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.

Canton Celebrates Its Long History

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Canton Main Street, about 1907

Canton Main Street, about 1907

The city of Canton, South Dakota–which existed before South Dakota became a state in 1889–celebrates its 150th year (1866 – 2016) this July.

Canton was founded in a spot called Trapper Shanty. The shanty had been built by trappers Dutch Charley, Bill Tunis, Old Ross, and his two sons, between Beaver Creek and the Sioux River. This small dwelling was an ideal place to capture game, and for several years, this shanty was the only structure in Lincoln County.

Nobody liked the name Trapper Shanty and the townspeople eventually decided to name the settlement Canton for a couple of reasons. Some people thought the spot was directly opposite Canton, China. Others thought it meant gateway in Chinese.

Canton Asylum, Main Building P6

Canton Asylum, Main Building P6

Even so early in its history, Canton’s citizens wanted and expected their city to be important and prosperous. It quickly became a little boom town as pioneers moved through it, or settled and stayed, on their journey west. Canton residents were always ready to embrace bigger and better things, such as an insane asylum built exclusively for Indians. They were sure that this institution—the only one of its kind in the world—would make the city famous. Though worldwide fame eluded the city, its leaders fought to keep the asylum open despite its many critics.

Fourth of July

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Sioux Indians Hitting a Dime at 100 Yards, July 4, 1891, courtesy Library of Congress

The Indian Bureau was never culturally sensitive, especially when it came to Native American celebrations. It actively discouraged or forbade ceremonial dances, feasts, and other gatherings, fearing that they might unite tribes or keep them from assimilating into white culture. Most gatherings required written permission. One explanation for the Indian Bureau allowing celebrations at all was offered in Sunday Magazine (July 2, 1911): “Shut off on reservations and compelled to do without any extraneous amusements, the Indian grows morose and is much more inclined to give trouble than when occasionally permitted to enjoy himself.”

The Bureau didn’t pay as much attention to Fourth of July celebrations, and Native Americans soon discovered that they could get together on that day without written permission. They began to use the Fourth of July as an excuse to gather and perform the dances and ceremonies they enjoyed. Some tribes had a practice of giving away assets during celebrations, often through a formal ceremony called a potlatch. Native Americans considered it an honor to give their possessions to others, and often gave to the poorest members of the tribe, first. Sioux Indians apparently ramped up this gift-giving practice on the Fourth of July, and the Indian Bureau began calling this “Give-Away Day.” Tribal members celebrated the Fourth with games of skill and strength, feasting, and dancing. They also incorporated their practice of honoring individuals with important gifts, with no thought of reciprocation. Gifts were substantial–horses, fancy bead work, saddles, and other valuable items. Whites seemed to be amazed by the practice, since it often left the giver without any resources.

Fourth of July Celebration, 1891, South Dakota, courtesy Library of Congress

 

Nez Perce Fourth of July Parade, Spaulding, Idaho, 1902, courtesy Library of Congress

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Trauma Care for the Insane

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How to Care for the Insane

How to Care for the Insane

Many asylum patients were ill with various chronic conditions, but accidents and self-inflicted injuries also kept doctors busy. In How to Care for the Insane by Dr. William Granger (1886), the author discusses some particular issues that nurses might confront:

A cut throat: Patients may cut their throats from ear to ear and do really little injury, or they may make a small stabbing wound and divide a large blood-vessel and die almost immediately, or they may cut the windpipe and not cut the blood-vessels. Little can be done by the attendants to stop the flow of blood, even if the great blood-vessels are not cut. The head should be kept bent forward and the chin pressed against the chest.

Injury from Eating Glass: Patients sometimes eat glass . . . In the treatment do not give an emetic or a cathartic. Such food as has a tendency to constipate the bowels, and such as will also enclose the glass and coat its sharp edges, is to be given. Potatoes, especially sweet, oatmeal, or thick indian-meal pudding, are appropriate. Cotton, which is generally at hand, will, if swallowed, engage the glass in its fibres, and so protect from injury.

Patients and Nurses in Female Ward B, Weston State Hospital, 1924, courtesy West Virginia& Regional History Collection

Patients and Nurses in Female Ward B, Weston State Hospital, 1924, courtesy West Virginia & Regional History Collection

State Hospital Nurses, circa 1914, courtesy Missouri State Archives

State Hospital Nurses, circa 1914, courtesy Missouri State Archives

Injury with Needles: This is a self-injury, but it may be severe and require immediate attention. Patients may open a vein or an artery with a needle, or plunge it into the eye. But the more common way is for a patient to stick many needles under the skin, sometimes to the number of several hundred. Sometimes patients introduce them near the heart or lungs, and as a needle will often “travel” when in the flesh, it may work its way into a deeper part, and so a number get into the lungs or the heart, causing death . . . An attempt or desire to so injure one’s self should be guarded against by the attendants, and if accomplished should be at once reported to the physician, that efforts may be made to extract the needle.

Common Sense

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Annie Payson Call

Annie Payson Call

Laypeople were interested in mental health, and by the early 1900s had recognized that their lives might be happier if they could overcome and control some of the mental distress which seemed rampant in their complex and hurried world. Annie Payson Call wrote articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal in which she offered advice to women who suffered various nervous afflictions. In her book Nerves and Common Sense (1909), she gave a case study of a woman’s problem and cure in her relationship with an irritable husband.

A brokenhearted woman complained to a friend about her husband’s unkindness and hard heart; after hearing her out, the friend helped her understand that the situation was essentially her own fault. Because she had been trying to please her husband and he didn’t notice her efforts, she had become emotionally distressed. “Now it is perfectly true that this husband was irritable and brutal,” said Call. However, because the woman was “demanding from her husband what he really ought to have given her as a matter of course,” she was wearing herself out and suffering to no avail.

Ladies' Home Journal Offered Women Advice

Ladies’ Home Journal Offered Women Advice

“She was a plucky little woman and very intelligent once her eyes were opened,” said Call. “She recognized the fact that her suffering was resistance to her husband’s irritable selfishness, and she stopped resisting.

“As his wife stopped demanding, he began to give,” Call related. “As his wife’s nerves became calm and quiet his nerves quieted and calmed.” It turned out that business worries had been at the root of his brutishness; once his wife stabilized her emotions he suddenly turned to her and confided his troubles. After that, all was well.

Patent Medicines Helped Nerve

Patent Medicines Helped Nerve

Call’s advice must at times have been trying in the extreme to her readers, but since she wrote many articles of this sort, they were obviously well-received enough that Ladies’ Home Journal continued to publish them. Many of her suggestions urged changes in attitude and thought, which probably worked well for readers who could not visit alienists (experts in mental health) or find sympathy at home.

 

You Get What You Pay For

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Female Patients Farming in the early 1900s

Female Patients Farming in the early 1900s

The superintendents at most asylums had the best of intentions when it came to patient care. They understood (for that era) what kind of help patients needed and what kind of attendants could best provide it. Most asylums had rules of conduct for staff and lists of optimal behaviors they expected to see in them; if these desires had been met, most asylums would have been better places. However, superintendents were at the mercy of legislatures, which often underfunded public asylums. Except for the wealthiest private institutions, attendant staffing was never high enough to provide good–or sometimes even adequate–care.

Tennessee Central Hospital for the Insane

Tennessee Central Hospital for the Insane

Staffing issues were especially tough during WWI, when many doctors and nurses left private employment for military service. In 1918 the superintendent of Tennessee’s Central Hospital wrote about the problem he (and all asylums had) in attracting good workers: “We have from forty to sixty beds soiled each night, and the patients who soil the beds at night soil themselves often during the day and have to be dressed and attended to…and the great State of Tennessee says to our attendants, ‘We will allow you from twenty to thirty-five dollars a month for this.'”

Laundry Room at Fulton State Hospital, 1910

Laundry Room at Fulton State Hospital, 1910

This was not much money for what was typically a 14-hour workday full of exhausting physical (and sometimes dangerous) labor. Workers in manufacturing earned around $48 weekly in 1914, unionized bricklayers in New York earned nearly $31 a week in 1913, and even notoriously underpaid female mill workers earned between $5 and $7 a week. The typical asylum attendant’s poor pay almost guaranteed that good workers would go elsewhere. Asylums were often left with attendants who for one reason or another could find work nowhere else.

Off to the Poorhouse

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Bradyville and Readyville Poorhouse Residents, circa 1903, courtesy http://cannonccp.weebly.com

Bradyville and Readyville Poorhouse Residents, circa 1903, courtesy http://cannonccp.weebly.com

Though early American society embraced self-sufficiency, people in authority did recognize that some people could not provide for themselves (widows/orphans/disabled) and that a person could fall upon hard times despite their best efforts. Churches and municipalities usually provided short-term relief in a person’s home, but a long-term situation was another matter.

Early on, the poor were simply auctioned off to the lowest bidder. The auction’s winner provided food, shelter, clothing, etc. to the pauper (and perhaps to his family) in exchange for the pauper’s labor. The arrangement was more like being an indentured servant than a slave, but it was definitely not anyone’s preferred way of life. As can be imagined, this system led to many abuses, and some auctioned paupers were badly treated, overworked, and nearly starved.

Peabody Poorfarm, Kansas

Peabody Poor Farm, Kansas

Poorhouses were set up (usually by counties) to be more efficient than this auctioning system. Authorities also hoped that the poor who resided in them could learn discipline and good habits so that they could get out and become useful citizens. They were not meant to be pleasant, but rather, to discourage residence by anyone who was at all capable of working. Children would be separated from parents, and wives from husbands. Many poorhouse inmates had to wear a dreary uniform that further shamed them. Residents were required to work, if able, often at the accompanying “poor farm.”

Fulton Country, Illinois, Poor Farm Residents

Fulton Country, Illinois, Poor Farm Residents

Going to the poorhouse was so dreadful that mournful poems and songs were written about the experience. One such effort by Will Carleton was called “Over the Hill to the Poorhouse” and ended with this stanza:

Over the hill to the poorhouse—my child’rn dear, goodbye!
Many a night I’ve watched you when only God was nigh:
And God’ll judge between us; but I will always pray
That you shall never suffer the half I do today. (1882)

A Rational Solution

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Almshouse Occupants at Meal Time, circa 1911

Almshouse Occupants at Meal Time, circa 1911

Wealthy families with an insane member could usually afford to pay someone to care for their unfortunate relative; they also had accommodations for him or her. It was an entirely different matter for the poor or even the middle class, whose homes were often small and cramped by today’s standards. A working family found it almost impossible to spare an able-bodied member to care full-time for someone who was sick, whether physically or mentally. Consequently, illness of any kind sometimes drove a family into poverty, or into the dreaded poorhouse.

Residents of an Almshouse Making Shoes, courtesy Library of Congress

Residents of an Almshouse Making Shoes, courtesy Library of Congress

Poorhouses were set up to care for people who had no one else to support them. Mentally ill people with no support also wound up in poorhouses, and nobody benefited when that happened. The insane person disrupted the routine of the poorhouse and very likely frightened the other people in it. That person could get no real help, either, because a poorhouse wasn’t set up to help people with mental illness. Consequently, no one benefited from the arrangement, and the victim of insanity often suffered terribly when the poorhouse caretaker simply confined him or her to a room or an outbuilding (see last post).

Kings County Almshouse, Brooklyn, NY, circa 1900, courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

Kings County Almshouse, Brooklyn, NY, circa 1900, courtesy the Museum of the City of New York

One of the arguments for asylums was that jailers and poorhouse managers didn’t have the accommodations to adequately care for the insane, or the expertise to do it even if they had the space. Asylums, where trained personnel in buildings constructed specifically for keeping the insane comfortable, were supposed to be an enlightened solution to an age-old problem.

Social Interests

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Railroad Depot in Canton, South Dakota

Railroad Depot in Canton, South Dakota

Throughout history, social ties have been important. Citizens in small towns certainly kept tabs on their neighbors, but even in large cities, prominent people were reported on in the “society pages.” Many small-town newspapers kept tabs on the comings and goings of the locals, and reported on visits from their relatives and friends. On September 30, 1910, the Sioux Valley News reported that:

— Ed L. Wendt took a trip up to Lake Preston Tuesday to attend to some business matters

— Col. Arthur Linn went to Hot Springs last Saturday to attend a meeting of the Soldiers’ Home board

Soldiers' Home in Hot Springs, South Dakota

Soldiers’ Home in Hot Springs, South Dakota

— Mrs. C. F. Neighbors came up from Sioux City Monday to spend a few days with her friend Miss Grace Hanson

— Miss Ethel McClanahan arrived in Canton a few days ago and has been a guest of Dr. Hummer and family at the Indian Asylum. Miss McClanahan was for a number of years chief nurse in St. Elizabeth’s hospital in Washington, D. C. . . .

Unidentified Asylum Nurses

Unidentified Asylum Nurses

McClanahan was working on a special case in the west at the time, and presumably stopped in to see Dr. Hummer on her way to  “visit friends further east” as the paper reported. Still, despite Dr. Hummer’s reputation for temper and haughtiness at the asylum, he could evidently be quite cordial to those he felt were his social or professional equals.

High Society

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East Side of Main Street, Canton, SD circa 1912

East Side of Main Street, Canton, SD circa 1912

“Out West” was a remote place in the public imagination, and Canton, South Dakota was a small town compared to the population centers of the East. However, Canton was a lively place, with many shops and amusements for the public. People also enjoyed visiting each other and providing their own entertainment in the form of card games and music. In December, 1912, the Sioux Valley News reported on a social event that would have been typical for the people involved.

Parlor Entertainment

Parlor Entertainment

“On Tuesday evening of last week, in the pretty parlors of Judge and Mrs. Gifford were gathered about twenty friends for an evening at cards,” the item began. The minutes passed into hours, and at midnight, Mrs. Gifford provided a “delicious luncheon” for her guests. After eating, the guests lingered and talked, or smoked cigars. The paper mentioned that one of the guests gave a piano solo, and probably other guests sang or played a song as well. “At a late hour, all departed for their several homes,” the item noted, “bearing with them the happiest of memories.”

Parlor in the Chester Wickwire House in Cortland, New York, circa 1890 to 1900, courtesy the 1890 House Museum and Center for Victorian Art in Cortland, New York

Parlor in the Chester Wickwire House in Cortland, New York, circa 1890 to 1900, courtesy the 1890 House Museum and Center for Victorian Art in Cortland, New York

Such an evening would be enjoyable for many people even in modern times, and these events likely bonded the social ties of the town’s leading citizens. They certainly did not lead the bored, dreary lives that many “back East” probably thought they did.