Uplifting Art

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Michael Bowen was a painter, but he saw himself as a peaceful warrior.

He was born to wealthy parents in Beverly Hills.

He grew up in the 1940s and 50s, resenting the conformity of his hometown.

His maternal grandmother introduced him to mysticism at a young age, through which he could rebel against his upbringing.

It was all about trying to get more in touch with God, to find the unconscious source that connected all people.

And how this was done depended on the person or the group, but for Michael, it was accomplished through his art.

As such, his paintings are full of color, swirling lines, and evocative uses of the human eye.

He saw these paintings as magic, as something beyond himself, something he couldn't help but create.

He believed viewers of his work had a magical connection to it, seeing things that even he couldn't have anticipated.

But as the 50s turned into the 60s, Michael felt dismay at the state of the country.

The Vietnam War was brutal and pointless, and the government just kept perpetuating the conflict.

He started to feel like his paintings weren't enough to combat this evil.

Michael was introduced to the hallucinogenic drug LSD through some friends, and it had what he believed was a mystical effect on him, helping him to move closer to God and to the consciousness that unites all human beings.

He began began to work with a guru in Mexico who encouraged him to experiment further with drugs, and at one point Michael consumed so much of the hallucinogenic flour that he was in a coma for a month.

But to him, this was all part of the process.

He returned to California after his time in Mexico, inspired to create a new type of art, performance art.

But again, to him, art was magic, and this performance art would be something akin to a ritual, a ritual to unite human consciousness and move forward toward peace.

In other words, to make love, not war.

Michael organized a large gathering in a park in San Francisco called the Human Be-In.

Tens of thousands of people joined in on the event.

They listened to speeches from psychologists and gurus, listened to poets recite their poetry, and they listened to now-famous rock bands like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead.

And of course, they did a lot of LSD.

The huge popularity of the event led it to being seen as a major success.

Michael felt that he was transforming the consciousness of America, but he also felt like he could do even more.

He returned to Mexico and engaged in more training with his guru, taking more drugs and practicing a variety of mystical techniques, including supposedly telekinesis, levitating things with your mind.

With this new power in his arsenal, he came up with a crazy idea for this next work of performance art.

Michael returned to the U.S.

and told every activist he could about his plan.

He wanted to get a massive group together, march on the Pentagon, and levitate it with their minds, transforming it from a symbol of war to a symbol of love.

And as it so happened, many more down-to-earth anti-war activists had also been wanting to organize a march on the Pentagon.

It's the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, after all, and as such was the epicenter from which the U.S.

coordinated its war efforts.

For months, many well-known activists put together plans for the march, which was to take place on October 21st of 1967.

In many ways, Michael's previous human be-in was the blueprint.

But this time, even more people showed up.

100,000 protesters joined together at Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., hearing speeches and listening to music from anti-war figures.

And once they were ready, they marched across the river to the Pentagon.

Michael and his fellow activists led a variety of strange rituals around the building, which spoke to how diverse the crowd was.

Some of the more religious members led an exorcism of the building, others chanted mantras or sprinkled magical cornmeal.

And finally, one of Michael's closest associates, an activist named Abby Hoffman, led a chant to levitate the Pentagon and transform it, ending the war.

It's maybe a bit of an anticlimax here, but the building obviously did not levitate.

and the war did go on.

But the most memorable moment came after, when Michael handed out hundreds hundreds of daisies that he had purchased for the event.

Some of the activists began to place the flowers in the barrels of the guns held by the soldiers surrounding the Pentagon.

This moment was captured in several iconic photographs, providing a symbol across the nation of resistance to war.

Michael may not have ended the war, but once again, he had used his art to transform human consciousness, to guide it toward a better future.

And to be clear, the moral of this story is not to do a dangerous amount of hallucinogenic drugs.

Instead, it is to have faith in the small, strange, and curious acts of resistance that all work together to change the world.

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Many people have secrets that they take to the grave, only for the truth to come out sometime after their death.

Like romance painter Francisco Goya, he was famous for vibrant and idyllic portraits of Spanish life.

It wasn't until after his death that a series of nightmarish paintings were discovered in his home.

They revealed mental health struggles that he hid from his patrons and his fans.

On December 10th of 1908, a coroner in Manhattan, Montana, also uncovered a secret after receiving the body of a town's most mysterious resident.

The discovery would launch a decades-long investigation into who this person was and what they were running from.

In the late 1850s, a mysterious stranger turned up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, looking for work.

He called himself Billy and claimed to be a cook and got hired at one of the local timber camps in the area.

Now, Billy was small in stature with a thin nose and a slight hunchback.

He was friendly, but private.

He didn't talk about himself very much.

In the mornings, he was out of the bunkhouse before his roommates woke up, and he didn't come to bed until everyone else was asleep.

After work, he'd go to the saloon with the other lumberjacks.

He would dance with all the girls and bought rounds of beer for the entire bar.

But his colleagues noticed that for all the booze that he bought for others, Billy would nurse the same single drink all night long.

He never let himself get drunk.

And there were other question marks about Billy as well.

He spoke English, Norwegian, and German, but always said that he came from Iowa.

He also picked up enough of the local Native American languages to have full conversations with tribal members.

To everyone at camp, it was obvious that there was more to Billy than he let on.

But he was a nice guy and he seemed harmless, and so the lumberjacks just let him keep his secrets, especially because Billy was good at his job.

He was a fantastic cook and was soon in demand at lumber camps across Wisconsin.

He amassed a small fortune over the years too and bought several properties in town.

And then, one day in the 1880s, a man showed up in Eau Claire looking for Billy.

The two of them had some kind of an argument and shortly after, Billy left town.

He moved to Manhattan, Montana, and changed his name to Sammy.

And Sammy spent the next 18 years living and cooking on ranches in the area.

He was popular among the ranch hands and a beloved dance partner at the local saloons.

He also got involved in local town meetings and voted in several elections.

He was generous with his money and often paid for his friends to receive medical care.

And when he died in 1908, the entire town mourned.

Even the coroner was upset upset to come collect his body.

And that's when he discovered Sammy's deepest secret.

Biologically, Sammy was a woman.

Now, as you might imagine, the coroner was surprised.

But the discovery also explained Sammy's behavior.

He never got drunk because he was likely scared of revealing the truth about his identity.

He got up early and stayed up late so that he could change clothes in private.

without being seen by other men at camp.

And this could also be why Sammy bought so much property, was an avid voter, and spent his hard-earned money with abandon.

These were luxuries that would have been unavailable to him as a woman.

And remember that strange man who showed up in Eau Claire and argued with Sammy?

Historians now think that it was his brother, begging Sammy to come home.

It's now believed that Sammy Williams was born in Norway, likely in 1833, as Ingeborg Weakens.

She and her family emigrated to Iowa when she was a kid.

As a young woman, she was engaged to a childhood friend named Sven, but Sven's family broke off the engagement because Ingeborg was too low of status.

Shortly after, she disappeared from history and a man named Billy Williams arrived in Wisconsin.

It's not known whether Billy or Sammy would have considered themselves trans.

It's possible he privately identified as a woman but simply wanted the independence of living as a man.

Whatever the case, Sammy's secret was a shock, but not a scandal that you might imagine it to be.

Because at the time, it's estimated that hundreds of people in the Old West were actually living as the opposite gender.

Some of these individuals would probably consider themselves queer or trans if they were alive today, but others were simply chasing freedom.

Outlaws would escape the gallows by hiding in plain sights as women.

Plenty of women traveled west and became men to avoid the confines of marriage.

Most of these gender nonconformists assimilated so seamlessly that they were only discovered after their deaths.

Their history was once considered an integral part of the Old West.

It's only in the last century that they've been erased or whittled down to singular characters like Calamity Jane.

Now, it's hard to say whether Sammy Williams saw themselves as trans in disguise or maybe some mixture of the two.

Whatever the case, their tombstone in Manhattan explains their story succinctly.

It reads, A female whose real name is unknown, but who has been for many years known as Sammy Williams.

And that's fitting, after all, since the Old West was the land of opportunity.

A chance to leave your past past behind, strike it rich, and become whoever you wanted to be.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

The show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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