Basketball Comes to Fort Shaw Indian School (pt. 1)

The Fort Shaw Indian School was part of a boarding school system designed to make Native American students conform to white culture. In a surprising twist, it also boasted a champion women’s basketball team.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. From time
to time we get requests from listeners for an episode

(00:21):
about some kind of sports history and what we do.
I mean, we have episodes that are related to the
Olympic Games and some that are on swimming and weightlifting,
and several different types of racing including horses and speedboats
and automobiles. We have not really talked a lot about
team sports, which I think is what people are asking

(00:43):
for when they ask for sports. Yes, today's subject is
the Fort Show Indian School girls basketball team. They became
world champions in nineteen o four, which is pretty early
in the entire history of that sport. But the story
also plays out right in the intersection of two other
pretty big stories. There's the American Indian boarding school program

(01:05):
in the United States and also the nineteen o four St.
Louis World's Fair. So we're going to tackle the story
in two parts. In today's part one, we have the
background on this boarding school system that the Fort Shaw
School was part of, as well as how basketball came
to and flourished at the school, and then in part
two we will talk about how the team became world

(01:26):
champions while they were there. And as a note at
the beginning, we are going to be talking about a
lot of intentional efforts to quote americanized Indigenous children. And
this is a weird word because the word American can
encompass the whole diversity of races and ethnicities and cultures
and religions. But these efforts to Americanized Native children, that

(01:50):
was really only about one type of American, one that
was white, Christian and English speaking. So we're we know
that American means a lot of things besides that, but
in this context, that's what it was really about. And also,
if it's not obvious at this point, we're gonna be
talking about some pretty abhorrent views in this episode the

(02:11):
next one, YEA, So when we use the word Americanized
in this context, know that we are referring to that
usage at the time someone else's very specific, very narrow
view of that. Fort Shaw, Montana, began its life in
June of eighteen sixty seven as an outpost which was
called Camp Reynolds, and that was on land that the

(02:33):
United States had acquired from France through the Louisiana Purchase,
which of course took place in eighteen o three. The
following month it was renamed Fort Shaw Military Reservation. It
remained in operation as a fort until eight The fort
served to protect white travelers and traders and the troops garrison.
There were an active fighting force in the United States

(02:55):
ongoing wars against the region's native nations and tribes. Those
wars had really gone on for centuries, and this is
playing out towards the end of those centuries of active warfare.
Also after the major removals of indigenous tribes from their
home territories, like the bulk of that had happened, but
it was still ongoing. So this is toward the end

(03:18):
of that phase of history, but still things related to
it were going on. So after about a year after
the Fort ceased military operations, the Office of Indian Affairs
converted it into a government boarding school for Native American children.
The Fort Shot Indian School became part of the nation's
network of federal off reservation boarding schools that were meant

(03:41):
to Americanize the indigenous population. The flagship of this system
was Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian School, which was established in eighteen
seventy nine. Its founder, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, believed
that Native Americans would become extinct if they didn't immediately
form to white culture. By forcing them to do so,

(04:03):
he thought he would save the indigenous population. This is
often summed up as quote, kill the Indian and save
the man. He's obviously not the only person who thought this.
There were other policymakers who were of the same mindset.
Pratt spoke at length about this whole idea a little
later on in his career at the nineteen Annual Conference

(04:25):
of Charities and Correction, and he gave an address that
began quote, a great general has said that the only
good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction
of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting
Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment,
but only in this that all the Indian there is
in the race should be dead, killed the Indian in him,

(04:48):
and save the man. Although Carlisle was the most well
known of these off reservation boarding schools, it wasn't the
first or only such effort. Mission schools and other religious
efforts go back almost to the beginning of European colonization
in North America, and we talked about some of these
in past podcasts, including the Harvard Indian School in Massachusetts

(05:10):
and the Foreign Mission School in Connecticut, and we'll link
to both of those episodes in the show notes church
efforts to educate the indigenous population. These earlier schools, a
lot of the time were at least at first, more
about spreading Christianity than about straight out cultural assimilation, but
that started to shift in the early nineteenth century. In

(05:31):
eighteen nineteen, Congress past the Civilization Fund Act, and this
act set aside funding for missionary societies to run quote
civilizing schools for Native Americans. Into the end of the
nineteenth century, hundreds of boarding and day schools were built
near and on reservation land, and they had the dual
mission of educating and so called civilizing the native students.

(05:57):
The government run off reservation boarding school is like the
ones at Carlisle and Fort Shaw, joined this extensive network
of boarding and day schools. Between eighteen eighty and nineteen
o two, the federal government built about twenty five boarding
schools that were physically removed from their students reservations, sometimes
by hundreds of miles, and collectively, all these boarding and

(06:20):
day schools, both on and off reservations, had the same
goal to remove all traces of Indigenous culture from the
Native population and replace it which with that which was
considered appropriately quote American. To do this, the off reservation
boarding schools removed Native children from their homes, families, tribes,

(06:41):
and cultures for periods of months or years, just too
far away a lot of the time for people to
go home, even for breaks. Students were held to really
strict scheduling and military style discipline. Classes were taught only
in English, and children who didn't already have an English
name were given one in called by that instead. Indigenous

(07:02):
languages and religious practices were all forbidden, and punishments for
breaking those rules were harsh and even abusive. The uniforms, meals, lessons,
and recreation were all meant to americanize the students dress, speech, demeanor,
and beliefs, and many of the schools teachers and administrators

(07:22):
told the students that their Native beliefs in ways of
life were wrong and backward and evil and even savage.
This was such an explicit effort like at Carlisle. They
even took before and after pictures after students arrived at school.
They would take before pictures of people in their own
traditional dress that they had come to the school in,

(07:44):
and then like give them haircuts and dressed them in
other clothes and take pictures afterwards. Most schools divided their
class time between academic and vocational instruction, under the idea
that students would graduate knowing some kind of productive trade.
So for the boys that might be things like blacksmithing
and farming. For girls, the trade was often sewing or

(08:07):
domestic work. Some schools even hired out their students labor
while they were attending school. But even so, the graduation
rates were actually really low, and there were a lot
of limits to the so called assimilation that the schools
were enforcing. Even though the students were expected to talk, dress,
act and work like white people, once they graduated or

(08:29):
otherwise left the school, they were still considered to be
Native American. They were still subject to the same segregation
and discrimination as the rest of the indigenous population. In
addition to all of that conditions that many of these
schools were very poor, and hundreds of students died of
disease and malnutrition, as well as of injury or exposure

(08:51):
after running away from the school. There have also been
numerous reports of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse taking place
at the schools over the decades. Sometimes Native parents really
had no other choice as to whether to send their
children to these boarding schools. In some cases, there just
wasn't another option available for getting an education, or life

(09:13):
was so difficult on the reservation that it seemed like
the choice was between boarding school and starvation. It is
obviously not really a choice. Some government Indian agents took
children by force or strongly pressured parents to send their
children to boarding boarding school. This was especially true when
it came to the leaders of tribes that had recently

(09:34):
been at war with the United States. Their children were
aggressively recruited, sometimes taken without their consent, and sent to
far off boarding schools, almost as hostages. Simultaneously, though, there
were families who sent their children voluntarily, hoping that if
they received an education at a government school, learning English

(09:54):
in the ways of white society, they might return home
to better advocate for their own people. This was especially
true when it came to schools that had better reputations
in terms of how the students were treated or weren't
so far away from the rest of the community. Somewhere
between twenty thousand and thirty thousand children went to federal
off reservation boarding schools from the late eighteen hundreds into

(10:17):
the early nineteen hundreds. But at the same time, roughly
a hundred thousand Native Americans went to school through similar
Americanization efforts at on reservation boarding schools and day schools.
So during these decades, the Native children who were receiving
some kind of formal education were overwhelmingly doing so at
a program that was meant to christianize and quote americanize them.

(10:41):
The United States, we should mention, was not the only
nation to have schools and other programs like this. Canada,
for example, had a very similar system of residential schools
that began operating in about eighteen eighty and the last
of those actually closed in nineteen. In Australia, showmen, indigenous
children and children of Aboriginal descent were forcibly removed from

(11:04):
their families that they became known as the Stolen Generations.
There's actually a pretty old podcast about that back in
the archive, and we've gotten a number of requests related
to this in some way. Over the years, we have
gotten approximately an equal number of requests for the residential
school program in Canada and about specifically Carlisle School in

(11:27):
the United States. But like Carlisle, as we've just said,
was part of a much, much bigger system. So after
the break, we're going to talk more about Fort Shaw
Indian School specifically and how it wound up starting a
basketball program. Saw Indian School was centrally located among eleven

(11:50):
different reservations that were scattered across four states. This included Colville,
Spokane and kurt Elaine in eastern Washington, Fort Hall in Idaho,
Wind River in Wyoming, and Blackfeet Flathead, Fort Bell, nap
for Peck, Crow and Northern Cheyenne in Montana. Even though
Fort Shaw was roughly central to all of these different reservations,

(12:13):
the closest ones were still more than a hundred miles away.
Fort Shaw was actually a replacement for another school, a
government run day school on Fort Peck Indian Reservation, which
burned down in the federal government looked too recently vacated
Fort Shaw because it would be easy and inexpensive to
turn it into a school. The officers quarters became housing

(12:36):
for faculty and staff. The barracks were student housing, and
since it had been a military base, had already had
other necessities like a mess hall, a chapel, a laundry,
and a hospital. Another bonus, from the government's point of
view was that long hundred plus mile journey home, and
some of them were from much farther away than a

(12:57):
hundred miles. The school was far enough away from all
of the reservations that its students came from that, in theory,
it would discourage students to visit home. It would discourage
family to come and visit students, both of which the
administrators thought might slow down the student's assimilation or cause
students to quote relapse into their native ways. They also

(13:19):
believed that this distance would deter students from trying to
run away. This was not entirely true. Children definitely tried
to and did run away from Fort Shaw. After its
conversion into a school, four Shaw reopened on December for
students ages five to eighteen. It's students included members of

(13:41):
numerous tribes and nations, including the Blackfeet, Chippewa, cree Crow,
Northern Cheyenne, Shoshonee, Grosvan, a Sinniboine and Sue. Many were
of multi tribal descent, and many had one white parent.
Although only some of the students spoke English upon arrival
at the school, nearly all of them spoke more than

(14:02):
one indigenous language as we sat at the top of
the show. A core element of Fort Shaw Indian School's
purpose was to remove students from their own cultural beliefs
and practices and instead assimilate them into white society. So
this included English and cultural instruction, along with some academic
and vocational classes, plus music, theater, and physical education. A

(14:24):
lot of the youngest students spent their first couple of
years learning English and white cultural norms before focusing on
any academic or vocational study. Vocational classes weren't just about
teaching the children useful skills that could help them earn
a living once they graduated. They were also about actually
keeping the school running. The children's labor at Fort Shaw

(14:46):
included raising the vegetables and livestock that provided food and
milk for the school, sewing all of the school uniforms,
and laundering and mending them. They also made items that
were sold to earn money for the school. Girls learned
in royttery and lace making, while boys learned things like
blacksmith ing, furniture making, and general carpentry. Their pe courses

(15:08):
were also separated by gender. The boys got to play
team sports along with doing track and field. The girls
mainly had what was called physical culture. This is sort
of a cross between a health class calisthenics and European
style gymnastics that was popular at the time. Josephine Langley,
known as Josie, was hired as an quote Indian assistant

(15:29):
along with two other young women from the Blackfeet reservation
in Josie wanted to be a teacher and she hoped
that by taking this job as an assistant, she would
be able to work her way up the ladder. She
had probably learned to play basketball while studying at Carlisle
Indian School, and she introduced the sport at Fort Shaw
around eight, at first playing with a soccer ball and

(15:52):
makeshift baskets until the school eventually approved the purchase of
regulation equipment. Games were played in the Army base his
old dance hall, which had a packed dirt floor and
was easily big enough to accommodate the court and the
players basketball, which was actually two words at this point
was not just new to Fort Shaw Indian School. James

(16:13):
Naismith had developed the sport only about five years before
its introduction there. He had developed it at Springfield College
in Connecticut, which was also known as the International y
m C. A training school. He had been looking for
a team sport that could be played indoors, particularly during
the winter months, when the college's football team's regiment of calistinics,

(16:35):
marching and weight training was just not sufficient to keep
up their physique. Around the turn of the twentieth century,
football was extremely violent. Teams basically faced off against each
other in a wedge formation, and they kind of threw
themselves at each other full force. It was not at
all something that could be played in a confined space

(16:55):
on an indoor surface without risking even more injuries than
were already opening during regular play. So in creating basketball,
Nay Smith was trying to invent a team sport that
was fast paced and vigorous, but did not involve large
young men hurling themselves into one another as hard as possible.
That's kind of a side note here. The football that

(17:17):
Nate Smith was trying to replace was also really new.
The first college football game is generally marked as happening
between Princeton and Rutgers on November six of eighteen sixty nine,
although that initial game was closer to soccer than to
American football as we know it today. This rugby soccer
hybrid of American football grew up over the next decade

(17:38):
or so, and the Carlysle Indian school football team, which
was founded in eight played a big role in the
evolution of that sport. On average, the Carlysle football players
were much smaller than the players on the teams that
they played against, and they came up with a ton
of strategic tricks to get around this disadvantage. If there
wasn't a specific rule against it, they would try it.

(18:01):
There are still American football rules today that came about
as the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee outlawed Carlyle strategies in
between seasons. I'm just gonna continue with this digression for
a moment to say that I do not care about
football as a sport. Uh. There are a lot of

(18:21):
you know, social and economic and medical and political issues
around football that I care a lot about, but like
it's it would take a lot to make me sit
down and watch a football game all the way through. Uh.
Even So, this whole story of the Carlisle, Indian School
football team is fascinating and I want to do an
episode about it one day. Um. Jim Thorpe, whose name

(18:44):
in the Fox language translated to bright Path, was the
first Native Americans to win a gold medal at the
Olympics for the United States. He was one of the
players and their strategies and the ways that they bent
every rule if it wasn't specific the outlawed. Their coach
Pop Warner would would try it. So like that's the
whole story is just fascinating and bizarre and has stuff

(19:07):
in it like the Carlisle team sewing these leather football
shaped patches on their uniforms to trick Harvard into thinking
they all had the ball, and then Harvard retaliating by
painting all of the ball's maroon. It's it is a
great story, and it's one of the few other things
about team sports. I might interest myself enough in doing

(19:31):
podcast on it sometime later. I like a little subversion
through sewing that makes it super fun. Yeah, it's it's um,
it's a it's fascinating anyway. So, Nathan, this original game
of basketball. To get back to basketball had thirteen rules.
We're not going to read them all, but they included
that the ball could be thrown or batted with one

(19:52):
or both hands, but not with a fist, shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping,
and striking opponents where all fouls as was hitting the
ball with a fist. The game was played in two
fifteen minute halves with a five minute rest, but otherwise
the clock did not stop during play, so it was
a very fast paced game, not a lot of stopping.
At the low scoring compared to today, although it wasn't

(20:16):
listed in the thirteen original rules. The games started with
a jump ball or a tip off at center court,
and both teams returned to center court for another jump
ball after baskets were scored. Soon after Na Smith drafted
the first set of rules, women's colleges in the Northeast
started taking up basketball as well. Senda Baronson of Smith

(20:37):
College released an adapted rule set for women in in
eight she headed up a committee to create an even
further modified set of rules for girls, which made the
game so much easier and less intense that a lot
of programs, especially west of the Mississippi, just ignored them
and had the girls play by what we're called the
quote boys rules, especially for girls teams that had already

(21:01):
been playing by the same rules as everyone else. Uh,
they were like, no, I'm not doing that. So this
basketball program at Fort Shaw was actually the first basketball
program organized in the state of Montana. It immediately became
immensely popular among the girls at the school. Physical games

(21:22):
played in teams were already a really important element of
pretty much all of their indigenous cultures. Basketball also had
some similarities to a number of Native girls games. These
included double ball, which used a pair of balls tethered
together and then tossed from a stick, which was exclusively
a women's sport among most of the Planes tribes. There

(21:44):
was another game called shinny, which was a lot like
field hockey and used curved sticks, which was generally a
women's rule or a women's game as well. Uh. Some
tribes also had versions of lacrosse that were played by women. Basically,
there were a lot of team sports with balls specifically
played by women in among a lot of different indigenous cultures.
Basketball was also a lot more fun and physically active

(22:07):
than physical culture class, and it was the one time
of day when students could really shed some of the
school's cultural expectations, they could participate in unladylike behavior like
running and jumping with abandon. Although the boys at the
school had shown an initial interest in basketball as well,
soon the girls were outperforming them on the court and

(22:27):
their interest waned. They also had plenty of other team
sports to choose from, whereas the girls did not because
there was no other basketball program in Montana at the time.
For the first few years of basketball at Fort Shaw
Indian School, all of the games were intramural scrimmage matches.
Even so, they were as popular with the local community

(22:47):
as they were with the girls at the school. At
an end of year ceremony game in eighteen nine seven,
they did an intramural demonstration that brought in three hundred
spectators to watch in a t Fred C. Campbell became
superintendent of Fort Shaw, and he seemed to have had
a genuine interest in making things better for the school,

(23:08):
improving the school's image and that of his students, and
he also wanted the community to begin seeing those students
in a different light. Racism against Native Americans was endemic
and severe, and Campbell recognized that all this work they
were doing to quote, assimilate the students was not really
going to be effective if once those students graduated from

(23:30):
the school they were still shunned from white society. So
he started inviting people from the community to the school
and taking students out into the community to try to
basically get everyone used to each other hopefully changed the
hearts and minds within the community. So a natural way
to do this was by hosting basketball games. And we're

(23:50):
gonna talk a little bit more about that, but first
we are going to pause and have a word from
one of our fantastic sponsors. In addition to being the
superintendent of the school, Fred Campbell had been an athlete himself.
Some sources actually credit him with being the one who
introduced basketball at Fort Shaw, but it was definitely played

(24:13):
there for a couple of years before he became superintendent.
From his own firsthand experience, he thought athletics were a
good way to build a person's self esteem and sense
of worth, on top of helping to develop a strong
and healthy body. So he focused on improving and building
up all the school's athletics teams, but it was really
the girls basketball team that he saw as having the

(24:34):
most promise for bringing good publicity to the school and
its students. Basketball had barely made its way into Montana
at this point. There were so few other teams to
play against that the Fort Shaw girls team's first game
against another school was actually against a boys team, and
that team was from Great Falls. Then Campbell organized another

(24:55):
girls team in sun River, which was not far away,
so the Fort Shaw team would have someone else to play.
When it was time for games, he would bring the
sun River team in by wagon. Fort Shaw defeated sun
River easily every time. Of course, more more schools, more
other programs started having basketball teams, but to play against

(25:18):
those other teams, the Fort Shaw team had to start
traveling farther and farther away. In late nineteen o two,
they traveled to Butte, Montana by wagon and then trained
where they where they defeated the Mute High team fifteen
to nine. The next day they traveled to Helena again
by train, and this time they were defeated fifteen to six. Again.

(25:40):
I will point out how much lower these scores are
than what we would normally see in a basketball game today.
There's only one of the one digit three. I think
that original basketball sound is a little more my taste
maybe than current basketball, because that is one of my
things of like you could just kind of watch the

(26:01):
last bit because there's so much scoring before that, which
is not too in any way thro shaded basketball. If
you love it, that's cool. That's just always been my thing,
and like I could come in for the last ten minutes, right, um,
that's when it's really a nail biterer. So after that
loss though at Helena, Campbell started refining the girls positions
on the team. He realized that Fort Shaw had lost

(26:21):
the ball to Helena in more than half of the
jump balls at center court, so he moved Nettie Worth,
who wasn't the tallest on the team but had a
really incredible vertical jump, to center. Nettie and her sister
Lizzie were a Sinnaboine and had been among Fort Shaw's
first students when it opened. This change was not quite
enough to help Fort Shaw defeat Beaute Parochial school in

(26:43):
the next game they played. They lost that one fifteen
to six, so Campbell made another switch. He left Nettie
Worth as center and he made Many Burton and in
a sense of her forwards. Many was a member of
the lem High Shoshoni Nation, which was not actually in
favor of sending children away to government government boarding schools.
But Many's father worked as a translator and he thought

(27:06):
that she could benefit from getting an English education. Emma
Sansor and her siblings were actually Matee of French, Canadian
and Chippewa Cree descent. They were listed in their school
records as Sue because their particular people were essentially landless
in the United States, they were not part of a
federally recognized tribe. Some of the people at the mission

(27:28):
school that they had attended previously falsified their tribal affiliation
to be able to get them into the school, which,
like we talked previously about how there were all kinds
of reasons for for children to go to these schools,
and this was a case where Emma and her siblings
were in dire financial straits and so at the people

(27:48):
who made this change to their tribal affiliation, we're doing
with it that was best for them. So this combination
of girls and positions that Campbell came up with became
a winning one for Fort Shaw. Their next game was
against a college team, Montana State University in Missoula, now
known as the University of Montana. Fort Shaw won nineteen

(28:10):
to nine, and from there they were undefeated for the
rest of the season, playing at least six more games,
including against another college team, the Montana Agricultural College Farmats,
and resounding wins in rematches against both Helena High School,
which was ten victory, and Buque Parochial, which was an
eighteen to eight score. These games were not all on

(28:32):
the road the school. While it had that large dance
hall that was great for their own scrimmages and practices,
they didn't really have a large enough space to accommodate
the crowds who started wanting to see the games, so
they started using Luther Hall in Great Falls, Montana as
their home game court. Luther Hall was a ballroom that
was big enough for the playing area and hundreds of spectators.

(28:58):
Great Falls is also about twenty five five miles away
from the school, and since travel to and from there
had to happen by wagon, the team and there uh
their chaperones and coach wind up staying at a hotel,
which was a treat for most of them. Over the
course of a few games, Great Falls, Montana started to
think of the Fort Shaw team as their own home team.

(29:20):
Although game coverage in the local papers still drifted into
casual racism, especially in descriptions of the girls appearances and
their quote savage wins, it started to carry a little
bit of a tone of local pride and to focus
more on the players other accomplishments at school rather than
the fact that they were quote Indian. Yeah, they didn't,

(29:41):
they didn't, the skies the girls cultural heritage, but it
stopped being written about as though it were a taboo
or something to judge about them. In the end of
the season, the Fort Shaw team had a record of
nine wins and two losses. The game of basketball was
still so new to the state of Montana that there

(30:01):
weren't official rankings or playoffs, but nevertheless, the Fort Shaw
team was regarded as the state champions. Many Burton had
become so popular, especially for her scoring ability, that spectators
chant whenever they were playing was shoot many shoots. The
basketball games also gave the school an opportunity to show
off some other talents. The band and the mandolin orchestra

(30:25):
provided the before game and halftime entertainment. Sometimes after the games,
the court was turned back into a dance floor, where
the girls showed off their skills in ballroom dancing. All
of this also brought in lots of coverage from the
local press. Of course, racism and prejudice still existed, but
the community started to see these students as talented and

(30:46):
capable rather than as uneducable troublemakers. In three s M
mcowen contacted Fred Campbell with an intriguing invitation. Mcowen had
previously been super intendant of the Chillico Indian School, but
he had recently moved into a new role director of
the Model Indian School that was being created for the St.

(31:09):
Louis World's Fair. McGowan asked Campbell to select some of
Fort Shaw's best students to participate in the Model School,
which was going to run from June one to November one,
nineteen o four, and Campbell agreed. But that becomes a
whole other story. So we're going to talk about what
this agreement meant for the basketball team and how it

(31:30):
led to their becoming world champions in part two of
this podcast. I'm excited for part to you me too.
It's a really fun story. You don't, I mean, when
you think about this being a completely new sport relief
for people, and now it completely shifted perceptions. I have
a new appreciation for basketball. I really admire the girls

(31:55):
and young women who played on this team. We're gonna
get to talk more about them next time to ya.
In the meantime, do you have listener mail to send
us out? I sure do. It's from Kristen and Kristen
has sent us a piece of mail that throws back
to our Halloween episode on the Green Children of Wolpit,
and it's entitled green Children of Woolpit might have been Blue?

(32:16):
Question mark christ and says, sorry, this is so late.
You don't need to apologize. It's fine. Um. I only
listened to the podcast episode last night. I was curious
about the possibility that perhaps the problem and identifying the
source of these children's skin color might be in the
definition of the color names. For instance, we know that
different cultures have different definitions of the line between green

(32:40):
and blue. Might not be so crazy to posit that
in eleventh and twelfth century, the eleventh and twelfth century
English folks might not adhere to our modern definitions. Considering
this possibility opens up a lot more medical possibilities to
the cause of the strange skin coloration. Maybe if we'd
have seen these kids today, we would think they looked
at blue. The leading thought I've got is mythiem with globinemia,

(33:04):
the same disease of the blue figures of Kentucky were
reported to have had other conditions on the differential might
be to trilogy of below, which is the heart disease
that Jimmy Kimmel's son has, or other congenital heart disease
leading to a chronic cyonosis from right to left, shunting
up the blood flow that causes the blood to bypass
the lungs before being sent back out to the body.

(33:26):
And what if in addition to having such a disorder,
they also had some sort of liver disease that made
them jaundiced. Yellow plus blue gives green as for our
modern definition, so many possibilities. Just the thought I wondered
if anyone else would have also had. I'm a second
year medical student, so my knowledge is limited, but the
episode was fascinating and distracted me from some deadlines. Thanks again, Kristen.

(33:48):
Thank you Kristen for this note. It is definitely true
that that blue and green are are not necessarily perceived
differently but described differently among different cultures. We've gotten a
couple of requests before for an episode about when words
for the color blue into different languages lexicon. There's like

(34:11):
a whole series of debate about about whether that's just
an issue of language, like people coming up with names
for different colors, or whether it's an actual issue of perception,
like where people not perceiving a different color during that time.
And I meant to jump down that rabbit hole before
reading this email, I did not do it, Um Regardless,
I think that is a fascinating suggestion. I also want

(34:33):
to say that I have on my list of things
to sometime at some point talk about on the podcast
UM the three, the three doctors who together worked out
a procedure to treat the tdrology of Felow. A lot
of people have asked for Vivian Thomas, but the other
two doctors who worked together and that both also have

(34:53):
their own fascinating stories. So thank you for that interesting
hypothesis about the green children of will Pit. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcasts where history podcasts at how stuff works dot com.
We are also all across social media at missed in
History dot com. That is where you will find us
on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Tumbler, all of those things.

(35:17):
You can also come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com. We will have links to those
other episodes from previously in the archive. Will have links
to those in the page for today's episode. We also
have a fully searchable archive of all of our past episodes.
Um there are links to all of the resources and
sources that Holly and I have used on their episodes,

(35:38):
so you can do all that if you come and
visit us at missed in history dot com for more
on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
Stuff Works dot com