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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast, I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Tracy, how much do you know about Isadora Duncan?

Well, very influential in the modern dance movement. Mm hmm. Horrifying accidental death, right?

That horrifying accidental death is what most people know about. But as you said, she was very influential in dance. Her life was also really full and rich and full of ups and downs and completely fascinating, in my opinion. And all of that gets lost because her story tends to get reduced to that freak accident that took her life. So I thought this would be a good time to talk about the woman who is often called the mother of modern dance.

You'll also see Martha Graham get that title. But Isadora was really the first doing some of the things that she did.

She had an unconventional upbringing. She had a very unconventional life. She is in some ways hilarious and sometimes very enchanting, occasionally frustrating. But she is someone that's a little bit admirable because she really did live entirely according to her own compass. She did not care about social mores in the least. And she also was just immensely resilient. And I got so deep into researching her and reading her memoir in particular, that this became an accidental two parter. So in this first episode, we're going to talk about Isadora Duncan's early life, which was full of struggle, but seemed overall to be really quite happy.

And the second part, we will get into her life after she became famous, and that's when things start to become plagued with tragedy. Well before that famous end of her life, that is usually what people know her for. So Duncan was born Angela Isadora Duncan in San Francisco, California, in the late 1970s. Her actual date of birth can be found listed two different ways a year apart. One of these is May 26, 1877. That's what's listed on her baptism certificate and the other is May 27th, 1878.

And that one is largely believed to be her actual date of birth, which Holly and I had a whole conversation about before coming in here. Yeah, I mean, I just chalked it up to, like, a priest with bad handwriting or being a little sloppy on the on the details.

Her mother, Mary Isadora Grant, who went by Daura, was a music teacher and had three other children. She was raising them on her own. So this was not a lavish life. Things had been different before Dora left her husband, Joseph Duncan. Joseph was a cashier at the Bank of California, but in his heart, he was a poet. He knew a great deal about art and music and literature, and the home that their children were born into was one that was filled with beautiful and valuable works of art.

Chosen by Joseph, who was a collector, was such a good guy that he was often consulted by wealthy friends to help them develop their own collections.

So Isadora wrote in her autobiography that her mother, Dora, had been ill during her pregnancy and could only eat oysters and iced champagne. This fanciful story is something she theorized was what made her a dancer. She said that it probably made her dance in the womb, just the thought of a pregnant woman being like only oysters and champagne for me.

But there were two things that ultimately led to the breakup of the Duncan home, which happened when Isadora was still just a baby. For one. There was a bit of a financial scandal with Joseph. He was allegedly using bank money for his own investing. For another, he fell in love with an older woman and he had an affair which became public knowledge. That older woman, incidentally, was Ina Culbreth, who went on to become California's poet laureate.

And at this time of the scandal, though she was a librarian, Theodora was embarrassed and furious over her husband's behaviour. She promptly divorced him and took the children to Oakland. This change meant that the family went from a life of comfort to one of poverty.

Dora was not shy about demonizing Joseph to his children. They regularly heard about what a terrible man he was. And Isidoro later quoted her mother as saying, quote, Your father was a demon. He ruined your mother's life.

Yeah. And to be clear, this was not a case where he was withholding some sort of settlement money in the divorce. He was broke after that whole scandal broke. So nobody in the family had any money. When Isadora was seven, her father came to the family house and she essentially met him. For the first time at that point, she told him that the family was busy and could not receive him. She basically was the one who greeted him at the door, but she did agree to go for a walk with him.

Of course, this sounds terrifying to modern ears. Like a strange man comes to the door, says, I'm your dad, and is like, will you go for a walk with me? No one would let their child do that. But this is a different time. Isadora took this walk with her dad. She found him to be warm and gentle and kind. And this was a little shocking because he was not at all the demon that she had imagined based on her mother's descriptions.

Several years later, Joseph had regained enough of his fortune that he actually bought a house for Dora and the children to live in.

All of this had a profound effect on Isadora at the age of 12, she'd seen her mother's anguish, heard her mother's angry descriptions of her father. But then she'd also seen her father is a fundamentally kind man, and she really struggled how to reconcile how two people could love each other and then hate each other. While she asked questions of the adults in her life about what had happened between her parents, she never really got any real answers. And she came to view marriage as the most awful concept imaginable.

She made a vow at that young age that she was open to love, but, quote, I would never lower myself to this degrading state.

Yes, she basically came to the conclusion, since no adult would help her figure out what had happened, that marriage must ruin love. There are plenty of people alive today that would give her a lamp.

Tegus agreed with that. Right. And this divorce had led to a total disillusionment on her mother, Dora's part about what she thought her life was, who she thought her husband was. And this led to another very significant change. While Dora had been a very devout Catholic up to that point in her life, after the divorce, she became an atheist rather abruptly. She also became a follower of Bob Ingersoll, who was often called the Great Agnostic, and she read Ingersoll's work to her children.

And she taught them that not only was everything in the Bible a fantasy, but that so were all of the trappings of childhood that were often told to children such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. This home education would sometimes get Isadora into trouble at school because she would announce during holiday parties, for example, that the whole thing was based on falsehood when she relayed one such instance to her mother where she had been sent home for yelling, There is no Santa Claus.

During a Christmas party over and over, Dora told her, there is no Santa Claus and there is no God, only your own spirit to help you.

So Dora and her children, that was Augustine. Raymond Elizabeth and Isadora did not have a lot of money, but Dora did ensure that they had as much exposure to the arts as possible. Since she was a music teacher, they all had plenty of access to singing and playing themselves, but they were also encouraged to put on plays and to dance and to read. Journalist Sam Dickson once wrote that, quote, Isadora Duncan danced as soon as she could walk.

And despite the strain of poverty and having to frequently move before her father bought them that house because they were often evicted for failure to pay rent, Isadora would later write of her childhood, quote, I have to be thankful that when we were young, my mother was poor. She could not afford servants or governesses for her children. And it is to this fact that I owe the spontaneous life which I had the opportunity to express as a child and never lost.

Isadora, who was also apparently a completely fearless child, had absolutely no problem doing things like cajoling the local butcher or baker into giving her free food to take home to the family when times were tight. And she even sold her mother's hand knitted hats and gloves door to door. And she made quite a bit of money doing this better than she would have made if Dora had sold those to a shop to then be sold.

Several years after the public humiliation that had led to her parents divorce, Isadora visited the Oakland Public Library and asked the librarian for a book recommendation. That librarian turned out to be Ina Culbreth.

She would go on to become a huge influence on the girl's life due to all kinds of foundational books that she recommended which ignited Duncan's imagination. Isadora did not know for quite some time that Ida had been her father's paramour. She later wrote, quote, She was evidently the great passion of his life, and it was probably by the invisible thread of circumstance that I was drawn to her.

Yes, she Ayna and Joseph had broken up before Isadora had met her in this way. But it is a strange coincidence, to be sure, by the time she was a pre-teen, Isadora was already quite skilled as a dancer.

Not only had she practiced a great deal, but she had also read a great deal about the. Art and about art in general from ancient Greece, right up through her own time, she created new steps informed by romantic visions of history and intending to replicate, for example, the style of Greek art. And she and her sister claim to have invented what she called, quote, a new system of dancing. But in reality, there was no system.

Still, this incorporation of gesture and movement in reaction in relation to music or poetry aligned with these historical ideals led her to being sought after by younger children before she was even a teenager to take dance lessons that had actually started years earlier. She wrote that when she was six years old, quote, My mother came home one day and found that I had collected half a dozen babies of the neighborhood, all of them too young to walk, and had them sitting before me on the floor while I was teaching them to wave their arms.

When she asked the explanation of this, I informed her that it was my school of the dance. She was amused in placing herself at the piano. She began to play for me. The school continued. It became very popular. Later on, little girls of the neighborhood came and their parents paid me a small sum to teach them. This was the beginning of what afterwards proved to be a very lucrative occupation. Yes, she really never stopped teaching dance from the time she was six until the end of her life.

I'm imagining how she gathered up all these babies.

Did she just go take them out of their cribs? Like, can I have your child? I would like to teach it today. I don't know. But as we said, she was fearless. She would go door to door and ask people for stuff. We are going to talk a little bit more about Isadora and her sister Elisabeth's dance classes in just a moment. But first, we will pause for a sponsor break. Stuff you missed in history class is brought to you by progressive insurance, saving money on your car insurance is easy with progressive.

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On March 5th, Disney invites you to travel to the fantasy world of Cassandre and Rya and the Last Dragon. When an evil force threatens the land dividing its people, it's up to Lone Warrior Riot to track down the last dragon and restore peace. From the studio that brought you Malana and Frozen comes the next epic adventure featuring the voices of Kelly Marie Tran and Aquafina, directed by Don Hall and Carlos Lopez, Estrada Syariah and The Last Dragon the way you want in theaters or order it on Disney plus with premiere access March 5th.

So that teaching situation that Isadora had established, which she is still pretty young, pretty quickly evolved, things became even more formalized when there was enough of a demand in San Francisco that she and her sister Elizabeth rented a house there. That was the castle mansion at Sutter and Van Ness Avenue so that they could give lessons across the bay as well as in Oakland. So the two teenagers at this point, maybe we'll talk about that in a second, took the ferry over to San Francisco each day, walked from the ferry dock to their rented space, and then taught the kids of the city to dance in exchange for teaching fees that they collected from their parents.

The name Castle Mansion makes this whole thing sound fancy. It was not. It was an old falling apart building. That's why they were able to rent it. There have even been some theories over the years that the Duncan sisters and their students may have even used wood from inside the building, like from decorative mantelpieces and whatnot, to start fires in the fireplaces just so they could stay warm as they danced because they apparently didn't have heat or power.

When exactly she made the switch to teaching full time as a little bit blurry in her own account. She stopped going to school at 10 and focused exclusively on her little dance school. But she also admits that she lied about her age regularly so parents and students would take her more seriously. So other versions of this story have her ending her formal education anywhere between the ages of 10 and 16. Isadora Duncan is always consistently characterized as a woman who bucked tradition, and this was already very much the case in these classes.

We had said that she made up her own steps, but she was really teaching students early forms of modern dance way before that concept was introduced. In any sort of professional dance room, she found the idea of ballet's rules and pointe shoes far too restricting for her taste. So she had developed her own technique and she danced barefoot, which was a completely new concept. And she was also ready to basically make a way for herself. She read about so many other places and ways of life and the books that she continued to just devour that being stuck poor and hustling to teach enough dance students to keep food on the table.

Living in Oakland, all of this was just not enough for her. She may have appreciated that her mother's lack of money had given her a foundation for creativity, but she dreamed of more and she started plotting ways to make that dream a reality.

One thing that's interesting here, too, is that she dreamed of more not just for herself.

She always wanted her mother and siblings with her in this. And to that end, she convinced her mother to take a trip to Chicago. She thought if she could just audition for the theaters there, it would offer a fresh start in a new, exciting place. And then she could plot her next move. And somehow she and Dora made this trip happen. A little bit of money was pulled together, and soon Isadora was being escorted across the country by her mother in the hopes of starting a professional performing career.

So things did not go quite as planned. Isadora auditioned for various theaters.

They all told her that she was lovely and that her dancing was quite good, but also that it was kind of weird. She was still doing her own thing. She was not doing the standardized styles and steps that most young women who had their eyes on the theater would have gotten through more formalized training. Isadora was even encouraged to go back home and to keep on loving dance, but to select a more appropriate career for a young woman. She didn't give up on her dreams, but things were getting kind of desperate.

Dora and Isadora Pond personal belongings like her grandmother's jewelry and even bits of lace from their garments just to get money so that they could eat. Finally, Isadora booked a gig, but it was far from what she imagined she was to dance in a music hall.

So like the theater managers that she had already auditioned for, this was not her audience. She was still doing her dance style. That was inspired by ancient Greece. And the clientele is said to have mostly wanted her to finish and get off the stage so they could see more alluring acts. She was paid fifty dollars a week and performed under an assumed name. But she later wrote of all this quote, We were saved from starvation, but I had enough of trying to amuse the public with something which was against my ideals.

And that was the first and last time I ever did.

So yeah, she only did that for a week and they asked if she wanted to do the next week. She was like, I'm out. But again, she still had not given up on her dreams by any means. She decided after this experience that what she needed to do was move on to New York, but she couldn't afford to make that trip. Eventually, she kind of got her break. Really. She made it. She read that Augusten Daley was going to be in Chicago with a touring show.

So she went to the stage door of the.

Theater and asked to be allowed to see him many, many days in a row, Augusten Bailey could also be a show topic. He was a North Carolina born theater man who worked as a playwright, a manager, a critic and a producer. And he became incredibly influential in the East Coast U.S. theater scene. And when Isadora Duncan was finally allowed to see him after multiple attempts, she basically launched into a monologue. She said, quote, I have a great idea to put before you, Mr.

Daly, and you are probably the only man in this country who can understand it. I have discovered the dance. I have discovered the art which has been lost for two thousand years. You are a supreme theatre artist, but there is one thing lacking in your theatre which made the old Greek theatre great. And this is the art of the dance, the tragic chorus. Without this, that is the head and body without legs to carry it on, I bring you the dance, I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionize our entire epoch.

Where have I discovered it? By the Pacific Ocean, by the waving pine forests of Sierra Nevada.

I have seen the ideal figure of youthful America dancing over the top of the Rockies, the supreme poet of our country. As Walt Whitman, I have discovered the dance that is worthy of the poem of Walt Whitman. I am indeed the spiritual daughter of Walt Whitman. For the children of America, I will create a new dance that will express America. I will bring your theater the vital soul. It lacks the soul of the dancer. That's a lot.

So much. I wanted to put it all in there because can you imagine a theater producer having some complete stranger come in and just like the like, throw all of this word salad?

I mean, it's pretty pretentious word salad. Oh, yeah. And she actually had more. There is more to it, but Daly kept interrupting her and telling her it was quite enough. He didn't need to hear any more of her spiel, but clearly he did see something in her that he thought was different and new and he actually thought she had potential and also just, you know, so much bravado. So he replied, quote, Well, I have a little part in a pantomime that I am putting on in New York.

You can report for rehearsals the first of October, and if you suit, you are engaged.

So, Bailey, Carson Duncan in this pantomime show he was doing, she hated pantomime and thought it was ridiculous. But she also wanted to work. Her siblings had already moved out to New York and she wanted to keep the family afloat. The show started touring and she would send half of her fifteen dollars a week to her mother and would skip staying in hotels with the rest of the cast and opt to go to a less costly boarding house for the night to save money.

Yes, she has descriptions of some of those boarding houses and they are a little bit scary in many instances. But to her she was like, I'm just going to pinch all my pennies and to keep her working daily, continue to find bit parts for her and other shows. So she was able to start a modest but consistent career in his New York productions. He cast her as a dancing fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and she was allowed to dance solo in a set up to the entrance of Titania and Oberon.

And although audiences reacted really, really positively to this solo, Daly wasn't particularly thrilled. He hadn't intended for her dancing to be anything but sort of an ambient setter, he actually said something to her like, this isn't a dance hall. But still, when the company went on tour, he included her and she got paid 25 dollars a week. This time, not long after the while, she was complaining to Daly about her general dissatisfaction, about the kinds of shows the theater did and the lack of art in them.

He made a pass at her and she resigned two days later and never saw him again.

The family had found a studio apartment that they all shared but didn't furnish. Isadora wanted the space for dancing, so they had mattresses only and they stood them on and against the wall during the day. In addition to using the apartment as her own dance studio, they often left for the day so they could rent the space out to other dance and music teachers to use.

The family was struggling along this way for a while. They were only having that sort of day rental income. And we're going to talk about a brief bit of good fortune that befell Isadora in just a moment when she ended up collaborating with a composer who was initially very much against combining his music with dance. But before we get into that story, we will pause for a sponsor break.

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Izidor is next break, and this was a fairly big one, came when she was dancing one evening to a piece of music written by American pianist and composer Ethelbert Nevine. She was still unemployed at this time. She was just dancing in her home and kind of making up her own dances. But Nevine got wind of this and he was not pleased. He found her apartment. He barged in and he told her that dancing to his music was forbidden. So she asked him to just please watch her dance to his piece that he had written titled Narcissus.

And he did. And when she finished, he said to her, you are an angel, you are a dominatrix. Those very movements I saw when I was composing the music for him, this whole interaction was a revelation. He saw his music interpreted through dance in a completely new way, and he saw in Isadora a star.

At this point, Nevine was important enough that when he talked up the dancer, he had seen putting new steps to his work as a wonder. It really ignited the New York art scene. They wanted to find out who this Isadora Duncan was. He set up concerts for the two of them, where he played piano and she danced. She was booked in private salons and small exclusive venues to the elite of the city.

Could come marvel at her. But ever in search of new wonders, they mostly moved on rather than rebooking her. They had thought her kind of a novelty. And any hope that she may have had that these engagements would lead to bigger opportunities just never came to fruition. She realized that the people of New York society really just viewed artists as what she called, quote, a sort of upper servant, perhaps because this rapid ascension and fall stung, or perhaps because she had just given the U.S. East Coast a chance and it had not gone as expected, Isadora was ready to move on.

And this sentiment ballooned when the building that she and her family had been staying in, the Windsor Hotel, burned down. So at that point, they had nowhere to live. So she borrowed money from some of her new admirers and friends to finance another move, this time across the Atlantic to London. She tells stories in her book about going to like various rich women that she had performed for and telling them this sad story. She would get so excited when they brought out their checkbook and then they would write a fairly small sum and she would be like, Oh, I got to go to another house, do this all over again.

Her brother Agustin did not join them. Once she had gotten this money together, he had gotten engaged and stayed in New York. This actually caused some strife. His mother felt a little betrayed by the whole thing. Money was still pretty tight. So Isadora, Dora, Elizabeth and Raymond made the two week voyage to England on a cattle boat.

So the family spent their first several days in London, literally on the street. They were moving from place to place as the police chased them off of benches. Isadora eventually went to nice neighborhoods and started knocking on doors, offering to dance as entertainment at any kind of social events they might be hosting. And this worked, which shocks me a little bit. I am forever amazed by all of her.

I just started knocking on doors and like seeing if I could get money or or food. And it it works every time for her. Yeah. That the whole family joined in with her on these entertainment ventures. Dora would play the piano, Elizabeth would recite poetry, and Raymond would offer thoughts on art and humanity. Yes.

Yes. So you would get a combo package, you would get a dancer, a piano player, a poetry recital and someone expounding.

And Isadora was able to book some engagements this way through word of mouth, like she would do one party. Someone would find the whole thing kind of interesting and book it for their party down the road. But it still really was not enough to keep the family above the bare minimum for survival. They spent their nights performing and then they would spend their days wandering around the British Museum. This is something they would do all the time. But once again, good fortune in the form of complete happenstance, smiled upon Isadora and the right person saw her dance.

So this story is even more quaint than the previous two times that someone discovered her because she wasn't performing. She and her brother Raymond are said to have been dancing in the garden of the house they were staying in when a woman walked up and started watching them. It turned out that woman was Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who was known to her many fans of Mrs. Pat. She was one of the biggest stars of London theater. She said to have been moved to tears while watching Isadora dance.

And Mrs. Pat and the Duncans struck up a conversation with the opener, quote, Where on earth did you people come from? Soon there was just mutual. Moderation flowing between them. Yes, she apparently took him back to her house. She's like, I'm going to play piano and I'll do some monologues for you and you dance again. And they had a great visit. So for all of the difficulty that Isadora had in the United States, getting people to understand her dancing and its nods to ancient Greece, London had no such problem.

And once Mrs. Pat introduced Miss Duncan and her family to London social scene and arts community, her star rose incredibly rapidly. Even the royal family embraced her new, different style. She was introduced to several members at various events.

And in short, Europe loved her, although there were always, we should point out, many older, more conservative patrons of the arts who kind of found her scandalous.

Soon, with some positive buzz to bolster her bookings, Duncan started touring. Raymond had gone to Paris and he wrote letters to Dora and Isadora Elizabeth had gone back to New York to start teaching again. And so Raymond's letters would tell Dora and Isadora that they simply had to come to France. Paris audiences found Isadora just enchanting. She met a flurry of renowned artists and writers and important members of French society. And just as they had visited the British Museum almost every day while they were in London, in Paris, the Duncans went to the Louvre day after day, occasionally switching to a different museum now and again.

But the love was really where it was at for them. They also happened to have timed this whole thing just right that they were able to see the Exposition Universelle in 1900. Isadora described this time in Paris as being, quote, about as happy as anyone could be, despite their money situation being perpetually precarious. According to her memoir, quote, Neither of the appreciation of princes nor my growing fame brought us enough to eat. Soon, Raymond also left for home.

And then Isadora and Dora were alone together, as they had been when they first left San Francisco for Chicago.

Isadora traveled to Berlin at the invitation of actress Loewy Fuller, who thought that Duncan and Japanese geisha actress and dancer Sara Yako would make a really excellent double bill. Germany was particularly enthralled with Duncan. There are stories of her in Munich, where she was carried through the streets by students to a cafe where she danced on the tables. From there, she went to Vienna and to Budapest. It seemed like in every city somebody would see her perform and then invite her on to the next destination with the promise of a booking.

Her month long contract in Budapest marked the first time that she was actually contracted to perform for a ticket buying public instead of it sort of a private one off events. Yeah, prior to that, she has been like a gig performer. In this time. They were like, no, we want to actually bill you in a theater and the the public will come and watch you. And it was in Budapest in 1982 that Duncan is said to have truly come into her own as a dancer and a performer.

It was there in her month long booking that she debuted her own choreography on the stage for the public and her show was sold out for the entire month. She was in residence also in Budapest. She had her first sexual experience. This was a man she referred to in her memoir as Romeo because he was playing that role at the Royal National Theatre at the time. The two of them became serious pretty quickly. But as soon as Romeo started talking about marriage, Isadora has affections cooled.

Unsurprisingly, based on her earlier pronouncements on that matter, they eventually broke off their romance. Isadora moves next to Vienna, but when she got sick there, Romeo came to stay at her bedside. She was ill for quite some time and he did not leave. But they didn't rekindle their romance once she was better again. She put her disillusionment with love into her art, she later said. And that way of dealing with loss or misfortune would just be a recurring theme throughout her life.

And we're actually going to pause here and leave Isadora in a pretty good place for this episode. At this point, she had gotten over her illness. She was the beloved star of Hungary and the rest of Europe. And we're going to leave it here because the rest of her life is less ebullient. So in part two, we're going to talk about the loves and tragedies that dominated her world after she had become famous. Do you also some listener mail?

I do, because there's exciting stuff that everyone has been talking about. Several people wrote in about it.

So if you were one of the people and this isn't your know, please know that I still appreciate it. I just didn't want to read them all. This is from our listener, Kiki, who writes, I love your podcast. I'm always happy on Mondays when I get to work and get to listen to your Saturday Classic and the new episode. It makes my busy day at work so much better. I was very excited to hear that, Scientia.

Have used the movie Frozen to have new insights into the Dyatlov Pass event. Please see the link to the article I found below. Your episode about this was on October six, 2014, if you'd like to do a Saturday classic of that. Hint, hint. And she links the article and says, I feel so close to both of you and I wish you all the best attached. Please find a picture of my coworker Lou, who also listens with me when he is in the office.

Thanks. In your devoted fan, Kiki Lou is an adorable brindle pup who is so cute. But the article she linked to is one that I had seen. It's from the Smithsonian. And it is very, very interesting because obviously that lead of frozen, we're going to come back to you. But I want to talk about this as a reminder in case anyone didn't listen to it. Dyatlov Pass incident was when some very experienced hikers were in the Dyatlov Pass.

They were later found dead. Things were very mysterious and no one has ever figured out exactly what happened. So one thing that I wanted to make very clear, and that is quoted in that article, is that the lead author of the paper that came out about this, Johan Gomm, had said, we do not claim to have solved the Dyatlov Pass mystery as no one survived to tell the story. But we showed the plausibility of the avalanche hypothesis for the first time.

So he and his co-author, who is Alexander and in I hope I'm pronouncing these names correctly, compiled historical records. And they recreated the mountains environment on the night that this incident happened to try to figure out what had gone on. They simulated using this data a slab avalanche, drawing on snow friction, data and local topography. One of the revelations here was that the slope had been thought to be more shallow than it actually was. And they use this to kind of give some weight to the possibility that a small snow slide could have swept through the area, leaving very few other traces behind, but causing some of the things that happened that we talked about in that show.

There was a lot of a lot of mystery around the the hikers had run out of their tents without their clothes, which people were like. No experienced hiker would do that. There has been a theory based on some of this work that they had done that and then it was still snowing. So they couldn't find their way back like they had done it, because they knew if they didn't just basically jump out that second, they would not survive. But here's the fun part if you're wondering how frozen fits.

So the researchers actually had some interesting assist from this because they got in touch with Disney, having noted the way that they depicted snow and how realistic it was. And they actually shared their animation code with these researchers and that helped them build that that recreation computer generated model that that helped them establish that this could have been a slab, what's called a slab avalanche, which is just basically like one thin section of snow that falls all at once, almost like a knife.

Cutting through their theory at this point is that the cut that they made into the slope as they were digging out their camp gave enough empty space that the gravity of the snow slab was able to release and drop and create the events that happened. We don't know if this is true. We'll probably never know for sure. But it's a really cool idea.

And I do I do love that somehow Disney got involved here. So thank you, Kiki, and everyone else who wrote to us about it. It is forever. I love that story and I love any information that comes to light about it. Now, if you would like to write to us, you can do so at History podcast at I heart radio dotcom. You can also find us on social media as missed in history and subscribe to the podcast is super duper easy.

You can do that on the I Heart radio app at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen to your favorite shows.

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