Mourning Dove, aka Christine Quintasket, Pt. 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. This is part two of our episode on Morning Dove, who is also known as Christine Quintasket. But I'm going to say it's a surprise two parter, both in that when I started writing it, I didn't expect it to be two parts, and also in that at the beginning of part one, I don't think I said that it was going to be a two parter.

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Speaker 1: But it is. Surprises abound.

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Speaker 2: Yes. So she was a novelist, an ethnographer, and an activist. And in part one we talked about some context involving the Confederated tribes of the Callville Reservation and that context had just a huge impact on her family and the indigenous nation they were part of. And then we also talked about her early life and her introduction to a man named Lucullas Virgil McWhorter, who was sort of her editor, literary agent and friend. Where we left off, she had written a book and they thought that book was going to come out soon, but it was not published yet. She did a newspaper interview in nineteen sixteen that described the book as soon to be published that publications turned out still to be years away, but we are picking up where we left off in nineteen sixteen. In part one, we talked about how Mourning Dove often earned a living by doing agricultural work, and at times she also supported herself through domestic work. In nineteen sixteen, while working as a housekeeper in Pulse, in Montana, she developed a serious illness. It was described as influenza and inflammatory rheumatism. She was sick for weeks and she thought she was going to die, but eventually an aunt came to look after her and, in her words, quote doctored me up with Indian medicines. She wasn't well enough to go back to the kind of physical labor involved with agricultural or domestic work, so she got a job working as a teacher at a school for indigenous children in all of our British Columbia. She had a sister who lived nearby, and she was able to live with her sister. Eventually she used some of her pay to buy her own typewriter. After a while, she also built a small shack adjacent to her sister's house. It's kind of her writing shack. She contracted the flu again during the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic and was hospitalized for two weeks. In nineteen nineteen, she got married to Fred Galler, who was an enrolled member of the Callville tribe and also had Winnatchi and white ancestry. This relationship seems to have been less tumultuous than her first marriage, but at times it could still be a struggle. They often worked together as migrant farm laborers, which was exhausting and sometimes very painful work for very little money. It also seems like he didn't get the way of her aspirations as a writer, but he didn't really support them either, and they had their own internal conflicts in the relationship. She especially did not like.

00:03:10
Speaker 1: It when he drank.

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Speaker 2: By this point, she had known Luke Ellis mcwarter for almost five years and their working relationship had evolved into one of mutual trust and support. She described him as having an Indian heart and he was really her biggest source of encouragement as a writer. Often he was the person she turned to in order to keep herself focused and working on her writing.

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Speaker 1: There were still some challenges, though. We mentioned in Part one how mcworder was much older than she was, and as a white man, he had a much different type of power and access to different connections than she did. Beyond that, while they were both focused on Indigenous stories and on her novel, which was focused on Indigenous characters, they were coming at it from very different perspectives. Aside from the obvious difference in their ethnicities and their life experience, mcwarter was really approaching things as an ethnographer while Mourningdove was a storyteller. They also had some huge differences of opinion regarding language. McWorter wanted Mourning Dove's English to be as polished as possible so that her work might dispel stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as ignorant and uneducated, but sometimes she would kind of look at his edits or material that he had written on her behalf and basically say she could not understand it without a dictionary.

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Speaker 2: At the same time, the two of them did really learn a lot from one another over the course of their work together. As they worked through Indigenous stories and Mourning Dove's fiction, he learned more about Salish languages In the community's worldview, and she learned from him about how to communicate with English speakers in English. In nineteen twenty one, while visiting a museum in Spokane, Washington, Morningdove saw a mounted specimen of the the American Mourning Dove, the bird you might remember from part one. She had originally been spelling her pen name Mourning MLR and ing. In a letter to mcwarter, she said she had made a sad mistake with that spelling, and from that point on she spelled her name with the U.

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Speaker 1: In Mourning Mourning Dove's novel Coogawea the Half Blood, a depiction of the Great Montana cattle range, was published by the Four Seas Company in Boston in nineteen twenty seven. It had taken so long to get the book published, and four Seas was concerned that it would not turn a profit, so it required Mourning Dove and McWhorter to provide part of the funding for its printing. For his part, McWorter was ultimately not very impressed with this publisher, and he would refer to them as four pubbles. Kogiea is very very approximately the word for chipmunk in the Incialchen language. The first syllable in that language especially, is a little different in a way, I have trouble replicated as somebody who doesn't speak that language. And the plot of this novel was inspired in part by a story called Chipmunk and Owl Woman. The story would also be part of Mourning Dove's book Coyote Stories, which will be talking about more in a bit. This story is a Western romance, and in a lot of ways it's about identity. Parts of it were inspired by Mourning Dove's own life and experiences. The main character, Kogawea, had both white and indigenous ancestry. It lives both between and in both of these worlds. The book explores the differences between her life and experiences and that of her sisters, one of whom marries a white man and lives mostly in a white man's world, and another who is raised in indigenous traditions by a grandmother. Overall, the novel's indigenous central characters are the most fully realized. Many of the white characters are more one dimensionally good or bad, and there are also stereotyped cowboys who mostly provide comic relief. Those differences between Mourning Dove's and McCarter's approaches played a huge part in this book, and a lot of that happened after the last time Mourning Dove saw it. Before it went to print, she had really been focused on writing a romance one that she thought would humanize Indigenous people to white readers when they read it. But McWorter really wanted the book to be an ethnographically accurate portrayal of her culture and to include more history and ethnography, so he added in notes on ethnography and other material, including a section on Indigenous music that was apparently plagiarized from another author named Anna Hurst. A lot of the literary discussion around Kogaweya has focused on mcworter's involvement with it and his influence on it. Even at the time, there were people who claimed that Mourning Dove had simply put her name on a white man's work, and McWorter did make meaningful changes to her work. A lot of articles about this book and about their relationship. Quote one passage from a letter that she wrote to him in nineteen twenty eight, after she had read the published book, she said quote, I felt like it was someone else's book and not mine at all. In fact, the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it, so that sounds terrible.

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Speaker 2: But the lines before those sentences put it in a kind of different light.

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Speaker 1: Quote.

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Speaker 2: I have just got through going over the book Kochieeah and am surprised at the changes that you made. I think they are fine, and you made a tasty dressing like a cook would do with a fine meal. I sure was interested in the book, and Hubby read it over, and all the rest of the family neglected their housework till they read it cover to cover. Later on, in nineteen thirty three, she wrote him another letter, Uh, this has some interesting typos in it, so we're going to read it as written.

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Speaker 1: Quote. I frequently think how fortunate that I met you. My book of Kogaweyah would never had been anything but the cheap, full skep paper that was written on if you had not helped me get it in shape. I can never repay you back. I am sure, while we are here in this old planet too poor.

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Speaker 2: That you can tell from that particular excerpt the kinds of things that she still struggled with a little bit in English, even at this point in her life. A lot of things that you read that quote from letters sort of edit all of that out, and so it's harder to get a sense.

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Speaker 1: Of like how she actually wrote.

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Speaker 2: We will talk about her other work and her continuing relationship with McWhorter after a sponsor break. Morning Dove's novel was not the financial success that she and Lucaalas mcwarter had hoped that it would be, and then after it was published, most of her income continued from doing agricultural and domestic labor a lot of the time, with her and her husband working together harvesting things like apples and hops. To be clear, she had critics in both white and Indigenous communities, but publishing this book was also something that a lot of people saw as an accomplishment and something to be respected. After it came out, she became an honorary member of the Eastern Washington State Historical Society and a lifetime member of the Washington State Historical Society. White newspapers noted that she was the first Indigenous woman to publish a novel and cited her as an authority on indigenous subjects. For example, a nineteen twenty eight article that was reprinted in a lot of newspapers was about the history of smoking and whether the plant known as kinikinik was the same as tobacco. It described her as resenting the idea that indigenous people had migrated to North America from China or Japan, saying, quote, neither of these people nor any other smoked until they learned it directly from us. It went on to paraphrase her as saying that quote, the finding of pipes and burial mounds are no proof to her that another race occupied this country before her own. The newspaper also quoted from Kogawea and its descriptions of Indigenous smoking practices and uses for pipes. This idea of prehistoric migration to the Americas from Asia is going to come up again in a moment, and it's an idea that is still contentious or even offensive among indigenous communities whose oral histories placed them on these continents since time immemorial. This also actually ties into recent archaeological research into fossilized footprints that date back to before migrations from Asia are believed to have happened. In the case of footprints found in White Sand's New Mexico, research suggests that they are at least ten thousand years earlier, before migration and from Asia is believed to have happened. Mourning Dove also started doing a lot of work as an activist, advocating for other Indigenous people and for people who made their living doing agricultural labor. The Wild Sunflower Indian Women's Club in Omak, Washington, promoted Indigenous arts and crafts, and Mourning Dove served as its president for three years. In nineteen twenty eight, she was one of nine founders of the Eagle Feather Club, which was focused on the social welfare and equitable treatment of Indigenous peoples. She was also continuing her work trying to preserve Indigenous stories and traditions, which she called folklores with an es on it, which I kind of love as her term for this. And this work had some complexities. The stories that she was collecting are part of a sacred body of cultural knowledge, and there are protocols around how and when they should be shared and who they should be shared with. Different indigenous nations all have their own protocols preferences around these things, and it seems like there were people who had no concerns at all about sharing their stories with Mourning Dove. Like her, a lot of them were afraid that this knowledge was going to be lost otherwise, but other people seem to have been more reluctant, and some of Morningdove's letters suggest that she thought people wouldn't be willing to talk to her if they knew their stories were going to wind up in a book. Mourning Dove definitely wasn't the only person trying to preserve and record indigenous cultural knowledge and heritage in this part of North America at this point. Another was James Alexander Tate. Tate had been born in the Shetland Islands, and after immigrating to Canada, he had married a Lake of Pomaic woman named Lucy Artco. He became immersed in Lake of Pomac knowledge and traditions, both as a spouse and as an anthropologist and ethnographer. Anthropologist Franz Boas also hired Tate as part of the American Museum of Natural History's Jesup Expedition, which ran from eighteen ninety seven to nineteen oh two and involved teams in both the Pacific Northwest and Siberia recording languages and cultural practices on both sides of the Bearing Straight. The stated purpose of this expedition was to gather evidence that indigenous peoples had migrated to the Americas from Asia across a land bridge, but for Boas, the priority was documenting these cultures as they were increasingly threatened by the kinds of assimilationist and destructive government policies and other actions that we have been talking about. Mourning Dove became immensely frustrated when she learned that Tate was paying people in the area five dollars for their stories. From her perspective, he was an outsider, and she also could not afford to do the same, so she was frustrated about the fact that he was paying people for their stories and that he was doing this work at all. But eventually she found more common ground with Tate. Like McWhorter, who she'd been working with a really long time at this point, he had to this part of North America from somewhere else, and he wasn't indigenous, but he did have a sincere interest in preserving indigenous cultures and in advocating for indigenous peoples, including advocating for indigenous land rights. In August of nineteen twenty nine, mccorter's wife Anne died. They had been married for almost thirty five years, and he was understandably devastated. His working relationship with Mourning Dove had developed into a mutually supportive friendship over the years, and she was worried about him after his wife's death. Within a few months, though, they were hard at work on the collection that would be published as the book Coyote Stories in nineteen thirty three. By that point, McCord had introduced Mourning Dove to his friend, Heister Dean Gooey known as Dean, who was initially brought on to work as a proofreader. Dean became more deeply involved with the book over time, though, along with his wife, Geraldine, who was one of the first people to graduate from the University of Washington's anthropology program.

00:16:00
Speaker 1: While they were all.

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Speaker 2: Working on this book, Mourning Dove was also continuing her advocacy. In nineteen thirty she was one of the founders of the Calville Indian Association, which worked to get money for land claims that had never been paid for. In nineteen thirty three, Congress passed the Emergency Conservation Work Act as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, trying to address the economic hardships of the Great Depression. This established the work relief program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps, and then legislation was passed establishing an Indigenous division of the Civilian Conservation Corps not long afterward, But initially most of the foreman and supervisors who were hired for this division were not Indigenous. Mourning Dove and the Calville Indian Association fought for these positions to be filled with Indigenous workers as well, with Mourningdove saying that she would take the matter to the Bureau of Indian Affairs if it wasn't resolved. Over the span of a year, the number of Indigenous managers in the Corps rose from a little over forty percent to about sixty percent. She was also doing a lot of public speaking for schools, colleges, community organizations, and the like, often sharing her culture, traditions and stories with a mostly white audience. She typically spoke wearing her traditional Callville clothing, including a beaded buckskin dress and moccasins. We have talked in the past about Indigenous writers and speakers who adopted a costume as part of their stage presence, in part because that seemed to be a way to get the interest of white audiences, but this was not a costume for Mourning Dove. These were her clothes, and she wanted to normalize what she wore and show that it was an everyday part of life and not something that should be exoticized or discouraged. Mourning Dove's book Coyote Stories was published in nineteen thirty three, so named because the figure of coyote was central to most of the stories in the book. The title page read Coyote Stories by Mourning Dove Humishuma, edited and illustrated by heisterdine Gui, with notes by L. V. McWhorter, Old Wolf, and a forward by Chief Standing Bear Oglala Sue. This book sold really well and it was reprinted within a year. It would have been impossible for one book to capture a fully authentic recording of these stories. Although the figure of coyote is present in the stories and traditions of many indigenous peoples, especially across the western part of North America, the stories themselves have nuances among different tribes, nations, and bands, even down to the level of versions that have been passed down within individual families. They are stories to have a long history of being told aloud for specific reasons, at particular times of year or for specific events. It's just not something that a book can fully encompass. But beyond that, this book was a lot different from what Mourning Dove and had envisioned when they first met one another eighteen years before. Rather than a straightforward recording of Indigenous cultural knowledge, under Guy's direction, it had evolved into a work that was meant more as bedtime stories for children. This was not what McWhorter had originally had in mind at all. In addition to wanting to preserve the stories themselves, he was worried that presenting Indigenous cultural knowledge as children's stories would reinforce the damaging stereotypes that Indigenous people were childlike. Mourning Dove had also removed parts of the stories that she described as ugly. At the same time, though working on this book was an act of cultural preservation in a different way, Mourning Dove and her collaborators had lengthy and wide ranging discussions about language, down to find nuances about how different words were used in different contexts. They had extensive conversations about the best ways to render and oral tradition spoken in Salish language into English print. Along the way, they essentially created a dictionary that included pronunciations, definitions, and notations about usage, and this work went on to influence McCord's own work as an anthropologist and an ethnographer. Traveling around the plateau to collect these stories had also given Mourning Dove the opportunity to interact with a lot of people, to build connections with them and find out what their concerns were, and this connected to work that she did on behalf of John Collier, Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which we will talk about after a sponsor break. To briefly recap something we talked about in Part one. Over the latter half of the nineteenth century, much of the US federal government's policy toward Indigenous peoples involved forcibly removing people from their ancestral homelands to reservations. This was a violent, destructive, and genocidal process, and it often followed active warfare. So treaties signed between the US and indigenous nations formally ended a conflict, with the indigenous nations ceding land to the United States in exchanged for an end to the fighting and then reservation land somewhere else on the continent. The General Allotment Act of eighteen eighty seven, also called the DAWs Act, shifted the United States approach from one establishing reservations and removing people to them, to one of allotment and assimilation. Reservation land was broken up and allotted to people individually, with purportedly excess land allowed to be sold to non indigenous people. This was again deeply destructive, with indigenous peoples losing a lot of what had been reservation land. It was also paired with things like the boarding school system for indigen and his students that was meant to force children to abandon their languages and cultures and assimilate with white society. There's more about both of these periods of history in our two part episode on the Occupation of Alcatraz that came out in twenty nineteen. In nineteen thirty four, the federal approach shifted again with the Indian Reorganization Act, also called the Wheeler Howard Act, which was part of a collection of efforts known as the Indian New Deal. This legislation followed the Miriam Report, also called the Problem of Indian Administration, which had come out in nineteen twenty eight. There is some debate about whether the Miriam Report directly led to the Indian Reorganization Act, but this was a scathing report on conditions across reservations in twenty six states, detailing serious problems involving poverty, inadequate health care, and an overall lack of funding. The report characterized decades of federal policy toward Indigenous peoples, including that policy of allotment, as at the root of these issues, and it called for massive reforms. The US government slowed down on issuing land allotments soon after this report was published, and the Indian Reorganization Act followed a little more than five years later. This legislation certainly was not perfect. Among other things, it didn't apply in the territories of Alaska and Hawaii, and it was focused on the idea that tribes would be governed by tribal councils that would be accountable to the US Bureau of Indian Affairs. And it could not undo the centuries of history that had already passed. But it did start to move the US government toward a policy that focused on self governance and self determination for Indigenous peoples.

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Speaker 1: It also shifted the focus from one of assimilation with white culture toward one of preserving indigenous cultures and traditions. John Collier had been named Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Afas the year before the Indian Reorganization Act was passed. He was one of the people who helped get the Act through Congress. This act abolished the allotment program that had been set up in the Dawes Act, and it provided funding to Indigenous nations to purchase land that had been taken from them. Because part of the focus here was indigenous nation's own self determination, tribal members had the right to vote on whether to accept the terms of the Act, and John Collier, possibly having heard about Mourning Dove through her publication of Coyote Stories, contacted her to ask for help and outreach to the people of the Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove was in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act. She thought that it would help protect tribal lands and might even lead to the restoration of the north half of the Callville Reservation, which had been returned to the public domain in the late nineteenth century. The law also included provisions for additional funding and support, all of which she thought would benefit her people, among other things. She spoke at a conference in Oregon that brought together representatives from eight reservations, saying, quote, I fought for twenty five years for the cause of Indian people. The reason I have fought for my people is this, I owe it to them, old men and women of the Callville Indians. Let us hope that this new form of government will not be imposing on our old people. That you younger men and women will have a voice in the government of the US. Let us try a new deal. This vote was contentious for many of the tribes and bands that lived in and around the Callville Reservation and other places as well. Some who opposed it wanted full autonomy instead, not to be governed by a council that essentially reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some in the interior Pacific Northwest wanted a return to the social structure of small autonomous bands, not the collection of bands that had been unilaterally grouped into one reservation and recognized as one tribe under an executive order in eighteen seventy two. The Indian Reorganization Act also incorporated the idea of blood quantum into its definition of who was or was not indigenous. The idea that you had to have a certain amount of quote native blood to be indigenous was really foreign to many Indigenous peoples, and it was totally contrary to long standing cultural practices of intermarriage and adoption. So opponents to this law included people who objected to the use of blood quantum for a range of reasons. When the Callville Tribe voted, there were four hundred and twenty one votes in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act and five hundred and sixty two votes against it, but more than seven hundred people who were eligible did not cast a vote. The initial wording of the Act had been that fifty one percent of eligible voters had to vote again against the act in order for a tribe to reject it, and Carville Superintendent Harvey K. Meyer and the Office of Indian Affairs had told tribal members that votes that were not cast would be counted in favor of the act. But in nineteen thirty five, the Act was amended to require a majority of votes cast in favor in order to pass the act, and this standard is what was applied to the vote of the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove and other supporters of the Indian Reorganization Act argued that the earlier standard had to have influenced whether people had decided to vote or not, and that changing the criteria after the fact meant that there needed to be a new vote. The tribe drafted a new constitution, which was passed in February of nineteen thirty eight, but because of that vote, Congress did not accept it as having been created under the Indian Reorganization Act's terms, and the terms of the Indian Reorganization Act, including its land protections, consequently did not apply to the Callville Reservation. Mourning Dove was deeply upset by this outcome and was one of the people who thought the way the vote had been handled was unfair. She continued to advocate for another vote that the federal government would recognize. She was also elected to the Council of the Confederated Callville Tribes in nineteen thirty five, but in late July of nineteen thirty six, she became ill and severely disoriented. Family members took her to Medical Lake State Hospital, which was a psychiatric hospital and she died there on August eighth, at the age of about forty eight. Her cause of death was given as exhaustion from manic depressive psychosis, But this was really kind of a catch all diagnosis that was used for a lot of people who died while in the hospital's care. Like it.

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Speaker 2: My read of this is that she was ill, and that her illness was caught causing psychiatric symptoms, and then she was given this cause of death that did not actually shed any light onto what was really going on. According to obituaries, she was survived by her husband, her father, four brothers, and three sisters.

00:29:15
Speaker 1: In the years before her death, Mourning Dove had been working on an autobiography, mainly about her life until roughly the year nineteen hundred. She wrote a lot about her family, how they lived in traditions and practices, involving things like her first menstrual period, or preparing for marriage and caring for children. She described gathering berries, fishing for salmon, hunting, and winters full of singing, dancing, and storytelling. She also wrote about an incredibly difficult winter she survived in eighteen ninety two and eighteen ninety three due to both blizzards and flooding, and she wrote about her people's history.

00:29:52
Speaker 2: She wasn't able to finish a completed draft before her death, and when she died, her notes for the book were with Dean and Geraldine Kowey. Apparently Dean had planned to turn these notes into an actual book after he retired, but then he died in nineteen seventy eight without having done so. Geraldine later gave the notes to her former anthropology professor and friend, Erna Gunter, who, ultimately, after working with them a bit, returned them back to Geraldine. More than four decades after her death, Mourning Dove's notes, contained in about twenty folders, were given to J. Miller, who at that point had been working with Calville tribe elders on recording their stories for about five years. Miller edited the notes for print. His introduction states that he would not have been able to turn her notes into a book without his experience working with Calville elders, which he continued to do as he worked with the autobiography. He had been working with the people whose first language was an interior Salish one, but whose words were being written down in English. In an essay, he described this as thinking in Salish and writing in English. The same was true of Mourning Dove, who was always more fluent in Insucchin than in English. Her writing in English often reflected thought processes and structures that came from the syntax of her first language and her indigenous culture. Miller also made changes based on how the Callville people he was working with in the nineteen eighties were writing and speaking like. In some cases, the language she had used fifty or more years before had come to be seen as antiquated or referencing stereotypes. This book, Mourning Dove, a Salition Autobiography, came out in nineteen ninety. There have been criticisms of Miller's work with this autobiography. For example, in her review of both the autobiography and of a new printing of Coogiuea that came out in nineteen ninety, Alana Kathleen Brown argues that Miller downplayed the significance of Mourning Dove's achievements and undermined her authority as the narrator of her own life. She frames Miller's portrayal of Mourning Dove as misogynist and argues that his no votes that were part of the nineteen ninety edition of Coyote Stories were patronizing and pedantic. She also disagrees with his decisions to edit Mourning Dove's work into Standard English, saying that doing that took away a lot of her thought and nuance. This review is really pretty scathing, but at the same time, Brown also notes that the autobiography itself is really important as a work by an Indigenous woman talking about her own life from her own perspective at that point in history. Today, the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation is a federally recognized tribe with more than nine thousand yearrolled members, and it is still affected by the outcome of the Indian Reorganization Act vote that Morning Dove was connected to in the nineteen thirties. In twenty eleven, then tribal chairman Michael Finley spoke about the ongoing legacy of the vote before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs during oversight hearings on the seventy fifth anniversary of the Act. As one example, since the tribe wasn't able to reacquire lands under the Act, parts of the reservation are sort of a checkerboard, which creates problems related to whether the tribe or another community has jurisdiction in terms of things like law enforcement and public safety. He also noted that the lack of protections from the Act gave the tribe less negotiating power during the construction of the Grand Cooley Dam. The dam was finished in nineteen forty two and was built partly on reservation lands and flooded roughly eighteen thousand acres of reservation land, including people's homes and burial sites.

00:33:35
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:33:36
Speaker 2: So, even though this has happened right at the end of her life, something that she sort of I think would have continued to advocate for had she lived longer, something that's still having just a lot of ongoing impact today, almost one hundred years later. Yeah, and I have a little bit of listener mail we wrap up today's episode. This is from Aaron, who says, Hello, Holly and Tracy, thank you for the hard work you guys put into the podcast. I'm currently renovating my home in Wilmington, North Carolina, and catching up on missed episodes has kept me company. I really enjoyed your latest six Impossible episodes on Ghosts. I'm from Wilmington about twenty five minutes north of where the Makeo light has been seen. My father in law used to go out with his friends in the early seventies and try to see the light. He swears he's seen it twice, and one of those times he says he's seen the shadow of a man swinging the light. He loves telling the grandkids about it in the spookiest voices he can muster. We all love it, especially this time of year. It's so fun to hear the history of things so close to home. I would love to hear more about the eighteen ninety eight coupdeta. I admit I have not looked to see if another host has done it already. Attached is my pet tax, my sweet baby boy Bagheera. He is every bit the giant protective panther. He's named for not going to feel bad about ending that sentence with a preposition because all the rules are made up and the points don't matter. That is my mom holding him the first picture. She is not that small. Baggy pants is just huge.

00:35:12
Speaker 1: Much loved.

00:35:13
Speaker 2: Aaron. I wrote back to Aaron and said, actually, Holly and I did a two part podcast on the eighteen ninety eight Coupdeta in Wilmington, North Carolina.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: I do not remember exactly when that came out, and.

00:35:30
Speaker 2: So I love these cat pictures for a couple of reasons. One is that the cat that I grew up with as a child was a gray tabby that had some similar markings and colorings to this kitty cat. That cat, however, was much smaller. It is truly enormous cat, according to the picture, very big. I want to pet this kiddy always, So thank you, so so much, Erin for these wonderful cat pictures.

00:36:08
Speaker 1: And for the story.

00:36:09
Speaker 2: I love hearing about people, people's family stories, about the make up light and whatever other ghost stories that we talked about in that episode.

00:36:17
Speaker 1: So if you would like.

00:36:18
Speaker 2: To send us a note about this or any of their podcast we're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. We're all over social media. Missed in History, which is where you'll find our Facebook, our x thing, our Instagram, that kind of stuff. You can send us a note at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, which I might have said already, 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 OSM.