Category Archives: Canton Asylum for Insane Indians

Canton Asylum for Insane Indians in South Dakota was also known as Hiawatha. It opened in December 1902 and closed in 1934 after charges of neglect and abuse were validated. Dr. Harry Reid Hummer and Oscar Sherman Gifford were its only two superintendents. Its only patients were Native Americans, typically called Indians. It was the only federal insane asylum created solely for an ethnic group and served only Indians.

Indians and Slaves

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The Five Civilized Tribes

Indian Territory may have seemed a world away from the slave-holding South, but slavery was introduced there in 1830. Some of the slaves who ran away from southern slave states were received as free people by tribes in the Territory. However, all tribes except the Seminole eventually began to buy slaves. In the 1830s, about 3,000 African-Americans lived in Indian Territory. Most of them were slaves.

Indian farmers used slaves to help them cultivate their crops. Some masters had large tracts of land, but most Indians were subsistence farmers who worked as hard as their slaves. In the 1830s and 1840s, slaves came with Indians who were removed from the their eastern lands. The Cherokee held about 1,500 slaves, the Chickasaw Nation about 1,200, and the Creek Nation about 300. There were about 8,000 slaves held by Indians by the time of the Civil War. After the war, tribes abolished slavery.

Slaves of Indians, 1893, courtesy Library of Congress

John Taylor (African-American) and Dick Charlie (Ute), 1880-1910?, courtesy Library of Congress

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Protection That Hurt

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Senator Henry L. Dawes

Legislation on behalf of the federal government’s Indian wards often served an individual congressman’s own agenda or sensibility, rather than the best interests of Indians. Several pieces of legislation  had particularly dire consequences, and the next posts will look at a few of these harmful laws or acts.

Congressman Henry Dawes of Massachusetts sponsored  the 1887 General Allotment Act (The Dawes Severalty Act), in which each head of a family received 160 acres of land (or 320 acres of grazing land). Most reservations held land well over the amount needed for allotments, so the surplus reservation land was sold to outsiders.

The allotted land held by Indians could not be sold for 25 years, and after that period, the Indian landholders would become American citizens. Like much legislation of the period, it did not work out well for Indians, who were usually relegated to unprofitable land that couldn’t sustain them. They fell into poverty, sold or were cheated out of their land, and never became the prosperous small farmers that Congress had envisioned.

From 1887 to 1934, 90 million acres of Indian reservation land were transferred to non-Indian ownership and control.

Opening of the Uintah Reservation to Homestead Claims, courtesy Utah State University

Klamath Indians Waiting for Allotment Drawing, 1908

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Oil Money

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Camp Modoc, Indian Territory, between 1888 and 1890, courtesy Library of Congress

Unscrupulous profiteers were never shy about trying to benefit from something Native Americans possessed. When petroleum was discovered in Oklahoma (see last post), the lands occupied by the Five Civilized Tribes became a magnet for exploitation.

Early in the nineteenth century, the United States gave the Five Civilized Tribes  all the land in Indian Territory. Congress later decided to divide the land into small acreages, called allotments. These allotments were given to Indian families, but were controlled and (nominally) protected by the federal government on their behalf.

In 1908, federal protection was lifted, and unscrupulous whites moved in to take advantage of the riches on the Oklahoma land. Many Indians could not read or write, or really understand the unfamiliar laws and practices involved in land ownership. Congress gave control of Indian lands to the county courts in Oklahoma, and the ravaging began. Hundreds of Indian families lost their land and the wealth they might have enjoyed. Within 30 years, Oklahoma Indians retained only one fifteenth of their original allotments.

Oil Workers Playing Dominoes, St. Louis, Oklahoma (1939), courtesy Library of Congress

Oil Derrick with Waste Oil in Stream, 1939, courtesy Library of Congress

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BIA Supervision

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Cato Sells

The Bureau of Indian Affairs expanded over time, as many other government offices did. In its 1913 report to Congress, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Cato Sells) noted that the Indian Office had received 77,000 letters in 1902 and employed 132  people, but had received 209,000 letters and had employed 227 people by 1911. The commissioner presented his office in the most positive light as he highlighted the strides and failures of the past few years.

He specifically discussed the discovery of petroleum in Indian Territory. In a special report about petroleum in 1902, the Census Bureau had barely noted the existence of 13 wells there. The land was occupied by the Five Civilized Tribes, though the Secretary of the Interior had authority over it through the Curtis Act of 1898. By 1912, Oklahoma was second among oil-producing states, and pumped out almost one-fifth of all the petroleum produced in the U.S.

The wealth represented by Oklahoma’s oil consequently focused greedy attention on the Indians who were supposed to benefit from it. The next post will continue this topic.

Hoy Oil Field on Black Bear Creek near Enid, Oklahoma, circa 1917, courtesy Library of Congress

Oil Wells in Bartlesville, Oklahoma

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Asylum Showcases

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Boston Lunatic Asylum

Superintendents and staff were proud of their facilities and generally welcomed the public. Often, model patients would be allowed to congregate around visiting areas so that visitors would get a positive impression of the facility. The best wards were usually the easiest to get to, for the same reason. What were often called “back wards” were for the more difficult patients, and casual visitors seldom went there. These policies usually worked, and most visitors were favorably impressed. When Charles Dickens visited Boston Lunatic Hospital in 1842, he said:

“Every patient in this asylum sits down to dinner every day with a knife and fork; and in the midst of them sits the gentleman whose manner of dealing with his charges I have just described. At every meal, moral influence alone restrains the more violent among them from cutting the throats of the rest.”

It is not likely that this calmness prevailed throughout the building or at all meals, but the asylum certainly looked good at first glance.

Patients' Dining Room, West Virginia Hospital for the Insane 1912

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Patients Work Hard

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Charity Hospital in New Orleans

Most asylums used work therapy both to save labor costs and as occupational therapy for patients. Patients typically cleaned/straightened their rooms, worked in the gardens, sewed, and performed other ordinary chores involved in running a large, self-sustaining establishment. Some institutions went a little further.

In Louisiana before the Civil War, several dozen insane patients were cared for in the Charity Hospital in New Orleans. When the legislature finally established a separate asylum for them (East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane in Jackson), it appropriated only $10,000 per year to support the entire institution and the 85 patients transferred to it in 1848.

Patients began their chores there, and some of the men worked in the brick yard for six to seven hours a day. By 1879, patients had made 225,000 bricks at a cost of $2/thousand. The bricks were used for additional buildings, which were required as increasing numbers of patients from Louisiana and surrounding states were admitted. Before the turn of the century, patients had made 2,200,000 bricks.

Brickmaking Around the Turn of the Century

East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane

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Newspapers And Local Mention

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Many early newspapers had society columns which detailed the entertainments and travels of prominent people. Small-town newspapers often had their counterpart, and reported on anything of interest which the town’s citizens might be doing. Here are entries in The Sioux Valley News‘ Local Mention column for Dec 4, 1903:

First Thanksgiving, (photo circa 1900-1920) courtesy Library of Congress

— Tom and Mrs. Stinson entertained a number of friends on Thanksgiving day.

— Oliver Carpenter’s many friends in this city will be pleased to learn that he has been promoted to the law department of the bureau of commerce at a salary of $1,200 a year.

— Mrs. C. M. Seely and Mrs. Dr. Turner gave a very pleasant dinner party to a few of their lady friends Monday afternoon at the Indian asylum.

— The Flandreau Indians scalped the Canton boys in foot ball Thanksgiving day by a score of 11 to 10. As this is Canton’s only defeat this year, the boys are quite happy. The game deserves an extended write-up but lack of space prevents.

Genoa Indian School Baseball Team, courtesy Nebraska State Historical Society

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An Easy Escape

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Sisseton Agency, 1891

Most patients at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians were allowed some degree of freedom if they were not violent or abusive. Elizabeth Faribault (originally from the Sisseton Agency) simply left the grounds without permission one evening in January, 1920. Asylum staff located her a couple of days later in Alvord, Iowa and brought her back to the asylum.

Faribault escaped again in September, 1921 by opening a window on the asylum’s sun porch and jumping through a screen to the ground. Once again she was returned to the institution, where she died of heart failure in 1928 at the age of 35. She had displayed no symptoms of  illness prior to death.

Indian Family, Sisseton 1885, courtesy http://www.firstpeople.us

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Escaping the Insane Asylum

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1890 Census Report

Few patients enjoyed their stay at an insane asylum. Sam Black Buffalo managed to escape from the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians the week after Thanksgiving, in 1905. Canton’s weekly newspaper, The Sioux Valley News,  recounted the escape, saying that Black Buffalo slipped away during an afternoon rain shower and wasn’t missed until supper. The paper called Black Buffalo “sharp as a tack, but deaf and dumb.” Even this early in its existence, the asylum was being used improperly to detain inconvenient, rather than insane, Indians.

On the same day it told of the escape, The Sioux Valley News gave its conclusion: “Dr. Turner, assistant superintendent of the asylum, went west Tuesday and discovered the fugitive on a way-freight at Emory. The conductor picked the fellow up at a watering tank and was afraid to put him off for fear he would freeze.”

Sam Black Buffalo was returned to the asylum on Wednesday, after two days of freedom.

One-Handed Alphabet for the Deaf and Dumb

Deaf and Dumb Asylum, Little Rock, Ark., (1905-1915)

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Another Insane Author

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Clifford Beers

Clifford Beers believed his mental collapse was precipitated by his elder brother’s illness and eventual death from it. The brother had enjoyed perfect health previous to his sudden illness, and Beers found himself fixating on the idea of his likewise becoming suddenly ill and dying of the same epileptic-like condition that had killed his brother. Eventually Beers tried to commit suicide and additionally fell prey to paranoia and hallucinations; he eventually entered an insane asylum.

Beers differs from Grimes (see last two posts) in that he described both his own mental state during his breakdown, and life in the various asylums where he spent time recovering.

He described going into a violent ward: “Clad in nothing but underclothes, I was thrust into a cell. Few, if any, prisons in this country contain worse holes than this cell proved to be. It was about six feet wide by ten long. A patient confined here must lie on the floor with no substitute for a bed but with one or two felt druggets (blanket-like material). For over a month I was kept in a half-starved condition. Worst of all, winter was approaching and these, my first quarters, were without heat.”

Beers recovered from his breakdown and went on the found the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, the precursor to the National Mental Health Association.

Beers' Book About His Experience

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