The Salt Lake City Asylum and Hospital, 1870–1886: Mental Illness in Early Utah
2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/26428652.90.2.04
ISSN2642-8652
Autores Tópico(s)Psychedelics and Drug Studies
ResumoIn the late nineteenth century, psychiatry was gradually beginning to be recognized as a medical discipline in Europe and in the more progressive “insane asylums” in the eastern United States. Derisive terms such as crazy, maniac, insane, madman, and lunatic were in common use to describe and disparage the mentally ill, but they did not appear in Utah newspapers until 1868, when Joseph Sherman, said to be a boot-maker from Canada, had already been jailed for nearly a year in the basement of city hall.Without offering any details, the Deseret News reported that Sherman had been “arrested as a maniac” in June of 1867 and simply held in jail. When he was brought before Judge Thomas J. Drake on April 14, 1868, Sherman refused to answer any questions, called the judge “a d____d old humbug,” and then tried to escape. Captured and brought back, he was returned to jail. The city attorney, Hosea Stout, stated that Sherman was “not fit to be at large” and petitioned the judge to “have him taken care of.”1But what did that mean? There were no laws in Utah Territory regarding civil commitment until 1886, after the large Territorial Asylum opened in Provo, and no record of Sherman's arrest or trial in any criminal court exists, not even a guardianship established through the probate court.2 As a perceived risk to public safety, Sherman was returned to his cell. He would not see daylight for another nine years.In 1867, most people in the United States still lived east of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and in 1870, after more than twenty years of in-migration, even Salt Lake City's population was no more than eighteen people per square mile.3 Almost everyone had made the journey west in wagons, buggies, and handcarts. Some of these latecomers were sick, and a few were labeled “insane” or “idiotic.” If they had no family to care for them, there was no place for them except on the streets or perhaps in jail. The 1860 United States Federal Census was the first to include a column to be marked for those who might be “deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict.” Only about twenty people in Utah Territory fell into these categories, and all lived with their families.4 There were no institutions to care for them and no laws governing their care, as there had been in the eastern United States.The great breakthrough in travel came when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. A year later, the Utah Central Railroad, promoted by Brigham Young and other leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, linked Salt Lake City to Ogden and thus by rail to both East and West Coasts.Efficient travel provided many benefits. Immigrants no longer had to spend months on the trail, enduring bad weather, accidents, illness, and exhaustion. For the price of a railroad ticket, sometimes borrowed from the church's Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company, and a few days’ time, whole families could arrive safely with all their belongings in what the Latter-day Saints called Zion. Commercial goods that had been very costly to haul for over a thousand miles could be shipped quickly and easily, making them cheaper and more abundant. The pioneer era was over.But along with the welcome trainloads of Mormon pioneers came an influx of itinerant individuals—called wayfarers or strangers—who had no ties to the LDS church or to families who had arrived earlier. Salt Lake City, and for that matter Utah territory, were left to deal with the unanticipated consequences of this influx.The Deseret News reported on February 3, 1869, that a petition had been sent to the Territorial Legislature, requesting an appropriation for an insane asylum. Joseph Sherman's fifteen months in the city jail was cited as part of the rationale.5 In the legislature, the House Special Joint Commission recommended that $10,000 be appropriated, if Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County would “appropriate $20,000, or see that the same is raised from other sources.”6 Two days later, on February 19, 1869, a line item in the Territorial Assembly's budget read, “To be drawn by Salt Lake City to assist in erecting an Insane asylum and Hospital, [$]5000.00.” For only half the requested amount, the institution would then be expected to carry out a second major function.7An “Asylum and Hospital” would be an answer to a social problem that weakened the safety and economic order of the territory. Whereas the other immigrants felt threatened by Native Americans, wild animals, capricious weather, and food shortages, those who could not contribute to the economy had to be controlled but also cared for, usually by law. This approach had been used since the seventeenth century in Massachusetts, where laws referred to “distracted persons” and “idiots.”8Mental hospitals had a long history in the United States by 1869, beginning in 1770 with the opening of what was later called the Virginia Eastern Asylum at Williamsburg. The earliest institutions were simply holding facilities meant to house the mentally ill and those with developmental delays whose families were unable to care for them. But by the early nineteenth century, the expectations for many public and private asylums had changed dramatically. Charities, legislators, and city governments prescribed and built institutions of all kinds—poor houses, reformatories, prisons, and insane asylums—to revive what they fondly recalled as the enviable traditions of the colonial period, and to return all citizens to peaceful and productive lives. At the same time, religious groups such as the Quakers and Shakers, influenced by the period of Protestant religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840), were creating institutions that, while rigid in their concept and practices, nonetheless included what was known as traitement moral.9 The term in English actually meant “a benevolent approach to care-taking.” Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809–1883) spent his forty-year career at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane attempting to cure patients through the architectural designs of asylums: their windows, corridors, and novel ventilation systems.10 One approach that was thought to elicit a cure, or at least improvement, remained in favor—a peaceful setting where, removed from visitors, from the noise and distractions of city life, and from all that had been familiar but upsetting, inmates would at least become more tractable.Utah's first mental institution is generally understood to be the Territorial Insane Asylum, a sprawling building in the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style. It opened in 1885, on the east side of Provo. It was not. In fact, the first asylum was a much less imposing stone and frame structure, only a few miles from the center of Salt Lake City. When the facility opened in 1870, reaching it required a difficult ride uphill, to a spot high on the western slope of the Wasatch Mountains on what was then, and now, known as the East Bench. Its nearest neighbor was a farmhouse more than half a mile to the west.The original Territorial Insane Asylum at Provo was demolished between 1976 and 1981 and replaced by a group of smaller residential and administration buildings.11 But the fate of the Asylum and Hospital at Salt Lake City? That is a much more complex question. It is not shown on any known map. There are no known drawings, other than a tiny, indistinct image on a featureless plain.12 In the 1870s and 1880s, early photographers—Charles R. Savage, Andrew J. Russell, Edward Martin, Charles W. Carter, and many others—made thousands of images of Salt Lake City while the hospital was being built and in use. Yet not one photograph of the building or its surroundings, only four miles from the center of town and virtually on the Mormon Trail, is known to exist.13 That lack of documentation has caused a great deal of confusion about where the place was and even doubts as to whether it existed at all. Its location, adjacent to the well-traveled route along Emigration Creek, and the prominent references to it in city newspapers, should have left no doubt about its presence.Fortunately, the Salt Lake Telegraph printed two descriptions of the Asylum and Hospital building, one in the fall of 1869 while construction was underway and the following one in April 1871, about a year after its completion. The facility's main portion was flanked by two wings, each two stories high. The Telegraph's reporting on its structure conveyed both a perception of the patients’ behavior and how that behavior would be treated. “The building contains in all seventeen apartments, some with strongly fastened doors and windows, but well-lighted, roomy and comfortable, where occasionally patients have to be kept when they are unusually refractory. Other rooms for dormitories are neat, comfortable and inviting. . . . While looking out on the West from the front side of the building are a couple of apartments for the use of the patients when rational.”14 (See figure 1.)Had the designers and builders understood and incorporated the lessons learned by doctors and asylum superintendents from coast to coast during decades of experience? The Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane (AMSAII), organized in 1844, circulated among its members the developing trends in architecture, particularly the shift from the large Kirkbride-style asylum toward cottage-type housing arranged to simulate a village, along with their practices of moral treatment.15 But it appears that Salt Lake City's institution had little in common with either of those widely used forms. What was there about its design that the city felt would be appropriate for someone like Joseph Sherman? Since it was meant to serve as both asylum and hospital, how had it been designed to serve two very different groups with different needs, in a single limited space?Along with its fences, outbuildings, fields, and nearly all the official records that might have been kept, the Asylum and Hospital is long gone. Its history has been so poorly documented that even people who should have known exactly where it stood seemed only to be guessing. A publication by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers placed it where a Catholic women's school, St. Mary of the Wasatch, was built in the 1920s, northeast of the school's stone entrance gates that are still standing near 1300 South and 2640 East streets.16 Later, Charles McKell, then the director of social service at the state hospital in Provo, offered two possible sites, one at about Twenty-fourth East and Ninth South, and the other, again, near St. Mary of the Wasatch.17 The actual location, quite plainly given in the 1870 ordinance establishing the Asylum and Hospital, is nearly a mile from either of those suggested locations.In fact, the Asylum and Hospital was close to streets and places that are well known in Salt Lake City today. It faced 1300 South Street, perhaps 200 yards north of where that crosses Wasatch Boulevard. The land there is still city property, at the south end of the Bonneville Golf Course and slightly west of the tennis courts. A small area of level terrain there is exactly where county property records, and the city ordinance of 1870, placed it. Later records refine its location further, reflecting the whittling down of the boundaries by subsequent buyers and sellers.18An even more persuasive clue is the presence of black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia) between the golf course and 1300 South. Some of the first pioneers brought black locust seeds to Utah Territory to act as “early successional plants,” trees that would grow in full sun where few others would, and rapidly. Their thorns and overly abundant blossoms make them unpopular today, but black locusts were specifically named in an early description of the asylum and its grounds.19 A small tree at the south boundary of the Bonneville Golf Course, and a dense cluster of large trees on a nearby private property, are likely the descendants of the original plantings.20 Rarely seen in Salt Lake City today, there are no other black locust trees in the surrounding area.With its approximately 12,000 inhabitants, Salt Lake City was the largest population center in a sparsely settled territory in 1869. It was also the center of newspaper journalism, the principal medium for large-scale information sharing at the time. Events at mental institutions were a popular topic in Utah newspapers and, presumably, with their readers. In the thirty-two years between 1853, when the first such article was printed in the fledgling Deseret News, and 1885, when Utah's Territorial Insane Asylum opened in Provo, over 1,500 articles, notices, and advertisements about asylums in the United States and worldwide appeared in Utah newspapers. Often the focus was on tragedy—fires and inmate deaths—but it would be false to claim that local residents were ignorant of these institutions. They could even have known about the town of Gheel, Belgium, where for centuries residents accepted the mentally ill to live among them, participating in a community approach that was more quiet inclusion than therapy.21At the City Council meeting on August 10, 1869, plans and specifications for the building were presented, along with the understanding that it would be built somewhere on the “Quarantine Grounds,” a large area that extended southeast along the Wasatch foothills from the mouth of Emigration Canyon. Council member Alonzo Raleigh, a mason by trade, was “added to said committee for the special purposes of [the building's] erection.” Raleigh, who expected to leave on a mission for the LDS church to the East in October, wasted no time.22 By September 19, the facility was under construction, long before the land had been legally purchased from its owner. In a confusing sequence of transactions, Salt Lake City mayor Daniel H. Wells had paid $209 for the land in December 1869, although the seller, George Peterson, did not actually receive the patent or title from the federal government until November 1871.23 The building was probably complete before the ordinance identifying it as proposed was passed by the city council on February 8 and printed in the Deseret News on February 23, 1870.24On the day the Asylum and Hospital was completed, a distinguished group of city and religious leaders, including Wells, Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff, and Judge Elias Smith “proceeded in carriages from the City Hall to the Asylum, located about four miles E. S. East from the point of starting, on the bench between Emigration and Parley's canons, on a very elevated and pleasant site.” A dirt road, described as “rather rough, somewhat crooked, and very dusty” led to an unsteady bridge across Emigration Creek and from there to the asylum's north gate. The group “assembled, sang a hymn, knelt in prayer, and dedicated the grounds, the building and appurtenances to God, for the purposes for which they were designed.” They did not go inside.The group then drove “about three-quarters of a mile east to the [new] Quarantine Hospital.” Known as the “Pest House,” it was not so much a hospital as a prison, built with a single purpose—to isolate those with infectious diseases who had no family or friends to care for them—and part of a longstanding practice in the United States and elsewhere. Its spring was another quarter-mile east, and from there most of the men went back to the city. A few returned to the asylum to spend more time observing the building's exterior, remarking on the trees recently planted around it—all somewhat thinned or killed outright by grasshoppers—and its small expanse of farmland.25Because 1870 was a census year, at least a partial list of the first patients’ names exists. The census listed Sarah Meyers, Alice Nuttall, Emma Walveton, and Alice Weiter, and described them as “insane.”26 With the patients, in the census, was the Peterson family: the steward, George, who had sold this land to the city, his wife Jacobine, and their children.27 The ordinance establishing the Asylum and Hospital provided clear instructions for record keeping, stating that the steward “shall also keep a book or record of the Asylum and Hospital, entering therein the name, time and place of birth, so far as can be ascertained, date of entrance, date of discharge or death of any inmate.”28 If Peterson and his successors followed this directive, the records have been lost.By June 1870, the city had appointed Jeter Clinton as the institution's physician and Theodore McKean as its superintendent, both of them recognized local men.29 Clinton's only apparent qualification for the position was that he had been a druggist.30 McKean apparently had little direct contact with patients or staff, but he did report to the Territorial Assembly in 1872 that “the building of the City Asylum and Hospital commenced in the fall of 1869 and was erected under the auspices of the City Council of Salt Lake City at a cost of $15,054.89.”31 The Asylum and Hospital accepted patients not only from the local area but from anywhere in the territory. It functioned as a charity hospital, but as McKean reported, “The expense of keeping the patients has been assumed in some instances by their friends, in others by the several counties where they resided and by the Corporation of Salt Lake City.”32With the limited information kept by staff, much of what is known about the patients must be drawn from newspapers and the Salt Lake City Record of the Dead, which reported the place of death simply as “Asylum.”33 The first patient to die was James Pettit, who was born in Nauvoo, Illinois, and came to Utah as a child in 1850. He had been “kept at the City Asylum . . . for about a year, being subject to fits” (epilepsy) when he died in December 1871.34 His death was followed by those of Joel Wood, a pioneer of 1866 who died of chronic diarrhea, and John Pouder or Powder, a middle-aged man who died of “inflam. Brain producing Insanity” and was buried in the “Potters field.”35 Henry Stocks arrived in the Salt Lake Valley from England in 1855. In 1856, Stocks admitted to Brigham Young that he had begun experiencing fits, but he became a member of the 48th Quorum of the Seventies nonetheless. Stocks became progressively more tormented, apparently causing such disruption that his wife Mary refused to live with him. He died in convulsions and was buried in a pauper's grave in April 1873.36The personal tragedies of people such as Powder and Stocks occurred amidst the close and often tense setting of Salt Lake City in the 1870s. Three newspapers shared prominence in the city at that time: the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Herald, and the Salt Lake Tribune. The first was published by the LDS church, the second was owned by church members and reflected the views of the Deseret News, and the third was a virulently anti-Mormon paper owned, at the time, by a Kansas businessman. The papers began a proxy battle over the asylum in 1873, centered on Joseph Sherman. The Herald led off in May 1873, giving a favorable review of the building and grounds “in a healthy and pleasant location. The building is kept clean, the yard for recreation is large, and the keepers humanely disposed.”37 The Salt Lake Tribune responded in September with “A Terrible Case of Suffering,” raging against the treatment of “J. Sherman,” who was still confined in the “living tomb” of the city jail after more than five years, never allowed to see daylight or any face other than his jailor's.” “The authorities,” wrote the newspaper, were unwilling to put Sherman in the asylum, “because the building is too fragile to restrain his violence.”38Having someone committed to the asylum was quite informal and, again, reflected the circumstances of contemporary Salt Lake City; before 1886, when the territorial legislature passed a suite of laws regarding commitment, treatment, and release, no legal process seems to have existed for commitment.39 Sometimes the action took place in a city justice or alderman's court. Perhaps most often, an unruly person like Sherman was simply arrested and sent to the asylum from the jail or prison. Annie White presented such a case. Reportedly, White had shot at her husband and, for some months, had roamed the city in a “demented” state. Then in May 1874, she “threatened to take the life” of a woman raising one of her children, “going to the house with a pistol and knife.” The Salt Lake Herald noted her arrest by the police and that she would “doubtless be sent to the insane asylum.”40 White was sent to the facility and, four years later, played a very sad part in its history.The experience of Susan Vance presented a similar situation, but one complicated by race. As a Native woman who lived a public life in a downtown slum, Vance received no respect from the press, which reported somewhat frequently about her run-ins with the city authorities. One of those authorities was—problematically—Jeter Clinton.41 Clinton had many roles in Salt Lake City including city alderman, justice of the peace, quarantine physician, and physician at the Asylum and Hospital.42In December 1873, Vance fired a six-shooter in her Commercial Street dwelling, prompting the police to jail her. When she appeared in court, it was before Clinton, who let her off with a small fine and “an admonition . . . that if she was brought before him again on a similar charge he would recommend that she be taken to the lunatic asylum.”43 Clinton's multiple positions in city government apparently allowed him to pass judgment on individuals he saw in police court—essentially sending himself patients; acting as their caretaker; and, perhaps, being paid by the city for both roles. The following April of 1874, the Deseret News briefly mentioned Vance's commitment to the institution, where she resided throughout the summer and which released her for showing improvement; by that October, police officers had picked Vance up again and returned her to the asylum.44 Thus, people like Annie White and Susan Vance, seen as troublesome by at least some of their fellow citizens, could be quite casually committed to the asylum, at times by a man who had a conflict of interest, to say the least.Jeter Clinton resigned his city positions around August 1874, including as asylum physician, and moved on to operating his resort at Lake Point.45 His replacement was Seymour Bicknell Young, a nephew of Brigham Young. Sent to New York for medical training, Seymour Young returned to Utah in 1874 and stepped into the asylum position, while also maintaining a private medical practice and holding important positions in the LDS church.46 Young made an offer to buy the facility from the city in 1876, and failing that, leased it for twenty dollars a month.47 In his diary, Young reported visiting the asylum on April 30, 1876.48 A few days later, he attended to Sam Rogers, a worker at the city jail, who had been stabbed in the chest with a knife attached to a broomstick.49 Joseph Sherman, still waiting to be moved to the hospital, had made the weapon and used it. After ten years in the city jail, Sherman was finally moved to the Asylum and Hospital in July 1877, where he would be kept in a cage in the building's yard for another eight years.50In the early nineteenth century, removing the patients from family and friends, from business and other cares, had been thought the first and most important element of a cure. Visitors were prohibited. Although the early asylums had only limited success in returning patients to anything like a productive or even a peaceful life and although asylum conditions generally devolved throughout the United States with the passage of time, some did operate with that humanitarian purpose in mind.51 Things were different at the Asylum and Hospital, where visitors, including newspaper reporters, were common. There was even a visitor register in Dr. Young's office, indicating that the earlier prohibition had not only been abandoned but refuted. Men's and women's rooms were no longer in separate areas but directly adjacent. In the fifteen rooms there were nineteen patients, some admittedly sick rather than insane, some hobbled or caged.52At least twenty-one asylum patients died between 1873 and 1878, among them Louis Bertrand, the first French convert to the LDS church, who had translated the Book of Mormon.53 The details of some of these deaths make it clear that the asylum had taken on many types of patients, including the infirm, community outsiders who were sick, and the elderly. George Straus, a German noted as a stranger in the city's death record, died in the fall of 1873 of consumption and was buried in an unmarked grave. William Pugh, meanwhile, had all the toes on his right foot amputated after they were frozen; it is likely that a post-surgery infection killed him in April 1874. And Elizabeth Savagar Cole, who had given birth on a ship leaving from Liverpool and crossed the plains in 1853, died twenty years later at the institution of “General Debility.”54Of the eight deaths in 1878 alone, those of Annie White and Mercy Hodgson Robinson provoked outrage and an investigation by a grand jury. Since about 1867, Robinson had lived in a small adobe house shaded by the city wall, which ran along what is now Fourth Avenue, near where it crossed City Creek. The house is still there, at 177 C Street.55 By the winter of 1878, however, she lived at the asylum, sharing a partitioned room with White. Both women died in a fire in the early morning hours of December 9, 1878, that engulfed their two rooms and dropped flaming embers into the one below. The institution had been full of visitors that day and what supervision might have been given by the steward, George Peterson, proved inadequate. White burned to death, her body “literally charred.” Robinson probably suffocated. The Deseret News speculated that the fire started when a visitor dropped a match, “or that a match was given to her by some one.” A coroner's inquest, held before George Taylor, exonerated both Seymour Young and George Peterson from the blame of the deaths—but it also insisted that visitors receive written permits from the physician.56Those findings must not have satisfied the larger community. The Third District Court of Utah Territory impaneled a grand jury in February 1879 to look into the asylum, among other matters; its findings were published by the local press in April.57 While the language of the grand jury report was restrained, its conclusions were damning. The details it revealed—that there were hospital patients among the insane, that the physician made only occasional visits, that the building and grounds, like the plan of management, were inadequate, and that the “contract system upon which it is conducted is open to objection as exposing helpless creatures to the cupidity of private interest”—exposed the deep flaws in Young's management, supported by public funding.58 Even the Deseret News printed the report, verbatim.59 For his part, Young never mentioned the fire, the patient deaths, or the grand jury's reports in his diary.After leasing the asylum from the city for more than three years, Young made an offer to buy it outright in November 1879 for five thousand dollars. The city council consented, with the provision that Young would care for Sarah Meyers at no additional cost. He made the first payment of one thousand dollars, the rest to be paid quarterly at 10 percent interest.60 This occurred despite another grand jury report, published in the local press a few days later, which described Young's institution as inadequate and even inhumane.61Deaths at the Asylum and Hospital continued. As the years passed and the oldest patients aged, at least eighteen of them died there. Even members of prominent families, whose names are recognizable to any Utah historian, were sent there as developmentally delayed or “idiotic” persons. Jacob Reese Kimball, the son of Heber C. and Ruth Reese Kimball, lived as a child and teen with his family. The first cryptic mention of his residence at the asylum was an 1875 notice asking that citizens watch for “a demented young man . . . who answers to the name of Jacob.” He died at the asylum about a month later, with no cause of death provided, and was buried in the Kimball-Whitney family cemetery.62 John M. Bernhisel, meanwhile, was a well-known and highly placed physician and political figure. The 1880 census identified Bernhisel's son William and daughter Cora both as “idiotic.” William was sent to the asylum, where he died of “softening of brain,” while Cora remained at home for many years and later lived in the Salt Lake County Infirmary and Hospital. When Cora died in 1940, she had been institutionalized for thirty years. Both are buried near their father in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.63 Unlike Kimball and the Bernhisels, most of the deceased were without family or friends in the territory, some of them known by a first name or surname alone.Amidst the struggles and inadequacies of the Asylum and Hospital, some local voices began to call for the creation of a larger public institution. Without preamble, the Salt Lake Herald reported a brief statement Daniel Wells made before the legislature in early February 1880. He presented a resolution for a committee to look into the need for establishing a territorial asylum and hospital, “and for sanitary purposes generally, which was adopted.” The Territorial Legislature agreed and appointed a committee. Elsewhere in that day's edition, the Herald editorialized that the lack of a publicly funded asylum in the territory “certainly reflects otherwise than creditable. . . . Humanity demands that a place for the afflicted be provided.”64 Wells then shepherded the resolution through the Territorial Legislature, with several readings and amendments, resulting in its passage.65 Wells had been t
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