Fort Shaw Indian School: Basketball Champions (pt. 2)

In 1904, the Fort Shaw Indian School women’s basketball team spent four months at the St. Louis World’s Fair. The team performed mandolin recitals, literary recitations, demonstrations of gymnastics and calisthenics, and became World Champions.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph 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. We are
concluding a two part episode today. In part one of

(00:21):
this show, we gave some background about the Fort Shaw
Indian School, which was part of the federally run system
of off reservation boarding schools that were meant to assimilate
in sort of scare quotes, native students into white culture,
or at least to get Native students to conform with
white culture. It didn't actually assimilate. There was still a

(00:43):
lot of racism and discrimination after people went through these programs.
We also talked a bit about the history of basketball
and how girls basketball at Fort Shaw quickly became the
best basketball team in Montana. Today, we are picking up
with the St. Louis World's Fair, where the team spent
about four months in nineteen o four becoming the world

(01:04):
champions there. As was the case in the previous episode,
we are still getting into some pretty abhorrent racism here,
and there is also a brief mention of animal cruelty.
In nineteen o three, Fort Shaw Indian School was as
we mentioned at the end of the previous episode invited
to participate in the nineteen o four St. Louis World's Fair,

(01:24):
also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, so named because
it was meant to start a year earlier and mark
the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. This was, of course,
also the subject of the nineteen forty four film starring
Judy Garland, which is spectacular. It's also totally not surprising
that forty years later Metro Goldwyn Mayor made a musical

(01:47):
out of this. This fair was huge. The nineteen o
four World's Fair ran from April thirtieth to December one,
during which time more than twenty million people attended it.
The fair site, which was the largest ever for a
World's Fair, covered twelve hundred acres that was dotted with
about nine hundred buildings, including fifteen exhibit palaces. The exhibitors

(02:10):
included sixty two nations and forty three of the then
forty five United States states. A mile long avenue called
the Pike was full of vendors and amusements. It seems
like every ubiquitous American food, from hot dogs to ice
cream cones, was supposedly introduced at the nineteen o four
World's Fair, but most of those stories just f y

(02:32):
I are apocryphal. Uh. There were carnival rides, the massive
ferris wheel, boer War reenactments, award of babies, and incubators.
It just goes on and on and on. A running
theme for this fair, as was often the case in
these kinds of expositions, was progress. Some of this progress
was related to science and industry. The incubators are actually

(02:55):
one example. There were meteorological balloon experiments, There was a
demonstrate and of the first ground to air wireless telegraph.
New technologies from X rays to electric typewriters got their
first public display. Some things that were still pretty novel
to the world at the time got their time to
shine to including all kinds of other electrical appliances, gasoline engines,

(03:18):
and automobiles. But some of it was also about cultural progress.
The general idea was that the United States culture was superior,
and that the nation was having a civilizing influence on
the rest of the world as well as within its
own borders. This cultural progress was displayed through large pavilions

(03:39):
of living exhibits of thousands of people from around the world.
These living exhibits were a common element of the world's
fairs and expositions of the era. They functioned almost like
temporary human zoos. People actually lived in these where the
duration of the fair and living exhibits were frequently arranged
to suggest a pro Russian from the least to the

(04:02):
most civilized people's One example in St. Louis was the
Philippine Village, which covered forty seven acres and housed more
than a thousand people from at least ten different Filipino
ethnic groups. Often, the cultural practices that were considered the
most taboo from a white Christian American perspective, uh were

(04:23):
the biggest draw. In the case of the Philippine Village,
this was the eager rote, who occasionally consumed dog for
ceremonial purposes, and during the fair, organizers gave them dog
to eat every day so that spectators could watch. Fort
Shaw's invitation was to participate in the Model Indian School.

(04:43):
This was a mock boarding school where students would demonstrate
the academic, domestic and vocational skills that they were taught
at school. The Fort Shaw School was not the only
Indian school to participate the Model Indian School was to
house about a hundred and fifty students selected from all
across the nation's network of Indian boarding schools, specifically schools

(05:04):
that were located within what had been Louisiana Purchased territory.
The school was part of a section of the fair
that came to be known as Indian Hill, where about
five hundred fifty Native Americans, mainly from tribes within the
Louisiana Purchased territory or on display. At this so called
Indian Reservation. Fourteen different tribes had individual areas that demonstrated

(05:29):
their traditional housing and living arrangements, clothing, food, and cultural practices.
This simultaneously illustrated the diversity among the nation's indigenous peoples
while also sending a message that they were, at least
in the organizer's view, primitive. The Model Indian School was
in the middle of Indian Hill. It was a three

(05:50):
story building that faced an open plaza when it was
surrounded by these spourteen miniature communities. School was in session
from nine am to five pm, and visitor us could
observe a kindergarten class from Human Indian School and Arizona Territory.
A seventh grade class from Chillico Indian School and what's
now Oklahoma, but was an Indian territory and a wide

(06:11):
array of domestic and vocational courses. These classes and workshops
were arranged along one side of a wide hallway, and
on the other side were open stalls where Native Americans
sold baskets, pots, and other indigenous art and handiwork. This
contrast was part of the point of the Model Indian
Schools existence. It sent a message. Without these schools, the

(06:34):
students would grow up to be selling so called primitive
crafts from a blanket on the ground. The school also
had a chapel, and that was where the students gave
performances and recitations in the afternoons. As the fair war on.
This actually became a really popular attraction. The crowds got
a lot too big to fit inside the chapel, so

(06:55):
whenever the weather allowed, these performances were moved outdoors. When M.
Mcowen contacted Fred Campbell to ask fort Shaw Indian School
to participate in the Model Indian School, it was up
to Campbell to choose which students should attend, and for
him this was an incredibly easy decision. The basketball team

(07:15):
was famous all across the state of Montana. They were
all exemplary students as well as being very responsible and mature.
Remember they're all traveling together all the time and seemed
to have no problems. Uh So, upon receiving this invitation,
Campbell told them that if they continued to do so
well in their academic and vocational work, and if they
kept playing as well as they had been until it

(07:37):
was time to travel to St. Louis, they would be
the ones to go. This is a strategic move on
Campbell's part. The team had become well known enough in
Montana that they could easily arrange games as they traveled
to the state to help raise money for the trip,
and as the word spread, he thought crowds would probably
follow them if they as they got farther and farther

(07:58):
away from home. Knowing that there was a chance they
would pass through towns that didn't yet have a basketball team,
Campbell also expanded the size of the team's roster so
that if there was no local team, or if the
local team didn't think it could make a respectable showing
against fort shot team, they'd have enough players on hand
for scrimmage games. This would also let them play five

(08:21):
on five exhibitions at the World's Fair if there was
no team to play against there, and we're going to
talk about who the players were and how they got
ready after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
When building out the team that would travel to the
World's Fair, Fred Campbell, who was coach, kept the trio

(08:44):
who had performed so well in earlier games. Nettie Worth
remained center, and Many Burton and Emma Sansavor were both
still forwards. Nettie's older sister, Lizzie, who was twenty three,
had recently graduated from Carlisle Indian School, and she came
on board as a chaperone and a substitute player. J
Sephine Langley, who had been with the team from the

(09:05):
beginning and had previously taken on a similar role, was
at this point engaged to be married, and she left
the team to take a full time job at the school.
Also remaining from the nineteen o two team was Belle Johnson,
who had been friends with Josie Langley when they were
both living on the Blackfeet Reservation. Bell's mother sent her
and her siblings to Fort Shaw on Josie's encouragement, and

(09:29):
Josie took them under her wing when they were orphaned
after their mother's death in nineteen hundred. Rounding out the
nineteen o four team where Katie Snell, Jenny Butch Rose, Larrose,
Flora Lucero, Sarah Mitchell, and Genevieve Healey who was known
as Jen. Katie, Jenny, and Sarah were all a Sinna boy. Rose.
LaRose was Shohony and Chippewa on her father's side and

(09:51):
Bannock on her mother's. Jen Healy was Gravant and Flora
was Chippewa. Most of them had been substitute players in
their previous season. Part of the agreement for their getting
to go to St. Louis was continuing to play as
well as they had been, but they didn't exactly get
that opportunity. The state had not developed a formal structure

(10:12):
for pairing teams against one another. There was no statewide
association or organization setting standards for games, playoffs, and championships.
It was the responsibility of individual schools to work out
game schedules, and Fort Shaw did not get that done.
The reasons for not getting that done are not entirely clear,

(10:33):
and it could have been a product of several factors,
like the general difficulties of scheduling games all across the
state when there was not an organized way to do it,
reluctance by other teams to play against Fort Shaw, which
by this point had proven itself to be a powerhouse,
and just being more focused on preparing for a multi
month trip to St. Louis. According to the Anaconda Standard,

(10:57):
it was because quote, there is no girls team in
the state that can give them anything like a tussle.
They stand alone and unrivaled. Whatever the reason, Fort Shaw
just didn't get much of a competitive schedule together for
the nineteen or three season, so instead of playing against
other teams, Fort Shaw spent most of the season playing
scrimmage games. This gave the new players more opportunities to

(11:20):
play and practice performing in front of a crowd. Meanwhile,
the school's vocational classes made new uniforms, still with long
sleeve tops with sailor collars and bloomer like pants with
red and white trim to distinguish between the two scrimmage teams.
In addition to all their scrimmage exhibitions, the young women
had a lot of other skills to brought to brush

(11:42):
up on before going to the World's Fair. In addition
to doing their academic and vocational work in front of
an audience at the Model Indian School, they would be
performing in mandolin recitals, doing literary recitations, and giving demonstrations
of gymnastics and calisthenics. Lizzie Worth acted as choreographer for
their demonstrations, and Fort Shaw's music teacher, Fern Evans set

(12:06):
the program and trained them for their musical recitals. Lily B.
Crawford trained them in their literary recitations, which was the
one aspect of their preparation that the girls struggled with.
Most of the girls had been playing team games together
since childhood, and they had been studying music since they
entered Fort Shaw. The school's music program was also highly regarded,

(12:28):
with the band accompanying the basketball team and holding performances
at halftime and after the game, but almost none of
them really had any experience speaking in front of a
crowd or reciting a literary piece for a crowd's enjoyment.
I should make it clear that they likely all had
experience with music from before they entered the school, but
the school was really really where they had formal education

(12:51):
and music. The piece they prepared for Their literary recitation
was from Henry Wadsworth Longfellows, the Song of Hiawatha, in particular,
it was part twenty the Famine. They also did an
interpretive performance called Song of the Mystic, which was a
dance that they performed in white robes, and the whole
dance and the robe that they're wearing was described as

(13:13):
just dazzlingly beautiful to watch. For their recitation UH, they
were to wear ceremonial buckskin dresses, which was a challenge.
At Fort Shaw, the girls were only allowed to wear
uniforms and back Home Indian Agents, which were government appointees
that sort of served as liaisons with UH native people's,
had strongly discouraged the wearing of traditional native garments, so

(13:37):
finding enough buckskin dresses and beaded breastplates for this recitation
actually proved to be very difficult. As they prepared to
go to St. Louis, the basketball team added these recitations, dances,
and recitals to their schedules so they would follow up
their exhibition games with concerts afterward, and the cost of
admission went toward their funds for the trip. Through the

(13:58):
early spring of nineteen o four, the fort Shaw team,
the band, and a few other students who had a
particular knack for performance, traveled to Anaconda, Butte and Missoula,
playing what was billed as a farewell game and performance,
the public's last chance to see them before they left
for St. Louis. After the scrimmage game, they change out

(14:18):
of their uniforms and into their traditional attire for an
evening of music, recitation and dance. The Model Indian School
at the St. Louis World's Fair was scheduled to open
on June first, nineteen o four, and the Fort Shaw
team had to join a little later. Because of their
school commitments. They weren't actually able to leave until the
start of June. They traveled by wagon and then train,

(14:41):
doing something of a whistle stop tour through Montana, North Dakota,
and Minnesota before turning south toward Missouri. They arrived on
the Fairs Montana day that was June fourteenth, nineteen o four,
and they played a mandolin recital not long after they
got off the train. I'm just gonna say that sounds
exhausting to I can barely get off the airplane and

(15:02):
come right to the office and start working and they
had been in transit on a train for a couple
of weeks, got off the train and played amndaland recital.
All of this sounds exhausting. Go play a basketball game
and then change clothes and you're gonna dance for a while,
and you're gonna play some music and you're gonna do recitation. Yes,
that's exhausting, it is. And we're gonna talk about the
time that they spent doing this in St. Louis after

(15:23):
another quick sponsor break. As we alluded to before the break,
it had taken the Fort Shaw basketball team and their
coach and chaperons about two weeks to travel from school
to St. Louis. Once they got there, they kept up
a busy schedule. In addition to their demonstration classes at

(15:46):
the Model Indian School, they had regularly scheduled performances of
their Hiawatha recitation song on the Mystic and their mandolin concertos.
Twice a week, weather permitting, they held basketball exhibitions in
the courtyard outside of the Model School. The players had downtime,
they usually spent it down at the Pike, which became
a favorite place to wander and watch and try out

(16:09):
new foods. Most of their games on the fairgrounds were scrimmages,
but they did actually leave the fairgrounds to play against
several local high school teams. Even though they never had
a home court advantage and they did not have the
welcoming crowd that they had grown used to back in Montana,
they still won every single time. If you've listened to

(16:29):
our live show from Dallas on Pierre de Freddy and
the Modern Olympic Games, you'll know that in nineteen o four,
the Olympic Games were held in St. Louis at the
same time at the as the World Spare. Unsurprisingly, this
led to some problems, but it also meant there were
a lot of athletic activities to take in in St. Louis,

(16:51):
including basketball games. But the Ford Shop basketball team was
really the only opportunity to see women's sports. Women weren't
a actually allowed to participate in the Olympic Games yet,
and women's basketball would not be an Olympic sport for
another seventy plus years. The team did, however, get the
honor of playing an exhibition game at the Olympics. Yeah,

(17:14):
if you'll recall these two events happening abutted right against
each other, caused so much confusion some people didn't even
know they that the Olympics were happening. Some of them
that were actually in the Olympics thought they were playing
at the World Fair. Aside from those couple of early
games in their first season of competitive play, at this point,
the Fort Shaw Indian schoolgirls basketball team was undefeated. News

(17:37):
coverage of their games suggested that they were unstoppable, speedier,
and more agile than the other teams, and adept at
feints and strategies that their opponents just could not match.
So Philip Strummel of Missouri decided it was time for
somebody to rise to this challenge. He put together an
all star team to play against Fort Shaw in a

(17:58):
three game match to determine who would be champion of
the World's Fair. He hand selected past members of St.
Louis's Central High School team, taking the best of the
best from the years that Central had been state champions.
This alumna team trained together with the specific goal exclusively
of defeating Fort Shaw. The games were to take place

(18:20):
over three Saturdays. The first game was held on September three,
and Fort Shaw one twenty four to two. Still not
the colossal scores that happened today. But that's a big disparity,
and they did it even though Emma Sansavor was only
recently back on the court, having sprained her ankle in

(18:41):
one of their games against the local high school. And
the words of the St. Louis Dispatch quote, to the
great surprise of several hundred spectators, the girls from Fort
Shaw were more active, more accurate, and cooler than their opponents.
At the next scheduled Saturday strummle, and this louis alumna
team didn't even show up, forfeiting the entire series. Apparently,

(19:05):
though the team was not actually content to lose the
series by forfeit, they asked for a second match, which
took place on October eight, this time in front of
the Model Indian School. So many people came to watch
that security had to be called to clear the playing
field and keep the crowd held back. Fort Shaw one

(19:26):
again seventeen to six, this time making them the undisputed
champions of the nineteen o four Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and
even though there was no official governing body for a
World basketball league, the public consensus was that they were
world champions as well, even though the World's Fare was
to run until December. The Model Indian School was really

(19:48):
only built as a summer building. It was just not
equipped to withstand cold temperatures or wintry weather. So not
long after that October eighth championship, the Fort Shaw students,
together with the best of the Model Schools student body,
helped dismantle it. And then they packed up and went
home and their journals and their letters. The players unsurprisingly
described this as being both a sorrow and a relief,

(20:11):
like they had they had seemed to have a really
good time in St. Louis, but they were also eager
to get back home to the rest of their classmates
and eventually to their families, maybe not to be working
and incredibly grueling sports and performance schedule. It is a
crueling It surprises me that they that they were able

(20:32):
to spend as much time on the pike as they did,
like that was really their favorite place to go anytime
they did not have something on their schedule to do.
The fourth Shop girls basketball team continued its undefeated streak
through nineteen oh six as its members became adults and
either left school or graduated. Though they were invited to
the Lewis and Clark Exposition of nineteen o five. By

(20:55):
that point, their reputation as a team was so formidable
that no one wanted to play against them. Only a
couple of world champion team members were still enrolled in
the school by nineteen o seven, which is the year
that Fred Campbell left a school superintendent to take a
job at the Fort Peck Indian Reservation as an allotting agent. Today,
there is a monuments to the team at the former

(21:16):
site of Fort Shaw Indian School. It's shaped like an
arch that reads nineteen o four World Champions Fort Shaw
Indian School. There's an inscribed stone with a picture of
the team and the players names on it beneath the arch.
It's not actually clear what happened to all of the
nineteen o four Fort Shaw players after the end of
the season. Most of them went on to finish school

(21:39):
mary and have families. Some later worked as seamstresses, teachers, nurses, aids,
and interpreters. Several died at sadly early ages, including Minnie Burton,
who died in childbirth at thirty three, and Emma Sansavor,
who died of septi simia after the birth of her
ninth child when she was thirty nine. Jenny Butch died

(22:00):
in nineteen o nine of a lethal dose of salts,
with foul play actually suspected in her death. Flora Lucero
died of diabetes in nineteen fifty eight. Jim Healy outlived
the rest of her team, dying in nineteen eighty one
at the age of nineties three. Apart from their physical
talent and skill on the court, the girls basketball team

(22:22):
at Fort Shaw is an amazing example of resilience in
the face of adversity. In addition to the general experience
of growing up in a boarding school that was a
meant to erase their own culture and replace it with
another one, several of the girls experienced personal tragedies in
their earlier life or while at school. Many had lost

(22:42):
immediate family members before being enrolled, or learned of the
deaths of parents, siblings, and other family members back at
home while they were studying, or actually lived through those
deaths when illnesses like typhoid and smallpox struck the school.
This was not limited to their time at Fort Shaw.
A five year old died of unknown causes during an

(23:03):
outbreak of fever that coincided with a heat wave at
the Model Indian School in July of nineteen o four,
leading the Pima Indian School Kindergarten to go back to
Arizona Territory early yeah. The unknown causes was the officially
recorded cause of death, but it was pretty apparent that
the child was sick and the school was fastly overheated.

(23:25):
Some of these tragedies took place during the playing season.
Emma Sansover's mother struggled with alcoholism and she had become
involved with an abusive man. Emma learned from a newspaper
report that her mother had disappeared and was suspected to
have been murdered just before a game in nineteen o
three during the team's tour. In the early spring of

(23:48):
nineteen o four, Katie Snell's little brother George and their
cousin Fred Cunahan both ran away from school and they
were caught in a blizzard. George survived but had severe
frost by and Fred died. The two boys, who were
both just seven, had apparently been inspired by the successful
escape of four older boys who had sneaked away before

(24:09):
the storm and successfully hopped a train back home before
the storm hit. That last tragedy really highlights one of
the disparities of this story. We spent a lot of
time in part one talking about the system of Indian
boarding schools in the United States and how the conditions
there were often miserable and even abusive for the students.

(24:29):
The girls basketball team had a lot of privileges. They
wrote about their time on the team and at the
fair as a joyful one. They made a remarkable name
for themselves and for the school, but this doesn't erase
the experience of their classmates, who were not so comparatively fortunate.
Although their enrollment started to decline in the nineteen teens,

(24:49):
federal off reservation boarding schools have continued to operate in
the decades since then. Fort Shaw closed in nineteen ten
and Carlisle Indian Industrial School closed in nineteen eighteen. Until
the nineteen sixties, the boarding schools that continue to operate
still had a goal of westernizing and americanizing their students

(25:10):
and erasing Native cultures. By nineteen seventy three, about sixty
thousand Native students were enrolled in boarding schools on and
off reservations. The focus of these schools started to change
in the nineteen seventies, largely through Native activism, and today
there are still a handful of federal boarding schools in operation,

(25:30):
run by the Bureau of Indian Education at the Bureau
of Indian Affairs, which is part of the United States
Department of the Interior. Now, these schools are generally focused
on students who were at risk for drug abuse, suicide,
and other serious issues. Rather than teaching only in English
and discouraging Native practices, the schools today actively teach Native

(25:52):
languages and cultural practices in addition to other academic subjects.
But these boarding schools continued to be the subject of controversy,
everything from government budget cuts to low graduation rates and
achievement scores, and a general question of whether the federal
government should be running boarding schools for Native students at all.

(26:13):
There's an ongoing movement for tribes and nations to assume
control over those schools themselves. To circle back to basketball
as we close out, It is a hugely popular sport
today in many Native American communities, with a really fast
paced style of play that's come to be known as
res ball. Even so, it was only in twenty eleven

(26:33):
that Tony Robinson became the first Native American woman drafted
into the w n b A basketball. We did a
sports episode, Tracy, I know I didn't you did research
on sportsings. I know I did a two part podcast
on sports ball, which is uh still kind of astounding
to me. I said in part one that I would

(26:54):
be really hard pressed to like sit all the way
through a football game, which is a thing that I
did in high school as part of the color guard
in the marching band. But I could not tell you
what was going on on the field at any point.
I just I yelled when people yelled, and then I
went out onto the field during halftime and did my

(27:18):
flag routine. Yeah. I never really got into football. Hockey
and baseball. I have both watched, uh with some fervor,
but football has never been my my sport. Neither has basketball,
for that matter, But lots of people love them and
get great enjoyment from him. My best friend is a
football fanatic, so I hear a lot about it during

(27:40):
the season. Yeah. When I um, we made that reference
in part one to the Carlisle, Indian Schools football team
and I was listening, I was doing some research about
that because I felt like we should acknowledge it. It
would be weird not to say something about it, since
you know, it has parallels to these two episodes in
so many different ways. But I was listening to this

(28:01):
explanation about how the football rules at the time differed
from the football rules now, and it got into this
whole thing about the first down line, and I was like,
I'm out. I don't know that's good. Uh you know
where I do. It's it's one of those things where

(28:23):
I have an almost visceral inability to understand it. So
many times in my life I have I have read
what the first down line is, and it's just it
won't stay in my brain. It falls directly out the
other side. You got other stuff in your brain? Do
you have listener mail in your brain? I do, and
it is really great. Uh. It is from Laura. Laura

(28:43):
wrote an email titled Aaron Burr and a Mummified Head,
So of course I had to read that. I love
everything about it. Right out of the gate, Laura says, Hi,
Tracy Holly, I just wanted to say thanks for a
great podcast recently. I enjoyed your feature Theodoja Burr Austin
and a throwback to the episode about her father Aaron

(29:04):
having grown up in Australia. I wasn't familiar with their
stories and found their lives extremely interesting, so much so
I went on to do some extra reading and found
a small connection to my own life. I learned that
after has failed Mexico venture, Aaron Burr escaped to Europe
and eventually London. Here he was befriended by the noted

(29:24):
social reformer Jeremy Bentham. In fact, the pair became so
close that Burr wrote to Theodosia of his new confidant, quote,
he is indeed the most perfect model that I have
seen or imagined of moral and intellectual excellence. He is
the most intimate friend I have in this country and
my constant associate. I live in his house and compose

(29:47):
a part of his family. The reason that this is
so interesting to me is that I am very familiar
with old Jeremy Bentham. In fact, I see him pretty
much every day, despite the fact that he died in
eighteen thirty two. Begins talking about the University College of
London and goes on to say, one of my favorite
parts of the old campus is the auto icon of

(30:08):
its spiritual founder. You guessed it, Bentham. Essentially, this auto
icon is his mummified remains sitting on top of a chair,
clothed in his actual black suit and hat, complete with
glasses and cane to fit with his dying wishes. Because
he left his body to science and it was dissected
in a public lecture by a friend, after which the

(30:30):
skeleton was preserved. Bentham originally wanted his head preserved, also
using techniques traditional to the Maori people of New Zealand,
but the process went horrifically wrong. Please see the attached
article for a picture. A wax likeness was placed on
the auto icon instead, and the disfigured head was displayed

(30:51):
separately until a series of pranks by Arrival University saw
it stolen and held for ransom. According to legend, it
was also hidden in a luggage locker in a Scottish
Strand train station and used for football practice. Not surprisingly,
it was then locked safely away in the until just
recently when a new exhibition at the university placed the

(31:13):
head back on public display to explore life, death and preservation.
And then there's a link to an article about this
bizarre severed head situation that was just they're lying around
for people to look at. Uh. Yeah, it was amazing.
Amazing to me that a piece of history that I
passed by every day was so connected to big events

(31:34):
happening around the world so many years ago, events that
I learned about from your podcast. Keep up the excellent work, Laura.
Thank you, Laura. I love that letter. It's really great. Um.
When so, when when we get email, we have a

(31:55):
little thing where we can start the email that captures
our attention in some way, and this is one where
I started when we got it, which was on Halloween.
And then, as is the case with what the first
down line means, my brain just flushed it completely out.
And so this morning when I was getting listener mail
together and I looked at my starred messages, I was like,

(32:16):
the what with the civiled I love it? I love it. Yes,
thank you so much, Laura. Do you would like to
write to us. We're a history podcast at how Stuff
Works dot com. We're also on Facebook and Facebook dot com,
slash miss in history. Our Twitter is missed in history.
Our Tumbler, and our interest in our Instagram are all
also missed in history. If you come to our website,

(32:39):
which is missed in history dot com, you will find
a searchable archive of all the episodes we've ever done
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done
that includes links to uh slash notations of all of
the research that we have used for these podcasts, so
you can do that if you come. Visit us at
miss in history dot com. For more on this and

(33:05):
thousands of other topics, visit how stop works dot com.
M