Mary Alice Nelson, aka Molly Spotted Elk

Molly was born on Indian Island, Maine, and she turned to dance to help her family make ends meet. But because audiences and companies in the U.S. pushed her toward stereotypical depictions of Native Americans, she eventually took her dancing to France.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
building your website today at squarespace dot com. Enter offer
code History at check out to get ten percent off
square Space. Build it Beautiful. Welcome to steph you missed
in history class from works dot com. Hello, and welcome

(00:25):
to the podcast. I am Tracy B. Wilson and I'm
Holly Frying. A few weeks ago, I was at the
Boston Atheneum. I needed to check out a book that
I wanted to use as a resource for our recent
episode on the Anglo Cherokee War, and because we have
not talked as much about Native American history lately, I
also spent some time just browsing the shelves around that

(00:46):
book to see if anything else caught my eye. Uh,
and one did. It was called Women of the Dawn
by Bunny McBride, and it's about four Native American women
from northeastern North America. And that's specific book did not
did not work out as a source for Usher just
because it reads like fiction. And I don't know about you, Holly.
When a when a historical text reads like fiction, it's

(01:09):
very hard for me to pick out the fact parts
from like the more color parts. So UM. I did, however,
learn about another book by the same author, which is
Molly Spotted Elk a Panop Scott in Paris. Molly Spotted
Elk was the stage name of Mary Alice Nelson, and

(01:31):
Mary Alice Nelson exself itself is an Anglicized form of
her name, which was Molly Dellis. We are going to
follow Bunny McBride's lead because she wrote her book Um
with the consent and involvement of her family, so I
think she knows best. We're gonna call her Molly for
this episode. Molly was born in Old Town on Indian Island, Maine,

(01:54):
and she turned to dance as a way for her
family to try to make ends meet, but has audiences
and dance companies and other venues in the United States
were really pushing her towards stereotypical depictions of Native Americans.
She eventually took that dancing to France. When you mentioned
this episode in that aspect of it to me, I

(02:16):
was reminded of our episode on Maria tal Chief where
she talked about as a child being put on these
stage shows where they were doing these very stereotype false
history Native American dance type things. And it ran very
similar to me in that regard. Yeah, there are some
similarities definitely with Maria tal Chief. There are also some

(02:38):
similarities to Josephine Baker, So yeah, she's got some parallels
with some other stuff, but still her own unique story.
And today, the Panomscot people are a federally recognized tribe
headquartered on Indian Island in the Panompscot River in Maine.
They're part of the Wabanaki Confederacy. Wabanaki means people of
the Dawn because they're collective. Terra Tory is on the

(03:00):
eastern edge of the North American East Coast. Historically, the
panops Got people were a highly mobile society. They used
birch bark canoes to move along the river and other
waterways and warm weather and sleds and snow shoes when
everything was frozen over because it gets quite cold in Maine.
Uh Hunting animals like moose and deer and muskrat was

(03:22):
a major source of food and materials for clothing. Fishing
was a staple as well, as we're growing and gathering.
By the time Molly was born on November seventeenth of
nineteen o three, Europeans arrival in North America had changed
the panop Scot way of life radically. Only about four
hundred people remained on a reservation on Indian Island. Introduced

(03:45):
diseases and violent conflicts had reduced the nation's population, while
their territory had shrunk through land cessations to first European
and then American governments. Hunting had ceased to be workable
as the major engine of the nation's economy me and
instead many of the Panops got relied in one way
or another on mains tourist industry or in entertainment. The

(04:09):
reliance on the tourist industry was definitely true of Molly's mother, Philamine,
who practiced traditional medicine and was also a basket maker.
Basket making is culturally very important to the panop Scott people.
Baskets are made of ash splints and sweet grass, and
the ash tree that they're made from is actually part
of the panop Scott creation story. Philamine was highly renowned

(04:32):
at making these baskets, both for her skill and making
beautiful baskets and because she was so prolific at making
them that she was able to put a significant amount
of income toward her family's expenses by selling them during
the tourist season, and the men in Molly's family were
notable as well. Molly's father, Horace, was the first panop
Scott to attend Dartmouth College, where he went for a year,

(04:55):
and he would later become a representative of the Panopska
people in the main legislature and eventually the governor of
the Penobscot nation. Both her paternal grandfathers were also tribal leaders.
Molly's career as a dancer started when she was very young.
Tourreasts coming into the area would ask Native children to dance,
and if they did a lot of times they were

(05:17):
rewarded with a nickel. Molly really loved to dance, and
at the age of nine she wanted to get some
more formal training and she wanted to take ballet lessons
in Bangor, Maine. She started cleaning houses at the age
of nine to pay her own way to do this.
She also spent a lot of her time looking after
her younger siblings because she was the oldest of eight children.

(05:41):
At the age of thirteen, Molly finished junior high school
at old Town Junior High and rather than going directly
on to high school, though, she detoured to Massachusetts for
three years, where she worked as a governess to help
her family make ends meet, and from there she learned
that the vaudeville circuit was looking for Native American dancers,
so she joined a small vaudeville company and she danced

(06:03):
with them until nineteen. When we say a small vaudeville company,
these are ofen tiny, sometimes kind of fly by night operations.
Performer performers often had to provide all their own costumes
and makeup, and they performed in the little hole in
the wild venues, some of which barely had a stage
or a curtain. But Molly really really loved dance, and

(06:25):
she was very good at it, and she was able
to scrimp and save her pay from these performances to
help the rest of her family. For the next few years,
she alternated between performing and trying to go back to school.
She really desperately wanted an education, and what she didn't
send back to her family she sucked away into a
school fund, and almost in cycle, she took breaks from

(06:48):
school to go to Boston to work, and then returned
to Indian Islands to enroll in school again. In the
summer of nineteen three, she got a job as a
so called Indian council are at a summer camp for
affluent girls. Summer camps were starting to become a popular
activity for youth, especially for families who've had a little

(07:08):
more money, UH, and a lot of camps at this point,
we're starting to lean on a hodgepods of Native American
cultural tropes for their themes and camp rituals, something that
has continued on into today in a lot of places.
The Boy Scouts, for example, were incorporated by Congress in
nineteen ten, and by nineteen fifteen they were explicitly including

(07:30):
Native American themes in the honor society known as the
Order of the Arrow. Molly's job at this camp was
to lend an air of Native American authenticity and to
lead the girls in Native themed activities such as canoeing
and dancing. She was fired from this job, which was
mortifying for her, when some pieces of jewelry that had

(07:51):
gone missing were found in her trunk and they may
have been put there intentionally to frame her. Yeah, a
lot of people that were um interview you for this book,
UH talked about how they didn't think that she had
stolen anything. They thought that somebody had done it on
purpose to get her in trouble, because even though she
was popular among a lot of the girls, she was

(08:12):
also facing a lot of racism on the job there.
In September of that year, after the summer, she started,
at the age of twenty, high school for the last time.
And by this point, obviously she was a lot older
than most of her peers in the class, and she
was really torn between trying to educate herself and trying
to earn money for her family. In the fall, she

(08:34):
started missing classes to pursue other work and eventually stopped
going entirely, but she didn't stop trying to pursue education though.
She went to live with the family of Frank Speck,
who was an anthropologist working at the University of Pennsylvania,
and she had met with him when she was younger
and he had been doing research on Indian Island. He

(08:55):
made arrangements for her to attend Swarthmore Preparatory School and
audit classes at the Universe City, and Molly contributed to
a study he was working on called Penobscott Man, The
Life of a Forest Tribe in Maine. It's not completely
clear whether Molly, ever, ultimately graduated from the university. There
are some newsletters that list her as an alumna, but

(09:18):
her personal papers are more ambivalent about it. Ironically, however,
both Molly and a sister who attended the university were
housed in the on campus International House. When Molly eventually
struck out on her own. It was to make a
more serious pursuit as a performer, and we're going to
talk a lot about that, but first we were going
to pause for a break where we talk about one

(09:41):
of our awesome sponsors. When Molly left her studies at
the University of Pennsylvania again not quite sure whether she
graduated or just stopped, it was to join an old
West show, Joseph Zachary and George Miller's One oh one

(10:06):
Ranch Show, which was named after the Father's ranch in Oklahoma.
This show toured from April to October, and then it
performed in an arena that was built at the ranch
for the rest of the year. One of Molly's sisters
had joined this troupe previously kind of brought Molly on
board with the One on one Ranch Show. Molly did
some horseback and elephant writing, as well as a lot

(10:28):
of dancing. She and her sister were also in a
film that the Miller Brothers made called On with the Show.
At one point she won a dance competition at a
pow wow, and it's possible that her Spotted Elk stage
name was actually given to her at this point by
one of the Plains tribes that she was performing with
while in Oklahoma. She definitely started using the stage name

(10:50):
Molly Spotted Elk after she got back from Oklahoma. In
Molly moved to New York, hoping to find fame as
a dancer, saying that if she did, her mother would
not have to sell baskets anymore. And she also still
continued to pursue her own education extensively reading, studying, and
writing during her off hours, which she really continued to

(11:12):
do for the rest of her life. She also kept
a diary, which was another thing she would do through
most of her life, and she relentlessly critiqued her own
dance abilities in it. So no matter how much critics
raved about her, she just never felt like she deserved
to call her own work excellent. And addition to trying
to find work as a dancer, Molly also made some

(11:34):
money as an artist's model, and as a footwear model
she had these very delicate five five feet and consequently
they were pretty sought after bottle footwear. She also gave
dance lessons and continued sending as much of her money
as she could back home to her family. I kind
of loved the irony that a dancer had such lovely
feet that people wanted to photograph them, I know, because

(11:56):
very often that is not the case when you're dancing
all the time. Yeah. I studied dance in college and
my feet are hideous, as we're all of the dancers
that I danced with, So go Molly. Eventually, Molly joined
the Foster Girls chorus line, which had been founded by
Alan Kay Foster in and with them she traveled to

(12:17):
San Antonio, Texas for an eight month engagement at the
Aztec Theater, where the company performed as sort of like
an opening act for films that were screened there. Molly
also got cameo roles and solos as Princess Spotted Elk,
and she gradually started doing private performances as well. After
the Foster Girls went back to New York, Molly got

(12:38):
work with another Pinop Scott entertainer, Lucy Nicola, whose stage
name was Princess Guadawassu. Her troupe was all Native Americans
and they performed in the Keith Albie Orpheum vaudeville circuit.
We haven't really talked about it, but entertainment, we briefly
said at the top of the show was one of
the one of the few career opportunities really open to

(13:00):
Native people at this time, and so um Lucy had
kind of arranged this all native troop to that end.
Lucy was actually also from Indian Island, and her family
had similarly made their living selling baskets in Kinnebunk in Kinnebunkport, Maine.
So Lucy and Molly had a lot in common from
that perspective. Soon, Molly was combining the vaudeville work that

(13:24):
she was doing with solo performances in which she would
perform both traditional Penobscot and other Native American dances with
more contemporary styles like the Charleston in the Black Bottom.
In Molly got what she hoped would be her big break.
It was a major role in The Silent Enemy, which
was a docu drama that came out in nineteen thirty.

(13:44):
This was a silent film with an all Native cast
about the Ojibway people in northern Canada. The film, set
before the arrival of European colonists, documented one tribe struggle
against hunger in the face of a brutal winter. This film,
Occupi has a bit of an odd place in film history.
Producer William Douglas Burden wanted to combat stereotypes of Native

(14:07):
Americans with his film. He was inspired by previous docu dramas,
and he originally planned to hire and all Ojibway cast
and to tell a story that was both sympathetic and accurate.
In the end, three of his UH five lead actors,
including Molly, wound up coming from other tribes, and one
of those three was a multi racial man who was

(14:29):
sort of hiding the complexities of his racial and ethnic
background UH and instead presenting himself as someone who had
been raised strictly as a Native person in a Native community.
Minor parts and extras came from a mix of Ojibway
actors as well as other Native American and First Nations people's.

(14:49):
Although the actors themselves collaborated on the scripts through rewrites
and revisions, the ends story that was told was still
filtered through a white lens, with some tropes that were
inaccurate and frankly offensive. For example, there was an evil
medicine man, and there's some treatment of animals that would
simply not fly in the film world today. So in

(15:09):
a lot of ways, this film was way ahead of
many others of the day in terms of opportunities for
representation of Native Americans in film. But if you watch
it today, and you can, it's available at archive dot org,
there is a lot that is still stereotypical or insensitive,
even when it came to things that have been refined

(15:29):
to be more accurate to Native American traditions. A lot
of the Native Americans who were involved in that process
were from different tribes, and as we've talked about on
the show before, Native American is not like one monolithic culture.
There are lots of huge nuances among things. So uh,
in some cases there were there were opinions that were

(15:51):
absolutely true for one tribe but not actually true for
the tribe that was being shown in the film. In
addition to being in a sort of in between place
in terms of representation of Native Americans and film, something
that you know, good representations of Native people were that
was hugely important to Molly and her work. This film

(16:13):
was also in an in between place in terms of
the transition from silent films to talkies. This was one
of the last silent films that Paramount ever produced, and
by the time it was ready to be released, the
world had mostly moved on to talkies. Nobody really wanted
to watch a silent film anymore, so in an effort
to salvage this movie, Paramount recorded a talking preface that

(16:35):
started before the main body of the film, as well
as a synchronized score with narration so people would hear
the narrator talking rather than reading titles on the screen.
The Silent Enemy, which had involved a year of grueling
filming in northern Maine, much of it during winter, was
released to almost unanimous critical praise, but as is often

(16:57):
the case with films that get a lot of critical praise,
it was not a financial success. Molly was able to
use her pay from it to buy her family a
new house on Indian Island, but it really did not
open the door to real fame the way she had hoped.
This is one of the first of many things where
I just feel like Molly could not catch a break

(17:18):
like like. The film was really good. The big thing
that worked against it was that the world had just
moved on to talkies by the time the film came out,
Otherwise it probably would have done much better at the
box office. So once the film came out, Molly went
back to working on clubs and stages, including getting a
contract with the Provincetown Players. She was approached for a

(17:39):
role in Cecil b the Mills remake of The squaw Man,
but that wound up falling through. She kept persevering and
finding solo roles and performance opportunities, and just trying ceaselessly
to portray Native American dances authentically, at least as much
as Broadway directors and audiences would allow. As had been
the case in so many other times in her life,

(18:02):
Molly took on multiple roles and bookings to help her
family back home as much as she could. She also
turned to direct advocacy, writing to state agencies and newspapers
to petition for more fair treatment of the Panomscot people
by the state appointed Indian Agent, which was at the
time the person who was responsible for dispersing funds to
the population. In one talent aimed. Thomas O'Brien invited Molly

(18:28):
to Paris, and this marked a huge shift in her life.
We will talk about it after another brief break for
a word from a sponsor. Molly's opportunity in Paris was
as part of a Native American jazz band known as
the United States Indian Band, which was to travel to

(18:50):
Europe as part of the International Colonial Exposition. Molly was
enormously excited to bring her dances to a new audience,
but unbeknownst to the band, they were there in part
to show cultural progress among Native Americans. So this was
in the era in which these expositions essentially contained human zoos.

(19:10):
The presence of the jazz band was sort of one
step up from that. In in addition to being part
of the jazz band, Molly also became part of the
International Ballet Corps. You know, we've talked about these expos
in some previous shows, where there would be like, this
is a village from an African nation with the villagers
living there, and people would kind of come to gawk

(19:32):
at it. Uh So the jazz band was not that,
but it was also like they hands selected the band
to show, hey, Native Americans can go to college now,
and like that has its own issues, like it's not
being put into a human zoo, but in a way
it's got some similarities to that. At the end of

(19:56):
the expo, the rest of the band went home and
Molly side and to stay in Paris. This was a
risk she was taking, basically hoping she would be able
to find work. European audiences approached her dancing in a
very different way from how audiences had approached it in
the States and the United States. Moley was basically a
colonial subject, and she was expected to play out a

(20:17):
stereotype of a Native American woman. European audiences still saw
her as strange and exotic, but seemed a lot more
willing to learn about her and her tradition and to
want to see authentic culture rather than expecting her to
perform a racist trope for their amusement. She moved out

(20:37):
of clubs and into cabarets, concerts, and recitals. For these performances,
becoming known as Princess Spotted Elk. She became pretty highly acclaimed,
not exactly famous, but she was finding steady work and
all the while she was still trying to learn. She
was going to lectures at the Slurbun and she was
working with Parisian anthropologists on their studies. Uh. This effort

(21:00):
to make money and survive while also educating herself was
just a theme through her whole life. Early on in
her stay in Paris, Molly met Jean Arschambeaux, who interviewed
her for Paris Soir shortly after her arrival, and he
fell in love with her and began writing her really
beautiful love letters, and he proposed two months after they met,

(21:24):
It's going to be one of the many times where
I say, if you are interested in this story, read
the book Molly spotted al Ka Panovs got in Paris,
because some of these love letters are excerpted there and
they're lovely. Molly, however, was reluctant, although she did eventually
take him up on an offer to rent a room

(21:44):
in his parents home. His parents were initially really welcoming
of her, but they became a little less approving as
it became clear that their son was pretty serious about her.
During this time, Molly worked on a novel, She kept
up with her diaries and her hers, and she really
threw herself into trying to make a real career as
a performer, and it really seemed like she was making

(22:07):
headway in this regard until the Great Depression struck along
with political turmoil in France and the rest of Europe,
and everything started to crumble. Molly's film opportunities all fell through. Jean,
who she called Johnny, lost his job at Paris Soir,
probably because his politics did not align with the view
that the paper needed to promote to sell enough copies

(22:29):
to stay in business, and then he lost his subsequent
job at Le Petitjean Now and started struggling to freelance.
By nine thirty three, three years into her relationship with Johnny,
Molly was out of money. She was facing chronic health
problems due to having had tuberculosis. She became homesick, then
she got anthrax, for which she was successfully treated. Then

(22:51):
she got pregnant. Johnny and Molly wanted to get married
as soon as they realized that she was pregnant, but
French law meant that she needed to present a birth certificate,
which would be followed by a number of delays in
trying to get a marriage license. Molly finally decided that
it would be best and safest if she went back
to the United States with the plan that Johnny would

(23:12):
join her later. It seemed more likely that they would
be able to get married there than that they would
be able to jump through all the hoops that she,
as a Native American from the United States, would have
to jump through to get married to him in France.
After writing to her sister, Molly went back to the
United States by boat and a journey that took a month,
only to find after getting to California, where her sister

(23:35):
had been living, that her sister had actually moved to
New York while Molly was in transit. Then, on May
thirty one, nine thirty four, Molly's daughter, who she named Jean,
was born two months early. Her sister wound up borrowing
some money to come back to Los Angeles to help out,
and in the fall of four Molly and the baby
went back to Indian Island, where the baby promptly contracted

(24:00):
hooping cough in influenzas. So as Tracy mentioned earlier, Molly
just could not catch a break. Yeah. Fortunately, baby Jean
recovered UM. She had a combination of traditional healing methods
from her grandmother, Molly's mother um and from a doctor,
so it was a blend of of treatments since she

(24:22):
did successfully recover, which is good because whooping cough and
influenza are both very serious, especially in a baby. The
following January, Molly got a role in the opera Mini
Ha Ha, which was by Peter Joseph Engels, and she
took this role even though it meant that she would
have to leave her baby with her mother. With her

(24:45):
daughter and her mother's care, Molly went back to trying
to earn money as a dancer and a performer. Although
she did get small roles in several films. Once again,
her film career didn't really take off, and she had
several minor things to her credit, but not any leading roles.
And this time, instead of trying to fund an education
for herself, as had been the case so often before,

(25:06):
she was trying to stock away her extra money to
either find her way back to France or to get
Johnny to the United States. That separation that they had
been living in was really difficult for both of them.
Molly had expected, and perhaps even okayed uh that Johnny
was going to have casual relationships with other women while

(25:27):
she was gone, but he wound up having an affair
with a woman that he said had been sent to
spy on him, and the emotional weight of this relationship,
in Molly's view, really crossed a line. This is also
the there's also the part that it was the dangerous
Johnny was involved. Johnny was a socialist, and so there

(25:48):
was some reason to suspect that this person really had
been sent to spy on him. UM, but definitely the
it seemed a more emotional affair than Molly was comfortable with. UH.
And after a series of tense letters, some of which
crossed in the mail or got lost in the mail entirely,
Johnny was on the verge of applying for a visa
to come to the United States. He asked Molly to

(26:10):
help him secure the necessary documentation that he either had
money or a job waiting for him when he got there.
But then he got sept to seemia. He had a
friend write Molly a letter a few weeks into this
multi month illness, because sept to seemia also is very
dangerous UH to tell her what was going on. But
those letters didn't arrive, and in the meantime, over her

(26:32):
mother's fierce objections. Because Molly's mother had become very attached
to Jean and had been raising her for a while,
and Molly was going to take Jean with her. Molly
made arrangements to go back to France with her daughter
in nineteen thirty eight. This is where, uh, I knew
there was some sadness in this story before I started

(26:52):
researching it, this fact that she goes back to France
in ninety eight being some foreshadowing. I'm to say it's
sadder than I thought it was going to be. Back
in France, Molly's life was less about public performance. She
might have done some dancing, but it would have been
in private halls or recitals. She and Johnny tried to

(27:13):
make ends meet through writing, including a French edition of
Panop Scott Legends, and eventually they had to move in
with Johnny's parents. Molly gave birth to a second child
in the spring of nineteen thirty nine, but the baby
died at about two weeks old and had never left
the hospital. Molly's book of Panop Scott Legends was published
later that summer, but just as her promotional tour was

(27:36):
scheduled to begin, Hitler invaded Poland. Shortly after that, Molly
and Johnny finally got married this obviously looming war and
Nazi invasion, dispelling any of Molly's lingering reservations about whether
a relationship or a marriage between her and Johnny was
going to work out. Johnny became a Scout master, assisted

(27:58):
with the Red Cross, helped refuge gee's and was vocally
anti Nazi. Molly sought aid from an Morgan, who was
JP Morgan's daughter to try to get the couple out
of France and and sent them a check to get
to Paris with the hope that they could meet someone
there who would help get them out of the country
and into the United States. However, because they had no

(28:21):
jobs waiting for them in the United States, and because
security to get into the United States had become a
lot tighter during the war, and because France's Socialist Party,
which Johnny was part of, had at one point considered
uniting with Germany's Socialist Party, which became the Nazi Party,
they just could not get a visa for Johnny to

(28:42):
go to the United States. Even though he had personally
been vehemently and adamantly against connecting to Germany's National Socialist Party,
it was still too big of a black mark against him.
There were just too many complicating factors. Molly was offered
a place on a refugee ship that was on for
the United States, but she refused to leave without her husband. Johnny,

(29:05):
marked an eligible for military service because of a heart problem,
made arrangements to flee by boat along with the scouts
that he was working with. Molly and Jean were supposed
to go to but at the last minute learned that
they couldn't because of their sex. Molly insisted that Johnny
go anyway, because at this point leaving was critical to
both his health and the scouts in his charge. She

(29:27):
had been really, really determined that if they were leaving,
they were leaving together, but at this point she was like,
you've got to go or you are going to die.
Once Johnny made his escape by river, Molly decided to
try to reach safety via Portugal. This was a seven
hundred mile trip. With help from Anne Morgan, she did
secure a third class fair for herself and her daughter

(29:49):
aboard the s S Manhattan, and she made her way
to the port by hitchhiking, by an ambulance, on in
a cart, on foot, and eventually by train. A lot
of this part that was done by foot and by hitchhiking,
was over the Pyrenees Mountains, where they basically slept by
the side of the road. Back in the United States,
Molly and Jean went back to Old Town. They moved

(30:10):
in with her parents. Her father at this point was
the Panamscat governor. They anxiously awaited word that Johnny and
the Scouts had made it out of Nazi occupied territory,
eventually learning that they had and were in a refugee
camp in Toulouse. While writing letters back and forth to
Johnny and trying to secure a visa for him, Molly
got a job as a dancer and a wardrobe mistress

(30:33):
for a touring company from the Metropolitan Opera Company out
of New York. She danced, but she also did a
lot of cleaning the costumes and keeping them in good repair.
At this point, she was thirty seven. Johnny considered coming
to the US illegally, both to escape the Nazis and
to view with Molly, but he didn't. After being hospitalized
for about twelve days, he died in the hospital of

(30:55):
Saint Gaudan's on October twenty three. N My last friends
and her family later reported that her flight from Nazi
occupied France, and Johnny's death irrevocably changed her. She spent
the next few years going back and forth between Indian
Island and New York to perform. She also went to
California to once again try to find work in film,

(31:16):
and while she was there, she had a psychological collapse.
In March of nine, she wound up being hospitalized. Her
mother eventually brought her home, and she was later admitted
to Bangor State Mental Hospital, where she stayed for a year.
She recovered somewhat, finally returning to Indian Island, where she
spent the rest of her life. She published a Panop

(31:37):
Scott dictionary and crafted traditional dolls, two of which are
actually in the Smithsonian collection. She died on February twenty one,
ninety seven, at the age of seventy three, and that
was after a fall uh and it was two weeks
after her mother's death at age nineteen. Her daughter Jean
died on July eleven. It took a turn at the end.

(32:00):
I knew that there was some sadness at the end
from like my my cursory research at the beginning to
decide if this seemed like a good fit for our show.
I was not quite prepared for exactly how uh how
it it sort of takes a turn at the Great Depression,
and how much of her life is just she doesn't
seem like she can win. She she spent her whole

(32:24):
life trying so hard to find an audience for traditional dancing,
and to educate herself and to make enough money to survive,
and like all of these things were competing for her
time and attention, um, because of the fact that she
was was Native American, And I don't know, I just

(32:44):
I wasn't quite prepared for the downer, the last especially
the last act of this episode. Is there is, however,
so so so much more detail and Molly spotted Elka
Pana Got in Paris by Bunny McBride. That book Prince
lots of excerpts of her letters, letters to her letters

(33:06):
from Johnny to Molly, her diaries. It's uh and a
lot of that. Um. These are all things that I
felt really comfortable reading about in Bunnie McBride's book because
she did work with the family and had their direct
involvement in their permission to tell this story. But a
lot of them are really intimate, and I was like
I don't feel like I can read this super intimate

(33:27):
letter on her podcast. UM, but if if you want
to learn more about Molly and her life, that book
is really really good. You should pick it up. Do
you have some listener, ma'am a dear. I do. And
this actually throws back to an episode from quite a
while ago, but it's a it's a letter that we
just got, um, just as you and I were leaving

(33:49):
for a whirlwind ten days of travel to Salt Lake
City in the New York City. It is from Tessa
and it's about our episode on the Gallipoli Campaign. And
she says, Hi, Holly, and I see. My name is Tessa.
And to answer the every important question, I listened to
you in between dispatching ambulances or answering emergency ambulance calls
in camera. In the Australian Capital Territory, I live in

(34:11):
a city with one of the best war museums, the
Australian War Memorial. They have a great website and if
you find yourself in Canberra you should really visit. Whilst
listening to the Glibpoli campaign episode from on my way
to work tonight, I discovered your podcast at the beginning
of the year, and I'm hoping to catch up to
the most recent ones soonih I was thinking about Simpson

(34:32):
and his Donkey, thinking what a fantastic pot topic for
the podcast he would be when Lo and Behold you
mentioned him. When I was in kindergarten UH and year
one at primary school, my school and another nearby primary
school would come together on a hill named Simpson's Hill
for Anzac Day and novemberlen Remembrance Day. The hill was

(34:54):
of course named for him, and he continues to be
a very important part of the culture of these two schools.
Take the dog for a walk up there as often
as I can. Is that is quite close to my house.
There's a flagpole and a small memorial. They're surrounded by
browning natural grasses, some rosemary plants and poppies. I was
always fascinated with the story of Simpson and his Donkey

(35:15):
as a As an adult, it still brings a tear
to my eye that he was so filled with bravery
as someone who works for the ambulance service now, although
in a communication side of things, I see him as
a shining example of how you can be filled with
the termination and care for your mates and Cambra, we
take pride in our memorial services for Anzac Day. It
is a public holiday and many folks will get up

(35:35):
at four am or earlier to get a good spot
on the Anzac parade, which is lined with memorials for
nurses the Vietnam, more and more for the memorial which
brings which begins at sunrise. A good Cambra joke is
that the first freezing morning of the year is always
going to be Antach Day morning. My dad used to
get up my little brother, sister and I and take

(35:56):
us down and explain to us, while we were shivering
in our jackets and blankets in the ark, why it
was important that we remember them. It was a good lesson. Nowadays,
during the memorials and celebrations for Anzac Day, there is
a special attention drawn to the nurses and women at
home and abroad who were affected by the war by service,
work or family. It's good that there's acknowledgment of their sacrifice. Sorry,

(36:18):
this email is a tadlong and may not make much sense.
It's by second night shift before days off, and I'm
a little tired. And then she concludes with some episode
suggestions and ends by saying thank you for the podcast,
which brightens my world immensely. Thanks, tess, I just wanted
to read that. I know that episode was quite a
long time ago, and for folks who don't remember, the

(36:40):
man she's talking about was an ambulance driver who was
evacuating soldiers, including on the back of a donkey, but
I don't know. I love to hear people who have
personal remembrances of how the things that we talk about
on our show. When you and I are Americans living
in the United States and and don't have personal experience
ants with um the how things have evolved uh to

(37:04):
be like public holidays in other parts of the world.
I love to hear from people who say, yeah, this
is exactly, this is how we observe this where I
live in this case in Canberra. So very thank you
so much, tess Uh. If you would like to write
to us about this or any other podcast, we're at
History Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com. We're also

(37:24):
on Facebook at facebook dot com, slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History. Are tumblers missed
in history dot com, wre dot com, and we're also
on panterest at pentrist dot com slash miss in History
as well as Instagram at missed in History. If you
want to learn more about what we talked about today
or any other subject, you can come to our parent
companies website, which is how stuff Works dot com. You

(37:45):
can also come to our website, which is missed in
history dot com, where you will find an archive of
every episode that has ever existed and show notes for
the episodes. Holly and I put together lots of other
cool stuff, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
miss in history dot com for more illness and thousands

(38:08):
of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.
Mmmmm