The Rebecca Riots

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm trace Ev Wilson and I'm Holly Fryne. Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people, especially in discussions of AI, kind of throwing around the word ludites in a way that irritates me, and I know there's some irony there. We've talked a bunch of times on the show about how language evolves and rules are made up, but the word ludite has come to sort of mean sort of a stubborn, backward person who's opposed to progress and technology. But what the ludite protests were really about was technical advances that were threatening people's livelihoods and leading to the production of lower quality goods. So if we're talking about somebody who's objection to AI is badly written articles replacing the work of paid freelancers, ludites pretty appropriate for that. But people have also used it to sort of imply that people who have these concerns are against all technology, and that bothers me. We've done an episode on the ludites that was all the way back in twenty thirteen. But as I was you know, mulling over this use of language. I kept thinking about workers smashing machines and this semi mythical figure of ned lud who was part of the Ludite uprisings, and how some of the men who were breaking machines during this uprising did so in dresses and called themselves general luds wives. That brought me then to the Rebecca Riots, which took place in Wales a couple of decades after the Ludite uprising took place in England, and there are some parallels there. That includes the smashing stuff, also the wearing of dresses, and beyond that, there's been kind of a similar narrowing of how these two events are remembered a lot of the time today, the one sentence description of the Rebecca Riots would be something like men in dresses smashed down the tollgates to protest against the really egregious fees that they were having to pay for using the roads. But those tolls and the tollgates, that was really just one part of it. The Rebecca Riots took place in western and southwestern Wales from eighteen thirty nine to eighteen forty three, primarily in Pembrokeshire, Cardiganshire and Carmarthenshire. The town of Comerthen in Carmarthenshire was at the time the fourth largest town in Wales, with a population of about ten thousand people. It was an important market town and sort of an administrative and political center within the area. Also, there are seemingly countless ways that different organizations and government bodies divide Wales into regions. Were just talking about the general area to the southwest and west, not any specific regional definition. At the time, people outside of Wales often imagined it as sort of an expanse of farmland where nothing much happened. And while farming was a key part of the economy, Wales was also industrializing really rapidly in the first decades of the nineteenth century. During the Rebecca Riots, most people in this part of Wales were working in agriculture or in domestic service, but about ten percent were employed at iron works. Some of those iron works were newly built. The Welsh population was soaring, with towns that were home to iron works and other industries growing just a lot faster than ones that weren't, and there were rural areas that were nearly depopulated as people moved into these cities and towns to try to find work, and the Rebecca Riots were not the first uprising to happen in Wales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In addition to agriculture, two of Wales's biggest industries were coal and iron and agricultural products. Coal and iron were all in high demand during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of eighteen twelve, although Britain was still variously at war. After these ended in eighteen fifteen, demand for a lot of these goods started to fall. Combined with a more general economic depression, This meant that workers faced lost jobs and reduced wages. This came to a head in Mercer Tidville with an uprising in eighteen thirty one. Demonstrators protested against job cuts and wage cuts and as many as twenty four people were killed after soldiers were deployed to try to restore order. There was also an armed uprising in Newport on the River Usk in eighteen thirty nine. This one was connected to the Chartist movement. The Chartist movement was a working class movement that was calling for a number of political reforms Those included universal voting rights for men over the age of twenty one, secret ballots, elimination of property requirements to become a member of Parliament, and payment for MPs so that would make serving as an MP a lot more accessible to more people. More than twenty Chartists were killed in this uprising as well, and its leaders were convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered. So while there were contemporary discussions of the Rebecca Riots that had a tone that was almost like a riot in Wales really like Wales like, this was not really an isolated incident. Although most historians don't describe the Rebecca Riots as part of the Chartist movement. One of the issues involved with the riots was representation within the government. Although the Great Reform Act of eighteen thirty two had made changes to the electoral system in England and Wales, only men could vote, and those men had to own property or pay specific taxes to be eligible. This meant that tenant farmers and farm laborers, who made up most of the population in southern and western Wales, still could not vote. Compounding this was that most of the people who did meet those requirements spoke English, while most of the farmers and farm workers spoke Welsh. In some cases, these were essentially English absentee landlords holding office to represent Wales, so people naturally felt like they didn't have true representation in Parliament, and the absentee landlords were also their own issue. Most of the people in this part of Wales were tenant farmers, so they did not own the land that they lived and worked on for centuries, though families had leased the same land for their entire lifetime, so they really had some stability. They felt a sense of ownership over the land that they were working and typically they were renting from a landlord who lived locally. There were some social expectations that landlords do things like donate money to charitable causes and the church, and to we have kind of a paternalistic interest in their tenants well being. This is not at all to say that every single landowner was generous or accommodating with their tenants, but there was an overall perception that absentee landlords who did not live in the area only cared about whether or not their tenants paid the rent, not whether their tenants were dueing. Okay, in the decades before the Rebecca riots. A lot of landlords had also moved away from these lifetime leases. More and more farmers are basically tenants at will, with leases as short as only a year, so not a lot of stability the possibility of having to just move over and over and over again. In the eighteen thirties, it was also just getting harder to pay rent. Most small farmers were operating at a subsistence level, and poverty was widespread. Common ground that had been used for grazing animals had largely been enclosed, making it harder for people to raise livestock. In a lot of places, the land was most suited for raising sheep, but that lack of access to grazing land meant that people were trying to grow crops instead. Work was also harder to find, and a series of poor harvests stretched from eighteen thirty nine to eighteen forty one. Many tenants tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a reduction in the rent to make up for all of these problems. Bad harvests also meant that people had less money to give to the church, and giving to the church was something they were required to do by law. People were expected to donate ten percent of their income to their local parish. Before eighteen thirty six, this had been an kind payment, so people donated part of their harvest or wool from their sheep, or something else they had grown or raised. But the Tithe Act of eighteen thirty six instead made this a cash payment, and the amount of the payment was based on the price of various crops a ridged out over the past seven years. So if the harvest was particularly bad one year, that did not immediately reduce the amount of the tithe that people were required to pay, and since that one bad year was averaged together with six other years, that might not actually reduce the tithe at all. To add to that, these payments were made to Anglican parishes, but most of the people living in Wales, especially working class people and farm laborers, were Nonconformists, so Methodists, Congregationalists or Baptists. They didn't attend the parish church, and many didn't really want to be paying a tithe to the Anglican Church at all. So bad harvests, high rents, cash tithe payments, all this other stuff. It meant that a lot of people were really struggling. And then the Poor Law of eighteen thirty four also made financial hardship a way more frightening prospect. Before the passage of this law, various relief projects were funded through taxes that were paid by the middle and upper classes, and they were mostly locally administered. But as the population of the UK had increased in the wake of industrialization and other economic changes had led to an increase in poverty, it had become increasingly expensive to care for the poor. There was also a perception among a lot of the people who had enough money to be paying these taxes that the poor people were just lazy and didn't want to work. So the Poor Law of eighteen thirty four was meant to ease the purported burden of poverty on communities. Parishes were grouped into poor Law unions, and each one was required to build a workhouse if they did not have one already. Conditions in the workhouses were intentionally harsh and cruel to discourage people from using them and to punish people for their poverty. While people were housed, fed and clothed in the workhouse, the housing was overcrowded, uncomfortable, and often filthy and infested with vermin. Food was meager and uniforms were uncomfortable and threadbare. Families were broken up and housed separately, and while children were theoretically educated in the workhouse, they could also be hired out as workers in minds and on farms. There were still some other forms of relief besides the workhouse, but needing help carried the risk of winding up in one. The workhouses were also funded through a local tax known as the poor rate, and pretty much everyone who had enough money to not be in the workhouse had to pay this tax, even if they didn't really have a lot of money to spare. The tollgates get the most attention in discussions of the Rebecca Riots, and sometimes it sounds like they were the whole focus. But really, in the face of all this, the tolls were more like the last straw, and we're going to talk more about that after we pause for a sponsor break. The roads in Wales in the start of the nineteenth century weren't really great. A network of roads, footpaths and cart paths connected farms to small towns and market villages, and then eventually to cities. Scottish engineer John McAdam had developed the road surfacing known as McAdam around eighteen twenty, and it was a lot more durable and efficient to lay down than other earlier road surfaces had been. But there was not a national agency that was responsible for building, maintaining or improving the roads. This was a lot like what we talked about happening in the US in our episode on Kitty Knox and the bike Boom from this past January. For a long time, road maintenance fell mostly to local landowners and the results could be all over the place. Landowners in the UK were allowed to set up toll houses if the tolls that they collected were used to pay for repair and improvements to the roads. These toll houses were typically built so that the keeper had a good view of the road and anyone who might be approaching on it, because even before the Rebecca Riots the tolls were not popular and attacks on toll houses and their keepers were an ongoing issue. Usually there was a gate across the road to force people on horseback or with some kind of horse and cart to stop, but if you were on foot or pushing a hand cart, you might be able to go around by a smaller path. An assortment of laws also empowered the creation of turnpike trusts. These were trusts that were established by businesses or groups of landowners to manage the tolls and the road maintenance they were meant to pay for and when we say assortment. By eighteen thirty six there were nine hundred and forty two acts for new turnpike trusts in England and Wales. In some cases, the trust that built the toll gate didn't actually manage it, but they instead least that out to somebody else. There is some suggestion that on the whole, the creation of turnpikes and turnpike trusts did improve the quality of the roads, but this was also a situation that could lead to a lot of mismanagement and abuse. At the same time, some of the trusts were not breaking even. It was really expensive to build and maintain these roads, and the cost of doing so just outstripped the money collected from the tolls a lot of the time, So whether they were trying to make more money or just break even, turnpike trusts raised the price of tolls and also built more toll gates so that people had to pay the tolls more often, and eventually toll collectors also started adding sidebars on smaller roads and paths that kept people on foot from being able to go around the gate on the main road, collecting tolls on foot traffic as well. So this might have been less of an issue if people only had to pay a toll one time time to get to where they were going, but the turnpike trusts and the toll gates that they were putting up just proliferated. At the peak of the Rebecca Riots, there were at least twenty different trusts operating in southwestern Wales, and there was a gate or a bar about every four miles. Camarthen, where a lot of people took their goods to market, was basically surrounded by twelve gates that were controlled by five different road trusts. Different trusts also set up gates on the same turnpikes, and then all of them would all charge their tolls to the people who tried to pass. As the Rebecca Riots were going on, One newspaper reporter took a fifteen mile trip from Camarthen to Pontardalas and encountered eleven different gates on the way. This affected farmers and farm laborers tremendously. They often had to pass through multiple gates to get two and from their fields and two and from market. Farmers in this part of Wales also used lime extensively to try to improve their soil, usually transporting it in carts. Initially, some trusts had exempted lime carts from the tolls, but when that stopped, farmers found that they were paying almost as much in tolls as they were for the lime they were carrying, and there was really no other option. Farmers and laborers had to use the roads to do their work. A farmer deciding to just not treat the soil with lime anymore because the tolls made it too expensive might wind up with a bad harvest as a result, and that would have its own financial consequences. So the tolls, combined with the high rents and the poor laws and the tithes and the poor rates and everything that we talked about before the break, eventually working people just felt like they were drowning. In May of eighteen thirty nine, a new toll gate was built in a vile wind on the border between Commercentshire and Pembrokeshire, on a road that a lot of people used to cart their lime back to their arms from the coast. It was built on the order of the Whitland Turnpike Trust, which had contracted Thomas Bullen as toll collector. Bullen was involved in a lot of the gates that were put up during this period. On May thirteenth, a large group of locals attacked and destroyed the new gate and set the toll house on fire. The next day, handbills were posted around the area calling for a meeting to discuss quote the propriety of its tollgate. The Whitland Turnpike Trust rebuilt the gate and in June the demonstrators destroyed it again in broad daylight. At this point there were not professional police forces in Western Wales, and special constables had been brought in to try to guard the gate after that first incident, but when they saw the demonstrators coming, they all fled. This toll gate was once again rebuilt and members of the Castlemartin Yeomanry and soldiers from the town of Brecken were called in to help try to protect it, but on July seventeenth of eighteen thirty nine, the gate was once again attacked and demolished. Although other attacks had been carried out by men in dresses, accounts of This one included the first written reference to the Daughters of Rebecca or myrrhead Rebecca, which would become one of the most memorable parts of the uprising. The men wore dresses, sometimes combining them with false beards and horsehair wigs. In the words of a nineteen ten book on the riots by Henry Tobot Evans quote, it was decided at a vilewind and Whitland that the rioters should be clothed in women's dresses, with blackened faces and fern in their white caps. Their arms were to consist of sticks, pikes, spades, hatchets, old swords, guns, in fact, any weapon they could get hold of. The leader to be called Rebecca was invariably to be mounted and accompanied by a bodyguard. All their doings were to be conducted under the superintendence of Mother Rebecca, and all arrangements and commands were to be made and given by her. There are two different stories about where the name Rebecca came from. One is that a man called Toomcarnabooth or Thomas Reeves had a hard time finding a dress that would fit him. This was a real person. He was definitely involved in the Rebecca riots and he was a large man who was locally well known as a pugilist. In this version, he finally did find a dress that belonged to a quote, tall and stout old maid, and that person was named Rebecca. Some historians find this to be the less likely of the two origin stories, in part because Toomcarnabooth was known to be active in these protests in eighteen forty two, not so much in eighteen thirty nine, when this name was first used. The other possible origin is from the Book of Genesis, chapter twenty four, verse sixty. Rebecca was the wife of Isaac and the mother of Jacob and Esau, and this verse comes from the account of how she was chosen to be Isaac's wife. Isaac's father, Abraham, had sent a servant to the place of his birth to find a wife for Isaac. The servant prayed to God for a sign directing him to the right woman, basically saying, quote, when I ask a woman at this fountain for water, let the one who offers me and my camel's water be the woman God has chosen to marry Isaac. Rebecca comes to the fountain, the servant asks for water, and she offers it to him and his camels. Skipping ahead a little bit, they go to the home of Rebecca's father, where the servant tells him that he's a servant of Abraham, who God has blessed with wealth, and that he's come to find Abraham's son Isaac a wife. She and her family agree to the marriage, and then later, when she is leaving, her family blesses her and says, quote, thou art our sister, be thou the mother of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gait of those which hate them. Regardless of origin story play, the role of Rebecca was a mark of honor. There was also an almost theatrical element to these demonstrations, with mother Rebecca portrayed as elderly and blind, riding a white horse and finding her way blocked by a gate. The assembled men in dresses the daughters of Rebecca would answer that nothing should block an old woman's way, and then they would tear the gate down. So a note on the blackening of the faces. None of the sources I found really gave a specific explanation for the demonstrators rationale and doing this. Blackened faces were also part of a sort of mock trial and public humiliation in Wales called the cafil Prenne or the wooden Horse, in which a mob of men wearing dresses with their faces blackened would tie somebody who had committed some kind of an offense to a wooden frame and then parade that person around the town. So this might have just been something that people were used to doing in this kind of public protest already. There's some speculation that in the case of the Rebecca Riots, this was to make the Rebeccaites harder to see at night, but since they were also described as wearing white dresses, that doesn't totally add up. It may have been more about disguising the demonstrator's identities. Various illustrated newspaper reports from the time don't portray the rioters in what we might think of as blackface or in any way that resembles the minstrel performers that were becoming popular in the US around this same time, but there have been more recent reenactments of the riots in which participants do look like they're in blackface. Around the same time as the gate in Ivalwin was being repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt, another new gate was attacked and destroyed at Flamboidy in Camarthen Sure. In that case the gate was not rebuilt, and after the third time the gate was destroyed at Ivowwan it was not rebuilt either. For a while, no more toll gates were attacked by large groups of men in dresses being led by Mother Rebecca. There were, however, ongoing theft's attempts to evade the toll and assaults on tollkeepers and the gates on a much smaller scale. Large scale riots returned in November of eighteen forty two, and we'll get to that after another quick sponsor break. As we said before the break. After the toll gates had been destroyed at Ivowin and Flamboidi in eighteen thirty nine, they were not rebuilt. There was this sort of pause in Rebeccaite demonstrations in Wales, although general unrest was still ongoing. Then in eighteen forty two, agriculture prices declined sharply, and that October a new gate called the Mermaid was built on the Lime Road in Saint Clear's and Carmarthenshire. On November eighteenth, Rebecca It attacked it and tore it down. Not long after, Rebecca Heites tore down the gates at Pooshtrap near Saint Clear's and at Trevaugh near Carmarthen. Demonstrations continued after that, and by December twelfth all the gates in Saint Clear's had been destroyed. There were local leaders of this movement in various towns and nighttime meetings to organize and rally support, but there was no one Rebecca who was the key to all this across all of Wales. In addition to planning out which tollgates to attack next, these meetings looked at other issues farmers and workers were facing. Rebeccaites encouraged one another to withhold their rent or to pay only the amount they thought was reasonable. This eventually became contentious, with Rebecca Heites attacking landlords whose behavior they thought was predatory, but also sometimes attacking other farmers who refused to participate in these rent protests or signed leases that the Rebecca Eight thought were unfair. As attacks on the gates escalated in late eighteen forty two, magistrates called for help. Royal marines were deployed from Pembroke Dock and police were called in from London, but they really couldn't stop these demonstrations. By March of eighteen forty three, every gate being managed by the Whitland Road Trust had been torn down, and in one town an armed mob had forced a toll collector and his wife out into the street naked and then tore down part of their house. The gates around Carmarthen were destroyed in May. Then on June nineteenth, demonstrators tried to destroy Camarthen's Workhouse, releasing the people being housed there, throwing beds and bedding out the windows and demolishing what they could. It's not clear how many people were involved in the attack on the workhouse. Estimates range from hundreds to two thousand, and it seems to have been a somewhat spontaneous assault. Unlike most of the Rebecca tests, the crowd included women and children, and aside from one man dressed as Rebecca, people were wearing their regular clothes. They were planning to march to Gildall Square to take their grievances to the magistrates, but along the way part of the crowd split off to attack the workhouse. In response to the workhouse attack, the light dragoons were deployed under the command of Colonel James Frederick Love, and authorities read the Riot Act. That's the text that was read alowed to demonstrators, ordering them to disperse their face criminal charges. Sixty people were arrested and eleven were convicted. After this, this was really when the Rebecca Riots started to get attention outside of this region of Wales. Eventually, the riots were well known enough that the imagery associated with them was being used to connect to other issues. The satirical magazine Punch carried an illustration in eighteen forty three that blended Irish nationalism with the riots, depicting Daniel O'Connell and the Repeat Association as Rebecca Rioters. The Repeal Association was advocating for the repeal of the Acts of Union of eighteen hundred, which had dissolved the Irish Parliament and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In this cartoon, Prime Minister Robert Peel is a toll collector and men in dresses are attacking a gate with slats that are labeled Church rate, Union tides and poor laws. Sometimes this is reprinted with the caption cutoff as a straightforward illustration just of the Rebecca riots, but the caption makes the connections to Peel O'Connell and the Repeal Association completely clear. The Time sent reporter Thomas Campbell Foster to Wales and he reported on the disturbances for about six months. Most of the local newspapers in Wales were really critical of the rioters, although some of them did also print letters that had been written by Rebecca Itites. Overall, though, Foster's reports were more sympathetic to all the social and economic issues that were at the heart of the riots, although without condoning the rioter's actions. I also want to know that I haven't read through Foster's reporting. I'm kind of relying on sources that have described it as more sympathetic, at least relatively speaking. But not long after this, Foster also went to Ireland to report on the Great Famine, which started in eighteen forty five, And while there were aspects of that reporting that were sort of similarly sympathetic to the hardships that Irish people were facing, it could also be really disparaging and reflect a lot of anti Irish bias. So while I read a lot of sort of summaries that described this reporting as like more sympathetic. It would not be surprising to me at all if some of those same threads were present in his reporting on Wales. He was an English reporter, presenting himself as an impartial outside observer in both cases, but he was still definitely coming at it from an English perspective, and English society saw itself as superior to both Ireland and Ways, as well as a long list of other countries. So many authorities also started taking stronger actions to try to stop the protests after the Carmarthen riots, but initially military units that were sent to the area to try to keep order weren't very effective at doing so. Basically, marching soldiers were loud and visible, so rebecca Itites were easily able to avoid them, and a common pastime among locals was feeding the soldier's false information about which gates were likely to be attacked next. They definitely come across as pretty bumbling at this point in the story. In the summer of eighteen forty three, there were overall fewer attacks on the toll gates, but the attacks themselves tended to be a lot stronger and more violent, and then beyond just the Gates. Rebecca Itites also sent threatening letters to landlords and debt collectors, and they committed other acts of arson and vandalism. This included burning crops and haystacks and outbuildings as well was damaging trees. By August of that year, rebecca It's were also holding mass meetings to discuss and push for political changes. Sometimes there were thousands of people in attendance. Also, there are a lot of accounts of men dressed as Rebecca doing things like forcing men to marry the mothers of their children who had been born out of wedlock, or if that was not possible, forcing those men to support those children, or punishing men who had abused or abandoned their families. So in addition to sort of fighting back against all of these social and economic issues in Wales, kind of maintaining a social order within the Welsh laboring and farming classes. The riot's only known death took place in September of eighteen forty three. That was when Sarah Williams, tollkeeper in Hindi Gate near Swansea, was shot. Some modern descriptions of Williams's death say she was young, but newspaper reporting from the time just scribe her as seventy five. An inquest was convened and a jury ruled that her cause of death was unknown, despite a surgeon testifying about evidence that she had been shot in the chest. Authorities offered a reward of five hundred pounds for information on who had killed her, but a culprit was never identified. She was very obviously shot, and I've seen some analysis of this that has like concluded that it was a case of jury nullification, somebody, you know, trying to protect the actual culprit, something like that. Eventually, the UK government deployed eighteen hundred soldiers and two cannons to Wales and sent more police officers from London. Colonel Love's attempts to keep order clearly had not been effective, so Major General George Brown was also dispatched to start overseeing the effort. Love had mostly responded to riots and demonstrations after they were already happening, but Brown started trying to station police and soldiers all around the world region and to just be more proactive. Arrests really increased over the autumn, and the number of incidents at the tollgates dropped sharply. However, since a lot of the tollgates had been destroyed and then either replaced with chains or not rebuilt. A lot of people were just passing by the tollgates without stopping to pay anything. A Royal Commission was convened to investigate the toll roads in October of eighteen forty three, with MP Thomas Franklin Lewis presiding. This commission issued its report in eighteen forty four and didn't find that there was widespread or systemic mismanagement of the toll system or wrongdoing by the toll trusts. But the commission did find some issues like multiple trusts all putting their own toll houses along the same road, and trusts building toll gates and then expecting the local community to repair and maintain them. In response to this, Parliament passed Lord Cauday Act, or the Turnpike South Wales Act in eighteen forty four, which simplified the toll system, reduced the number of toll houses, and regulated the turnpike trusts. The large Rebeccaite demonstrations had really ended by the time this law was passed, and trials of people who were arrested in connection to them ended. In early eighteen forty four. Although rioting was punishable by hanging, mostly Rebeccaites were convicted of lesser charges. Some of them were transported to Australia. In the decades that followed the Rebecca Riots, some of the issues that had led to the unrest improved, at least to some extent. The development of railways in Wales made it easier for people to travel and to transport their goods. Gradually, the toll gates were removed, with the last toll gate of this era ceasing operation in eighteen ninety five, although a number of toll roads and toll bridges have come and gone since then. There were also changes to the poor laws, and the corn Laws were repealed in eighteen forty six. We didn't talk about the corn Laws at all in this episode, but these were tariffs that were generally seen as favoring rich landowners over working people, and in times of scarcity they could make food prohibitively expensive for poor people to buy. They were repealed in part because of the effects of the Great Famine in Ireland. The riots also became the subject of fiction and theater, starting even before they ended. As examples, there was a play called Rebecca and Her Daughters that was staged at Royal Amphitheater, Liverpool. In eighteen forty three, Elizabeth Amy Dillon published a novel called The Rebecca Rioter, a Story of a Kila life in two volumes at eighteen eighty. Dylan Thomas wrote a screenplay called Rebecca's Daughters in nineteen forty eight that eventually became a film much later in nineteen ninety two. There are also a couple of different bands that have named themselves the Rebecca Riots, including an acoustic folk trio out of Berkeley, California in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands. There's a wooden sculpture commemorating the Rebecca Riots in Saint Clair's which was commissioned by the Saint Clair's Council and unveiled in March of two thousand and eight. It depicts three men in dresses, one on horseback, breaking down a fence. The men and horses are carved from cedar and the fence is ash. Some of the toll gates from this era are also still standing and in some cases are being lived in as homes. Yeah, there are a couple others that are more like museums community spaces. We will wrap it up with a quote from the introduction of that nineteen ten book we've referenced a couple of times. This introduction was written by Gladys Tobat Evans. Quote. Rebeccaism was the spirit of revolt which filled the whole nature of the peasant against the tyranny of the government, the oppression of the masses by the classes, the fostering of the individual rights at the expense of they at large. Rebeccaism was the embodiment of the peasants anger and righteous indignation at the trampling underfoot of his rights and his feelings. Rebeccaism was the spirit of a nation asserting itself against the wrongdoings and evil actions of the few, that is, the Rebecca Riots. Do you have a bit of listener mail? I do. This is from Sarah, and Sarah wrote, Holly and Tracy. I just listened to your recent episodes on mourning Dove. I found it incredibly informative, thought provoking, and it was actually relatable to the goings on in our library. Recently we had Emma Noise or author of Baby Speaks Salish, give a talk about her experiences as a member of the Synix Band of the Confederated Tribes of the Callville Reservation. She spoke about coyote stories, the importance of listening, and her discussion about her language was more than interesting. I've been listening to your podcast for years now, and every episode as a learning opportunity. Thanks for all the hard work and for the thoughtfulness that goes into episodes such as this. A brief description of the book, quote Baby Speaks Salish as a one of a kind manual created by a mother seeking to share more call the Okanagan Salish language with her daughter than she herself was exposed to as a young girl. Created for caregivers and the language curious, this book provides simple examples for how to integrate more Salish words into adult and child interactions. This book can be purchased in some local bookstores in Spokane, Washington. It's also online at from here Spokane dot com. Thanks Sarah, Thanks so much, Sarah. I had not heard about this book, but I love this idea and it also gives me a moment to say. Our colleague Whune Lance Twitchell, who is host of the podcast The Tongue Unbroken, which is coming back for a new season in the beginning of twenty twenty four. Has also written a book which is called Kuhanti. And this book was written in conjunction with ling It language speakers and is written only in the indigenous language without translations. So it's like a book written in that language for kids, which is an idea I love. And I was so happy when I learned that Hune had gotten it published. So thank you Sarah for this email for giving me a chance to name drop that if you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over social media at mist in History, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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