John ‘Mad Jack’ Mytton

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 Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And before we get into today's topic, we have a little housekeeping, which is to mention that we have our Stuff you Missed in History Class international trip ready to go. Yep. The dates for that trip are November two to the eighth, twenty twenty four. You can sign up if you want and if you want to go to the wonderful and delightful country of Iceland. Very excited about Iceland. I love Iceland desperately. We are going to spend time in Rayyivic, but we are also going to vic which is where the beautiful black beaches are. We are going to do some fun activities. There will be glacier time. Yeah, there will be interesting fun things to eat. There will be visiting Blue Lagoon. There will be visiting a different lagoon that's an actual lagoon, lagoon with glaciers in it. Yes, we're gonna do walking tours, you know. We'll see the oldest parliament site in Europe, which is pretty fun. We have both been in recent years and I am obsessed with Iceland. I had the best time in raykievic Yeah, way more than I ever anticipated. I really fell in love with it. Yeah. We went for our honeymoon in twenty sixteen, and our intent had been to return for our five year anniversary, but instead that was COVID incredibly excited about returning in November of twenty twenty four instead. Yeah. There will be waterfalls, There will be I mean probably rain There are a lot of rainbows in US. Yeah, and if if all things cooperate, we have a good chance of seeing the Northern Lights, which I did get to see completely at a random time of year. But it was quite My understanding is it was the Northern lights light like, it was not as intense as it normally would be. Yeah, So it was quite late in the season and a little surprising that we could see them at all. So I am very excited to go and spend time. All of these trips are always so incredibly fun and delightful, and the people that go with us are just as much a part of making the experience great as anything that we have planned for it. So if you think this sounds interesting to you as well, you can check it out with all the details at Defined Destinations dot com slash Iceland twenty twenty four. You can also just go to define Destinations dot com and they will have the Iceland Tour listed on their homepage that you can click into and get all of the details, including photos of some of the beautiful things we're going to see. We will mention it several more times, but if this sounds really interesting to you, you might want to jump on it. If you have any specific questions about what's going to be going on on the tour, you want to go through Defined Destinations. Our tour organizer, Michael, who has been with us on all of our trips, is really really wonderful and he does all of the planning. We kind of get the benefit of having Michael do all the legwork so that we can just go and have fun with all of you. So if you have questions or need clarification on anything, that is your place to go. And now we can hop right into today's episode. So perhaps exactly correctly, I don't know how I stumbled across this person. It's John Mitton. He is one of those figures who is pretty well known in some places. He is at times funny other times to me kind of insufferable. He's definitely the kind of person who is like a poster child for having more money than since Mitton is often called an eccentric that doesn't really capture his story. And despite his very wild stories of like incredibly bad behavior in some cases, he's also something of a local hero in the area where he lived, and I ran across several instances of people talking about his story in kind of a comedic way, and some of it is funny. It's so outlandish that I can understand that approach, but like in the bigger picture, if you look at his whole life, it's also really sad in some ways. So I also want to include a brief heads up here. This person kept a lot of animals, but some of his behavior towards and with those animals are things we would consider animal cruelty. Today, we're not going to linger on any of that, but just know if you're especially sensitive to it, it's yucky. I'm leaving out the worst parts. I'm pretty sensitive to that stuff, and I think I think we have a pretty cleaned up version of it where you you're not going to get any any gory details. So but heads up just as we go in the best way to introduce John Mitton maybe to look at how he was talked about after he was gone and people were looking at his short life as a whole. A memoir of John Mitton that was published just after his death, written by a friend, opens this way after noting a similar effort by another writer, quote, as no subject is so interesting to man as man, I have a good theme for my pen inasmuch as there is one present to my mind who's equal as a private English gentleman the world never before saw. Neither is it, for some reasons desirable that the world should ever again see. My only fear is that I may be deficient in strength of pencil to draw the picture to the life and to represent the anomaly in human nature which the character of the late John Mitton presents, at one time an honor to his nature, at another a satire on humanity. What more can be done than to strike the balance with an even hand, And as the brightness of the sun hides its blemishes, let me hope the greater part of his faults will be lost amid the virtues with which they are mingled. At all events, my purpose is not to hold up the torch to the failings of my old and never forsaken friend, my chief object being to account for them, and leave his virtues to speak for themselves. I owe him pity on the score of human nature. He claims it by his own acts and deeds, and above all by one act of him, to whose will all men must bow, and by whom all men's deeds will be weighed. Let not the lash of censure then fall too heavy upon one who himself carried charity to excess. Let the greatness of his fall be unto him as a shield. Let it be remembered he died in a prison, an epitome of human misery. A glance over his history, however, may not be unprofitable. It will point a moral if it do not adorn a tale. So that friend who wrote that memoir titled Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mitton, Esquire of Halston, Shropshire, formerly MP for Shrewsbury, hi Sheriff for the Counties of Celup and Marioneth and Major of the North Shropshire Yeoman Recavalry, with notices of his hunting, shooting, driving, racing, eccentric and extravagant exploits. So on one title that was The Writer who Goes by Nimrod. His actual name was Charles James Apperley. He was a sporting writer. He used the pen name Nimrod, presumably after the biblical king who commissioned the Tower of Babel, and as he noted, Apperly was a friend of John Mitton, who was also known as mad Jack because he was a lot. Minton is typically described as an eccentric and a rake. His life history plays out like a William Hogarth morality engraving on bad behavior, although Mitton was born about one hundred years after Hogarth. I note that because when I was first reading his stuff, I was like, wait, did Hogarth base all of his work on him? No? Came wait before he seems to have learned absolutely nothing from that artist's works. When a new biography of Minton was written more than one hundred years after he was gone, a review of the book, which was titled mad CAP's Progress, said this quote, mad Cap is a kindly word to use for John Mitton. In his short life, he got through an immense amount of money, did many reckless and foolish things, and did as far as one can see very little good to anybody. It is true that he was popular for a time, but even in the idle and extravagant society in which he turned, John Mitton seems to have been regarded as a man who carried things too far. John Minton was born on September thirtieth, seventeen ninety six, two months premature, at Halston Hall in Shropshire, not far from the Welsh border. His father, who was also named John Mitton, died when his son was still a baby, and Nimrod and other friends and biographers have made the case over the years that his mother's inability to say no to the young child was to some degree the source of his eventual ruin parent blamey, but honestly, he clearly never learned boundaries. One writer and friend going by the name J. W. C, who published his version of Mitton's life after his death, wrote quote, is it a marvel that his career should be erratic whose infancy was never subjected to restraint? The death of John Mitton Senior left little John, who wasn't yet too incredibly wealthy. He was named inheritor of Halston Hall, and he got a cash bequeathment of three hundred thousand pounds and an annual allowance of one hundred thousand pounds. The family estate he inherited included land in England and Wales. He was not just given all of this as a child, of course, the Mitten family had solicitors who looked after the fortune until John came of age. As for schooling, he was expelled from both Westminster and Harrow for bad behavior. As an example of that bad behavior, he once wrote to the chancellor at Westminster to explain that he was about to be married and he was going to need to have his annual allowance increase to support his wife. This was before he was getting that huge sum. I have seen various amounts reported, but it was something like six thousand pounds a year, which was a lot. The chancellor replied to him, quote, sir, if you can't live on your allowance, you may starve, and if you marry, I'll commit you to prison. If that sounds like an extreme response, is because Minton was enjoying far more money than anyone else in his class. And also he was thirteen at this time, so marriage was preposterous. And while this was kind of a pretty benign prank to basically make the case to the Chancellor Westminster that he needed more money, and I guess he wanted him to intercede with his family. This was apparently the kind of thing he did constantly, which led to a lot of ongoing friction with the Chancellor. There is even a story that this kind of culminated in him putting a horse in the Chancellor's bed and that that was the final straw. I don't know if that's a true story or not. He did move on to higher education though, and enrolled at Cambridge, but that didn't hold his attention and he decided to try a military career. He joined a local volunteer regiment in Oswistree when he was sixteen, then moved to the Shropshire Yeomanry Cavalry after a reorganization that folded in his prior unit. To be clear, this was a part time commitment and it did not stop Mitton from taking a grand tour of Europe, which was a custom for wealthy young men at the time. Yeah, he definitely had an attention issue and it was like I'm going to do this. Wait now, I want to go on a ground tour and then when he was nineteen, Mitton went to France to join the seventh Husser Cavalry in the Napoleonic Wars. The fighting was pretty much over by the time he got there, although he was reportedly, according to some accounts, writing with them when that regiment joined the Army of Occupation. And although this was a brief foray into a military career, Mitton apparently talked about it for the rest of his life. According to an account written by a friend other than Nimrod, quote, he used to talk of those days with rapture. I remember while at breakfast in his drawing room he took from a wardrobe a uniform jacket of the seventh and holding it before me, he exclaimed, Ah, if this old skin could speak, as the Swan of Avon say, it could a tail unfold. We mentioned that John Mitton was in France after most of the actual action of the war was done, so he found other ways to amuse himself, which were mostly exactly the sorts of things that a spoiled rich kid would be expected to do. To give a sense of the reckless lifestyle that Mitton engaged in from a young age during his time in France, he lost a billiard's bet so extravagant that it was talked about in sporting circles for years. In one match of billiards, he lost ten thousand pounds. That is a lot. Today we always talk about how converting currency over such a stretch of time is really guesswork at bests, but the UK National Archives converter puts that at close to six hundred thousand pounds in modern value, So no wonder this became legendary. Yeah, on one billiard's match. He also got into a lot of fights, seemingly for fun. Mitton was, by all accounts naturally very strong and courageous to an almost stupid degree. He was not a skilled fighter, but he was powerful enough that he often won fights despite his own clumsiness, and was robust enough that he was able to easily shake off the ones he lost. His friend Nimrod wrote of his incredibly hearty nature quote, never was constitution so murdered as mister Mitten's was. For what but one of adamant could have withstood the shocks independent of wine, to which it was almost daily exposed. His dress alone would have caused the death of nine hundred of one thousand men who passed one part of the day and night in a state of luxury and warmth. He never wore any but the thinnest and finest silk stockings, with very thin boots or shoes, so that in winter he rarely had dry feet. To flannel, he was a stranger since he left off his petticoats. Even his hunting breeches were without lining. He wore one small waistcoat, all was open in the front from about the second of the lower buttons, and about home he was as often without his hat as with one. His winter shooting gear was a light jacket, white linen trousers without lining, our drawers of which he knew not the use, and in frost and snow he waded through all water that came in his way. Minton may not seem like the type to start a family based on these descriptions, but he did, and we will talk about that right after we pause or a sponsor break. After leaving the army and returning home to England, Minton got married to a young woman named Harriet Emma Jones on May twenty first, eighteen eighteen, at Saint George's Hanover Square. Harriet was, like John, from a family of means. Her father was Baronet Sir Thomas Cherwitt Jones. The couple had a daughter a year into the marriage, but Harriet died after an illness in eighteen twenty. During his marriage, Mitton ran for MP as a Tory and was elected to Parliament to represent Shrewsbury. He was twenty three at the time. This role got even less attention and discipline than his other endeavors. He reportedly spent exactly thirty minutes in the House of Commons before he got bored and left and never came back. Yeah, and he may have purchased those votes, like he may have promised everyone who voted for him ten pounds. That's one version of how he got elected. The year after Harriet's death, Mitton became interested in Caroline Mallett Gifford, the seventeen year old sister of one of his friends, and he suggested a marriage to Caroline's mother, Lady Charlotte Gifford. This was something that was actually pretty difficult to decide for the Gifford family. John was good friends with the family and they adored him. A lot of people seem to really love him, but there had also been a lot of unsavory rumors about him mistreating Harriet during their short marriage, and he already had a reputation as a rake who had little regard for money. When his friend Charles Apperly was asked by Caroline's mother if he would marry off his own daughter to Mitton, his reply was quote, in my opinion, Lady Charlotte, mister Minton has no business with a wife at all. But should he marry your daughter, Caroline, there is a greater prospect of his making a good husband to her than any other woman in the whole world. The wedding went ahead and the couple were married in October of eighteen twenty one. In the beginning of the marriage, they do seem to have been doing all right. Caroline is described by Mitton's friends as being an incredibly good wife who did seem to love her husband. That eventually changed, though. The couple had five children together from eighteen twenty two to eighteen twenty seven. These were Barbara John, Charles Euphrates, and William John. Was Sheriff of Mariannath in Wales starting in eighteen twenty one. You will also see him reported as high sheriff for shrupture, and he was, but that was after he served his first high sheriff role for two years. And to be clear, he was not really a lawman. This is a little bit, you know, one of those things where the words mean different things, because by this point that title was largely ceremonial, but it did lend an air of respectability to Mitton, at least for a time. After that, he seems to have thrown himself headlong into amusements. One of his very favorites was fox hunting. In that earlier quote we read about his clothes, it mentioned how he would completely disregard any kind of normal human needs for being out in the brush chasing down foxes or other prey. It seems as though hunting, like box was something that he did with more enthusiasm than skill. He had done it since he was a boy. But he seemed to actually love when things went wrong as much or even more maybe than when things went right. He got injured pretty frequently and did not seem to mind. Just about every account written by people who knew him notes that he never even complained when he had injuries, like broken ribs after being thrown from a horse. Yeah, there are. I don't even dozens, at least his stories about him like going out hunting and his clothes get torn in the brush, so he just keeps hunting naked, and he doesn't even care that it's cold or you know, getting swacked by something while he's out, and he just keeps going. He definitely had a high tolerance for discomfort. He also loved, loved, loved a bet. Horse racing was an especially engaging sport for him. It was one in which he loved to wager. We mentioned earlier than he had a son named Euphrates. That child was not named for the river. He was named after a race horse that Minton owned that won a lot of races and continued to compete until that horse was thirteen. Just as with his other enthusiasms, though Minton didn't really know a lot about horses, he was an excellent rider and he knew them really well in that way, and he would spend a lot of money to purchase a horse if someone he trusted recommended it. But he didn't know anything about breeding. So while he had a stable that was incredibly large and could have potentially produced a lineage of champions, he never managed it like he never got that part of it together, which a normal person would do if you were making those investments. He also apparently had a similar problem with the hounds that he used for fox hunting. At one point had said he had two thousand dogs, but he never put a breeding program together. That's so many dogs. It's so many dogs. He had so many of everything. As a young man, Mitton is said to have drunk six bottles of port every day. As he aged, he switched from drinking port to drinking brandy, but the volume that he consumed remained the same. And there are innumerable tales of Mitten's intense and careless behavior, some of which was surely the result of drinking all that alcohol. His friend Nimrod wrote to this behavior, quote that John Mitton saw his thirty eighth year must either be attributed to the good genius that accompanied him or to the signal interposition of providence. For scarcely a day passed over his head in which he did not put his life to the hazard. Some of his escapes indeed border closely on the miraculous, but it would fill a volume were I to enumerate them. How often has he been run away with by horses in gigs, how often struggling in deep water without being able to swim. How was it that he did not get torn into peace? Is in the countless street broils in which he was engaged. And lastly, how did he avoid being shot in a duel? The latter question is soon answered he never fought one. Nimrod goes on to say that while Mitton loved a brawl, he had a rather gentle spirit and never could have fired on a man if he was called to in one of these wild stories. This is like one of the most famous. He was riding with a friend in a gig, and he asked that friend if he had ever been hurt by a gig flipping over, And when the friend said he had not he had never been in such an accident, Minton suggested that he had not really lived unless he had had that experience, And then he purposely and violently wrecked the gig that they were in by running one of the wheels up a steep embankment, so it flipped. Luckily, both of the men walked away from that incident. On another occasion, Mitton was testing a horse he was considering buying by running him in tandem in front of an another horse that was attached to a gig. But as they were traveling, he started wondering if this new horse could jump, and gave him a whip on the flank as they approached a gate. This horse cleared the jump, but the second horse, Mitten, and the horse dealer were all left behind with the gig in the process. He also liked to do a trick with one of his horses that was basically the gig equivalent of popping a wheelie. So on command, the horse would rear up while attached to this gig. The cart would then tip back until the back touched the ground. When it came to money, he was not only cavalier about spending it, but also about handling it at all. This sounds completely bananas, so brace he has said to have put high denomination pound notes on sandwiches and eat them. Given how dirty money is, we always see these discussions about if you test a bill of money, that makes me completely nauseous. It's disgusting. Also left money lying everywhere everywhere. Apparently he didn't like paper currency. People who visited Halston Hall would often find it just on the ground or in bushes. It's unclear nobody knows to this day whether he was dropping money accidentally because he was just so completely casual about handling things, or if he purposely was throwing it on the ground because of his disdain for it. And then there's the bear. Mitten had a pet bear, as much as one can have a pet bear. He purchased this bear, along with a monkey, for thirty five pounds when both of them were quite young, and raised them in the house. He also had a horse that routinely slept in the house, as well as innumerable dogs. We just mentioned the extraordinary number of dogs. He's said to have ridden this bear, using spurs to drive it into the middle of one of his parties while yelling tally hoe. His guests were panicked, and rightly so. This bear is described in this incident as pretty calm until Mitton got her with a spur, at which point the bear whipped around and bit Mitton right through his calf. Minton thought this was hilarious, even though he was seriously wounded. At one point, he also got a horse dealer drunk, and when the man passed out, Mitton put him to bed with the bear and two bulldogs, and he liked to have dogfights in the dining room to entertain guests while they ate. Yeah, he he had boundary issues. When a horse dealer named George Underhill visited Mitton in search of money that he was owed, Mitton gave him a sealed letter with instructions to take it to an address in Shrewsbury to see a banker who would give him the money. This is basically an order of payment, but that banker was also a governor in the Lunatic Assylum, as it was called, and the note was not in order for payment, but a letter which read quote admit the bearer, George Underhill, into the Lunatic Asylum, your obedient servant, John Minton. It appears that the banker knew this was a joke and George Underhill was not in any real danger. But oh Man and Minton also could be kind in his own way. He was lenient with the tenants on his land when they struggled financially. He gave away grain so people could eat. He would borrow money only to give it or lend it to someone else, and he often got in hot water because the recipient would vanish with no intention of repayment. Coming up, we're going to talk about how Minton's life shifted considerably to one far less grand. But first we will pause for a sponsor break. Minton's cavalier attitude about my me, both in spending it for his own amusements and in giving it to others, led to his great fortune dwindling away. And as this happened and his drinking became more and more problematic, his behavior with his wife Caroline became unkind. In the stilted writing of the day, it is never spelled out exactly what happened between them. The Nimrod biography we've been talking about includes the information that Caroline confided in the writer about it once quote recounting some of his acts which only a madman would have committed, But it doesn't state what any of those acts were, only that from the biographer and friend's point of view, quote, were my life to endure a thousand years? I could never lose my recollection unless I lost my reason. Of that distressing scene, Caroline left Mitton in eighteen thirty. She's often described as running away, and the two of them never reconciled. By this point, Mitton had accrued a massive debt, and he had started selling off property to meet his obligations. But in the wake of Caroline's exit, he decided he might once again like to attempt to run for parliament, this time representing Shropshire. His first address to the voters was as follows, quote, Gentlemen, domestic affliction of no slight or common nature has latterly limited my intercourse with you. My wishes for the prosperity of my native country have ever in absence held their usual sway, Having once had the honor of representing your county town in Parliament. Feeling that various avocations precluded the conscientious performance of my duty to my constituents, I declined the representation that the dissolution of that parliament. I have now no wife, no family, no hounds, no horses. Some will say no steadiness of purpose. But feeling that I can devote myself to your service, should you honor me with your support and confidence, I venture to offer myself to your notice as a candidate for the county, totally unshackled by prejudice or otherwise, and a strenuous advocate for reform, Relying upon the strength of the cause. I shall advocate, I throw myself upon your favor, and shall assuredly take the sense of the county. I shall look to the vote of every independent freeholder, without making further professions. Uh. He did not win the seat. It was not long after that Mitton fled his creditors, landing eventually in France and Calais, specifically where he had spent most of his brief military career. When his friend Apperly saw him there, he found Mitten to be a much changed man. He described him as quote a round shouldered, decrepit, tottering, old young man, if I may be allowed such a term. There was a mind as well as a body in ruins. The one had partaken of the injury done to the other, and it was and at once apparent that all was a wreck. In fact, he was a melancholy spectacle of fallen man, of one over whom all the storms of life seemed to be engendered in one dark cloud. But Minton didn't seem dejected or sad, and he seemed to think his finances were on the brink of turning around. But Apperley saw through all of this, and he noted to Mitton's valet and their mutual friends that he feared that John may quote either go mad or die, and very shortly too. Mitton's behavior was as erratic as ever in France, and sometimes even more so. In an infamous story, he set fire to his night shirt in an effort to scare his hiccups away. When Apperly asked him why he did such a thing, he said quote that he wished to show me how he could bear pain. According to Apperley's account, he drank even more heavily to medicate as he was badly burned. In this episode. His doctor thought he could die at any moment, but he somehow recovered, at least physically. But in the Nimrod biography, Applely described spending days with Mitten as he behaved in ways that were just inscrutable and sometimes terrifying. This included an incident where he took six knives into bed, believed to be with the intent of self harm. His mother and his friends went to great lengths to nurse him back to health. They eventually moved him to a chateau in the country, where he very much improved, both physically and mentally, until he escaped from his friends and managed to get his hands on a bottle of brandy. Eventually he was able to connect with some of the less noble characters he had been associating with in his Calaet circle, who thought they should take him back to England so they could sign over his remaining property to them. Yeah, he had clearly fallen in with people that wanted to take advantage of his not robust and healthy state of mind. Of course, once he was back in England, Mitton was arrested and he was taken first to Shrewsbury Jail and then to the King's Bench Prison, which was a debtor's prison in London. He was released after serving his sentence, and right after that he met up on Westminster Bridge with a young woman that he had never seen before named Susan, and right there, at the moment they met, he told her he would give her five hundred pounds a year if she stayed with him, and she did. This is a weird thing. Sometimes it's described as he fell in love with her at first sight, but it honestly reads as just something of like a lonely desperate person. But she is described by his friends as being incredibly kind to Mitton. She even kind of won the favor of his mother, who thanked her later on for having been so invested in caring for him. The two of them left for France. He was then arrested in France for his debts. Once he was released from his prison time there, he went back to England and then he was back in King's Bench prison almost immediately. John Mitton died in prison on March twenty ninth, eighteen thirty four, at the age of thirty seven. A coroner's inquest was called to determine his cause of death. According to the notice in the Gloucester Chronicle, quote, two medical attendants stated that the immediate cause of death was disease of the brain delirium tremens caused by the excessive use of spiritust liquors, verdict natural death. Mitton's mother was with him when he died and arranged for his remains to be buried at the Halston property. Three thousand people attended his burial at the family crypt, and the shops in Shrewsbury were closed that day in his honor. As a coda to John Mitton's story, in The Standard Newspaper of London in nineteen hundred, a reader wrote in regarding an encounter they had had with his son some years earlier. This letter to the editor included the setup that he'd the writer and a friend had dined one evening at the Bedford Hotel, but at the end of the meal they found that they were short on the bill, and the manager was kind enough to overlook the small gap. It wasn't a big a big short on the bill, but they did have to move out of the fancy or private dining room and into the coffee room, which was a little less fancy, and there they met John Minton junior. He, according to this account, bought them each oranges from the waiter, and then gave each of them half a sovereign for pocket money. And then he left. And the writer of this tale, identified as SFH, said they heard that he had just ridden a horse up a flight of hotel stairs on a wager, without injury to himself or the horse. This account summarizes this entire incident by saying, quote, though he had a kind heart, he was not free from his father's faults and follies, nor I fear did he escape from the ruinous results which were the natural consequence that story, incidentally about riding a horse up the hotel stairs is something that his father definitely did. It is a little unclear whether his son repeated that same act or if this was a confusion of local lore on the writer's part since they were both named John Mitton. But this does kind of explain why he has this strange hero status because everyone recognizes that he was completely out of control, that he also had this desire and proclivity to be kind to people when he could, and apparently his son was also similarly living his life. I have so many thoughts about him that we could talk about on the behind the scenes. Okay, I have a listener mail from our listener, Shanila. I hope that's how she pronounces it. I live next to someone with this name growing up who pronounced it that way, so if I got it wrong, I apologize. Schwritz Hi Alian Tracy. I discovered your podcast several years ago and have been intermittently listening to episodes in any quiet moment when my kids weren't around. Now that the youngest in full time non virtual school, I am starting at the beginning and working my way through all your old episodes. I recently listened to the one about how a war between Canada and the US was almost started over a pig, and was delighted to hear Holly mentioned she had lived in the pew wall Up, Tacoma area as a child. Qe all Up is my hometown, and it brings me so much joy to hear of someone else from here, especially someone I listened to and admire. Several years ago, I moved to my husband's hometown of Boise, Idaho, and I deeply missed the Pacific Northwest. Thank you for the unexpected smile you gave me. My husband and I are regular watchers of Jeopardy, and I feel compelled to suggest that you both should apply to be on the show. Hardly an episode goes by that I don't say, oh, I know that I just listened to this history podcast about it, regarding at least one clue if I am ever on Jeopardy and when it will be because of your podcast. She mentions another interesting story we might talk about, and then some sum mates by saying, thank you always for being so delightful. We don't have any pets because keeping four children alive is all I can handle. They are pretty cute, even if they're not free, so I attached a picture of them. Cheers. I'm so so delighted that you have this beautiful family. I kind of wanted to say this to say I could never be on Jeopardy. I choke in the moment of being questioned. I have taken the Jeopardy test a couple times and didn't pass it. Yeah. I would be like, I don't know about that, but do you want to hear about this other weird thing I know? And then they'd be like, no, man, please go away. But you know, always good to hear someone from pewall Up. People in pewall Up don't tam they rest. That's one of the many slogans you can usually find on a T shirt there. I too miss the Pacific Northwest. It's so beautiful and I love it so I hope you get to visit often and take your kids. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and if you have not yet subscribed, that is easy as pie to do. Just do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. 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.