European Fashions

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Fur-Hat Industry

Trade usually benefited both parties in an exchange, since value (of goods traded) is in the eye of the beholder. However, from a strictly economic standpoint, European traders came out well ahead of their Native American counterparts. Except for guns and powder, Europeans exchanged relatively inexpensive trade goods like pots and pans, beads, and cloth for Indians’ furs, which took an entire season for hunters to amass. Europeans were dependent on Native Americans for the furs which had been almost depleted in Europe. However, because they weren’t aware of the European situation, Native Americans couldn’t always leverage their goods to better advantage.

The fur trade was fueled to a surprising extent by men’s fashion. Beaver-felt hats were particularly in vogue during the late 1600s and 1700s, and so many beaver were procured for their pelts that hunting areas were exhausted in certain areas in the New World even before 1700. European fur traders ranged further and further looking for fur suppliers, which led to exploration, cultural exchanges, and warfare. By the middle of the 1700s, European goods had been introduced–and readily accepted–into most native peoples’ lifestyle. In certain areas like the Great Lakes, nearly all Native American men owned muskets or rifles, and women relied on metal cookware and European cloth. The fur trade began to dwindle when animals became scarce or disappeared due to over-hunting, and when silk hats became fashionable in Europe.

Victorian-era Beaver Top Hat

1892 Silk Plush Hat

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Trade Issues

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The Second Continental Congress Voting Independence, courtesy National Archives

Though Europeans early on decided that their own culture should dominate the continent, they also recognized their need for, and dependence upon, relationships with Native Americans. Going beyond fanciful grade-school depictions of friendly meetings between native peoples and newcomers, reality shows that trade was a tried and true method of getting to know one another and establishing relationships. The northern and southern colonies loosely coalesced into organized units and each formed a superintendency of Indian affairs. Later on, the Continental Congress created three similar departments, the Northern, Middle, and Southern. Each department was headed by a commissioner, and the departments’ function was mainly to preserve peace and harmonious relationships with Native Americans and prevent the various tribes from siding against the colonies during their fight for independence.

Once the new nation was established, Congress considered trade and commerce with Native Americans to be of national concern. They had this issue in mind when founders wrote Section 8, Article 1 of the Constitution: Congress had the power to “regulate Commerce with Foreign nations and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.” In this section, it is plain that Native Americans were independent entities and separate from the new nation and its citizens. Congress also recognized that Indian nations were at a disadvantage in dealing with Europeans and had been taken advantage of by unscrupulous traders. The nation quickly established an act (1790) which prohibited any person to trade with Indian tribes without a license issued by a superintendent of one of the Indian departments.

Illustration of a Hudson Bay Trading Post from Harper's Weekly, circa 1888

Fur Traders in Canada, 1777

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Philosophical Changes

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Interaction Between Wampanoag Nation and Colonists, engraving courtesy Library of Congress

As colonists became citizens of the United States, two great forces emerged to pit themselves against the Native American way of life. One was a desire for westward expansion on the part of whites, and the other was a desire from religious leaders and organizations to “uplift” Native Americans from their own religions, cultures and ways of thinking into European and Christian ones.

It was a huge undertaking for either of these newly arrived forces. The territory west of the settled eastern seaboard area was vast and unexplored by those wishing to inhabit it. The peoples and cultures that religious organizations sought to change were just as widely dispersed and different. The government divided Native American culture into several groups: The Northern Fishermen, Seed Gatherers, Navaho Shepherds, Pueblo Farmers, Desert Dwellers, Hunters of the Plains, and Woodsmen of Eastern Forests (and later, various divisions within Alaska).* These large divisions included hundreds of different tribes. To imagine that an incoming people like the early colonists could impose their culture on all these others seems inconceivable, yet in just a few decades, the new nation began to send out explorers and plant the seeds to do just that.

 

*These divisions are taken from A History of Indian Policy by S. Lyman Tyler, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Washington, D.C., 1973.

Rand McNally Map of Western Expansion

Map Created by Anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber Showing Various Indian Cultures

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Conflicting Ideals

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Painting, George Rogers Clark Making a Treaty with the Indians

Though the U.S. population usually supported freedom passionately, the government and its people could also entertain strong paternalistic views. Eugenics laws (see last few posts) were created in part due to a feeling that certain authoritarians “knew best” which traits were good for the country and which were not. More than that, those authoritarians felt compelled and and justified in forcing those views on others. Besides the so-called “defectives” who were the targets of eugenic laws, the country’s paternalism extended to other groups like females, immigrants, and non-Caucasion races.

When European colonists first met with Native Americans, their representatives treated tribes as sovereign nations and negotiated individual treaties with each group. Once the American nation formed, the country’s Indian Department became the responsibility of the Secretary of War. As activities between the new nation and Native Americans increased, the Secretary of War became overwhelmed by paperwork. In 1822, the Secretary eventually separated all duties specifically concerned with Native Americans into a separate department and asked Thomas L. McKenney (the Superintendent of Indian Trade) to run it. He declined. In 1824, Congress established the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and this time, McKenney was persuaded to accept a position as its head. Native Americans almost immediately began to lose ground as distinct nations and increasingly fell under the power of a government who “knew best” for them.

John C. Calhoun, Secretary of War in 1824

Thomas L. McKenney, courtesy State Historical Society of Missouri

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Indefinite Definitions

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Harry Laughlin, circa 1929

Harry Laughlin, circa 1929

One of the reasons eugenics laws were so disturbing is because their targets were so loosely defined.

Harry Laughlin’s Model Eugenical Sterilization Law in 1914 spelled out just how nebulous the so-called “undesirable” element of a population could be. He proposed to authorize sterilization of what he called the socially inadequate–and the list of these people was long and frightening. Continue reading →

A Notorious Case

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Carrie Buck and Emma Buck, 1924, courtesy of the University of Albany, New York

As eugenics became more popular (see last post), sterilization laws were adopted in many states. One of the most notorious and tragic cases involving forced sterilization was Carrie Buck’s. In 1927, Buck was the first person to be sterilized under Virginia’s 1924 law. She had had an illegitimate daughter, and at 17 years old, joined her own mother at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Both were considered feeble-minded and promiscuous, and Carrie’s daugher, Vivian, also received the feeble-minded diagnosis. Carrie’s mother had been involuntarily institutionalized, but Carrie was additionally involuntarily sterilized. Writing for the majority, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared that “. . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Even though sterilization was legal, Carrie’s diagnosis made no sense. She had done well at school, and her daughter  made the honor roll in elementary school, several years later. Obviously, neither of these females was feeble-minded. However, Carrie had been raped by a member of her foster family, and apparently they (with her defense lawyer and the lawyer for the Virginia Colony ) conspired to send her to an institution to help the family avoid shame and to test the state’s sterilization law.

Over the years, institutionalization had been used as a tool by many families to cover up or hide problems in both male and female members, and this classic miscarriage of justice was just one of many instances of its misuse. Carrie’s younger sister was also sterilized after being told she was going to the hospital for appendicitis surgery.

Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. kn Buck v. Bell, courtesy Library of Congress

Virginia State Epileptic Colony Cottage for Feeble-Minded Women

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Insanity Mixed With Other Issues

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A 1926 Poster Urging the Removal of Defective People

Dr. Harry Hummer’s concern about releasing female patients of childbearing age (see last post) shows that he was looking at factors beyond a patient’s ability to live comfortably outside asylum walls. Hummer was neither alone nor unusual in his concern that a former female patient might bear a child who would, in turn, inherit the mother’s problem. (For some reason, he did not voice the same concerns about male patients.) Both anecdotal observation and real scientific research over many years had made it clear that certain genetic traits could be inherited. A fear of inherited insanity was of long standing, and featured as a theme in a number of Victorian novels in which characters refused to marry because of the “taint of insanity” running through their bloodline.

The rising popularity of eugenics (the theory and practice of improving the genetic quality of a population) during the turn of the century and into the 1930s, gave validity to concerns about inheriting madness. Researchers in eugenics tended to believe that many human qualities–good or bad–were inherited rather than the product of environment. Their pseudo-science was well-presented, however, and many people believed that almost anything could be inherited. Even before Hummer became the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians‘ superintendent, Americans had begun to support the  idea of sterilizing so-called “unfit” people in order to stop specific undesirable traits from passing to a new generation. In 1907, the country’s first compulsory sterilization law was passed in Indiana, and targeted “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists.” The law was struck down in 1921 but later reinstated in 1927; the second law targeted the “insane, feeble-minded, and epileptic” and stayed on the books until 1974.

Contestants in a Better Baby Contest at the 1931 Indiana State Fair

Eugenic Certificate

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Another Patient’s Fate

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Admission Notes Showing Insane and Epileptics Co-Mingled

Susan Wishecoby was sent to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians probably because of her epilepsy. She apparently did not know exactly what was wrong with her, and erroneously thought she was going to a hospital. She wrote many letters to the commissioners of Indian Affairs in office during her confinement, but they always referred her requests for discharge to Dr. Harry Hummer.

Wishecoby obviously got better, and worked with the attendants keeping the wards clean. After Commissioner Burke forwarded a letter of Wishecoby’s to Hummer, he replied: “She suffered from epileptic seizures, upon admission, but has not had one, so far as we have observed, for more than three years.” Hummer went on to say that Wishecoby had had delusions which were also in abeyance, and that her “irascible nature” was probably permanent. Hummer added that “her actions here are all that could be desired.”

After making such a case for her recovery, Hummer hastened to add: “…that she is endeavoring to convince us that she should be returned, and, when the restraints of this institution are removed, she may give way.” Then he got to the heart of the matter–she was of childbearing age. “If we are concerned only in treating this individual, we should probably discharge her. If we are concerned also in treating the future generations and preventing the increase of the number of cases of mental disease, we should pause and give this matter deep consideration.”

Records are incomplete, but the letters that remain show that Hummer wrote these words to the commissioner in July, 1925, and that Susan Wishecoby was returned home on September 14, 1925. The intervention of her brother and the reservation superintendent probably came into play, since references are made to them in additional letters around that same time.

An Epileptic Asylum in Abilene, Texas

One Treatment for Epilepsy

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Released for Convenience

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Fort Totten Agency, Dakota Territory, courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota

Dr. Harry Hummer did not release patients from the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians very often. Though he was willingly to release a few people to their families over the years, Hummer often refused to do so on the grounds that someone who was doing well at the asylum might relapse. However, when he found one or two of his patients extremely inconvenient, he had no problem reversing his usual philosophy. Jerome Court was such a case.

Court was a violent patient who probably had a problem with alcohol and went on drunken sprees that landed him in jail. When he was taken to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians from the Fort Totten, North Dakota reservation, Court quickly engineered an escape. He was captured and returned to the asylum and escaped once more with the help of an employee who had fallen in love with him. Court was troublesome and dangerous, and Hummer decided he wasn’t insane. “After having held Jerome C. Court since July 12, 1923 to date, and after many mental examinations, I am forced to conclude that he is either “not insane” or that he had practically recovered from any psychotic symptoms by the time he reached here,” Hummer wrote to the Ft. Totten superintendent.

Hummer’s diagnosis is suspect because he had a history of not examining patients, and was faulted for it on many occasions. However, after bickering back and forth with the Fort Totten superintendent and the commissioner of Indian Affairs, Hummer won the day and released Court.

Indian Girls at the Grey Nuns’ School at Fort Totten, courtesy State Historical Society of North Dakota

Hummer Made Exceptions

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Images of Melancholia and Recovery

Though Dr. Harry Hummer did not seem to consider anyone ever completely cured of insanity (see last two posts), he was sometimes willing to let patients return home if they could be cared for properly by family. In this, he probably had some genuine concerns for the patient. He was likely aware of the many instances in which Native Americans had lost property due to unscrupulous outsiders, and he knew that some of his patients had allotments that needed protection. Hummer also felt that certain conditions required care that might be too much for naive family members who didn’t understand the burdens of round-the-clock attention.

When convinced that patients would do well under family care, Hummer did sometimes release them willingly. In 1911, Lucy Gladstone came to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians because of a suicide attempt. For several months, Hummer treated her for depression and some sort of seizures. Gladstone grew better and worked in the sewing room and with the laundry; she was tidy and quiet, and gradually came out of her depression. Within the year, Hummer considered her so much recovered that he released her to the care of her brother and felt confident enough to let her travel to his home without an escort.

Patients Working in Laundry Room at Texas State Lunatic Asylum

Patients in Sewing Room at Willard State Hospital for the Insane

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