad Ali Pasha. Uh the Egyptian ruler,
was pretty unimpressed by these hydraulic irrigation systems that Bill
(10:32):
Zoni was showing him. But Bill Zoni did meet somebody
who later influenced his career. That was Henry Salt, who
was the British consul general in Egypt, and Henry Salt
sent him on a little looting expedition essentially to excavate
a colossal head in thieves that turned out to be
(10:52):
the bust of Ramsey's the Second the Great King, and
even though it had been damaged by Napoleon's expedition to Egypt,
something We've done an earlier couple podcasts on bell Zoni,
managed to bring it back to the British Museum, where
it inspired Percy Shelley to write Azymandia is one of
my favorite Shelley poems. That about you. So two years later,
(11:14):
bell Zoni started excavating Egyptian tombs for treasure. According to
Encyclopedia Britannica, though much like Indiana Jones or so we
mentioned earlier, he didn't much care what got damaged as
long as the valuable stuff that he was looking for
came out okay, and those hasty excavations were made even
more so by French rivals. He was competing against a bandit.
(11:34):
Bill Zoni eventually doubled the number of known royal tombs
in the Valley of the Kings. He discovered the tomb
of Seti the first, and even took an entire obelisk
from an island in the Nile before French rivals stole
it from him at gunpoint. He also explored a temple,
he found the entrance to one of the pyramids at Geeza,
and he really added a huge amount to the British
(11:57):
museum store. He did die eventually, dison Terry just a
few years after while preparing for an expedition to Timbuktu.
So there you go, not a popular archaeologist. Well. As
we mentioned earlier, Lucas and Spielberg both sites Saturday matinee
movies from the thirties and forties as inspiration for their films.
These serial films are quest stories, and they often feature
(12:20):
an indie like hero. The look of Raiders of the
Lost Arc, however, is at least partly inspired by the
nineteen fifties six film Secret of the Incas. According to
the costume designer, that film, in turn, was partly inspired
by the life of Hiram Bingham, the third who's credited
with rediscovery Machu Pichu. While many scholars believe that German
(12:40):
Augusto Burns visited Machu Pichu in eighteen sixty seven and
local people certainly never really lost the site in any way,
Encyclopedia Britannica says it was quote Bingham and his work
that were the key catalyst for the archaeological investigation of
sites in the Andes and other parts of South America.
He also managed at excavations and publicized the site. A
(13:02):
Wired article by Randy Alfred actually notes that the entire
April nineteen thirteen issue of National Geographic was devoted to this.
I mean, imagine if suddenly you knew about Machi Picchu
and you had not before. So. Bingham, who was born
in Honolulu in eighteen seventy five, learned mountaineering as a boy,
obviously a skill that would come in handy down the road,
(13:24):
and he married the heiress of the Tiffany and Company
fortune also something could also come the handy down the road,
useful because he was the poor son of a missionary.
So in nineteen o six, by that point a Professor
Bingham traveled to South America and took the Andean route
taken by our former podcast subject again Simon Boulevard, from
(13:46):
Venezuela to Columbia. Then in nineteen o eight he traced
another route, this time a Spanish trade route from Buenos
Aires to Lima, just trying to get a sense of
the continent, it almost seemed to me, and trying to
branch out from his academic work and get a little
bit more into traveling and exploration. So in nineteen o
nine he went to work for Yale as a professor
(14:07):
of Latin American history and also started to meet and
mingle with Peruvian scholars, having only really studied South American
history from a European perspective before. He became really fascinated
at this point by indigenous history and started working with
Peruvian excavators who were exploring choke A Corral. He was
amazed by the site, but he didn't buy the idea
(14:28):
that it was the fabled last city of the Incas
known as Vilka Bamba and when I came across that name,
it rang a bell because I used to play the
game Amazon Trail, which was a spinoff of Oregon Trail,
and you would have to try to get to the
city and present this endless list of stuff to the
Inca king. He was always he was never happy with
(14:50):
like the medicine that you were bringing him, and wanted
you to bring more and more and more. So, yeah,
it was a familiar name, but it was what Bingham
was hoping he could find. So after some research, Bingham
figured that this lost city of bilk Obama would be
near Cuzco, Peru, and he traveled from there through the
Sacred Valley, which was prime state territory for the Inca
(15:14):
emperors back in the day, and then, according to a
lecture given by historian Christopher Heeney with National Geographic Live,
his party eventually sought to ask a local innkeeper if
there were any ruins in the area. The innkeeper, whose
name was Milture Artaga, pointed up and said Machu Buchu.
So on July nineteen eleven, Artaga led the party across
(15:38):
this narrow bridge, over a raging river and then up
a mountain side covered in vipers and Casey weren't thinking
this sounded Indiana Jones like enough, and then finally came
to a family that I was living on the slopes,
and the family sent their five year old son to
lead Bingham and the rest of the party up to
(15:59):
the fantastic stone terraces of Machu Pichu. So the next year,
he and his team excavated human remains, a silver head dress,
and many signs of everyday living. Bingham was convinced that
Machu Pichi was vic Obamba, though it actually turned out
to be another site that he exposed, something that wasn't
definitely realized until the nineteen sixties. Bingham went on to
(16:21):
become the governor of Connecticut and a U S Senator,
and he wrote a book called The Lost City of
the Incas. Three years after its publication, a film idea
was submitted to Paramount, featuring a Yale trained archaeologist and
Machu Pichu excavator. Ultimately, the whole story was flipped around,
given a new title and a new type of leading man,
one very unlike Bingham, but very much like Indiana Jones.
(16:44):
You have this sort of loose connection there between the
two and as a side note to just before we
move on from Bingham. According to the terms of the
original Matchu Pichu dig, the Peruvian government gave Yale access
to all of the artifacts found there, with the condition
that they could be returned at any time. And in
two thousand and eight the proving government stud Yell for
(17:05):
their return and Yale agreed to it, and I think
by the end of this year, by the end of twelve,
they are supposed to return all of the Machu Pichi stuff. Well,
so far we've talked about a gun toting, snake fearing naturalist,
eluding Egyptologist, and an academic in search of a lost city.
But there's one thing that really defines the character of
(17:27):
Indiana Jones, his search for supernatural objects like the Arc
or the Holy Grail, and his desire to keep them
out of the hands of people who want them for evil,
usually not usually Nazis. So this last entry on our
list had a very strong academic bent, but also an
all consuming interest in the Holy Grail, plus a very
(17:49):
unfortunate connection with the Nazis. Born in Germany and nineteen
o four, Otto Ron was fascinated, of course by the
legend of the Holy Grail, uh the copy by Christ
at the Last Supper, and also the cup used to
catch his blood, which is said to have supernatural powers
and is connected to King Arthur and Camelot and all that.
(18:09):
I'm sure most of you know the whole Holy Grail,
part of the Holy Grail, but att Iron became a medievalist.
He was so interested in the Grail, and he used
the Pars of All, which is a thirteenth century German romance,
as his jumping off point for his search for the Grail.
He ultimately came to believe that the Grail was connected
to a castle in the French Pyrenees and Walt Sigur.
(18:32):
According to a Smithsonian documentary, the castle had been the
last refuge of the Cathars, a Christian sect that had
been nearly wiped out by crusaders. Survivors banded together inside
and managed to withstand a month long siege before they
finally fell in the mid thirteenth century. They asked for
a fifteen days stay of execution before being burned alive inside,
(18:53):
but before that happened, a small band of Nights supposedly
snuck outside of the walls climbed on a cliff and
hid for several days under the castle and fled with
a bag, a very mysterious bag, possibly containing the Holy Grail.
So in nineteen thirty two, Ron visited the castle and
wound up at a cave system about twenty miles away
(19:16):
from it, believing that this had been the first hiding
place of the Holy Grail. He explored what had been
an underground Cathar cathedral with a Senegalese attendant and was
really nearly killed when an underground flood rushed through the cave. Suddenly,
I think they were exploring the caves kind of Indiana
Jones style, and then they heard this distant, rushing noise
(19:38):
and realized that there was a wall of water coming
their way. They had to run for their lives out
of the cave. Ron ultimately wrote a book about all
of his experiences, academic and adventurous for the Grail, and
called it Crusade against the Grail. Then in nineteen thirty
three he got kind of a strange piece of fan mail. Yeah,
(20:00):
it was this mysterious unsigned telegram offering him a monthly
salary to write a sequel to his book. So when
he showed up at the Berlin address, given on the telegram,
he found Heinrich Himmler, the commander of the s S
and a super fan who had practically memorized his first
book and had a castle ready for the Grail, an
(20:21):
SS camelot of a sort with a Grail room. Himmler
wanted Ron to work for the s S searching for
the Grail, of course, and while Ron wasn't particularly interested,
he really felt that there was no way out of
the situation. Understandably, according to an article by John Preston
and the Telegraph, he told a friend, quote, what was
I supposed to do? Turn Himler down? He also figured
(20:42):
it would be pretty good money for his expeditions. It
wasn't long there before Ron realized that he had gotten
himself into a pretty dicey situation. So Himmler loved his
next book that he wrote, Lucifer's Court, a Heretic's Journey
in search of the Lightbringers, and even ordered up five
thousand special copies to distribute to Nazi officials. But when
(21:06):
Ron looked over his latest work, he started to find
things that he hadn't written, including some anti Semitic passages.
So it's worth mentioning here that Ron was openly gay,
which was something Himmler chose to ignore, but he may
have also been part Jewish or had some Jewish ancestors
and not even known that himself. He also, increasingly dissatisfied
(21:29):
with working for the FS, began running in anti Nazi
circles pretty discreetly, but still sort of playing with fire
there regardless. In seven, Ron fell from Himler's good grace
after a drunken incident. He was punished with three months
as a duck out guard, where he was appalled by
what he saw. According to the Smithsonian, he told a
friend it had become quote impossible for a tolerant liberal
(21:52):
man like me to live in a nation that my
native country has become. So he wrote to Himler resigning
from the s S. And it's unclear exactly what happened
after that, but it's likely that he was told that
he would be killed if he didn't do it himself first,
so he committed suicide at thirty four, looking at his
favorite mountain. So that's a sad end to one of
(22:12):
these Indiana Jones stories. But of course these four are
just a small sampling of the possible indie contenders out there.
You'll sometimes hear Vendal Jones mentioned as a likely candidate.
He was an American biblical scholar who searched for the
Ark of the Covenant. He suggested himself that if you
take the V and the L off of his first name,
(22:34):
you get Indeed Jones. But according to The Vancouver Son,
Lucas and Spielberg say that the name Indiana actually came
from Lucas's dog's name, which the dog coincidentally was also
the inspiration for the look of Chewbacca. And um, I
watched the third film again last night sort of a
(22:54):
research to say this, yeah, and um, there's there's a
mention of the dog and how Indiana Jones, who is
a junior, takes his nickname from the family dog. Spielberg
supposedly suggested the name Jones, and the original name idea
was supposed to be Smith. Indiana Smith does not doesn't
have the same ring to it. It really doesn't. I'm
(23:15):
glad they decided on Jones. So other possibilities as Indiana
Jones inspirations include a few that could easily make nice
full length podcast in the future, which is why we
didn't want to try to condense them to include on
This list t E. Lawrence, for example if who was
better known as Lawrence of Arabia. Percy Fawcett, who disappeared
in the Amazon in the nineteen twenties and was the
(23:36):
subject of the great book The Lost City of z
also f A. Mitchell Hedges, a British traveler who got
into fistfights and searched for the Crystal Skull. Then there's
James Henry Breasted, who was an American who knew Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew,
and Arabic and was the first US professor of Egyptology.
And then William Montgomery McGovern, who was a professor at
(23:58):
Northwestern across the Himalayas and disguise and shot at twenty
eight foot anaconda that charged his boat while he was
in the Amazon. Also the grandfather of the actress Elizabeth
McGovern of Downtown Abbey Um. When I was getting near
the time when we needed to go into the studio
and record, I started reading more about these guys and
(24:19):
getting like really agitated, just because I wanted to find
out more about them. They're so interesting. I mean, anaconda
charging your boat. That sounds pretty cool, Pure Indiana Jones.
So it was a very fun one to research, and certainly,
like you said, a lot of these could be full
length episodes. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the promising
part about it. For your little Research Jones that you
(24:41):
were on, we will get to cover to people, hopefully
in the future. So just a final thought, there's a
Vanity Fair interview with Steven Spielberg that helps explain a
bit why Indiana Jones is apparently such a universal character.
He said, quote, Indiana Jones was never a machine. I
think one of the things we brought to the genre
was the willingness to allow our leading man to get
(25:02):
hurt and to express his pain, and to get his
mad out, and to take prep falls and sometimes be
the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones
is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think
make the audience feel that with a little more exercise
and a little more courage, they could be just like him.
So he's not the terminator. He's not so far away
(25:22):
from the people who go to see the movies that
he's inaccessible to their own dreams and aspirations, and he's
not so far removed from real life people that these
comparisons to admittedly extraordinary men. These adventures who lead extraordinary lives,
um still don't seem too far fetched. He can have
a little piece of each of the mama. Yeah, so
(25:44):
even if they're not directing inspiration, it still makes exploring
their lives a little more fun. It was certainly fun.
So if you have any suggestions for Indiana Jones, is
that we missed or that you just want to throw
out there. I know there are still more even without
a brief ate at least we did at the end.
There are a lot that I did not include, but
if you have an absolute favorite, feel free to email
(26:07):
us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. We're also
on Twitter at Misston History and we're on Facebook and
if you want to learn a little bit more about
the topics we discussed on this podcast, we have a
great article called how Archaeology Works, and I think it's
written by our own Seren Doity. Is it not is?
And actually I definitely use Indiana Jones as the zero art.
(26:29):
So I think if you go to it, you will
find Indiana Jones with his whip and his fedora. And
you can find that by visiting our homepage at www
dot How Stuff Works dot com. Be sure to check
out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join
how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising
(26:49):
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone
up has a ride down about it today on iTunes.
Eat even the NAT
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.