March 19, 2025 • 45 mins
Mary Hunter Austin was a U.S. writer known for walking throughout the American Southwest. But her life of activism was far more complicated than brief bios usually mention.
Research:
- "Mary Hunter Austin." Encyclopedia of the American West, edited by Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod, Macmillan Reference USA, 1996. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/BT2330100082/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=6a4f821e. Accessed 26 Feb. 2025.
- "Mary Hunter Austin." Encyclopedia of World Biography Online, vol. 23, Gale, 2003. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1631008133/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=ceca42e0. Accessed 26 Feb. 2025.
- #0840: Willa Cather to Mary Hunter Austin, June 26 [1926]. https://cather.unl.edu/writings/letters/let0840
- Austin, Mary Hunter. “Earth Horizon.” Houghton Mifflin. 1932.
- Austin, Mary Hunter. “Experiences Facing Death.” Bobbs-Merrill Company. 1931.
- Blend, Benay. “Mary Austin and the Western Conservation Movement: 1900-1927.” Journal of the Southwest , Spring, 1988, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Spring, 1988). https://www.jstor.org/stable/40169782
- Davis, Lisa Selin. “The Loneliest Land.” National Parks Conservation Association. Spring 2015. https://www.npca.org/articles/942-the-loneliest-land
- Egenhoff, Elizabeth L. “Mary Austin.” Mineral Information Service. November 1965. https://npshistory.com/publications/deva/mis-v18n11-1965.pdf
- Fink, Augusta. “I-Mary: A Biography of Mary Austin.” University of Arizona Press. 1983.
- Hoffman, Abraham. “Mary Austin, Stafford Austin, and the Owens Valley.” Journal of the Southwest , Autumn-Winter 2011, Vol. 53, No. ¾. Via JSTOR. http://www.jstor.com/stable/41710078
- Lanzendorfer, Joy. “Searching for Mary Austin.” Alta. https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a8713/searching-for-mary-austin-joy-lanzendorfer/
- Online Archive of California. “Austin (Mary Hunter) Papers.” https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c85t3ppq/
- Richards, Penny L. “Bad Blood and Lost Borders: Eugenic Ambivalence in Mary Austin’s Short Fiction.”
- Richards, Penny L. “Disability History Image #3.” 8/30/2005. https://disstud.blogspot.com/2005/08/
- Romancito, Rick. “The Image Maker and the Writer.” Taos News. 10/2/2024. https://www.taosnews.com/opinion/columns/the-image-maker-and-the-writer/article_7805f16a-8ab9-5645-9e84-4a189e18ac23.html
- Siber, Kate. “The 19th-Century Writer Who Braved the Desert Alone.” Outside. 1/22/2019. https://www.outsideonline.com/culture/books-media/mary-austin-mojave-nature-writer/
- Stout, Janis P. “Mary Austin’s Feminism: A Reassessment.” Studies in the Novel , spring 1998, Vol. 30, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/29533250
- The Ansel Adams Gallery. “Visions of Taos: The Making of “Taos Pueblo” by Ansel Adams and Mary Austin.” https://www.anseladams.com/visions-of-taos-the-making-of-taos-pueblo/
- Viehmann, Martha L. “A Rain Song for America: Mary Austin, American Indians, and American Literature and Culture.” Western American Literature , Spring 2004, Vol. 39, No. 1. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43022288
- Wynn, Dudley. “Mary Austin, Woman Alone.” The Virginia Quarterly Review , SPRING 1937, Vol. 13, No. 2. Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26433922
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start today's episode,
we have an announcement.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
We sure do.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, we are going to Morocco in November. Very exciting.
This is our next trip that we'll be having through
Defined Destinations. You can find out more about this trip
at Defined Destinations dot Com. The trip is called a
(00:41):
Taste of Morocco. They have a different Morocco trip that's
coming up in the incredibly near future, like just in
a couple or three weeks. I think it's not that trip.
It's the one that's in November. We'll be talking more
about this at the end of the episode today, but
I wanted to go ahead and put it out there
at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
We're going to Morocco.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
If you want to pause episode right now and go
to Defined Destinations dot Com to see about it, you
can do that.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We're talking about it more at the end though. Yeah.
I'm very excited me too.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
In terms of today's episode, I was looking for a
topic that had something to do with conservation or nature
or environmentalism. That was just what I felt like talking
about at the moment, and that ultimately led me to
Mary Hunter Austin. She published most of her work just
under the name Mary Austin, but since there are some
(01:34):
other historical Mary Austin's, I put the Hunter in there
for clarity in the title of the episode. I was
initially drawn to her story because one of the things
that she became known for was walking, and I do
love a walk. I usually walk in the woods, though,
and Austin's walks were mostly through the deserts of the
American Southwest, which she came to just deeply love. She's
(01:57):
been compared to people like John Muir, but she doesn't
have nearly that kind of name recognition today. Mary Austin
was a complicated person with a complicated life.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So it turns out there is not nearly as.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Much walking in the desert as I thought I was
going to get going into this episode. Also as a
heads up, this episode includes some pretty troubling stuff involving
her daughter, Ruth, who was disabled.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Mary Hunter was born September ninth, eighteen sixty eight, in Carlinville, Illinois.
She was the fourth of six children born to George
and Susannah Graham Hunter. George was a lawyer who had
immigrated from England in eighteen fifty one, and he had
served in the US Army during the Civil War. The
family spent much of Mary's childhood living on a farm
(02:47):
outside of town.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Mary really idolized her father. He loved to read, and
she loved to spend time in his study, which was
just full of books. She never really connected to her mother.
That she felt a need to have a relationship with
her mother, but that relationship could be very tumultuous. Susannah
was a strict Methodist who was very focused on religion
(03:10):
and respectability, and she later became involved in temperance organizations
like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Meanwhile, Mary was simultaneously intelligent, sensitive, stubborn,
and rebellious. Punishment, for example, was just not really a
deterrent to her. She would sort of do whatever she
(03:30):
wanted and deal with the consequences later. She felt like
her family didn't really understand her, and she was also
awkward and didn't have a lot of friends except for
her younger sister Jenny, who she was very close to.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
As an adult. Austin was known for her spirituality and mysticism,
and she claimed to be clairvoyant. This started at a
very early age. She described herself as seeing things like
mystical images that she wasn't sure if anyone else saw,
and of having memories of things that had happened before
she was born. She would also announce what she thought
(04:08):
other people were thinking or feeling, leaving her mother to
say that she thought Mary was possessed.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
By the age of four or five, Mary had started
to conceive of herself as two Mary's the regular Mary
who was sort of lonely and uncertain and always at
odds with her family, and then I Mary, who was
an inner self who was beyond and.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Above all of that.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Later on, she described this inner self as the source
of her writing. She also had a profound spiritual experience
at about that same age, sitting under a walnut tree,
in which she was just struck with a sudden awareness
of everything around her and a profound sense of wonder,
which she connected to God.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
George Hunter had contracted malaria while serving in the Civil War,
and he was chronically ill throughout Mary's childchildhood. He died
in October of eighteen seventy eight when Mary was about ten.
Then a couple of months later, Mary contracted diphtheria as
she was recovering, her sister Jenny got it to and
(05:14):
Jenny did not survive. Mary blamed herself for having gotten
her sister sick, and her mother blamed her as well.
At Jenny's funeral, Mary overheard her mother ask someone why
it couldn't have been Mary who died rather than her sister.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
After these deaths, the family left their farm and they
moved into Carlonville. Susannah got a job as a nurse
while she waited for approval on a widow's pension. With
her mother working, Mary took on a lot of the
household work, as well as the care of her baby brother, George.
She spent more and more time alone, reading and writing.
(05:52):
Susannah joined the Carlonville branch of the Chautauqua Literary and
Scientific Circle, and Mary started using their home study courses
to learn about literature and science. After reading a Chautauqua
course in geology, she became particularly fascinated with fossils and
started collecting them. Mary was bright and a good student
(06:13):
when she first started school. She was so far ahead
of her peers that she was placed in third grade.
In eighteen eighty four, at the age of sixteen, she
enrolled at Blackburn College in Carlonville, Illinois. She started out
studying art, but then changed to science. While she wanted
to be a writer, she thought she could master english
(06:34):
and writing on her own, and she wanted to dedicate
her college education to something else. Mary had a series
of illnesses, some of them pretty serious really, throughout her life,
and her college education was interrupted after she got a
cold that she couldn't seem to recover from. She had
to withdraw from Blackburn, and then once she was better,
(06:55):
she enrolled at the State Normal School in Bloomington, Illinois.
Quickly realized that she did not like the curriculum there,
so she went back to Blackburn and she graduated in
eighteen eighty eight. She had to get extra tutoring to
make up for these interruptions in her coursework because her
mother had given her a deadline she was going to
(07:16):
cut off Mary's financial support for her education if she
missed that deadline.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
By the time Mary graduated, her brother Jim had moved
to California's San Joaquin Valley and filed a claim on
a homestead there to recap. A series of homesteading laws
allowed people in the United States to claim purportedly public
lands for very little money under the condition that they
improve it, meaning that they had to settle on it
(07:42):
and cultivate it. But this was not vacant land that
was waiting to be occupied. It was the traditional and
ancestral homelands of indigenous nations and peoples who had been
stripped of that land through wars, treaties, and forestry locations.
Jim asked his mother for permission to file a claim
on her behalf as well, and without really talking to
(08:05):
Mary about it, Susannah and Jim decided that Mary should
go to California too, with the hope that she would
claim land of her own. It might seem surprising that
Mary agreed to go. She didn't really even think that
her mother should go. She thought Jim should have the
opportunity to have his own life rather than going back
(08:25):
to being the head of his mother's household, which is
what he had done after their father's death. Mary's relationships
with both Susannah and Jim had also really gone downhill
after George's death, but Mary went and became both physically
and emotionally unwell during the trip west, to the point
that Susannah's letters to her friends described the trip as
(08:48):
almost killing her. Although Mary was struck by the beauty
of some of the landscapes that they traveled through, her
condition got worse after arriving in California. Living in a
barely furnished cabin without enough food to live on, Mary
was tasked with hunting rabbits and other small game, which
(09:09):
she did, but she hated killing animals, and she could
barely tolerate eating what she.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Had brought in.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
She spent much of her time exploring the natural world
around her, writing down her observations, and having strange visions
and premonitions. It's not totally clear whether these were spiritual
experiences or reflective of her mental state and persistent malnourishment.
They had arrived in California in the middle of a drought,
(09:37):
and Susannah and Jim really struggled with their homesteads. Mary
didn't wind up filing a homestead claim of her own,
although there was a timber claim in her name that
was eventually abandoned. A neighbor offered the family the chance
to run an inn out of an existing building on
his land, and that helped them all make ends meet
(09:58):
enough for Jim and Susanna to keep their land claims.
As they started to have a little more money, Mary
started to physically recover, and she started to make connections
to the other people living in the area homesteaders, sheep herders,
and ranchers. The people she felt most at home with
were often Indigenous or Mexican, not the people her family
(10:21):
thought she should be associating with. She was interested in
the ways that people outside the world of white homesteaders
lived and in a landscape around her, and in how
they lived with it. In eighteen eighty nine, she tried
to get a job teaching, but failed the California Teaching
Exam twice. She finally got a job at a private school,
(10:41):
and she found lodgings with a family that she felt
a deeper affinity for than she did. Her own.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Teaching wasn't really what she wanted to do, though. She
wanted to write, and the one way it seemed like
she could get the financial support she needed to do
that was to get married. So we'll have more on
that after a sponsor break. Mary Hunter lived in an
(11:13):
era when marriage and motherhood were the expected path for
white middle class women. We've talked about a number of
women in similar circumstances who supported themselves through writing without
getting married. But Mary really didn't have the family support
that she would need to get started with that. Her
(11:33):
mother and her brother had their own plans, and they
weren't really including Mary in their decisions or in things
like the proceeds from the sale of their house back
in Illinois. Getting married probably seemed like the only option
for her to have some financial stability.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
But there were obstacles throughout her life. People commented on
Austin's appearance, which was not thought to be conventionally pretty
or feminine. She was very thin, and she had a
square jaw and heavy eyebrows. People didn't typically smile in
photos from this era, but in most pictures of Mary Austin,
(12:12):
she is frowning. And in a part of North America
that was considered the frontier, there were not that many
available men to choose from.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I feel like everybody that had these opinions about Mary
Hunter's appearance just needed to shut up.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
A lot of that talk, and it bothered me.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Stafford Wallace Austin, known as Wallace probably seemed like her
best possible choice for a husband. He was seven years
older than she was, but they were both intelligent and serious.
They could talk to each other as intellectual equals. He
was one of seven children born to a well off
sugar planter in Hawaii, and so it seemed like they
(12:54):
would be financially secure. Wallace was also supportive of Mary's
goals as a writer. They had direct conversations about these
goals before getting married, and his wedding present to her
was a gold pen with a pearl handle. Agreeing to
marry him seemed like the only thing her family thought
she had ever done right. They got married on May eighteenth,
(13:17):
eighteen ninety one, when Mary was twenty one.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
But this marriage did not go very well. One caveat
here is that almost everything we know about the marriage
comes from Mary's point of view, and her account is
really not kind to Wallace at all. But that financial
security did not really materialize, as Wallace kept investing in
ventures that did not work out. But Mary played a
(13:43):
role in their situation too. While they'd had candid conversations
about her ambitions as a writer, Wallace hadn't expected her
to just abandon most of the domestic tasks that a
wife typically handled, which is what she did. While they'd
had into actual conversations during their courtship as a married couple,
(14:03):
they really didn't seem to be able to talk through
what was going on in their lives.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
And what was going on was a lot of hardship
and continually moving around. Wallace tried to start a vineyard,
which failed. Then they moved to the Owens Valley where
he had embarked on an irrigation project with his brothers,
and then he went to San Francisco to work on
a different project with a brother. They just they were
(14:28):
never really settled and their money was always tight. Mary
got pregnant and during the last months of her pregnancy,
they were living in a hotel in Lone Pine that's
roughly between Fresno, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Mary went
out for a walk one day and came back to
find that they had been evicted for not paying the bills.
(14:50):
On the advice of an acquaintance, she went to a
boarding house that was primarily being used by mine workers
who had developed lead poisoning, which wasn't on the job has.
She offered to do things there like cook, clean, and
mend in exchange for a place to stay. When Wallace
got back, she learned that the irrigation project had failed
(15:11):
and that Wallace was now in debt because of it.
On top of that, he had known they were going
to be evicted and he had not told her, and
she found out that he had also turned down paying
work as a school principal. Mary kept working at the
boarding house, and she started seriously trying to publish enough
work to make ends meet, like short pieces like essays
(15:34):
and short stories. As her pregnancy made it increasingly difficult
to do the more physical parts of her job at
the boarding house, she decided to go to Bakersfield, where
her mother lived, to have the baby. On October thirtieth
of that year, she gave birth to her daughter, Ruth,
after a very difficult labor that lasted for more than
forty eight hours. While Mary was still recovering from giving birth,
(15:58):
Wallace told her that his finances had totally collapsed and
that he was facing legal action and that she should
handle his remaining property as she saw fit. She did
this by selling everything that could be sold and arranging
to pay off the rest of his debts in installments.
When Mary and Ruth joined Wallace back in the Owens Valley,
(16:21):
their relationship continued to be rocky. He had finally resigned
himself to teaching, so they had a small but steady income,
but he was angry that she had made arrangements to
pay off his debts rather than just filing for bankruptcy.
Mary and Ruth were also sick a lot of the time,
and sometimes Mary needed a wet nurse. Her nurse was
(16:44):
a Piute woman from a nearby settlement, as she was able. Though,
Mary kept writing and kept exploring the valley where they lived.
She really fell in love with the arid landscape, and
she formed relationships with many of the payute women who
were living in the area, voting one named Saab, whom
Mary became particularly close to. She started learning Pyute methods
(17:06):
for doing things like making baskets and identifying and gathering
local plants. Wallace eventually became the Inyo County school superintendent,
and Mary kept working on selling short pieces of writing
so they had a little more income, but they faced
some new struggles. Mary's lack of attention to typical homemaking
(17:27):
duties raised eyebrows as did her friendships outside of the
community of white homesteaders. As we said earlier, many of
her friends were Mexican or indigenous, and she frequently visited
mining camps and saloons and other places that were not
considered appropriate for a white woman to be.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
She was also.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Worried about Ruth. As a baby, Ruth had been prone
to periods of inconsolable crying, and then as she moved
through toddlerhood, she didn't start learning to speak when most
other children did. She moved her hands strangely, and it
seemed like she couldn't coordinate her body. She would scream
without a clear reason, and she also made strange sounds.
(18:09):
Mary's friend, Helen McKnight doyle was a physician known as
Doctor Nelly, and she described Ruth as having quote passionate,
ungovernable spells. Another doctor who examined Ruth said that her
condition was incurable. Some more modern historians have concluded that
Ruth may have been injured during her birth, or that
(18:30):
she may have had a genetic disorder known as rhet syndrome,
or that she may have been autistic.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
We are not suggesting that there is blame involved with
having a disabled child, but this was Mary's mindset. When
she learned she was pregnant. She had promised herself that
she was going to give birth to a brilliant child.
The disparity between that promise to herself and Ruth's reality
was painful, and Mary grieved over it. She thought all
(18:59):
the physical work that she had done in the last
months of her pregnancy, or the long journey she had
taken to get to her mother's to give birth, might
have harmed Ruth somehow. When doctors and friends assured her
that she wasn't at fault, she turned her blame to Wallace.
At this point, the eugenics movement dominated conversations on things
(19:20):
like health and disability, and Mary held some of these
ideas herself. She concluded that Wallace must have had bad
blood that she had then passed on to her child.
Her family, unsurprisingly did not really help. By Mary's account,
Wallace was not very involved in raising their daughter, and
(19:41):
socially he really wouldn't have been expected to be. Mary's
mother was of the belief that hardships were a punishment
from God. After hosting Ruth for a visit, Susannah wrote
Mary a letter that said in part quote, I don't
know what you've done, daughter, to have such judgment upon
you you. Mary largely cut off contact with her mother
(20:04):
after that, and Susannah died in eighteen ninety six. Although
their relationship had always been difficult, Mary was really heartbroken
that they had not reconciled before her death. Beyond the
lack of family support, there were really no other support
systems in place for disabled children or their families at
this point. We don't know Ruth's own thoughts about herself,
(20:27):
but it is very clear that in today's terminology she
had high support needs. Mary didn't have much money for
doctors or to hire help, and while there were neighbors
who offered to watch Ruth from time to time, these
offers could be short lived when people couldn't figure out
how to interact with her. When she got a little
(20:47):
bit older, Ruth repeatedly tried to run away.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Mary thought the only way she could make this work
was to earn enough money to support them both and
to pay for care and help for her daughter. Her
options were really to write or to teach, but she
was trying to do that while also trying to raise
a child who needed a lot of care. When Mary
kept Ruth at home with her while she tried to write.
(21:13):
At the same time, her parenting could be inattentive to
the point of neglect. When Mary later found a teaching
job and had nobody to look after Ruth while she
was gone, she would sometimes leave Ruth by herself. People
understandably judged Mary for all of this, but then when
the Frager family offered to take Ruth in on their ranch,
(21:36):
those same people, including her husband, accused Mary of abandoning
her child, Even though the Fragger family was kind to
Ruth and really seemed to look after her well. A
lot of people were already really judgmental of Mary's defiance
of social norms and when she didn't seem like an
attentive mother. On top of all that, people thought she
(21:59):
was monstrous. Wallace did not face similar judgment. People were
more likely to feel sympathy for him for being married
to someone that they thought was such a terrible wife
and mother. Mary's critics initially included Helen McKnight doyle, who
later became her friend. At one point, while Ruth was
living with the Fraggers, doctor Nelly heard that she was ill,
(22:22):
and she went to get Mary, she assumed that she
would want to be with her daughter. Mary's response was quote,
Ruth makes me nervous and I make her nervous. It
is not good for us to be together, which doctor
Nelly described as an offense against all motherhood, But she
eventually came to the conclusion that Mary could provide the
(22:42):
best home for her child by earning enough to pay
for her care, rather than trying to abandon her work
and care for her daughter without any resources to do so.
In nineteen o three, when Ruth was eleven, Mary Austin
published her first and best known book, The Lamb of
Little Rain. It's a set of lyrical sketches about the
(23:03):
Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert and the indigenous people
living there. The pieces had appeared serially in the Atlantic
before being published by Houghton Mifflin Books. It's not a
straightforward nonfiction piece. Many of the places that Mary describes
in it are amalgamations or composites of places in the
real world. She started writing it after recovering from an
(23:27):
illness during which she had a vision of two angel
like beings in the room with her. She said that
it had taken her twelve years to research, but only
a month to craft it. With the money she earned
from the Land of Little Rain, Mary was able to
place Ruth in a small private hospital in Santa Clara, California,
(23:48):
run by doctor R. E.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Osborne.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
She thought the hospital staff would be able to give
Ruth better care than she was able to do herself.
She also thought it would be better for Ruth to
be with other children who were like her. Ruth had
been the target of derision and cruelty from children and
adults alike, and she was definitely able to understand what
was happening when that happened. This was initially a trial placement,
(24:15):
and it became permanent in nineteen oh five. Austin worried
about her daughter for the rest of Ruth's life, but
she never visited after this. She found the whole idea devastating,
and the prevailing wisdom at the time was often that
family visits to hospitals and institutions would disrupt the care
that children were receiving there and would actually make things
(24:37):
worse for them. When people asked about Ruth, Mary would answer, quote,
we have lost her. Austin's life from this point combines travel, writing,
and activism, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break.
(25:01):
Around the same time that Mary Austin published The Land
of Little Rain, she separated from her husband, although their
divorce was not finalized until nineteen fourteen. She does seem
to have had some other relationships, but she never remarried.
After their separation, Mary visited San Francisco and met writer
George Sterling and went to Carmel also called Carmel by
(25:25):
the Sea on the Monterey Peninsula, where there was an
artist colony. She started expanding her network of other writers,
including Jack London and past podcast subject Ambrose Bierce, and
she started writing and publishing a book roughly every year.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Austin had developed an affinity for the indigenous peoples of
the Desert Southwest, which is obvious through her writing. Her
next book after The Land of Little Rain was The
Basket Woman, a book of Pyute tales and legends for children,
and that came out in nineteen oh four. It's clear
that she was trying to be respectful and how she
discussed Indigenous people in the land that they lived on,
(26:05):
but this was definitely something that was filtered through her
own lens, and she wasn't really aware of how that
lens affected her impressions and interpretations of what was around her.
It's also not clear how much permission she had to
share these stories, if any. She also incorporated Indigenous art
and dress and language into her life in a way
(26:27):
that could be appropriative, and in her autobiography she described
herself as having a quote slightly mythical Indian ancestor, even
though she did not have indigenous ancestry. And while she
advocated for Indigenous rights, white people started regarding her as
the expert in these issues rather than the people she
(26:49):
was advocating for.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
While she was no longer really in a relationship with
her husband, their lives did overlap from time to time,
especially in the early years of their separation. The biggest
example is in a water rights dispute between the Owens
Valley and the City of Los Angeles in the early
to mid nineteen hundreds. Essentially, people acting on behalf of
(27:12):
Los Angeles had been buying up land in the Owens Valley.
Local people initially thought this was related to a federal
land reclamation project, and so that's the use of irrigation
to turn arid or semi arid land into farmland. When
an article in the La Times announced that the plan
was actually to build an aqueduct that would drain water
(27:35):
out of the valley and carry it to Los Angeles,
more than two hundred miles away, people in Owens Valley
were outraged. Whileas Austin was a huge part of the
advocacy against this project, but a lot of Mary's writing
about it really leaves his workout. She kind of claims
most of the credit.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
After this, Mary Austin left Owens Valley at first, returning
to Carmel. She had a craftsman style cottage built for
herself there and a treehouse that she used as a
writing studio that she called wikiup from the indigenous dwelling
style that is also referred to as a wigwam.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
In April of nineteen oh six, she went to San
Francisco to meet with her publisher. While she was there,
she had a premonition of an impending disaster, and she
was frightened enough that she left her hotel to go
stay with a friend. The next morning, an earthquake struck,
followed by a fire. This was a huge disaster, and
(28:34):
she later published her account of it in The argonaut
Our episode on this earthquake and fire ran as a
Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty four. Austin's books
from these years include The Flock, which was a successor
to the Land of Little Rain about sheep herding, and
Santa Lucia, which was focused on an unhappy marriage that
was similar to her own. Lost Borders was.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
A collection of fiction that ends with the show short
story The Walking Woman. Most of Austin's work is at
least somewhat autobiographical, and in The Walking Woman, a narrator
describes an encounter with the Walking Woman, who is well
known by reputation in the area where she lives. She
started by walking off in illness and ultimately quote she
(29:20):
was the Walking Woman. That was it. She had walked
off all sense of society, made values, and knowing the
best when the best came to her, was able to
take it.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
These books came out in the years after Austin had
gone to the doctor about persistent arm pain and was
told she was dying of breast cancer. Doctors said surgery
might extend her life, but that her prognosis was terminal.
She decided not to have that surgery and instead to
live the best life she could in the time that
(29:53):
she had left. That diagnosis came in nineteen oh seven,
and when she was still alive in nineteen oh nine
to go to Italy.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
She met another person we've covered on the show, Isadora Duncan.
While she was there, she also spent a lot of
time exploring Italy's museums and Catholic religious sites. Although Austin
no longer thought of herself as Christian, she was drawing
spiritual inspiration from multiple religions and traditions. She started treating
(30:22):
her pain with prayer based on advice she got while
visiting the Convent of the Blue Nuns. Soon after undertaking
a retreat with the nuns, her pain was gone, and
she considered herself to be cured. The books that came
out of her time in Italy include Christ in Italy
being The Adventures of a Maverick among Masterpieces, and The
(30:43):
Man Jesus being a brief account of the life and
teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth. After leaving Italy, Austin
went to France, and before returning to the United States,
she visited London, where she met writers like H. G.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Wells and G. K.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Chesterton, who we covered on the show in March of
twenty twenty three. She also met Herbert and lou Henry Hoover,
the future President and first Lady of the United States.
She made multiple visits to the Lyceum Club, where she
met seemingly everyone who was famous in the worlds of
English language literature and art in the early twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
On the way home, Austin visited New York City, where
her play The Arrowmaker, about a paiute woman, was being staged.
She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association and became
connected to birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. For the next
few years, she spent her time traveling back and forth
between California and New York while also advocating for women's suffrage,
(31:43):
birth control, the right to divorce, and indigenous rights.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
A lot of her books during these years were connected
to these issues. Her semi autobiographical novel, A Woman of Genius,
came out in nineteen twelve and is about a woman
whose aspirations as an actor ran against society's expectations of her.
The Ford, which came out in nineteen seventeen, fictionalized the
water dispute between Owens Valley and Los Angeles Number twenty six.
(32:12):
Jane Street was a feminist novel that was named after
the boarding house that was home to its central character,
Ruth Farwell. By the time this novel came out, Austin's daughter, Ruth,
had died at the age of twenty six. That happened
on October sixth, nineteen eighteen. Some sources attribute Ruth's death
(32:33):
to the pandemic flu, but her death certificate listed her
cause of death as acute asthma. In the nineteen teens,
Austin started visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she moved
into a house there called Casakarita in nineteen twenty four.
She continued to travel extensively, including lecture tours and book tours,
(32:54):
but this was her primary home for the rest of
her life. While living in New Mexico, she became a
more vocal proponent of indigenous rights, including advocating for the
preservation of indigenous traditions and arts. She also worked with
Arthur leon Kampa of the University of New Mexico to
collect Spanish language folklore, transcribing it from oral accounts. In
(33:17):
nineteen twenty seven, Austin became involved in a second water
rights controversy. This one connected to the building of Hoover Dam,
which is sometimes called the Boulder Dam depending on when
things about it were written. The plan was to build
a dam across the Colorado River in the Black Canyon,
which would provide hydroelectric power, flood control, and a water
(33:39):
supply for irrigation and other uses. The Colorado River drains
water from seven states, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona,
and California, so this project required agreement among all of
these states on how the water would be used and distributed.
(34:00):
Austin was against the building of Hoover Dam. She advocated
not for a project that would provide massive amounts of
water to big cities, but one that could bring irrigation
and flood control to small, self sufficient communities that could
live within the constraints of what the land around them
could support. She thought these communities might gradually industrialize, but
(34:24):
that they would do so in a way that would
allow them to maintain their traditions and their connections to
the past, rather than just becoming huge and homogenized. She
advocated for local control of water resources and preservation and
conservation of an area's land and heritage.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
In nineteen twenty seven, Austin was appointed by the governor
of New Mexico to serve as one of the state's
representatives at the Seven States Conference on Water Resources. Another representative,
Francis Wilson, described the address Austin gave in an interview
later on quote, never in my life have I seen
anything so funny as that speech she made. There were
(35:04):
all these men armed to the teeth with facts, and
Mary Austin stood up and made a speech that, well,
the kind of speech Mary would make.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I don't mean that they weren't interested and that it
wasn't a good speech. But those hard headed, hard boiled
men didn't care how beautiful Arizona is or what folklore
and Indians it has.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
I did not find a transcript of the actual speech, uh,
but that felt to me like it probably accurately summed
up the tone of it. Obviously, Hoover Dam was ultimately built,
but disputes among those seven states about water rights associated
with it continued for years. Arizona and California in particular,
(35:47):
remained at odds over it for decades. This was not
resolved until Arizona versus California was decided by the US
Supreme Court in nineteen sixty three, which was long after
Austin's death. In nineteen twenty nine, Austin met Ansel Adams,
who was at the very start of his career as
a photographer. They collaborated on his first book, Taos Pueblo,
(36:10):
which paired his photographs with her text. With the help
of Tony Luhan, who is from the pueblo, Adams got
permission from the Pueblo Council to take photographs there. This
book was a limited edition of one hundred signed, numbered,
and hand bound copies. Adams printed the photographs by hand.
(36:31):
Across those one hundred books, it totaled nearly thirteen hundred prints.
A facsimile edition of this book was published in nineteen
seventy seven, and both editions are very expensive and hard
to find today, but you can see the twelve prints
it includes online at the Two Red Roses Foundation. In
nineteen thirty two, Austin published her autobiography called Earth Horizon.
(36:56):
It's written primarily in the third person, although it occasionally
shifts into first. It sort of continues that idea of
Mary and I Mary that she had first come to
in her childhood. This book led H. G. Wells to
threaten to sue her over a brief mention of an
affair that he had in which he had fathered a
(37:16):
child out of wedlock. Austin rewrote the paragraph in question,
but during all of the stress surrounding all of this,
she had a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Austin continued to have trouble with her heart after this.
She'd struggled to earn enough money off and on throughout
her career, and her financial problems got worse in the
wake of the Great Depression.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
In nineteen thirty three, she was awarded an honorary Doctor
of Letters from the University of New Mexico. She published
a collection of indigenous legends in folklore called One Smoke
Stories in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Mary Hunter Austin died in her sleep on August thirteenth,
nineteen thirty four, at the age of sixty five, following
another heart attack. Over the course of her career, she
had published thirty two books and well over two hundred
articles and shorter works. Ansel Adams had said of her quote,
seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual
(38:14):
and spiritual power and discipline. She is a future person,
one who will a century from now appear as a
writer of major stature in the complex matrix of American culture.
That turned out not to be true. Helen McKnight doyle
published a biography of her in nineteen thirty nine, but
(38:35):
Mary Austin was largely forgotten about after her death. Although
there was some rediscovery of her work starting in the
nineteen eighties, it is mostly taught today in the context
of environmental literature. She's sometimes described as an early ecofeminist,
although that term was not coined until the nineteen seventies.
She said of herself quote, I may not know how
(38:58):
to write, nor how to delineate character, nor even how
to tell a story. The one thing I am sure
about myself that I know the relation of letters and landscape,
of life and environment. Some of the land that Austin
wrote about in works like The Land of Little Rain
is now part of a number of parks and preserves,
including Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve.
(39:22):
Her home in Inno County is now California Historical Landmark
two twenty nine. This is where she wrote most of
the land of Little Rain, and the marker includes a
quote from it quote, but if you ever come beyond
the borders as far as the town that lies in
a hill temple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave
it until you have knocked at the door of the
(39:43):
brown house under the willow tree at the end of
the village street. And there you shall have such news
of the land of its trails, and what is a
stir in them, as one lover of it can give
to another.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
And that is Mary Hunter Austin.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
I did not intend to pick an episode that was
about desert landscapes in which we were also going to
talk about going to Morocco.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
That's a coincidence. It just worked out.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
But in lieu of listener mail, let's talk about going
to Morocco. Okay again, we are going to go to Morocco.
This trip is from November fourth through fifteenth, twenty twenty five.
November fourth is really the travel day that people will
leave the United States to go to Morocco. We have
(40:32):
had folks join us on these trips who have been
flying from places other than the United States, but most
folks are from the US, so that's why we say
it that way. I am really excited about this trip.
It feels a little weird to be talking about going
on a trip in the kind of chaotic times that
we're living in currently, but still excited about It is
(40:54):
something that we started planning last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
not able to announce until just now.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm very excited. Listen. We're gonna go
to fees. There's gonna be some Indiana Jones filming locations
that I'm gonna make sure I check out. But we're
also doing a lot of really really beautiful stuff. I
actually met a woman from Morocco while I was on
vacation recently, and she was so excited that We're going
to spend a couple days in chef Showen, which is
(41:23):
an extraordinarily beautiful place. It's all just gonna be a
little mind blowing, I think.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Yeah. So we have some things that I'm particularly excited
about that are slightly different from what we have done
on our previous trips. One is we are going to
have a Moroccan cooking class. Yeah, very excited about that.
We were also going to have one night of glamping.
It's a luxury camping experience. I'm very excited about that. Also,
(41:53):
this is most of our trips. I guess all of
our trips really before this point that we've gone on
for the show have been to Europe. So I'm interested
in going to a place that is, you know, culturally
and in terms of the landscape, like quite different from
where we have traveled to before. The photos of some
(42:17):
of the places that we are going to be visiting
are just so beautiful. I don't know, I can't, I
don't know what else to say about it. I'm very
excited about it. I think on the spectrum of trips
that we have gone on, this is probably toward the
more active trip.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
We are on the move throughout this trip, we're not Yes, listen,
is this a fear for me? Yes, because I like
to like nest up in a hotel for a week
and like have my base of operations. So I'm going
to have to pack in a manner that makes me
able to pick up every day and a half and go.
But I think that's also great and it's a good challenge.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yes, Yes, So again we are both incredibly excited about
this trip. You can learn more about it at defined
destinations dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
That is all one word. The actual url.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
At it of it as is Defined Destinations dot Com slash.
Then it's Taste of Morocco twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
That's all.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Each of those words is separated by a dash of
That feels a little complicated to me to read out
in a way. So the probably easier way to get
there is to go to Defined Destinations dot Com on
under tours, it is the one called a Taste of Morocco.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
If you have questions.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
About the travel arrangements, the trip itself, all of that,
the folks to ask are going to be the folks
at Defined Destinations. Because Holly and I will be on
this trip. We are both extremely excited about it and
looking forward to meeting everyone who joins us on the trip.
But when it comes to things like hotel and accommodations
(44:01):
and any dietary restrictions, anything like that, like, that's going
to be Defined Destinations making those arrangements and answering those questions.
I don't know if I have anything else to add
with that other than very excited for the twelfth time.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, it's going to be a blast and I can't wait. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Yeah, So I'm sure we will be talking about this
some more. We will be putting links to it up
on our various social media and yeah, if you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or about travel, or about you know, signing
up for this trip and telling us how excited that
(44:44):
you are that you're going to be going on it.
We are at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Stuff you Missed in History.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
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.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
I'm Tracy V.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start today's episode,
we have an announcement.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
We sure do.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Yeah, we are going to Morocco in November. Very exciting.
This is our next trip that we'll be having through
Defined Destinations. You can find out more about this trip
at Defined Destinations dot Com. The trip is called a
(00:41):
Taste of Morocco. They have a different Morocco trip that's
coming up in the incredibly near future, like just in
a couple or three weeks. I think it's not that trip.
It's the one that's in November. We'll be talking more
about this at the end of the episode today, but
I wanted to go ahead and put it out there
at the beginning.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
We're going to Morocco.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
If you want to pause episode right now and go
to Defined Destinations dot Com to see about it, you
can do that.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
We're talking about it more at the end though. Yeah.
I'm very excited me too.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
In terms of today's episode, I was looking for a
topic that had something to do with conservation or nature
or environmentalism. That was just what I felt like talking
about at the moment, and that ultimately led me to
Mary Hunter Austin. She published most of her work just
under the name Mary Austin, but since there are some
(01:34):
other historical Mary Austin's, I put the Hunter in there
for clarity in the title of the episode. I was
initially drawn to her story because one of the things
that she became known for was walking, and I do
love a walk. I usually walk in the woods, though,
and Austin's walks were mostly through the deserts of the
American Southwest, which she came to just deeply love. She's
(01:57):
been compared to people like John Muir, but she doesn't
have nearly that kind of name recognition today. Mary Austin
was a complicated person with a complicated life.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So it turns out there is not nearly as.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Much walking in the desert as I thought I was
going to get going into this episode. Also as a
heads up, this episode includes some pretty troubling stuff involving
her daughter, Ruth, who was disabled.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Mary Hunter was born September ninth, eighteen sixty eight, in Carlinville, Illinois.
She was the fourth of six children born to George
and Susannah Graham Hunter. George was a lawyer who had
immigrated from England in eighteen fifty one, and he had
served in the US Army during the Civil War. The
family spent much of Mary's childhood living on a farm
(02:47):
outside of town.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Mary really idolized her father. He loved to read, and
she loved to spend time in his study, which was
just full of books. She never really connected to her mother.
That she felt a need to have a relationship with
her mother, but that relationship could be very tumultuous. Susannah
was a strict Methodist who was very focused on religion
(03:10):
and respectability, and she later became involved in temperance organizations
like the Women's Christian Temperance Union. Meanwhile, Mary was simultaneously intelligent, sensitive, stubborn,
and rebellious. Punishment, for example, was just not really a
deterrent to her. She would sort of do whatever she
(03:30):
wanted and deal with the consequences later. She felt like
her family didn't really understand her, and she was also
awkward and didn't have a lot of friends except for
her younger sister Jenny, who she was very close to.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
As an adult. Austin was known for her spirituality and mysticism,
and she claimed to be clairvoyant. This started at a
very early age. She described herself as seeing things like
mystical images that she wasn't sure if anyone else saw,
and of having memories of things that had happened before
she was born. She would also announce what she thought
(04:08):
other people were thinking or feeling, leaving her mother to
say that she thought Mary was possessed.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
By the age of four or five, Mary had started
to conceive of herself as two Mary's the regular Mary
who was sort of lonely and uncertain and always at
odds with her family, and then I Mary, who was
an inner self who was beyond and.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Above all of that.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Later on, she described this inner self as the source
of her writing. She also had a profound spiritual experience
at about that same age, sitting under a walnut tree,
in which she was just struck with a sudden awareness
of everything around her and a profound sense of wonder,
which she connected to God.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
George Hunter had contracted malaria while serving in the Civil War,
and he was chronically ill throughout Mary's childchildhood. He died
in October of eighteen seventy eight when Mary was about ten.
Then a couple of months later, Mary contracted diphtheria as
she was recovering, her sister Jenny got it to and
(05:14):
Jenny did not survive. Mary blamed herself for having gotten
her sister sick, and her mother blamed her as well.
At Jenny's funeral, Mary overheard her mother ask someone why
it couldn't have been Mary who died rather than her sister.
Speaker 3 (05:31):
After these deaths, the family left their farm and they
moved into Carlonville. Susannah got a job as a nurse
while she waited for approval on a widow's pension. With
her mother working, Mary took on a lot of the
household work, as well as the care of her baby brother, George.
She spent more and more time alone, reading and writing.
(05:52):
Susannah joined the Carlonville branch of the Chautauqua Literary and
Scientific Circle, and Mary started using their home study courses
to learn about literature and science. After reading a Chautauqua
course in geology, she became particularly fascinated with fossils and
started collecting them. Mary was bright and a good student
(06:13):
when she first started school. She was so far ahead
of her peers that she was placed in third grade.
In eighteen eighty four, at the age of sixteen, she
enrolled at Blackburn College in Carlonville, Illinois. She started out
studying art, but then changed to science. While she wanted
to be a writer, she thought she could master english
(06:34):
and writing on her own, and she wanted to dedicate
her college education to something else. Mary had a series
of illnesses, some of them pretty serious really, throughout her life,
and her college education was interrupted after she got a
cold that she couldn't seem to recover from. She had
to withdraw from Blackburn, and then once she was better,
(06:55):
she enrolled at the State Normal School in Bloomington, Illinois.
Quickly realized that she did not like the curriculum there,
so she went back to Blackburn and she graduated in
eighteen eighty eight. She had to get extra tutoring to
make up for these interruptions in her coursework because her
mother had given her a deadline she was going to
(07:16):
cut off Mary's financial support for her education if she
missed that deadline.
Speaker 1 (07:21):
By the time Mary graduated, her brother Jim had moved
to California's San Joaquin Valley and filed a claim on
a homestead there to recap. A series of homesteading laws
allowed people in the United States to claim purportedly public
lands for very little money under the condition that they
improve it, meaning that they had to settle on it
(07:42):
and cultivate it. But this was not vacant land that
was waiting to be occupied. It was the traditional and
ancestral homelands of indigenous nations and peoples who had been
stripped of that land through wars, treaties, and forestry locations.
Jim asked his mother for permission to file a claim
on her behalf as well, and without really talking to
(08:05):
Mary about it, Susannah and Jim decided that Mary should
go to California too, with the hope that she would
claim land of her own. It might seem surprising that
Mary agreed to go. She didn't really even think that
her mother should go. She thought Jim should have the
opportunity to have his own life rather than going back
(08:25):
to being the head of his mother's household, which is
what he had done after their father's death. Mary's relationships
with both Susannah and Jim had also really gone downhill
after George's death, but Mary went and became both physically
and emotionally unwell during the trip west, to the point
that Susannah's letters to her friends described the trip as
(08:48):
almost killing her. Although Mary was struck by the beauty
of some of the landscapes that they traveled through, her
condition got worse after arriving in California. Living in a
barely furnished cabin without enough food to live on, Mary
was tasked with hunting rabbits and other small game, which
(09:09):
she did, but she hated killing animals, and she could
barely tolerate eating what she.
Speaker 2 (09:14):
Had brought in.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
She spent much of her time exploring the natural world
around her, writing down her observations, and having strange visions
and premonitions. It's not totally clear whether these were spiritual
experiences or reflective of her mental state and persistent malnourishment.
They had arrived in California in the middle of a drought,
(09:37):
and Susannah and Jim really struggled with their homesteads. Mary
didn't wind up filing a homestead claim of her own,
although there was a timber claim in her name that
was eventually abandoned. A neighbor offered the family the chance
to run an inn out of an existing building on
his land, and that helped them all make ends meet
(09:58):
enough for Jim and Susanna to keep their land claims.
As they started to have a little more money, Mary
started to physically recover, and she started to make connections
to the other people living in the area homesteaders, sheep herders,
and ranchers. The people she felt most at home with
were often Indigenous or Mexican, not the people her family
(10:21):
thought she should be associating with. She was interested in
the ways that people outside the world of white homesteaders
lived and in a landscape around her, and in how
they lived with it. In eighteen eighty nine, she tried
to get a job teaching, but failed the California Teaching
Exam twice. She finally got a job at a private school,
(10:41):
and she found lodgings with a family that she felt
a deeper affinity for than she did. Her own.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Teaching wasn't really what she wanted to do, though. She
wanted to write, and the one way it seemed like
she could get the financial support she needed to do
that was to get married. So we'll have more on
that after a sponsor break. Mary Hunter lived in an
(11:13):
era when marriage and motherhood were the expected path for
white middle class women. We've talked about a number of
women in similar circumstances who supported themselves through writing without
getting married. But Mary really didn't have the family support
that she would need to get started with that. Her
(11:33):
mother and her brother had their own plans, and they
weren't really including Mary in their decisions or in things
like the proceeds from the sale of their house back
in Illinois. Getting married probably seemed like the only option
for her to have some financial stability.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
But there were obstacles throughout her life. People commented on
Austin's appearance, which was not thought to be conventionally pretty
or feminine. She was very thin, and she had a
square jaw and heavy eyebrows. People didn't typically smile in
photos from this era, but in most pictures of Mary Austin,
(12:12):
she is frowning. And in a part of North America
that was considered the frontier, there were not that many
available men to choose from.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
I feel like everybody that had these opinions about Mary
Hunter's appearance just needed to shut up.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
A lot of that talk, and it bothered me.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
Stafford Wallace Austin, known as Wallace probably seemed like her
best possible choice for a husband. He was seven years
older than she was, but they were both intelligent and serious.
They could talk to each other as intellectual equals. He
was one of seven children born to a well off
sugar planter in Hawaii, and so it seemed like they
(12:54):
would be financially secure. Wallace was also supportive of Mary's
goals as a writer. They had direct conversations about these
goals before getting married, and his wedding present to her
was a gold pen with a pearl handle. Agreeing to
marry him seemed like the only thing her family thought
she had ever done right. They got married on May eighteenth,
(13:17):
eighteen ninety one, when Mary was twenty one.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
But this marriage did not go very well. One caveat
here is that almost everything we know about the marriage
comes from Mary's point of view, and her account is
really not kind to Wallace at all. But that financial
security did not really materialize, as Wallace kept investing in
ventures that did not work out. But Mary played a
(13:43):
role in their situation too. While they'd had candid conversations
about her ambitions as a writer, Wallace hadn't expected her
to just abandon most of the domestic tasks that a
wife typically handled, which is what she did. While they'd
had into actual conversations during their courtship as a married couple,
(14:03):
they really didn't seem to be able to talk through
what was going on in their lives.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
And what was going on was a lot of hardship
and continually moving around. Wallace tried to start a vineyard,
which failed. Then they moved to the Owens Valley where
he had embarked on an irrigation project with his brothers,
and then he went to San Francisco to work on
a different project with a brother. They just they were
(14:28):
never really settled and their money was always tight. Mary
got pregnant and during the last months of her pregnancy,
they were living in a hotel in Lone Pine that's
roughly between Fresno, California and Las Vegas, Nevada. Mary went
out for a walk one day and came back to
find that they had been evicted for not paying the bills.
(14:50):
On the advice of an acquaintance, she went to a
boarding house that was primarily being used by mine workers
who had developed lead poisoning, which wasn't on the job has.
She offered to do things there like cook, clean, and
mend in exchange for a place to stay. When Wallace
got back, she learned that the irrigation project had failed
(15:11):
and that Wallace was now in debt because of it.
On top of that, he had known they were going
to be evicted and he had not told her, and
she found out that he had also turned down paying
work as a school principal. Mary kept working at the
boarding house, and she started seriously trying to publish enough
work to make ends meet, like short pieces like essays
(15:34):
and short stories. As her pregnancy made it increasingly difficult
to do the more physical parts of her job at
the boarding house, she decided to go to Bakersfield, where
her mother lived, to have the baby. On October thirtieth
of that year, she gave birth to her daughter, Ruth,
after a very difficult labor that lasted for more than
forty eight hours. While Mary was still recovering from giving birth,
(15:58):
Wallace told her that his finances had totally collapsed and
that he was facing legal action and that she should
handle his remaining property as she saw fit. She did
this by selling everything that could be sold and arranging
to pay off the rest of his debts in installments.
When Mary and Ruth joined Wallace back in the Owens Valley,
(16:21):
their relationship continued to be rocky. He had finally resigned
himself to teaching, so they had a small but steady income,
but he was angry that she had made arrangements to
pay off his debts rather than just filing for bankruptcy.
Mary and Ruth were also sick a lot of the time,
and sometimes Mary needed a wet nurse. Her nurse was
(16:44):
a Piute woman from a nearby settlement, as she was able. Though,
Mary kept writing and kept exploring the valley where they lived.
She really fell in love with the arid landscape, and
she formed relationships with many of the payute women who
were living in the area, voting one named Saab, whom
Mary became particularly close to. She started learning Pyute methods
(17:06):
for doing things like making baskets and identifying and gathering
local plants. Wallace eventually became the Inyo County school superintendent,
and Mary kept working on selling short pieces of writing
so they had a little more income, but they faced
some new struggles. Mary's lack of attention to typical homemaking
(17:27):
duties raised eyebrows as did her friendships outside of the
community of white homesteaders. As we said earlier, many of
her friends were Mexican or indigenous, and she frequently visited
mining camps and saloons and other places that were not
considered appropriate for a white woman to be.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
She was also.
Speaker 3 (17:46):
Worried about Ruth. As a baby, Ruth had been prone
to periods of inconsolable crying, and then as she moved
through toddlerhood, she didn't start learning to speak when most
other children did. She moved her hands strangely, and it
seemed like she couldn't coordinate her body. She would scream
without a clear reason, and she also made strange sounds.
(18:09):
Mary's friend, Helen McKnight doyle was a physician known as
Doctor Nelly, and she described Ruth as having quote passionate,
ungovernable spells. Another doctor who examined Ruth said that her
condition was incurable. Some more modern historians have concluded that
Ruth may have been injured during her birth, or that
(18:30):
she may have had a genetic disorder known as rhet syndrome,
or that she may have been autistic.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
We are not suggesting that there is blame involved with
having a disabled child, but this was Mary's mindset. When
she learned she was pregnant. She had promised herself that
she was going to give birth to a brilliant child.
The disparity between that promise to herself and Ruth's reality
was painful, and Mary grieved over it. She thought all
(18:59):
the physical work that she had done in the last
months of her pregnancy, or the long journey she had
taken to get to her mother's to give birth, might
have harmed Ruth somehow. When doctors and friends assured her
that she wasn't at fault, she turned her blame to Wallace.
At this point, the eugenics movement dominated conversations on things
(19:20):
like health and disability, and Mary held some of these
ideas herself. She concluded that Wallace must have had bad
blood that she had then passed on to her child.
Her family, unsurprisingly did not really help. By Mary's account,
Wallace was not very involved in raising their daughter, and
(19:41):
socially he really wouldn't have been expected to be. Mary's
mother was of the belief that hardships were a punishment
from God. After hosting Ruth for a visit, Susannah wrote
Mary a letter that said in part quote, I don't
know what you've done, daughter, to have such judgment upon
you you. Mary largely cut off contact with her mother
(20:04):
after that, and Susannah died in eighteen ninety six. Although
their relationship had always been difficult, Mary was really heartbroken
that they had not reconciled before her death. Beyond the
lack of family support, there were really no other support
systems in place for disabled children or their families at
this point. We don't know Ruth's own thoughts about herself,
(20:27):
but it is very clear that in today's terminology she
had high support needs. Mary didn't have much money for
doctors or to hire help, and while there were neighbors
who offered to watch Ruth from time to time, these
offers could be short lived when people couldn't figure out
how to interact with her. When she got a little
(20:47):
bit older, Ruth repeatedly tried to run away.
Speaker 3 (20:51):
Mary thought the only way she could make this work
was to earn enough money to support them both and
to pay for care and help for her daughter. Her
options were really to write or to teach, but she
was trying to do that while also trying to raise
a child who needed a lot of care. When Mary
kept Ruth at home with her while she tried to write.
(21:13):
At the same time, her parenting could be inattentive to
the point of neglect. When Mary later found a teaching
job and had nobody to look after Ruth while she
was gone, she would sometimes leave Ruth by herself. People
understandably judged Mary for all of this, but then when
the Frager family offered to take Ruth in on their ranch,
(21:36):
those same people, including her husband, accused Mary of abandoning
her child, Even though the Fragger family was kind to
Ruth and really seemed to look after her well. A
lot of people were already really judgmental of Mary's defiance
of social norms and when she didn't seem like an
attentive mother. On top of all that, people thought she
(21:59):
was monstrous. Wallace did not face similar judgment. People were
more likely to feel sympathy for him for being married
to someone that they thought was such a terrible wife
and mother. Mary's critics initially included Helen McKnight doyle, who
later became her friend. At one point, while Ruth was
living with the Fraggers, doctor Nelly heard that she was ill,
(22:22):
and she went to get Mary, she assumed that she
would want to be with her daughter. Mary's response was quote,
Ruth makes me nervous and I make her nervous. It
is not good for us to be together, which doctor
Nelly described as an offense against all motherhood, But she
eventually came to the conclusion that Mary could provide the
(22:42):
best home for her child by earning enough to pay
for her care, rather than trying to abandon her work
and care for her daughter without any resources to do so.
In nineteen o three, when Ruth was eleven, Mary Austin
published her first and best known book, The Lamb of
Little Rain. It's a set of lyrical sketches about the
(23:03):
Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert and the indigenous people
living there. The pieces had appeared serially in the Atlantic
before being published by Houghton Mifflin Books. It's not a
straightforward nonfiction piece. Many of the places that Mary describes
in it are amalgamations or composites of places in the
real world. She started writing it after recovering from an
(23:27):
illness during which she had a vision of two angel
like beings in the room with her. She said that
it had taken her twelve years to research, but only
a month to craft it. With the money she earned
from the Land of Little Rain, Mary was able to
place Ruth in a small private hospital in Santa Clara, California,
(23:48):
run by doctor R. E.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Osborne.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
She thought the hospital staff would be able to give
Ruth better care than she was able to do herself.
She also thought it would be better for Ruth to
be with other children who were like her. Ruth had
been the target of derision and cruelty from children and
adults alike, and she was definitely able to understand what
was happening when that happened. This was initially a trial placement,
(24:15):
and it became permanent in nineteen oh five. Austin worried
about her daughter for the rest of Ruth's life, but
she never visited after this. She found the whole idea devastating,
and the prevailing wisdom at the time was often that
family visits to hospitals and institutions would disrupt the care
that children were receiving there and would actually make things
(24:37):
worse for them. When people asked about Ruth, Mary would answer, quote,
we have lost her. Austin's life from this point combines travel, writing,
and activism, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break.
(25:01):
Around the same time that Mary Austin published The Land
of Little Rain, she separated from her husband, although their
divorce was not finalized until nineteen fourteen. She does seem
to have had some other relationships, but she never remarried.
After their separation, Mary visited San Francisco and met writer
George Sterling and went to Carmel also called Carmel by
(25:25):
the Sea on the Monterey Peninsula, where there was an
artist colony. She started expanding her network of other writers,
including Jack London and past podcast subject Ambrose Bierce, and
she started writing and publishing a book roughly every year.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Austin had developed an affinity for the indigenous peoples of
the Desert Southwest, which is obvious through her writing. Her
next book after The Land of Little Rain was The
Basket Woman, a book of Pyute tales and legends for children,
and that came out in nineteen oh four. It's clear
that she was trying to be respectful and how she
discussed Indigenous people in the land that they lived on,
(26:05):
but this was definitely something that was filtered through her
own lens, and she wasn't really aware of how that
lens affected her impressions and interpretations of what was around her.
It's also not clear how much permission she had to
share these stories, if any. She also incorporated Indigenous art
and dress and language into her life in a way
(26:27):
that could be appropriative, and in her autobiography she described
herself as having a quote slightly mythical Indian ancestor, even
though she did not have indigenous ancestry. And while she
advocated for Indigenous rights, white people started regarding her as
the expert in these issues rather than the people she
(26:49):
was advocating for.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
While she was no longer really in a relationship with
her husband, their lives did overlap from time to time,
especially in the early years of their separation. The biggest
example is in a water rights dispute between the Owens
Valley and the City of Los Angeles in the early
to mid nineteen hundreds. Essentially, people acting on behalf of
(27:12):
Los Angeles had been buying up land in the Owens Valley.
Local people initially thought this was related to a federal
land reclamation project, and so that's the use of irrigation
to turn arid or semi arid land into farmland. When
an article in the La Times announced that the plan
was actually to build an aqueduct that would drain water
(27:35):
out of the valley and carry it to Los Angeles,
more than two hundred miles away, people in Owens Valley
were outraged. Whileas Austin was a huge part of the
advocacy against this project, but a lot of Mary's writing
about it really leaves his workout. She kind of claims
most of the credit.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
After this, Mary Austin left Owens Valley at first, returning
to Carmel. She had a craftsman style cottage built for
herself there and a treehouse that she used as a
writing studio that she called wikiup from the indigenous dwelling
style that is also referred to as a wigwam.
Speaker 3 (28:14):
In April of nineteen oh six, she went to San
Francisco to meet with her publisher. While she was there,
she had a premonition of an impending disaster, and she
was frightened enough that she left her hotel to go
stay with a friend. The next morning, an earthquake struck,
followed by a fire. This was a huge disaster, and
(28:34):
she later published her account of it in The argonaut
Our episode on this earthquake and fire ran as a
Saturday Classic in May of twenty twenty four. Austin's books
from these years include The Flock, which was a successor
to the Land of Little Rain about sheep herding, and
Santa Lucia, which was focused on an unhappy marriage that
was similar to her own. Lost Borders was.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
A collection of fiction that ends with the show short
story The Walking Woman. Most of Austin's work is at
least somewhat autobiographical, and in The Walking Woman, a narrator
describes an encounter with the Walking Woman, who is well
known by reputation in the area where she lives. She
started by walking off in illness and ultimately quote she
(29:20):
was the Walking Woman. That was it. She had walked
off all sense of society, made values, and knowing the
best when the best came to her, was able to
take it.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
These books came out in the years after Austin had
gone to the doctor about persistent arm pain and was
told she was dying of breast cancer. Doctors said surgery
might extend her life, but that her prognosis was terminal.
She decided not to have that surgery and instead to
live the best life she could in the time that
(29:53):
she had left. That diagnosis came in nineteen oh seven,
and when she was still alive in nineteen oh nine
to go to Italy.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
She met another person we've covered on the show, Isadora Duncan.
While she was there, she also spent a lot of
time exploring Italy's museums and Catholic religious sites. Although Austin
no longer thought of herself as Christian, she was drawing
spiritual inspiration from multiple religions and traditions. She started treating
(30:22):
her pain with prayer based on advice she got while
visiting the Convent of the Blue Nuns. Soon after undertaking
a retreat with the nuns, her pain was gone, and
she considered herself to be cured. The books that came
out of her time in Italy include Christ in Italy
being The Adventures of a Maverick among Masterpieces, and The
(30:43):
Man Jesus being a brief account of the life and
teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth. After leaving Italy, Austin
went to France, and before returning to the United States,
she visited London, where she met writers like H. G.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Wells and G. K.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Chesterton, who we covered on the show in March of
twenty twenty three. She also met Herbert and lou Henry Hoover,
the future President and first Lady of the United States.
She made multiple visits to the Lyceum Club, where she
met seemingly everyone who was famous in the worlds of
English language literature and art in the early twentieth century.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
On the way home, Austin visited New York City, where
her play The Arrowmaker, about a paiute woman, was being staged.
She joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association and became
connected to birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. For the next
few years, she spent her time traveling back and forth
between California and New York while also advocating for women's suffrage,
(31:43):
birth control, the right to divorce, and indigenous rights.
Speaker 3 (31:48):
A lot of her books during these years were connected
to these issues. Her semi autobiographical novel, A Woman of Genius,
came out in nineteen twelve and is about a woman
whose aspirations as an actor ran against society's expectations of her.
The Ford, which came out in nineteen seventeen, fictionalized the
water dispute between Owens Valley and Los Angeles Number twenty six.
(32:12):
Jane Street was a feminist novel that was named after
the boarding house that was home to its central character,
Ruth Farwell. By the time this novel came out, Austin's daughter, Ruth,
had died at the age of twenty six. That happened
on October sixth, nineteen eighteen. Some sources attribute Ruth's death
(32:33):
to the pandemic flu, but her death certificate listed her
cause of death as acute asthma. In the nineteen teens,
Austin started visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she moved
into a house there called Casakarita in nineteen twenty four.
She continued to travel extensively, including lecture tours and book tours,
(32:54):
but this was her primary home for the rest of
her life. While living in New Mexico, she became a
more vocal proponent of indigenous rights, including advocating for the
preservation of indigenous traditions and arts. She also worked with
Arthur leon Kampa of the University of New Mexico to
collect Spanish language folklore, transcribing it from oral accounts. In
(33:17):
nineteen twenty seven, Austin became involved in a second water
rights controversy. This one connected to the building of Hoover Dam,
which is sometimes called the Boulder Dam depending on when
things about it were written. The plan was to build
a dam across the Colorado River in the Black Canyon,
which would provide hydroelectric power, flood control, and a water
(33:39):
supply for irrigation and other uses. The Colorado River drains
water from seven states, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona,
and California, so this project required agreement among all of
these states on how the water would be used and distributed.
(34:00):
Austin was against the building of Hoover Dam. She advocated
not for a project that would provide massive amounts of
water to big cities, but one that could bring irrigation
and flood control to small, self sufficient communities that could
live within the constraints of what the land around them
could support. She thought these communities might gradually industrialize, but
(34:24):
that they would do so in a way that would
allow them to maintain their traditions and their connections to
the past, rather than just becoming huge and homogenized. She
advocated for local control of water resources and preservation and
conservation of an area's land and heritage.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
In nineteen twenty seven, Austin was appointed by the governor
of New Mexico to serve as one of the state's
representatives at the Seven States Conference on Water Resources. Another representative,
Francis Wilson, described the address Austin gave in an interview
later on quote, never in my life have I seen
anything so funny as that speech she made. There were
(35:04):
all these men armed to the teeth with facts, and
Mary Austin stood up and made a speech that, well,
the kind of speech Mary would make.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
I don't mean that they weren't interested and that it
wasn't a good speech. But those hard headed, hard boiled
men didn't care how beautiful Arizona is or what folklore
and Indians it has.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
I did not find a transcript of the actual speech, uh,
but that felt to me like it probably accurately summed
up the tone of it. Obviously, Hoover Dam was ultimately built,
but disputes among those seven states about water rights associated
with it continued for years. Arizona and California in particular,
(35:47):
remained at odds over it for decades. This was not
resolved until Arizona versus California was decided by the US
Supreme Court in nineteen sixty three, which was long after
Austin's death. In nineteen twenty nine, Austin met Ansel Adams,
who was at the very start of his career as
a photographer. They collaborated on his first book, Taos Pueblo,
(36:10):
which paired his photographs with her text. With the help
of Tony Luhan, who is from the pueblo, Adams got
permission from the Pueblo Council to take photographs there. This
book was a limited edition of one hundred signed, numbered,
and hand bound copies. Adams printed the photographs by hand.
(36:31):
Across those one hundred books, it totaled nearly thirteen hundred prints.
A facsimile edition of this book was published in nineteen
seventy seven, and both editions are very expensive and hard
to find today, but you can see the twelve prints
it includes online at the Two Red Roses Foundation. In
nineteen thirty two, Austin published her autobiography called Earth Horizon.
(36:56):
It's written primarily in the third person, although it occasionally
shifts into first. It sort of continues that idea of
Mary and I Mary that she had first come to
in her childhood. This book led H. G. Wells to
threaten to sue her over a brief mention of an
affair that he had in which he had fathered a
(37:16):
child out of wedlock. Austin rewrote the paragraph in question,
but during all of the stress surrounding all of this,
she had a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (37:27):
Austin continued to have trouble with her heart after this.
She'd struggled to earn enough money off and on throughout
her career, and her financial problems got worse in the
wake of the Great Depression.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
In nineteen thirty three, she was awarded an honorary Doctor
of Letters from the University of New Mexico. She published
a collection of indigenous legends in folklore called One Smoke
Stories in nineteen thirty four.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
Mary Hunter Austin died in her sleep on August thirteenth,
nineteen thirty four, at the age of sixty five, following
another heart attack. Over the course of her career, she
had published thirty two books and well over two hundred
articles and shorter works. Ansel Adams had said of her quote,
seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual
(38:14):
and spiritual power and discipline. She is a future person,
one who will a century from now appear as a
writer of major stature in the complex matrix of American culture.
That turned out not to be true. Helen McKnight doyle
published a biography of her in nineteen thirty nine, but
(38:35):
Mary Austin was largely forgotten about after her death. Although
there was some rediscovery of her work starting in the
nineteen eighties, it is mostly taught today in the context
of environmental literature. She's sometimes described as an early ecofeminist,
although that term was not coined until the nineteen seventies.
She said of herself quote, I may not know how
(38:58):
to write, nor how to delineate character, nor even how
to tell a story. The one thing I am sure
about myself that I know the relation of letters and landscape,
of life and environment. Some of the land that Austin
wrote about in works like The Land of Little Rain
is now part of a number of parks and preserves,
including Death Valley National Park and the Mojave National Preserve.
(39:22):
Her home in Inno County is now California Historical Landmark
two twenty nine. This is where she wrote most of
the land of Little Rain, and the marker includes a
quote from it quote, but if you ever come beyond
the borders as far as the town that lies in
a hill temple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave
it until you have knocked at the door of the
(39:43):
brown house under the willow tree at the end of
the village street. And there you shall have such news
of the land of its trails, and what is a
stir in them, as one lover of it can give
to another.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
And that is Mary Hunter Austin.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
I did not intend to pick an episode that was
about desert landscapes in which we were also going to
talk about going to Morocco.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
That's a coincidence. It just worked out.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
But in lieu of listener mail, let's talk about going
to Morocco. Okay again, we are going to go to Morocco.
This trip is from November fourth through fifteenth, twenty twenty five.
November fourth is really the travel day that people will
leave the United States to go to Morocco. We have
(40:32):
had folks join us on these trips who have been
flying from places other than the United States, but most
folks are from the US, so that's why we say
it that way. I am really excited about this trip.
It feels a little weird to be talking about going
on a trip in the kind of chaotic times that
we're living in currently, but still excited about It is
(40:54):
something that we started planning last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
not able to announce until just now.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, I mean, I'm very excited. Listen. We're gonna go
to fees. There's gonna be some Indiana Jones filming locations
that I'm gonna make sure I check out. But we're
also doing a lot of really really beautiful stuff. I
actually met a woman from Morocco while I was on
vacation recently, and she was so excited that We're going
to spend a couple days in chef Showen, which is
(41:23):
an extraordinarily beautiful place. It's all just gonna be a
little mind blowing, I think.
Speaker 3 (41:28):
Yeah. So we have some things that I'm particularly excited
about that are slightly different from what we have done
on our previous trips. One is we are going to
have a Moroccan cooking class. Yeah, very excited about that.
We were also going to have one night of glamping.
It's a luxury camping experience. I'm very excited about that. Also,
(41:53):
this is most of our trips. I guess all of
our trips really before this point that we've gone on
for the show have been to Europe. So I'm interested
in going to a place that is, you know, culturally
and in terms of the landscape, like quite different from
where we have traveled to before. The photos of some
(42:17):
of the places that we are going to be visiting
are just so beautiful. I don't know, I can't, I
don't know what else to say about it. I'm very
excited about it. I think on the spectrum of trips
that we have gone on, this is probably toward the
more active trip.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
We are on the move throughout this trip, we're not Yes, listen,
is this a fear for me? Yes, because I like
to like nest up in a hotel for a week
and like have my base of operations. So I'm going
to have to pack in a manner that makes me
able to pick up every day and a half and go.
But I think that's also great and it's a good challenge.
Speaker 3 (42:54):
Yes, Yes, So again we are both incredibly excited about
this trip. You can learn more about it at defined
destinations dot com.
Speaker 2 (43:07):
That is all one word. The actual url.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
At it of it as is Defined Destinations dot Com slash.
Then it's Taste of Morocco twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (43:19):
That's all.
Speaker 3 (43:19):
Each of those words is separated by a dash of
That feels a little complicated to me to read out
in a way. So the probably easier way to get
there is to go to Defined Destinations dot Com on
under tours, it is the one called a Taste of Morocco.
Speaker 2 (43:37):
If you have questions.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
About the travel arrangements, the trip itself, all of that,
the folks to ask are going to be the folks
at Defined Destinations. Because Holly and I will be on
this trip. We are both extremely excited about it and
looking forward to meeting everyone who joins us on the trip.
But when it comes to things like hotel and accommodations
(44:01):
and any dietary restrictions, anything like that, like, that's going
to be Defined Destinations making those arrangements and answering those questions.
I don't know if I have anything else to add
with that other than very excited for the twelfth time.
Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah, it's going to be a blast and I can't wait. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (44:23):
Yeah, So I'm sure we will be talking about this
some more. We will be putting links to it up
on our various social media and yeah, if you would
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast or about travel, or about you know, signing
up for this trip and telling us how excited that
(44:44):
you are that you're going to be going on it.
We are at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and
you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app
and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
Stuff you Missed in History.
Speaker 3 (45:02):
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.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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