Missouri Leviathan

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry.

00:00:16
Speaker 2: I don't remember which historical hoax we talked about on the show that led me to put the Missouri Leviathan on my short list. I do remember, though, that I didn't want to do this episode immediately because I like find the hoax episodes to be very fun, but I also like to spread them out a little bit, since they can seem a little bit repetitive if they get all bunched up together. After doing this research, I'm not entirely convinced that hoax is actually the right word for the Missouri Leviathan. But regardless, now it has been long enough since I put this on a list that I don't even remember what the episode was that inspired it, so that seems like it's been long enough that it will not seem repetitive.

00:01:03
Speaker 1: The Missouri Leviathan was an enormous skeleton made of fossilized bones that were excavated and assembled by Albert C. Kock. He was born on May tenth, eighteen oh four, in Saxony. That's now Germany. His parents were Johann Yusebius Sigismund Cock and Johanna Maria Vellemine Martini. We don't know a whole lot about his early life, but he came to the United States in eighteen twenty six and initially settled in Pennsylvania. One of the ways Cock tried to make a living after arriving in the United States was collecting and selling specimens for natural history museums. That might sound kind of weird today, but it was not all that uncommon as a way for people to make money at the time. The first natural history museums as we would recognize them today, date back to about the seventeenth century, but a lot more of them opened in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This included museums that were established by universities and institutions other formal organizations, as well as ones that were just started by individual people who wanted to start a museum. This surge was driven by a public fascination with ongoing discoveries in the natural sciences, like entire fields like palaeodology were just getting established. This was also paired with a rise in leisure time among some economic classes, so more people had time to do things like visit museums, so there was a huge market for all kinds of objects to go in such museums. Cock partnered with various people in his collecting business as he moved from place to place, and he sold objects to a museum in Berlin as well as to institutions in the United States. Before leaving Pennsylvania, Cock married Elizabeth Reid. They would eventually go on to have four children. By eighteen thirty they'd moved to Michigan, and by eighteen thirty five if they were in Saint Louis, Missouri. In Saint Louis, Cox started a museum of his own and that opened in eighteen thirty six. Like many early natural history museums, the Saint Louis Museum followed in the footsteps of Renaissance era cabinets of curiosities, which were cabinets or even entire rooms where well off people collected things like fossils, shells, animal specimens, and even works of art. These were also still around by the nineteenth century, and Cox's father, who was a magistrate in their village in Saxony, had one of these in their home, so it's possible that that was the inspiration for Cox Museum. Cox Museum was near where the Gateway Art stands today, and it was full of all kinds of things, plants and animal specimens, taxidermy.

00:03:48
Speaker 2: Fossils, shells, pieces of coral and Egyptian artifacts. On February twenty second, eighteen thirty eight, he announced that he had purchased the collection of William Clark, who had teamed up with Meriwether Lewis for the Core of Discovery expedition across the western part of North America. Clark had developed a huge collection of indigenous artwork and other objects during this expedition and during his military service and his time working as an Indian agent. The details are a little fuzzy about exactly how Cock acquired this collection. A number of sources say that he bought it after William Clark's death, but Clark died on September first, eighteen thirty eight, and that was a few months after this acquisition was announced. A lot of the objects in the Saint Louis Museum would have a home in a natural history museum today, but a lot of the natural history museums of this era also had a focus on almost vaudeville like entertainment and spectacles that didn't necessarily have a place in the real world. That was the case for the Saint Louis Museum as well. Albert Kok and his museum are often compared to P. T. Barnum, who became tightly associated with both showmanship and flimflam. Some of Cock's exhibits would be compared to Barnum's Fiji Mermaid, which was made from a monkey and a fish like. Cock had an animal that he called the proc which he said was the size of a mule, with stripes like a zebra and the head of a rhinoceros. The Saint Louis Museum also had a dramatic saloon for entertainers to perform in a dramatic saloon not an uncommon addition to natural history museums of this era.

00:05:37
Speaker 1: I feel like there's a speakeasy opportunity here. Cock was also an avid fossil collector, including the fossilized bones of the megafauna that had lived in North America until the end of the Last Ice Age, so things like mastodons and giant ground sloths, and that is what led to the creation of the Missouri Leviathan. There are a number of stories about exactly how he came into possession of these fossilized bones, possibly because he used bones from multiple animals to do it. One story is that in eighteen thirty eight he heard about a farmer on the Brebus River in east central Missouri who had been trying to improve a spring and found several bones in the process. Another is that a year later, in eighteen thirty nine, he heard that a farmer near Rock Creek in Kimswick, southeast of Saint Louis, had found some bones in a field. Kock is known to have excavated massdon bones from at least three places, those two that we just mentioned and a site on the Poonditaire River. Cock had no formal training as a paleontologist or a naturalist or a museum curator, but neither did a lot of other people doing this same work in the eighteen thirties. We don't really know if he'd ever read any of the existing literature about mastodons in their anatomine, so it's not entirely clear whether he intentionally assembled the bones of multiple animals to make one deceptively enormous skeleton, or if He thought this was what a real animal had looked like, and he used the bones of multiple animals to basically fill in what he thought were gaps.

00:07:23
Speaker 2: The skeleton he assembled and displayed at his museum, calling it the Missourium or the Missouri Leviathan, belonged to what he said was an animal thirty two feet long and fifteen feet tall. That's almost ten meters long and four and a half meters tall. As we said, an adult American mastodon was about the size of an elephant, so males were typically a little less than ten feet tall or three meters tall. Those are approximate conversions, obviously, Although some people use the word mastodon and mammoth interchangeably, these were different animals, with macedons typically being shorter and stockier with straighter tusks than mammoths had. This assemblage had at least ten more vertebrae than a mastodon would have had. Kock also placed spacers between the vertebrae to make the skeleton even longer. He also used a couple of ribs to make the collar bones. He claimed that the Missourium was aquatic, and added long bones to the skeleton's toes to create what looked like webbed feet, and rather than having the animal's tusks point forward, he pointed them out to the side. Here is his explanation for these sideways pointing tusks, taken from a pamphlet that he wrote and published in eighteen forty one, which was titled Description of Missourium or Missouri Leviathan, together with its supposed habits and Indian traditions concerning the location from which it was exhumed. Also comparisons of the whale, crocodile, and Basoorium with the Leviathan is described in the forty first chapter of the Book of Job quote.

00:09:08
Speaker 1: As I was.

00:09:08
Speaker 2: Successful in finding the right tusks solid in the head when I first discovered it, and as it remained fixed in its socket during its excavation and transportation over a very rough and wilderness country, I am enabled therefore to give a correct and indisputable description of the position and situation which the tusts occupied in the skull of the animal during its life. They were carried by him almost horizontally, bending somewhat down and coming with their points up again. Their length is ten feet exclusive of one foot inches from which formed the root and is hidden from the eye of the observer as it is concealed in and under the skull. In other words, he said he knew the animal's tusks swept out to the side because that's the way one of them was pointing when he found it, and it didn't move from that position in all of the jostling it took to get it back to the museum. We'll talk about what he said. These sideways, pointing tusks were four after we paused for a sponsor break.

00:10:20
Speaker 1: According to Albert Cock, the Missouri Leviathan was a giants aquatic animal armored like an alligator. He had made it from Macedon bones. But in his pamphlet Description of the Missourium or Missouri Leviathan, which we read the entire title of before the break, he not only said it was not a Masthdon, but also that it had several notable differences from a masdon. He wrote, quote, the most striking difference between the Leviathan and the Macedon are First, the leviathan had no trunk, therefore could not be classed under the Probosa genus. Second, its toes were armed with claws or nails, and this circumstance prevents its being classed with the hoofed animals, to which class the mastodon belongs. Third, the Leviathan has twenty four dorsal vertebrae and forty eight ribs, whereas the mastodon has nineteen dorsal vertebrae in thirty eight ribs. Fourth, the scapula or shoulder blade is materially shorter in the Leviathan than in the mastodon. Also, the ribs are much smaller. Fifth, the dental system at the first view somewhat resembles that of the mastodon, but upon a close examination the observer will perceive that the teeth of the Leviathan are much smaller in proportion to the maxillary bones than those of the mastodon, and also better calculated for masticulating softer substances. He had this to say about how the Missouri Leviathan existed in its purported habitat, which is where we find out about those sideways tusks quote. The animal has been, without doubt an inhabitant of water courses such as large rivers and lakes, which is proven by the formation of the bones. First, his feet were webbed. Second, all his bones were solid, and without marrow, as the aquatic animals of the present day. Third, his ribs were too small and slender to resist the many pressures and bruises they would be subject to on land. Fourth, his legs are short and thick. Five his tail is flat and broad. Sixth and last, his tusks are so situated in the head that it would be utterly impossible for him to exist in a timbered country. He possessed, also, like the hippopotamus, the faculty of walking on the bottom of waters and rose occasionally to take air. The singular position of the tusks has been very wisely adapted by the creator for the protection of the body from the many injuries which it would be exposed while swimming or walking under the water. Cox pamphlet also incorporated what he described as indigenous traditions, although with this caveat quote, it is perfectly true that we cannot with any degree of certainty depend on Indian traditions, but it is equally true that generally these traditions are founded on events which have actually transpired. From there, he related a whole story that he claimed was an indigenous legend about the arrival of the first O sage and a war with giant animals living in the area. It is completely unclear whether this is something an indigenous person told him or if he just made it up. I can imagine an indigenous person telling him this to see if he believed it. Yeah, and even if it was based in a real legend that was part of indigenous law and culture like that was not really his to share for hours. The pamphlet also connected the Missouri Leviathan to the sea serpent love Viiathan described in the Hebrew Bible, including in the Book of Job. It's sort of a close reading of the Biblical verses drawing purported connections to the fossil. It goes through the whole.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: Biblical text with like connections to this creature. Here is just an example from this quote, the thirteenth and fourteenth verse, who can discover the face of his garment, or who can come to him with his double bridle? Who can open the doors of his face? His teeth are terrible roundabout. The first sentence again has reference to his shield or covering. Doubtless no one could approach him without incurring imminent danger, not even near enough to discover the face of his garment or in other words, to examine the construction in particular parts of his covering the latter part of the thirteenth and the whole of the fourteenth. First take particular notice of his enormous grinders an immense tes usks, more especially to the situation which these latter occupy in the skull.

00:15:06
Speaker 1: And in a claim that prompted a lot of controversy, Cock wrote that he had also found objects clearly made by human beings, proving that these animals lived at the same time that humans did. He started by describing a different find, which may have been a ground sloth, before moving on to the Leviathan quote. There was embedded immediately under the femur or hind leg bone of this animal an arrowhead of rose colored flint, resembling those used by the American Indians, but of a larger size. This was the only arrowhead immediately with the skeleton, but in the same strata, at a distance of five or six feet in a horizontal direction, four more arrowheads were found. Three of these were of the same formation as the preceding. The fourth was of a very rude workmanship. One of the last mentioned three was of agate, The others of blueft lint. These arrowheads are indisputably the work of human hands. I examined the deposit in which they were embedded and raised them out of their embedment with my own hands.

00:16:11
Speaker 2: A lot of the back and forth about this conclusion played out in scientific journals later on, so we will be returning to it in a bit. But Kock had hoped his so called Missourium would bring in big crowds to the Saint Louis Museum. When it didn't, he tried another tack, which was to take the skeleton on tour.

00:16:32
Speaker 1: He sold the museum to W. S. McPherson on January twentieth, eighteen forty one. One thing that's not clear is what happened to William Clark's collection when Kock made this sale. Theoretically it should have stayed with the museum, but it apparently didn't, and later on members of the Clark family accused Kok of stealing it. In Philadelphia, Cock displayed the Missourium at the Masonic Hall the skeleton and attracted the attention of the local scientific community. An expert started pointing out issues with Cox's work. This included paleontologist Richard Harlan and anatomist Paul Goddard of the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. Harlan published a thorough description of the skeleton in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and in it he had this to say, quote one of the most extensive and remarkable collections of fossil bones of extinct species of mammals which have hitherto been brought to light in this country, a gratification for which our scientific community will acknowledge themselves, indebted to the perseverance of the enterprising proprietor, mister Albert Cock of Saint Louis, Missouri. This collection consists mainly of the largest skeleton of an aged mastodon, hitherto disinterred in America. Nearly complete, the proprietor, not possessing the advantage of anatomical knowledge, has committed some errors in the articulation of the bones, which no doubt his ulterior researches will enable him to rectify. Among these errors may be noticed here ten or more supernumery vertebrae in the spinal column, some supernumery ribs, and the first rib occupying the position of the clavicle, et cetera. So Harlan recognized that these were macedon bones, not bones of some newly discovered creature. But he also really gave Cock the benefit of the doubt, framing his decisions on how he put all this together as errors that were brought about by ignorance, rather than an intentional effort to deceive people. At a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in October of eighteen forty one, Goddard reported on his examination of the skeleton. He said he had found it to be quote, a skeleton composed of mastodon bones, most of which appeared to belong to a single set, any however, having been superadded, and others mended and glued together in a manner holy erroneous. Goddard then walked through various errors he had noticed in the skeleton's spine, ribs, head, shoulder, blades, and feet. Cock did have supporters, though a rebuttal of Goddard's report appeared in The Farmer's Cabinet and American Herd Book by someone who signed their work only as j M, whose identity I was not able to confirm. This rebuttal began quote. The most charitable conclusion is that doctor Goddard took not the opportunity to examine sufficiently the bones of the Missourium, and is therefore entirely unacquainted with their particular construction and confirmation. Before refuting Goddard's observations point by point, you ask a lot of questions, like how had Goddard been able to get up high enough to see what he said was glue on skeleton's snout. Cock does not seem to have heeded these criticisms before taking the Missourium across the Atlantic. He displayed the skeleton at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, and it once again attracted the attention of experts. These experts included Richard Owen, who coined the term dinosaur in eighteen forty one. Owen pointed out a lot of the same flaws as Goddard and Harlan had. In eighteen forty two, he read a report before the Geological Society of London in which he noted that Kak had addressed one error in how he had mounted two of the ribs, but said any other changes would cost too much money.

00:20:41
Speaker 2: One of Owen's comments on this was about the position of those tusks and why Cock might have found the skull with one of the tusks pointing out to the side. Quote with respect to the horizontal position of the tusks and the skeleton exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, mister Owen states that it may have arisen from compression, the tusk of the masodon, like that of the elephant, being inserted by a nearly straight cylindrical base in a socket of corresponding form, and can be rotated in any given direction when the natural attachments are destroyed by decomposition, and he alludes to the skeleton exhibited in London in eighteen oh five, in which the tusks were bent downward.

00:21:22
Speaker 1: But like other experts who had examined the Missouri Leviathan, Owen recognized the value of the bones themselves, so in eighteen forty four he bought the Leviathan for the British Museum, where he was superintendent of Natural History. Some articles report the sale price as two thousand dollars and others as thirteen hundred pounds, and a lot of sources, including the website of the Natural History Museum, which was formed from the British Museum's natural history collection, say that Cock was also paid one thousand dollars a year for the rest of his life, but an article by all Or Bruce McMillan describes this annual payment in connection to a different sale, one that we're going to talk about after we pause for a sponsor break.

00:22:17
Speaker 2: After buying the so called Missouri Leviathan from Albert Cock, Richard Owen took it apart and reassembled the appropriate bones into a single Macedon skeleton, and this new configuration was relatively correct. Today this Macedon is on display at the Natural History Museum in London, and according to Adrian Lister, who's a paleobiologist at the museum, it's still mostly as Owen articulated it. This makes it the first accurately assembled Masdon skeleton in the world. Cock had taken his family with him when he left the US for Europe, and when he set sale to return to the United States on May twenty sixth, eighteen forty four, his wife and their four children stayed behind. It seemed like for a stretch of time they lived in Dresden while he made trips back and forth to the United States. After a really terrible storm filled crossing back to the Uskock arrived back in New York, where he visited Barnum's American Museum. Then he spent some time traveling around New York and New England, collecting fossils and shark's teeth and other specimens. He kept a diary in German which he published in Dresden in eighteen forty seven. This was later translated into English as Journey through a part of the United States of North America in the years eighteen forty four to eighteen forty six.

00:23:42
Speaker 1: Cock eventually returned to Saint Louis, where he went back to looking for large fossil bones. He also started purchasing mines and mineral rights, beginning with a lead mine in Franklin County, Missouri. By eighteen forty five, even though he had no medical training and there is no evidence of him ever earning it doctoral degree, he was calling himself doctor. That year, he excavated another assortment of fossilized bones that he assembled into one skeleton, which he called the Hydruggists, meaning King of the Waters. This measured one hundred and fourteen feet or almost thirty five meters long. He dug these bones up in Alabama after trying to find the source of various large bones that were all around the area. People just kind of had gigantic bones as part of their home and business decor. Cock tried to get these bones to New York by sea, but there was a shipwreck along the way, and Cock thought all of his work had been lost until he learned that salvagers had managed to get the crates off the ship before it sank, and because they considered these bones to be scientific specimens, he was not charged a fee to get them back. Cox's so called sea serpents was really from the prehistoric way genus Basilosaurus, and the one hundred and fourteen foot long skeleton that he created probably included the bones from at least three animals. Because of his earlier work with the Missouri Leviathan, a lot of palaeontologists and other experts just started out from the point of view that this was definitely a hoax. But Cock once again went on tour with this skeleton, with one of the people who saw it being Edward Drinker Cope, who would later become notorious for his involvement in a feud with Ovnil Charles Marsh that is known today as the Bone Wars. We just ran that as a Saturday classic. Kok and the Hydrarchus wound up at the Leipzig Fair in eighteen forty seven, and Friedrich Wilhelm, the fourth King of Prussia, bought it, placing it on display in Berlin's Royal Anatomical Museum. The king gave Kock an annual lifelong stipend of a thousand Reich dollars. It's possible that various sources are conflating this with what Richard Owen paid him for the Leviathan in eighteen forty four. Yeah, I had trouble really confirming whether he was getting two different annual stipends in the amount of a thousand of something, or whether they kind of melded together in retelling. Even though his work with this quote Sea Serpent had already been widely discredited, Cock published a booklet on it in Dresden in eighteen fifty. This title, which I just ran through Google Translate from German, was remarks on the family of hydros, which consists of several species, the largest and most powerful predatory animals in the prehistoric world. In addition to a few words about the discovery of the large Zugludon macro Spondulis Muller, which belongs to that family, which was found by the author in Alabama in eighteen forty eight, and from then first was brought to Dresden, with a second section containing some battle scenes of the Indians and the white settlers of America, told as briefly as possible. Uh This booklet totaled thirty two pages, The first seventeen were the title Feels Like It Back in the US. Physician and archaeologist Montroval Wilson Dickson commissioned John L. Egan to create a panoramic painting to accompany his lectures, one that could be wound onto two big rollers that changed the scene behind him as he spoke. This twenty five panel panorama depicted things like Mississippi Valley wildlife, indigenous peoples, warfare between those peoples and Europeans, steamboats, excavations of indigenous burial mounds, and Cock's discovery and excavation of the Missouri Leviathan.

00:27:55
Speaker 2: After returning to the US again, Cock became an active member of the Academy of Science in Saint Louis and was elected to membership of that body on April twenty first, eighteen fifty six. At some point he assembled another sea serpent skeleton, this one ninety six feet long. This was known as the Great Zuglidon. He sold this to E. L. Wood for his museum in Chicago.

00:28:20
Speaker 1: And during his later years, Cox's ideas on humankind living alongside extinct megafauna became the subject of contentious debate. He published work on this in the Transactions of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis in eighteen fifty nine, writing quote, I will state then that in the year eighteen fifty nine, I discovered and disinterred in Gasconade County, Missouri, bones of the above named animals. The bones were sufficiently well preserved for me to decide positively that they belonged to Mastodon gigantius. Some remarkable portion bones had been more or less burned by fire. The fire had extended but a few feet beyond the space occupied by the animal before its destruction, and there was more than sufficient evidence on the spot that the fire had not been an accidental one, but on the contrary, that it had been kindled by human agency, and, according to all appearance, with the design of killing the huge creature. Cook also wrote that he had found stones in the area, including throwing stones, projectile points, spearheads, axes, etc. To him, this represented irrefutable proof that humans had hunted these animals as we know today. Kok was correct.

00:29:40
Speaker 2: Some of the responses to his work that were published from the eighteen fifties through the eighteen seventies and beyond thought that it was possible that humans and Macedons had lived at the same time in North America, but many of them argued that the evidence Cock was presenting to support this was not enough to prove it. This was actually also correct. These Macedons became extinct roughly thirteen thousand years ago, and subsequent radiocarbon dating has shown that a lot of the projectile points and other human made objects that were found around these bones are a lot more recent than that I would say radiocarbon dating. Like other studies like Okay, these these projectile points are not from the period that the Macedons were living. It's likely that the presence of these objects in the same springs and other waterways where the bones are common comes from religious rituals other observations that were carried out by indigenous peoples in more recent centuries. That is definitely not the case for every human made object found near Macedon bones. Though in a twenty twenty three installment of Unearthed, we talked about a projectile point that had been made from Macedon bone embedded in another Masdon bone, and that discovery was described as the oldest direct evidence of humans hunting Masdons. That just wasn't the case with these specific objects that Kok was using to support his idea.

00:31:17
Speaker 1: Though. Although Cok did have some partial support for his ideas, a lot of the response was scathing. Doctor P. R. Hoy, writing in The American Naturalist in eighteen seventy one, called Cock's account quote unreliable in every particular saving locality. Hoy went on to say, quote the doctor certainly exercised a lively imagination when he stated that the bones were found in a layer of vegetable mold which was covered by twenty feet in thickness of alternate layers of sand, clay, and gravel, and that under this extensive stratification he found the identical flint arrowhead that the mound builders used in slaying this giant of past ages. Taking advantage of his helplessness being mired hopelessly that ends with three consecutive exclamation points. Hoi went on to write, quote, I am pained to record this evidence of doctor Cox's want of accuracy in this matter, but the cause of science seems to demand the truth. Doctor Cox's report has been quoted in proof of the antiquity of man. The position and state of the bones rather go to show that the Macedon lived in an age not so remote as usually supposed. I should not be surprised if the evidence were speedily found to prove that man was contemporaneous with the Macedon, but certainly the missourium affords none. By the time Hoy's article was published, Cock had died. After his trips back and forth between the US and Europe, he returned to the US for good, this time bringing his family with him. They lived in Saint Louis for a while before moving to Gauconda, Illinois, where his brother Lewis lived. Albert Kock died on December eighteenth, eighteen sixty seven, which means the King of Prussia wound up paying about twenty thousand Reichs dollars for his prehistoric whalebones. If there was also a one thousand dollars annual payment from the British Museum. Then that one totaled about twenty two thousand dollars. The inscription on Cox's tombstone, written in Latin read quote, he dug up hidden hydras, a titan, and a bore, immense things buried in the earth, which now survive as monuments. About a decade before his death, Kock acknowledged that his Missouri Lefiathan had been made from the bones of an American mastodon. Another amateur paleontologist, C. W. Beeler, did further excavations at the Kimswick site where Cock had excavated some of his masted on bones. Bhler exhibited these bones as well, including during the nineteen oh four World's Fair in Saint Louis. An organization formed to try to protect these bone beds during the construction of Interstate fifty five, and eventually the Missouri Department of Natural Resources bought four hundred and eighteen acres of land in the area and added that to the state park system. Today, this area is massedon State Historic Site and the bone bed was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on April fourteenth, nineteen eighty seven. Some of the other sites that Cock excavated are no longer accessible. They were flooded following the construction of a dam, So overall, Cock seems like kind of a mixed bag. His Missouri Leviathan and Hydrarchis skeletons definitely did not represent the real skeletons of real animals that really existed in the ancient past. But it's clear he had a genuine fascination for fossils. Some of his journeys to excavate bones were arduous and difficult, and at least once he set out while sick with agu because he was afraid of missing out on the bones if he didn't. But it's not as clear whether he was trying to deceive people with the skeletons he made from the fossils he loved so much, or if he kind of just didn't know what he was doing and was maybe bubbling. But he did contribute to the preservation of these and other specimens, although possibly also to the loss or scattering of William Clark's collection of items that had belonged to indigenous people. Of Cox's three most famous massive skeletons, so the Missouri Leviathan, the Hydraucos and the Great Zuglidan. Only the Leviathan survives, although, as we said earlier, disassembled and rearticulated as the mastodon that it was. The Zuglidon was destroyed during the Great Chicago Fire in eighteen seventy one, and most of the bones from the Hydracos were destroyed during World War Two. If there's an afterlife, I'm fascinated by the thought of what he thinks of how people perceive him today. Yeah.

00:35:57
Speaker 2: When I put this on the list, I was like, this was such a big hoax, And then I was like, I'm actually not fully convinced that it was a hoax, because there's also the possibility that you just didn't know what you were doing. Yeah, I have listener Maile from Kirsten Fabulous. Kirsten wrote about our recent Saturday classic about Spam and said, Hello, I'm a longtime listener as I sew at work and have lots of listening time. I was catching up on back episodes and heard your episode about Spam and the Horrmale Company. While I'm not an avid eater, i am a former Drum Corps International participant and have a historical tidbit I thought you'd enjoy as well as.

00:36:39
Speaker 1: Their touring girl troops. Horrmale also had an all female drum corps. They lasted for the better part of a decade, wore panty hose to every rehearsal, and were reportedly a fan favorite. I'm attaching an article about them, and Jay Store has a couple articles about them as well. I never thought Hormale and DCI would overlap, but throw in some wonderful feminism and it sounds like a great recipe. And there's a link to a block about these this drum corps, including pet tax of my four dogs. I'm part of a blended family, so i have two poodle mixes, Annie and Charger, and my partner has the two Brittany mixes, Sam and Louis. Thank you for your wonderful and educational content that always helps me feel productive. And then we have, oh my goodness, just four of the cutest, sweetest dog faces. Listen. I said it recently before. I have poodle fever right now. Yeah, so if you send me pictures of poodles, I'm gonna screech over them. You're just gonna be the time for time for a poodle to come home with me. Uh so I meant to reply to Kirsten and say, Kirsten, Carolina Crown nineteen ninety two, which which drum corps were you in?

00:37:50
Speaker 2: I also technically Carolina Crown nineteen ninety three. I did not actually make it into the performing season that year for reasons reasons including having contracted minoonucleosis the year before, I was not well enough to do it. I also had personal reasons involved with just being a teenager. So so thank you so much. I had no idea about you know this all women's drum Corps. I started thinking about whether did they ever feed us any spam while we were on tour with the drum Corps. I don't think they did, but I wouldn't have put it past them. I might have balked at that as a teenager, I would not balk at it today. Thank you so much for this email and for just such the cutest, cutest dog pictures. If you would like to send us some notes about this or any other podcast or a history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we are on social media as miss and History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.