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.

An Insane Author

Leave a reply

Dementia Praecox Patient

Green Grimes, a patient at the Lunatic Asylum of Tennessee (see last post) wrote a book about insanity. He explained that in his own case, he became partially insane with melancholy depression after the loss of his favorite brother. His widower father remarried and his stepmother made life so unpleasant that Grimes left home as a young boy, and applied to his older brother for help. After his refusal, Grimes became a mechanic and did well enough to get married and have three children. He was swindled of his assets later in life by someone he trusted, and stated that he went from moral insanity to raving madness, accompanied by epilepsy.

Grimes had a reasonable insight into some causes of insanity, saying that it could be produced by the death of a near relation or bosom friend, sudden hard spells of sickness, sudden disappointment, or by intemperance or opium eating.

He also attributed insanity to inflammation from a dislocated joint reaching the brain, and to an”affected” liver, or an “affected” ligament running from the shoulder to the brain. Tellingly, one cause for insanity was “pretended friendship.” Grimes undoubtedly put the blame for his own insanity on the betrayal of a friend.

Insane Male Patients

________________________________________________________________________

Crazy About Insane Asylums

Leave a reply

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Though families weren’t always enthusiastic about having their names–or loved ones–associated with an insane asylum, towns had a different attitude. Asylums meant construction work, a steady employee payroll, additional supply orders for local businesses, and so on.

In 1858, Virginia voted to add another insane asylum to its system, due to overcrowding at their Staunton and Williamsburg facilities. The towns of Fayetteville, Sutton, and Weston were in consideration for the project, and that meant competition between the three.

Several important men in the government at Richmond were from Weston, and they urged the town to spruce itself up before the selection committee arrived to inspect it. Citizens hustled to whitewash and paint houses, mend fences, gravel their dirt streets, and repair their sidewalks. They went the extra mile and hauled away their trash, filled potholes, and then greeted the committee with a parade and a brass band.

Weston became the site of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in what later became West Virginia.

Current Image of Hospital

Early Postcard of Weston, WV

________________________________________________________________________

Clashes and Their Consequences

Leave a reply

General George Custer

Colonel George Armstrong Custer brought hundreds of soldiers to help him search for a good spot to put the army’s new fort. (See last post.) For some reason, he also brought along two miners—who found gold. It wasn’t a big strike by any means, but it fed the rumors about gold in the sacred Black Hills. Soon other prospectors did find gold—a huge amount—and treaties didn’t mean much after that. Miners poured into the region, with more and more settlers following.

The Sioux defended their land, but nothing would stop the onslaught of miners. Finally the Commissioner of Indian Affairs decreed that if the Lakota didn’t settle on reservations by January 31, 1878, they would be considered hostile enemies. The Lakota refused to go to the reservations.

A respected leader, Sitting Bull, gathered warriors from the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes to his camp in Montana Territory. He had a vision that showed the white soldiers falling in the Lakota camp like grasshoppers falling from the sky. That vision inspired another war chief, Crazy Horse, to lead the first of several battles against the military forces sent to defeat Native Americans’ resistance .

Sitting Bull

The U.S. soldiers did fall like grasshoppers. However, after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn, the Fort Laramie Treaty boundary lines were redrawn so that the Black Hills fell outside protected territory.

General Custer and Scouts

________________________________________________________________________

 

Clashes Between Indians and Whites

Leave a reply

Returning War Party, courtesy Library of Congress

Dakota Territory, where the city of Canton was eventually established, embraced the Mandan, Arikara, Kidatsa, Assiniboin, Crow, Cheyenne, Cree, and Dakota (Santee Sioux) tribes. The Lakota Sioux were openly hostile to white newcomers, and even the early trappers avoided their sacred land in the Black Hills. Things changed when pioneer families came in and railroads began to snake through the countryside. Railroad workers arrived in hordes to cut through previously untouched land. People who had heard rumors about gold sometimes sneaked into the Black Hills.

The Lakota Nations were important to peace in the region, and in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government granted them a huge parcel of land west of the Missouri River. The government forbade settlers or miners to enter the Black Hills without permission, and the Sioux agreed to stop fighting with the newcomers.

Some people inevitably broke the treaty, and inevitably there were clashes. One Sioux retaliation tactic was to raid settlements and then retreat to the Black Hills where they were protected from pursuit by their treaty. The military wanted a fort in the area to better their chances of cutting off the Sioux before they could get to the Black Hills. That desire for a fort changed everything.

My next post will discuss what happened when the government pursued building a fort in the area.

Sioux Indians From Pine Ridge Reservation, S.D., courtesy Library of Congress

Sioux Delegation, 1891, courtesy Library of Congress

________________________________________________________________________

 

Miss Smith Goes to the Insane Asylum

Leave a reply

Female Patient, Bellevue, 1885, courtesy Wellcome Images

Families sometimes committed their relatives to asylums for convenience or spite. In 1910, New York resident Alice Stanton Smith was arrested for carrying a small revolver for protection. She was sent to Bellevue hospital, stripped, forced into a chair, and injected with morphine. Later she was released as sane. Adorned with diamonds and other gems, Smith appeared in the Harlem Police Court to defend herself the following week–not so much against the crime of carrying a revolver, but to plead with the court not to send her back to Bellevue.

The court magistrate called the psychopathic ward at Bellevue to talk with the examining physicians there; they said Smith was only “a little nervous and eccentric.” Her brother sent an agent to court, saying that Smith had been doing “crazy acts” for years. When pressed for an example, he said that Smith had once slapped a guest at a dinner party.

Smith–worth $100,000 in her own right–told the court that her relatives had tried to have her declared insane a number of times. Though Smith did not appear deranged to the reporters in the court nor to the physicians at Bellevue, the magistrate sent her back to the asylum.

Bellevue Hospital Ambulance

Lunacy Law, 1913

________________________________________________________________________

Better Treatment for the Insane

Leave a reply

Devices for Physical Control, courtesy Medscape

Early treatments for insanity left much to be desired, but they were infinitely preferable to old-style treatments. In 1916, several authors gave an overview of the progress within the field; they noted that by the mid-1800s, treatment for insanity had begun to include non-medical procedures. Within the non-medical area of treatment, practitioners began to sharply diverge from former practices.

Dr. Benjamin Rush (1745-1813) believed that the people in charge of caring for the insane should control them through fear or intimidation. Rush said, “The first object of a physician when he enters a cell or chamber of the average person should be  to catch his eye and look him out of countenance.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush

Rush endorsed the use of straitjackets and the tranquilizing chair (see post from 3/30/10), along with depriving a stubborn patient of his “customary pleasant food.” An unusual way through which Rush sought obedience was to “pour cold water under the coat sleeve so that it may descend to the arm pits.”

Illustration in Former Asylum Patient's Book

________________________________________________________________________

Sunstroke and Insanity

Leave a reply

Insane Asylum

Many early doctors believed that sunstroke could cause traumatic insanity. They thought it was due to inflammation caused by the great heat of the sun, but also considered it possible that anyone working in a hot environment–like cooks–could fall victim to it. If a mental patient seemed to have no congenital or hereditary reasons for idiocy or dementia, his or her condition was sometimes attributed to sunstroke in childhood or infancy.

Early insanity from sunstroke typically presented itself in an unsteady gait, optimism, and delusions of exaltation. Chronic, non-progressive sunstroke insanity had other symptoms, like sudden suspicions and one or two fixed delusions. Often patients would become violent and be sent to an asylum.

In reality, sunstroke occurs when the body becomes overheated and can’t cool itself–it is a life-threatening condition that can lead to death and organ damage if not immediately treated. Sunstroke can kill its victims several weeks after the event, usually as a result of heart and liver problems.

Arkansas State Lunatic Asylum

Northampton State Lunatic Asylum

________________________________________________________________________

Misunderstanding Convulsions

Leave a reply

Treatment of Insanity, 1846

Doctors didn’t understand what caused many psychological problems or mental illnesses, and usually relied on a “best guess” approach to anything without an immediate cause and effect. A doctor at the neurological unit of Boston City Hospital discussed the case of a boy experiencing convulsions. He had shown signs of a cerebral injury at birth, and later developed grand mal seizures. He was also bitten by a dog as a child, and began to have convulsions that usually occurred when he saw a dog. The doctor felt that emotion (in this case, fear of a dog), was the precipitating factor in the patient’s attacks.

The doctor brought up other instances of an emotional cause for convulsions. A 17-year-old girl suffered her first grand mal attack within two hours of being forced to break off an engagement. The doctor also described another physician’s initial treatment for a 12-year-old girl  who had had cranial trauma and then seizures earlier in life: a regime of high enemas. Later, when the girl was 18, the doctors tried a “nine months trial of dehydration” which made her condition worse.

 

________________________________________________________________________

Insanity Diagnosis

Leave a reply

Insane Epileptic Patient Eliza Whitfield, age 28 in 1889

Epilepsy always puzzled alienists (early psychiatrists) because of the strange behavior victims exhibited in contrast to the rationality they often also displayed between episodes. The American Journal of Insanity was full of articles about epilepsy, and continued to explore the topic after it became the American Journal of Psychiatry. One article in 1923 explored the question of psychotic symptoms in epilepsy.

The writers noted that patients were often described as having a “typical epileptic disposition.” An author they referenced described this disposition: “The whole life of the epileptic shows hatred. It bursts forth in all its brutality on the slightest provocation; the horrid the brutal, and all that is evil…”

It is no wonder that with this prejudice against them, many epileptics were confined to insane asylums based on their behavior during and after convulsions.

 

Admission Notes Showing Epilepsy, courtesy Gutenberg.org

An Epileptic Boy, courtesy Gutenberg.org

________________________________________________________________________

How Does the Bureau of Indian Affairs Run?

Leave a reply

John Collier

John Collier’s article about Amerindians (see last post) laid the blame for much of the Indians’ misery on the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Indians were now full citizens of the United States, Collier wrote, but unlike all other citizens, were completely under the control of Congress through the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA controlled Indian property valued at $1,650,000,000, Indian income, and even their persons to a great extent.

The BIA could force Indian children to go to schools hundreds of miles away from home, “enforce an unpublished penal code” that allowed them to arrest Indians at will, censor Indians’ religious observances, and nullify an Indian’s last will and testament unless it had been previously approved by the BIA.

Worst of all, said Collier, the BIA “makes accounting to no agency juristic, legislative, and administrative.” It acted as a government unto itself and had a monopoly of control on reservations. He did note that the agency was finally having to account for itself through a survey being conducted at the time of his writing. This accounting resulted in the Meriam Report, discussed in posts on May 12-19.

Native American Farmer on Flathead Reservation , circa 1920, courtesy BIA

Sioux Men in Traditional Dress, 1909, courtesy Library of Congress

________________________________________________________________________