Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class Mary Hunter Austin About this episode 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.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Tracy V. Wilson? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.
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1:16 Tracy V. Wilson? Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back down memory lane for season two, sharing lessons on life, love, and loss. These are the kind of insights that only come from experience. So tune in to Silver Linings with The Old Gays on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Workplace chaos. We've all been there. Deadlines are slipping, projects are piling up, and suddenly you realize the missing piece is the right person. That's when you say, this is a job for sponsored jobs. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, your job post gets a boost so you can connect with quality candidates faster. In fact, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs.
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2:13 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeart Radio.
2:24 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. Before we start today's episode, we have an announcement. We sure do. Yeah, we are going to Morocco. Yeah. 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 DefinedDestinations.com. The trip is called A 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.
3:04 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. We're going to Morocco. If you want to pause this episode right now and go to DefinedDestinations.com to see about it. You can do that. We'll be talking about it more at the end, though. Yeah, I'm very excited. Me too. 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.
3:46 Tracy V. Wilson? But since there are some other historical Mary Austins, 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 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, so it turns out there is not nearly as much walking in the desert as I thought I was going to get going into this episode.
4:28 Tracy V. Wilson? Also, as a heads up, this episode includes some pretty troubling stuff involving her daughter Ruth, who was disabled.
4:37 Holly Frey? Mary Hunter was born September 9th, 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois. She was the fourth of six children born to George and Susanna Graham Hunter. George was a lawyer who had immigrated from England in 1851, and he had served in the US Army during the Civil War. The family spent much of Mary's childhood living on a farm outside of town.
5:01 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, though. She felt a need to have a relationship with her mother, but that relationship could be very tumultuous. Susanna was a strict Methodist who was very focused on religion 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 wanted and deal with the consequences later.
5:46 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
5:56 Holly Frey? 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 other people were thinking or feeling, leaving her mother to say that she thought Mary was possessed.
6:27 Tracy V. Wilson? By the age of four or five, Mary had started to conceive of herself as two Marys. 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 above all of that. 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.
7:05 Holly Frey? George Hunter had contracted malaria while serving in the Civil War, and he was chronically ill throughout Mary's childhood. He died in October of 1878, when Mary was about 10. Then, a couple of months later, Mary contracted diphtheria. As she was recovering, her sister Jenny got it too, and 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.
7:42 Tracy V. Wilson? After these deaths, the family left their farm and they moved into Carlinville. Susanna 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. Susanna joined the Carlinville branch of the Shetahqua Literary and Scientific Circle, and Mary started using their home study courses to learn about literature and science. After reading a Shetahqua course in geology, she became particularly fascinated with fossils and started collecting them.
8:22 Holly Frey? Mary was bright and a good student. When she first started school, she was so far ahead of her peers that she was placed in 3rd grade. In 1884, at the age of 16, she enrolled at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois. She started out studying art, but then changed to science. While she wanted to be a writer, she thought she could master English and writing on her own, and she wanted to dedicate her college education to something else.
8:53 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, she enrolled at the State Normal School in Bloomington, Illinois. She quickly realized that she did not like the curriculum there, so she went back to Blackburn, and she graduated in 1888. 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 gonna cut off Mary's financial support for her education if she missed that deadline.
9:33 Holly Frey? 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 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 forced relocations. Jim asked his mother for permission to file
10:13 Holly Frey? a claim on her behalf as well. And, without really talking to Mary about it, Susanna and Jim decided that Mary should go to California too, with the hope that she would claim land of her own.
10:26 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 Susanna 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 Susanna's letters to her friends described the trip as almost killing her.
11:03 Holly Frey? Although Mary was struck by the beauty of some of the landscapes that they traveled through, her condition got worse after arriving in California. They were living in a barely furnished cabin without enough food to live on. Mary was tasked with hunting rabbits and other small game, which she did, but she hated killing animals and she could barely tolerate eating what she had brought in. 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.
11:45 Tracy V. Wilson? They had arrived in California in the middle of a drought, and Susanna 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 enough for Jim and Susanna to keep their land claims.
12:15 Holly Frey? 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 thought she should be associating with. She was interested in the ways that people outside the world of white homesteaders lived, and in the landscape around her, and in how they lived with it. In 1889, she tried to get a job teaching but failed the California teaching exam twice. She finally got a job at a private school, and she found lodgings with a family that she felt a deeper affinity for than she did her own.
13:00 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
13:19 Speaker 01 That sound? That's the National Squash League. Pro teams, the world's best players, and rally so fast you'll forget to breathe. Season four is in full swing, and every match streams free on YouTube. Big hits, bigger rivalries, and a front row seat from wherever you are. Watch every match for free on YouTube. Search National Squash League and hit subscribe or follow live updates on Instagram at NSL.Sport.
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15:55 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jessa have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends
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17:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Mary Hunter lived in an 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 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.
17:40 Holly Frey? 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, 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.
18:10 Tracy V. Wilson? I feel like everybody that had these opinions about Mary Hunter's appearance just needed to shut up.
18:17 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of that talk and it bothered me. 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 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.
18:59 Tracy V. Wilson? Agreeing to marry him seemed like the only thing her family thought she had ever done right. They got married on May 18th, 1891, when Mary was 21.
19:09 Holly Frey? 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 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 intellectual conversations during their
19:50 Holly Frey? courtship, as a married couple, they really didn't seem to be able to talk through what was going on in their lives.
19:57 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 never really settled and their money was always tight.
20:21 Holly Frey? 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. 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 was an on-the-job hazard. 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, and that Wallace was now in debt because of it. On top of that, he had known
21:05 Holly Frey? 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.
21:14 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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 30th of that year, she gave birth to her daughter Ruth after a very difficult labor that lasted for more than 48 hours.
21:44 Holly Frey? While Mary was still recovering from giving birth, 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.
22:06 Tracy V. Wilson? When Mary and Ruth joined Wallace back in the Owens Valley, 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 a Paiute 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 Paiute women who were living in the area, including one named Seavi who Mary became
22:51 Tracy V. Wilson? particularly close to. She started learning Paiute methods for doing things like making baskets and identifying and gathering local plants.
23:01 Holly Frey? 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 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.
23:35 Tracy V. Wilson? She was also 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. Mary's friend Helen McKnight Doyle was a physician known as Dr. Nellie, 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
24:18 Tracy V. Wilson? birth, or that she may have had a genetic disorder known as Rhett syndrome, or that she may have been autistic.
24:26 Holly Frey? 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 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 like health and disability,
25:11 Holly Frey? 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.
25:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Her family, unsurprisingly, did not really help. By Mary's account, Wallace was not very involved in raising their daughter, and 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, Susanna wrote Mary a letter that said in part, quote, "I don't know what you've done, daughter, to have such judgment upon you." Mary largely cut off contact with her mother after that, and Susanna died in 1896. Although their relationship had always been difficult, Mary was really heartbroken that they had not reconciled before her death.
26:05 Holly Frey? 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, 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 bit older, Ruth repeatedly tried to run away.
26:40 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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,
27:25 Tracy V. Wilson? those same people, including her husband, accused Mary of abandoning her child, even though the Frager family was kind to Ruth and really seemed to look after her well.
27:38 Holly Frey? 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 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.
28:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Mary's critics initially included Helen McKnight Doyle, who later became her friend.
28:06 Tracy V. Wilson? At one point, while Ruth was living with the Fragers, Dr. Nellie heard that she was ill 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 Dr. Nellie described as "an offense against all motherhood." But she eventually came to the conclusion that Mary could provide the 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.
28:42 Holly Frey? In 1903, when Ruth was 11, Mary Austin published her first and best-known book, The Land of Little Rain. It's a set of lyrical sketches about the 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 illness, during which she had a vision of two angel-like beings in the room with her.
29:22 Holly Frey? She said that it had taken her 12 years to research, but only a month to craft it.
29:29 Tracy V. Wilson? 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, run by Dr. R.E. Osborne. 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.
30:02 Holly Frey? This was initially a trial placement and it became permanent in 1905. 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 worse for them. When people asked about Ruth, Mary would answer, quote, "We have lost her."
30:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Austin's life from this point combines travel, writing, and activism, and we'll talk about that after a sponsor break.
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31:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
32:00 Tracy V. Wilson? only gets better with age on the podcast that never gets old. Listen to Silver Linings, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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34:01 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 1914. 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 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.
34:42 Holly Frey? 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 Paiute tales and legends for children, and that came out in 1904. It's clear that she was trying to be respectful in how she discussed indigenous people and the land that they lived on, 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.
35:22 Holly Frey? She also incorporated indigenous art and dress and language into her life in a way that could be appropriative, and in her autobiography, she described herself as having a "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 was advocating for.
35:52 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 1900s. Essentially, people acting on behalf of 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
36:34 Tracy V. Wilson? that would drain water out of the valley and carry it to Los Angeles, more than 200 miles away, people in Owens Valley were outraged. Wallace Austin was a huge part of the advocacy against this project, but a lot of Mary's writing about it really leaves his work out. She kind of claims most of the credit.
36:56 Holly Frey? 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 Wiki-Up, from the indigenous dwelling style that is also referred to as a wigwam.
37:15 Tracy V. Wilson? In April of 1906, 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 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 2024.
37:44 Holly Frey? 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 a collection of fiction that ends with the 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 an illness, and ultimately, quote, "She was the walking woman. That was it. She had walked off all sense of society-made values,
38:27 Holly Frey? and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it."
38:32 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 she had left. That diagnosis came in 1907, and when she was still alive in 1909, she decided to go to Italy.
39:02 Holly Frey? 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 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 Man Jesus: Being a Brief Account of the Life
39:46 Holly Frey? and Teachings of the Prophet of Nazareth."
39:49 Tracy V. Wilson? After leaving Italy, Austin went to France, and before returning to the United States, she visited London, where she met writers like H.G. Wells and G.K. Chesterton, who we covered on the show in March of 2023. 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 20th century.
40:20 Holly Frey? 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 Women's 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, birth control, the right to divorce, and indigenous rights.
40:48 Tracy V. Wilson? A lot of her books during these years were connected to these issues. Her semi-autobiographical novel, "A Woman of Genius," came out in 1912 and is about a woman whose aspirations as an actor ran against society's expectations of her. The Ford, which came out in 1917, fictionalized the water dispute between Owens Valley and Los Angeles. Number 26 Jane Street was a feminist novel that was named after the boarding house that was home to its central character, Ruth Farwell.
41:21 Holly Frey? By the time this novel came out, Austin's daughter Ruth had died at the age of 26. That happened on October 6, 1918. Some sources attribute Ruth's death to the pandemic flu, but her death certificate listed her cause of death as acute asthma.
41:40 Tracy V. Wilson? In the 19-teens, Austin started visiting Santa Fe, New Mexico, and she moved into a house there called Casa Carita in 1924. She continued to travel extensively, including lecture tours and book tours, 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 Campa of the University of New Mexico to collect Spanish-language folklore, transcribing it from oral accounts.
42:17 Holly Frey? In 1927, 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 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.
43:01 Tracy V. Wilson? 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 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.
43:41 Holly Frey? In 1927, 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, Frances 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 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. Oh, 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."
44:24 Tracy V. Wilson? I did not find a transcript of the actual speech. 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 remained at odds over it for decades. This was not resolved until Arizona versus California was decided by the US Supreme Court in 1963, which was long after Austin's death.
45:00 Holly Frey? In 1929, Austin met Ansel Adams, who was at the very start of his career as a photographer. They collaborated on his first book, Taos Pueblo, which paired his photographs with her text. With the help of Tony Luhon, who is from the Pueblo, Adams got permission from the Pueblo Council to take photographs there. This book was a limited edition of 100 signed, numbered, and handbound copies. Adams printed the photographs by hand. Across those 100 books, it totaled nearly 1,300 prints. A facsimile edition of this book was published in 1977, and both editions are very expensive
45:43 Holly Frey? and hard to find today, but you can see the 12 prints it includes online at the Two Red Roses Foundation.
45:51 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1932, Austin published her autobiography called Earth Horizon. 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 child out of wedlock. Austin rewrote the paragraph in question, but during all of this stress surrounding all of this, she had a heart attack.
46:27 Holly Frey? 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.
46:40 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1933, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of New Mexico. She published a collection of indigenous legends and folklore called One Smoke Stories in 1934.
46:53 Holly Frey? Mary Hunter Austin died in her sleep on August 13, 1934, at the age of 65, following another heart attack. Over the course of her career, she had published 32 books and well over 200 articles and shorter works. Ansel Adams had said of her, quote, "Seldom have I met and known anyone of such intellectual 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."
47:28 Tracy V. Wilson? That turned out not to be true. Helen McKnight Doyle published a biography of her in 1939, but Mary Austin was largely forgotten about after her death, although there was some rediscovery of her work starting in the 1980s. It is mostly taught today in the context of environmental literature. She's sometimes described as an early eco-feminist, although that term was not coined until the 1970s. She said of herself, quote, "I may not know how 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."
48:11 Holly Frey? 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. Her home in Inyo County is now California Historical Landmark 229. 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 dimple at the foot of Kearsarge, never leave it until you have knocked at the door of the 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."
48:57 Tracy V. Wilson? And that is Mary Hunter Austin.
49:00 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. That's a coincidence.
49:10 Holly Frey? It just worked out.
49:11 Tracy V. Wilson? But in lieu of listener mail, let's talk about going to Morocco.
49:15 Holly Frey? Okay.
49:17 Tracy V. Wilson? Again, we are going to go to Morocco. This trip is from November 4th through 15th, 2025. November 4th is really the travel day that people will leave the United States to go to Morocco. We have 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.
49:43 Tracy V. Wilson? 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. It's something that we started planning last year.
49:58 Holly Frey? Yeah, yeah.
49:59 Tracy V. Wilson? We are not able to announce until just now.
50:02 Holly Frey? Yeah, I mean, I'm very excited. Listen, we're gonna go to Fez. 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 gonna spend a couple of days in Chef Chouen, which is an extraordinarily beautiful place. It's all just gonna be a little mind blowing, I think.
50:28 Tracy V. Wilson? 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.
50:40 Holly Frey? Yeah.
50:41 Tracy V. Wilson? Very excited about that. We, we're also going to have one night of glamping. It's a luxury camping experience. I'm very excited about that also. 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, and in terms of the landscape, like quite different from where we have traveled to before. The photos of some 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.
51:25 Tracy V. Wilson? I think on the spectrum of trips that we have gone on, this is probably toward the more active trip.
51:33 Holly Frey? We are on the move throughout this trip. We're not-
51:36 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes.
51:37 Holly Frey? 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 gonna have to pack in a manner that makes me able to pick up every day and a half and go.
51:51 Tracy V. Wilson? Right.
51:52 Holly Frey? But I think that's also great and it's a good challenge.
51:54 Tracy V. Wilson? Yes, yes. So again, we are both incredibly excited about this trip. You can learn more about it at defineddestinations.com. That is all one word. The actual URL added of it is defineddestinations.com slash, then it's Taste of Morocco 2025. That's all, each of those words is separated by a dash. 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 defineddestinations.com. Under Tours, it is the one called A Taste of Morocco.
52:38 Tracy V. Wilson? If you have questions 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 hotels and accommodations 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 12th time.
53:18 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's gonna be a blast and I can't wait.
53:22 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, 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 you are that you're going to be going on it, we are at [email protected] . And you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you like to get your podcasts.
54:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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54:46 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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