California and the Politics of Disability,

1850–1970 Eileen V. Wallis

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California and
the Politics of
Disability,
1850–1970
Eileen V. Wallis
California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970
 Eileen V. Wallis

California
and the Politics
of Disability,
1850–1970
Eileen V. Wallis
History Department
California State Polytechnic
University
Pomona, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-21713-5 ISBN 978-3-031-21714-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21714-2

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For Arn Tretsven
(1968–2022)
 Acknowledgments

Thanks must go first to the Historical Society of the Pomona Valley

(HSPV) and its members. It was my fellow members of the HSPV’s
Executive Board who first introduced me to Spadra (the first “a” is
pronounced long, as in “hay”) and to the former Pacific Colony. Partic-
ular thanks to immediate HSPV past-President Mickey Gallivan, who
graciously shared with me her memories of Pacific’s interactions with
the surrounding community, and to current HSPV President Deborah
Clifford. Thanks also to Kimberley Erickson and Katie Richardson of
the Special Collections and Archives at my home institution, California
State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP). Special Collections started
collecting and preserving research materials on Pacific in 2014 when the
transfer of the Pacific property to our university was announced, and
today continues to promote the preservation of the site’s history for
future generations.
Back in 2018, when this book was still just a glimmer in my eye, I
had the good fortunate to be accepted to the National Endowment for
the Humanities’ 2018 Summer Institute on Global Histories of Disability.
The Institute was key in expanding my understanding of disability history
in both a national and a global context. Long chats with fellow atten-
dees helped convince me that California and its bureaucracy of disability
was indeed a topic worthy of further exploration. The Institute was also
a chance for me, as an individual who identifies as disabled, to work
through some of my own complicated feelings about my research topic in

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

a welcoming and understanding space. Special thanks to Sarah Scalenghe

of Loyola University in Maryland, who served as the Institute Director;
to Jeff Brune of Gallaudet University in DC, the host institution; and to
the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The bulk of the primary source research for this book had to be
conducted during the global COVID-19 pandemic. I am, therefore,
deeply indebted to the librarians and archivists who, while working under
extremely difficult conditions, were willing to have long phone and email
conversations with me; to scan materials where possible; and to help me
figure out how to keep my research agenda on track. These include librar-
ians and archivists at the Bancroft Library at the University of California,
Berkeley; the Special Collections Departments at UCLA and USC; the
California State Archives; the Huntington Library in San Marino, Cali-
fornia; the Lanterman House Archives; the Ronald Reagan Presidential
Library and Museum; the Wellcome Collection in London; and the Amer-
ican Heritage Collection at the University of Wyoming. Special thanks to
Sarah Kesterson, who conducted research for me by proxy in the AHC
collections when I was unable to travel there in person. Thanks also to
Joanna Linkchorst, President of the Friends of Rockhaven, who shared
with me via email primary sources related to the remarkable history of
that facility.
In 2020, I won a New York Academy of Medicine Library Paul
Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine to spend a month in
residence in their extraordinary collections. Although COVID-19 restric-
tions and disruptions delayed my ability to travel there until 2022, my
time at the library was nonetheless incredibly fruitful. Historical Collec-
tions Librarian Arlene Shaner’s encyclopedic knowledge of the library’s
holdings proved invaluable. She also put me in touch with Nicole Topich,
Special Collections Librarian at the Oskar Diethelm Library, part of the
DeWitt Wallace Institute at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of
Psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian. Thanks to Ms. Topich’s assistance, I
discovered even more amazing primary sources related to medical history
in California. It seems counterintuitive to travel to the East Coast to study
disability and medicine on the West Coast, but such are the vagaries of
archival collections.
Thanks to the members of the Disability Studies and Mad Studies
working group at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology,
and Medicine for their feedback on a draft of what ultimately became
Chapter 8; to Suzanne G. Fox, President of Red Bird Publishing, Inc., in
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

Bozeman, Montana, for her invaluable help with editing; Joseph Stuart
for his assistance with indexing; and everyone at Palgrave Macmillan.
Thanks also to my university, CPP, and particularly to my home
college, the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences. The College
helped me secure a sabbatical and release time to complete this manuscript
as well as providing me with an early opportunity to present my research
through its Dean’s Invited Lecture series.
As always, the CPP Department of History’s support was and is
amazing. No one knows better than my colleagues the tragedies and
triumphs of maintaining scholarly productivity at a teaching-focused
public university.
Finally, thanks to family and friends, who have (mostly) patiently
listened to me talk about this topic for years. They have likely learned
more about it than they ever wanted or needed to know. And to my very
patient dog: we will get caught up on all those walks we missed while I
was writing, I promise.
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 “Friendless and Homeless:” The Gold Rush to 1870 13
3 “A Sin and a Shame”: Regional Institutional
Development in the Late Nineteenth Century 55
4 “Helpless and Delinquent”: The Los Angeles
Psychopathic Association 99
5 “The Thankless Task”: Parole, Eugenics,
and the Institutionalization of the Addicted 123
6 “Their Responsibility”: From the Great Depression
to the Birth of the Community Clinic 169
7 “To Promote Mental Health”: The Bureaucracy
of Disability at Midcentury 215
8 “Whistling in the Dark”: California’s Politics
of Disability Transformed 261
9 California After the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act 301

xi
xii CONTENTS

Conclusion 317
Bibliography 327
Index 343
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The State Insane Asylum at Stockton in 1890. Image

from An Illustrated history of San Joaquin County,
California: containing a history of San Joaquin County
from the earliest period of its occupancy to the present
time, together with glimpses of its future prospects;
with … biographical mention of many of its pioneers
and also prominent citizens of today (Chicago: Lewis Pub.
Co.), 1890 67
Fig. 4.1 Sonoma State Home in 1914. Image by Zan Stark.
Courtesy of the California History Room, California State
Library, Sacramento, California 108
Fig. 4.2 Detail, “Who’s To Blame?,” Los Angeles Record, October
23, 1915. 115
Fig. 5.1 Interior view of the Los Angeles County General
Hospital Psychopathic Department, ca.1925. Courtesy
of the University of Southern California Libraries
and the California Historical Society 129
Fig. 6.1 “Pacific colony mental hospital classroom,” February 5,
1950. Courtesy Los Angeles Times photographic archive,
library special collections, Charles E. Young Research
Library, UCLA 199
Fig. 7.1 Patton State Hospital, San Bernardino, California:
a psychiatric patient mopping the floor as therapy
(Drawing by D. R. Wilder, ca. 1954. Courtesy
of the Wellcome Collection) 218

xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.2 “Pacific Colony nursery cribs jammed together due

to overcrowding,” February 5, 1950 (Courtesy Los
Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Library Special
Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA) 223
Fig. 8.1 Patton State Hospital, San Bernardino, California: a clinical
consultation among doctors at which the patient is
not allowed to say anything. Drawing by D. R. Wilder, ca.
1954. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection 264
Fig. 9.1 “California State Mental Health Funds Get $18 Million
Boost under Bipartisan Agreement with Governor Ronald
Reagan, August 1974.” From left, State Assemblyman
Frank D. Lanterman, State Senator Anthony Beilenson,
Governor Ronald Reagan, State Senator Alfred Alquist,
and Assembly Speaker Leo McCarthy. Courtesy
of the Frank D. Lanterman Political Papers, Lanterman
House Archives 307
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In 1886, the first group of individuals from Southern California were

sent to the Home for the Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children
in Sonoma. At the time, Sonoma was the only state-run institution in
California that accepted minors deemed by their doctors, their families,
and the courts to be “feeble-minded.” It was a journey of more than four
hundred miles. The oldest among them was twenty-nine; the youngest,
only nine. Most spent their entire lives, however long or short, in the
institution and were ultimately buried on its grounds. Seventy-eight years
later, in 1964, all the headstones from the cemetery were removed to
protect the privacy of patients’ families and, no doubt, to spare them the
perceived stigma of being associated with someone who had been insti-
tutionalized. Yet the establishment of the home at its permanent location
in Northern California was heralded at the time as a great moral victory
for the state, something worthy of celebration. “California has not been
behind her sister States in her efforts to give sight to the blind, hearing
to the deaf; and speech to the dumb; but, alas, those for whom we plead
have eyes, but they see not; ears, but they hear not; tongues, but they
speak not; and hearts, but they understand not. Shall we be deaf to their
claims and blind to their wants. Heaven forbid,” declared the home’s first
superintendent, Dr. Buford T. Woods, in his annual report to the Cali-
fornia State Legislature. “Christianity and humanity alike say not, and in

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
E. V. Wallis, California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21714-2_1
2 E. V. WALLIS

this great battle with intellectual darkness, California expects ‘every man
to do his duty.’”1
This is a book about the state of California and disability that focuses
on how ideas and understandings about institutionalization changed over
time and how those changes shaped the lived experiences of Califor-
nians deemed “mentally disordered” from 1850 to 1970. It uses Los
Angeles County as a case study to understand the interplay between
state and county (and to a lesser extent, local and federal) governments
and how that shaped the rise of institutions for the disabled in the
state as well as their eventual decline. “Mentally disordered” was not
a socio-medical category, but rather a bureaucratic one. It is, however,
still a useful construct for understanding the ways in which California’s
politicians, doctors, and reformers lumped together what we would now
consider two distinct categories of disability—mental disability and devel-
opmental disability—for their own convenience. I focus on these two
groups because they were the two populations arguably most vulnerable
to institutionalization in this era, as well as the ones least likely to leave
primary sources behind. Although their overall numbers in state hospitals
were smaller, individuals with substance-abuse problems, whom the state
of California also considered to some degree mentally disordered in this
era, are also included.
It is important to note, however, that until well into the twentieth
century, those in control of institutionalized individuals in California
regularly blurred the line between mental, developmental, and other
forms of disability. The “feeble-minded” (the most used term from the
1910s until the 1950s) might have been so designated due to a score on
an IQ test. But many were also presumed to have some other alleged
defect (physical, psychological, medical, or moral) as well. As Richard
W. Fox notes, California’s “state officials quite consciously advocated
this ‘social definition’ of feeblemindedness in preference to the view that
limited the concept….The social definition of feeblemindedness made it
virtually indistinguishable from insanity: both were labels for irrational or
imprudent behavior.”2 It is extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible,
to know exactly what people meant historically when they used different
terms for disability.3
The time span of this study encompasses the rise of institutions for the
disabled in California; the development of their blend of care and custodi-
alism in the nineteenth century; the era of overcrowding, abuse, and crisis;
and the ultimate dismantling of most state institutions for the disabled,
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

a process that began in the late 1950s and culminated with the passage
of the Lanterman Disability Service Act/Lanterman-Petris-Short/LPS in
1969 and the beginning of the era of state-mandated deinstitutionaliza-
tion. In many ways, it is thus a history of a bureaucracy: in this case, the
bureaucracy around mental health and mental health care that California
developed over more than a century.
American disability policy reflects changing ideas about what disability
is and how government should respond to it.4 Even now, the vast majority
of the money spent at the state and federal levels is tied to the so-called
medical model of disability that frames disability solely as a medical condi-
tion to be treated. Policy driven by the medical model in turn largely
revolves around work: who can do it and thus support themselves, and
who cannot. “In this paradigm, if a person can work, that individual is
not disabled.”5 However, disability does not exist in the body—or, more
correctly, it does not just exist in the body. It is socially and politically
constructed. As Tobin Siebers explains,

disability has been a medical matter for as long as human beings have
sought to escape the stigma of death, disease, and injury. The medical
model defines disability as an individual defect lodged in the person, a
defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full
capacity as a human being….Unlike the medical approach, the emerging
field of disability studies defines disability not as an individual defect but as
the product of social injustice, one that requires not the cure or elimina-
tion of the defective person but significant changes in the social and build
environment.6

Examining the story of Californians with mental and developmental

disabilities through the lens of what I term “the bureaucracy of disability”
is thus useful for two reasons. First, it allows us to delve into the many-
layered systems of power and control California built around disability
and then reinforced using all the coercive tools available to it. But this
story also acknowledges that power never rested in just one place or
person. For example, not all policies about disability and institutional-
ization flowed from the state legislature, and even those that did were
the product of a state government that was itself constantly evolving and
changing. Second, this approach creates space to understand the sheer
tenacity of that bureaucracy once it was established and why it was so
4 E. V. WALLIS

difficult to reform California’s governmental approach to disability once

it had been created and enshrined in state law.7
It is tempting to reduce this story to one only of California’s bureau-
cracy of disability and the professionals who represented it using their
power to oppress individuals deemed “deviant” (for whatever reason)
by the society around them. That would be a morally and emotionally
satisfying story to tell. However, as with so many things in history, the
reality was far more complex. Reducing what happened in California to
a binary of “good” (Californians with disabilities) and “bad” (Califor-
nians who organized and managed the state hospitals and their related
systems) denies both agency. It also removes many other actors from
the story: local communities, county governments, family members, social
reformers, federal policy-makers, and so on. Undoubtably, many of them
also used the bureaucracy of disability for their own ends. That makes it
even more important for us to understand what those ends might have
been. As Richard W. Fox puts it when he discusses the role of families in
institutionalization,

The “helping professionals” and the institutions for incarcerating deviants

did take over from the family and the local community the responsibility
for caring for troublesome charges but they did not—as is often implied in
the literature of “social control”—simply muscle the family or community
aside. Those traditional units frequently cooperated in the transformation
and reaped some immediate benefits from it.

Recognizing a need to understand the formation of, and the motives

behind, the bureaucracy of disability that California built is not, however,
the same as justifying it. Over the 120 years covered in this book, thou-
sands of men, women, and children were confined in Californians state
asylums and hospitals and frequently treated as criminals, even though
the vast majority had never committed a crime. Many did not survive, and
many who did suffer long-term physical, emotional, and financial distress
from the experience. This was wrong.8
Although I will focus on state hospitals for the mentally and devel-
opmentally disabled, I will also cover other forms of care and relief in
this study to understand how different systems of care and confinement
related to and often mutually reinforced each other. This includes private
asylums, sanitariums, and sanitoriums; county hospitals and poor farms;
community-based clinics, and so on. Aspects of some of California’s
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

other systems of confinement and control, such as prisons and juvenile

detention facilities, will be mentioned. However, due to how California
government was organized prior to 1970, those institutions for the most
part fall outside the scope of this study.9
One of the biggest challenges of writing this kind of history is the
source limitations. Although I have, as much as possible, used memoirs
and other primary sources created by Californians with mental and devel-
opmental disabilities and addictions, they are relatively few, particularly
compared to the avalanche of primary source materials churned out by
the state’s bureaucracy of disability over 120 years. Government sources
present a related problem in that even when the voice of a disabled indi-
vidual can be “heard” in official records, they are often nearly drowned
out by the professional voices around them. As Kirsten Anderberg notes
in her work on Camarillo State Hospital, often “the administration and
staff have one story, and the inmates/patients have a different story….the
‘official’ stories via administration and staff were the ones documented
and circulated.”10 It was also important to me to dig deeper than just
asylum reports and government sources to “hear,” as much as possible,
not only Californians with disabilities, but their family members, medical
professionals, politicians, social reformers, and bureaucrats. Newspapers
from around the state and oral histories are thus also used extensively
in this project. I use relatively few patient records, and those I do refer-
ence are beyond the seventy-five-year limit the state of California puts
on such data. This choice is in part due to my awareness of “the coer-
cive means by which many primary sources were created, collected, and
maintained.…Many people with disabilities live and have lived in times
and spaces where they had no recognized right or access to privacy—
privacy of body, privacy of space, privacy of information.” On the other
hand, I do agree there is some value to sharing names and stories when
possible, particularly those of individuals who have been so marginalized
in the state’s history, to “potentially enrich and alter the biography of
some disabled individuals.”11 One additional sensitive issue in working
with primary sources in this project is the number of minors who were
in California’s state hospitals, and particularly in its institutions for the
developmentally disabled. Thus minors in this study are not identified by
name unless (1) they had already been identified by name in the press or
in other publicly available sources at the time and (2) the records about
them are beyond the seventy-five–year limit.12
6 E. V. WALLIS

Over the last twenty years, the historiography of disability in the

United States has both deepened and expanded. However, works focused
exclusively on California or on the American West as a region remain
relatively few. The seminal study of the history of mental health poli-
cies in California is that of Richard W. Fox, although that study ends
in 1930. Angela Hawk contextualizes California’s nineteenth-century
mental health policies within a larger Pacific context. Joel T. Braslow’s
study of historical psychiatric treatment in California leans more into
medical history, but nonetheless is an important contribution to the
field.13
Eugenic sterilization in California is by far the most extensively
researched topic within the region’s history of disability, with invalu-
able work by Alexandra Minna Stern, Wendy Kline, and Natalie Lira.
Studies of public policy in California and public policies around health
care, broadly defined, are also available, including the work of Miroslava
Chávez-Garcia, Kristine Ashton Gunnell, and Natalia Molina.14
Scholarly work on disability history in the United States tends to have
either a geographical or a topical focus, such as that of Steven Noll,
Susan Burch, and Sarah E. Rose. Research into the intersections between
disability and American public policy has also been done, including the
work of Edward Berkowtiz and Deborah Doroshow. Studies of the
history of madness and mental disability have the longest historiographical
tradition, going back, of course, to the work of Michel Foucault. Subse-
quent scholarly work by Andrew Scull, David J. Rothman, and others
have expanded our understanding not just of mental disability, but also
of the structures of power and care around it. Likewise, important works
are now available on the history of developmental disability in both the
United States and Great Britain, such as those of Mark Jackson, David
Right, and Anne Digby. Historical scholarship on the Disability Rights
movement, including the works of Paul Longmore, is also key to the
historiography.15
A quick word about the terminology around disability used in the
book. “There is no standard grammatical structure in how people use
their chosen disability-specific terms,” Corbett Joan O’Toole explains. I
am, therefore, choosing to use the term “disabled” for all disabilities. I
use the term “physically disabled” to describe wheelchair users, individ-
uals who employ mobility aids, and so on. “Visually disabled” is used
to describe individuals with blind, low, or partial vision, and “hearing
disabled” for individuals who identify as D/deaf. I have chosen to use the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

term “developmentally disabled” rather than intellectually disabled/self-

advocate or neurodivergent, and “mentally disabled” or “mad” instead
of mentally ill or consumer/survivor. As I have discussed, I will also use
“mentally disordered,” a twentieth-century term used to encompass both
mental and developmental disabilities. I have chosen to avoid using the
terms “patient” and “inmate” when possible in favor of “person/people,
“individual/s,” or, ideally, names. I will alternate between using person-
first and disability-first language. My definition of “institution” is drawn
from that used by the organization Self Advocates Becoming Empow-
ered: “an institution is any facility or program where people do not have
control over their lives. A facility or program can mean a private or public
institution, nursing home, group home, foster care home, day treatment
program, or sheltered workshop.”16 I recognize we no longer use many
terms used historically around disability. However, as a historian, I am
choosing not to alter the use of such terms in quoted primary sources.
Likewise, “care” and “caring” are concepts with many different mean-
ings that need to be defined for the purposes of this study. Since this
is a book largely focused on the development of a state hospital system
and the bureaucracy that went with it, the temptation is to embrace only
“care” in the strictly medical sense of the word. Doing so, however,
would not capture the full scope of activities that occurred both inside and
outside of these institutions. To that end, I will use Evelyn Nakano Glen’s
definition of “caring”: “the relationship and activities involved in main-
taining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally.” She notes that
there are really three types of caring labor, all of which are connected. First
is direct care, including “physical care, e.g., feeding, bathing, grooming),
emotional care (e.g., listening, talking, offering reassurance), and services
to help people meet their physical and emotional needs (e.g., shopping
for food, driving to appointments, going on outings).” Second is “main-
taining the immediate physical surroundings/milieu in which the people
live,” such as laundry and cleaning. Third is the “work of fostering
people’s relationships and social connections.” Although Glenn’s work
is focused primarily on contemporary issues around care, her model is
nonetheless useful to understanding what Californians in institutions,
politicians, reformers, and medical professionals meant when they spoke
of “care” in an institutional context.17
Chapter 2 begins with California gaining statehood in 1850. The gold
rush, which had started two years earlier, led to both a population and
8 E. V. WALLIS

an economic boom in the new state. This in turn accelerated the devel-
opment of asylums and hospitals in California far ahead of the rest of the
region. California’s first political discussion about the need for, and costs
of, institutions for the mentally disabled, poor, and disabled is covered
here, as is the creation of the first state asylum at Stockton. The chapter
ends with an exploration of what that particularly scandal-plagued institu-
tion might tell us about the future trajectory of state asylum development.
In Chapter 3, the focus shifts to Southern California and the creation of
the first systems of care at the local and county levels there, as well as
the creation of the first Southern California asylum. California’s quick
creation of additional insane asylums in Northern California is covered,
as is the move beyond the insane asylum to create additional state institu-
tions, including the first state institution for the “feebleminded” and the
first state school for the hearing disabled and visually disabled. All these
institutional settings exercised varying degrees of both care and control
over the individuals within them. Finally, the chapter examines Califor-
nia’s struggle to create a state-level system of oversight for its growing
bureaucracy of disability. Chapter 4 moves beyond the state and county
levels to look at community-level activism around creating institutions for
the disabled. It uses the Los Angeles Psychopathic Association (LAPA)
and its crusade to create the Pacific Colony as a case study to understand
how social reformers of the Progressive era came to regard Californians
with disabilities not as people, but as patients or inmates; not as individ-
uals with unique needs, but as problems to be solved. Chapter 5 looks at
some key developments around disability in the early twentieth century:
the creation of psychopathic parole; the embedding of eugenics and ster-
ilization in both California law and in California’s state hospitals; and
attempts to solve California’s rising incidence of drug and alcohol abuse
through institutionalization. Chapter 6 covers the impact of the Great
Depression and World War II, California’s bureaucracy of disability, the
growth and expansion of child guidance and community mental health
clinics across the state, and the growing involvement of parents and other
activist groups. Chapter 7 discusses California’s massive physical expan-
sion of its state hospitals for the disabled and its continued expansion
of services at the local level. This chapter uses two different government
reports for the era, one state, one county, to illustrate how inpatient and
outpatient care were beginning to diverge in the state. Chapter 8 looks
at the state’s fully developed bureaucracy of disability at midcentury and
the battle to reform it. Led by innovative state legislators, it was a battle
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

that ended with the near-wholesale destruction of the legal underpinnings

of the California’s old system. Chapter 9 thus takes a look at the imple-
mentation of an entirely new and untested bureaucracy of disability that
replaced the old system in the 1970s, one that would have long-term
consequences for California.

Notes
1. I have chosen not to share the names of these individuals here.
Second Annual Report of the Trustees of the California Home for the
Care and Training of Feeble-Minded Children, 1886 (Sacramento: State
Office, 1886), n.p. On the lack of markers at the Sonoma State
Home Cemetery, see https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/2361837/
sonoma-state-home-cemetery (accessed on October 10, 2022).
2. Richard W. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind: Insanity in California, 1870–
1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 33.
3. Take, for example, “severely disabled.” In modern research, it means an
individual with a disability that lasts for twelve continuous months. But
the term was thrown around far more loosely by doctors, politicians, and
reformers for most of the twentieth century. On the modern use of this
term, see Corbett Joan O’Toole, Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History
(Ft. Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2015), n16.
4. Richard K. Scotch, “American Disability Policy in the Twentieth
Century,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri
Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 386.
5. Scotch, “American Disability Policy in the Twentieth Century,” 386.
6. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2010), 3.
7. As Richard K. Scotch explains, “Public policies not only reflect social status
and cultural constructs; they also help create and reinforce them….This
active governmental role has especially applied to disabled people whose
exclusion from much of mainstream economic life, along with the need
by some for accommodation for their impairments, creates a greater
need for public services and subsidies. Much of the social construction
of disability and its consequences in the past hundred years had come
through the medium of public policymaking and policy implementation.”
Scotch, “American Disability Policy in the Twentieth Century,” 385.
8. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind, 163, 181.
9. Paul Lerman, Deinstitutionalization and the Welfare State (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982), xiv.
10. Kirsten Anderberg and Wilma Wilson, They Call Them Camisoles—Revis-
ited: The Story of One Woman’s Four Month Stay as a Committed Patient
10 E. V. WALLIS

at Camarillo State Mental Hospital in 1939 (CreateSpace Independent

Publishing Platform, 2011), 254.
11. Kim E. Nielsen, “The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, ed. Michael Rembis, Catherine
Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018),
26.
12. Obviously, identifying data and other information drawn from sources
other than patient records are not technically covered by the seventy-
five-year rule, but for minors, I have chosen to honor that, nonetheless.
Kim E. Nielsen, “The Perils and Promises of Disability Biography,” in The
Oxford Handbook of Disability History, 25.
13. Fox, So Far Disordered in Mind, 1978; Angela Hawk, “Going ‘Mad’ in
Gold Country: Migrant Populations and the Problem of Containment
in Pacific Mining Boom Regions,” Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 1
(February 2011): 64–96; Angela Hawk, “Madness, Mining, and Migra-
tion in the US and the Pacific” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
Irvine, 2011); Joel T. Braslow, Mental Ills and Bodily Cures: Psychiatric
Treatment in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1997).
14. Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better
Breeding in Modern America, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 2016); Wendy Klein, Building a Better Race: Gender,
Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby
Boom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005); Miroslava
Chávez-Garcia, State of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making
of California’s Juvenile Justice System (Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2012); Natalie Lira, Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and
Confinement in California, 1900–1950s (Oakland: University of California
Press, 2022); Kristine Ashton Gunnell, Daughters of Charity: Women, Reli-
gious Mission, and Hospital Care in Los Angeles, 1856–1927 (Chicago:
DePaul University, 2013); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public
Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University
of California, 2006).
15. Steven Noll, Feeble-minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally
Retarded in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1995); Susan Burch, Committed: Remembering Native
Kinship in and Beyond Institutions (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2021); Sarah E. Rose, No Right to Be Idle: The Inven-
tion of Disability, 1840s–1930s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina,
2017); Edwards Berkowitz, Disabled Policy: America’s Programs for
the Handicapped (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and
America’s Welfare State: From Roosevelt to Reagan (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1991); Deborah Blythe Doroshow, Emotionally
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Disturbed: A History of Caring for America’s Troubled Children (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2019); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civi-
lization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1965); Andrew T. Scull, Decarceration:
Community Treatment and the Deviant: A Radical Review (Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1977), Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s
Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 2022) and Psychiatry and Its Discontents
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2019); David J. Rothman,
Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive
America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company: 1980) and The Discovery
of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, rev. ed.
(New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002); Mark Jackson, The Borderland of
Imbecility: Medicine, Society, and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in
Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Manchester: Manchester Univer-
sity Press, 2000); David Wright and Anne Digby, eds., From Idiocy to
Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabil-
ities (New York: Routledge, 1996); David Wright, “Getting out of the
Asylum: Understanding the Confinement of the Insane in the Nineteenth
Century,” The Society for the Social History of Medicine (1997): 137–155;
Paul K. Longmore, Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2009); Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky,
eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New
York University Press, 2001).
16. “Self Advocates Becoming Empowered,” position statement on defi-
nition of institutions, https://www.sabeusa.org/meet-sabe/policy-statem
ents/definition-of-institutions/. As O’Toole notes, “neurodivergent” is
used primarily by people who are autistic but may also encompass all
neurology-related disabilities. O’Toole, Fading Scars, 37.
17. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in
America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5.
 CHAPTER 2

“Friendless and Homeless:” The Gold Rush

to 1870

“It is really too bad that the unfortunate insane persons who are found
in our city are taken to the station house where they are confined with
criminals and in a noise and a din that would almost make a sane man
crazy,” San Francisco’s Alta newspaper observed in 1851, just one year
after California had become a state. “There are half a dozen of this class
confined and several more are running about the street friendless and
homeless.”1
No sooner had California become a state than it was confronted
with the question of what to do with the mentally disordered living
within its new borders. This need was particularly acute in areas that had
experienced rapid growth during the gold rush: San Francisco, Sacra-
mento, and, to a lesser extent, Northern California in general, where
residents complained to authorities about the sick, disorderly, and disrup-
tive elements in their communities. Compared to the rest of the American
West, the gold rush accelerated the development of asylums and hospitals
California far ahead of the rest of the region. Indeed, it was the rapid
increase in population triggered by the rush that led directly to Californi-
ans’ first discussions about the need for, and costs of, institutions for the
ill, poor, and disabled.
California in 1850 was already several decades behind eastern states
in dealing with these issues, and in fact often looked to states like New
York and Pennsylvania both as models and as a source of medical staff.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

Switzerland AG 2023
E. V. Wallis, California and the Politics of Disability, 1850–1970,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21714-2_2
14 E. V. WALLIS

But it nonetheless founded the first insane asylum west of the Mississippi
River in Stockton, California, in 1851. The story of institutions for the
disabled and of institutionalization was largely a Northern California story
for the first twenty years after statehood. It centered on Sacramento as the
main legislative seat; San Francisco as the largest population center; and
Stockton as the site of the first asylum.2
In creating its first hospitals and asylums, California chose to mimic
the structures and beliefs already in place in the eastern United States
and in Europe. Expert medical knowledge and expertise in the United
States generally flowed from east to west in this period. As we shall see,
because it was not formed as an American state until halfway through
the nineteenth century, California entered the debate about the care of
the mentally disordered at a key moment of transition. Over the ensuing
decades, California built one of the largest statewide systems of asylums
and mental hospitals in the United States. California embraced main-
stream ideas about the care of the mentally and developmentally disabled
as part of a larger quest for legitimacy, driven by the state’s doctors and by
California’s need to prove itself a state with enough power and resources
to create for its residents the kinds of structures of care seen in older,
wealthier states and countries. This was to have lasting consequences for
Californians with all types of disabilities.
No sources have survived that tell us about how disability was handled
during the indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican eras of California. Medical
care in the missions and pueblos alike was rudimentary at best, and
surviving historical records are largely silent on what we would now
recognize as disabilities. It seems likely, however, that individuals with
intellectual, physical, or developmental disabilities who survived birth and
early childhood, as well as individuals suffering from mental disabilities,
were cared for within their own communities. Previous studies of other
parts of the United States and of Europe have shown that agricultural
and ranching communities were often better able to create space for indi-
viduals with disabilities to still be active, contributing members of both
family and society than industrial ones were. This was due in large part to
the home and workspace often being one and the same, thus making it
easier to supervise an individual without unduly straining the productive
capacity needed for survival. Many generations living under one roof were
also more common in those economies and that increased the availability
of caregivers overall. Individuals with disabilities thus may not have stood
out in a way that attracted the attention and concern of authorities. This
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 15

of course does not mean such care was positive or even humane; it was
just different. During the Mexican era of California, there was at least
one attempt to create a legal obligation to provide care: in 1837, “the
Mexican Congress gave local government officials responsibility for social
welfare issues, including caring for the sick and the poor.”3
One of the earliest sources to explicitly mention disability in California
is the memoir of Dr. J. Praslow. He was a German physician who moved
to California during the gold rush, and he traveled extensively throughout
the state, remarking on everything from the weather to the economy to
the prevalence of different illnesses and diseases in different corners of the
state. In one entry, he observed that “cretinism occurs rather frequently
among the Indians and native-born Spaniards; in the neighborhood of
Cape Mendocino, I saw six such cases, in one tribe of Indians, in whom
the disease was developed to a high degree.” In another entry, Dr. Praslow
reported, “I also observed several cases [of cretinism] in the hills of the
southern part of the state among the Spaniards.”4 Praslow, however, did
have an unfortunate tendency to exaggerate both his observations and his
prowess as a physician, and thus any observations he made must be cited
with caution. On a visit to Southern California, for example, he claimed
that

the climate is so healthy that illness I rarely found and one sees many
persons who have reached an age of over a hundred years. I saw people
here who were from 100 to 115 years old and who were still very active.
The fertility of the women is very great and because of this the area was in
good repute during the Spanish regime because the women of Old Spain,
who had been barren, became fertile after a sojourn in this country. It is
still said that women from the United States, who have been married ten
or fifteen years and are childless, bear children after being in this area for
a time.5

Instead of looking to any local history or traditions, California’s

approach to its mentally and physically disabled residents from 1848,
when California became part of the United States, on, was heavily influ-
enced by previous developments in the rest of America. Historically in the
United States, community aid was only provided to individuals who lived
in that community. Colonial Anglo-Americans had brought that belief
with them from England, where “warning off the strolling poor” had
long been the practice.6 There was, however, no consistency from colony
16 E. V. WALLIS

to colony or, later, from state to state. Even after the American Revolu-
tion, the federal government played little part in giving shape or form to
local “poor laws.” Each locality developed its own laws and its own insti-
tutions, if any. Ability to provide assistance depended on the community’s
own economic health, and “local or private resources, however reluctantly
given, were usually all the institution-builders could muster.”7
Both American and European societies in the first few decades of the
nineteenth century assumed individuals with what we would now term
developmental, physical, or mental disabilities were “incurable.” Thus,
the impulse to provide any level of care or support for them was driven
by two impulses, neither of which included the idea of treatment. One
was the ideal of Christian charity, of caring for the less fortunate in
society as a demonstration of Christian faith. The other was a firm belief
that individuals incapable of being “productive” should be removed from
society for the good of all. The final form such removal took (asylum,
jail, poorhouse, etc.) mattered less than the removal itself. As Angela
Hawk explains, in this era “insane asylums and jails were a widespread and
standard component of what Michel Foucault had termed the ‘carceral
archipelago’—a diffuse network of disciplinary mechanisms that normal-
ized ‘containment’ as the primary strategy for addressing social deviancy
in the era of industrialization.”8
There was little understanding of disability at the time. For most of the
nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries, as Janice A. Brockley
writes, different kinds of disabilities could be hard to separate. “Whether
a disability originated in the body or mind could be almost impossible to
distinguish. With few ways to measure the brain directly, mental capacity
had to be judged by action or communication.”9 People might call indi-
viduals with mental disabilities “lunatics,” “mad,” or “eccentrics,” while
they might call those with developmental disabilities “cretins” or “idiots”
or “fools.” By the early twentieth century, all were often simply lumped
together as a single category, the “feebleminded.” Likewise, little atten-
tion was paid to the enormous differences in care or support different
individuals needed based on the type or severity of disability.10 What was
agreed upon was that all such individuals had the potential to disrupt,
and that potential had to be addressed. Nineteenth-century America in
general had a “deeply held legal-political assumption that community
life should be ordered and well-regulated.” It also assumed that it was
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 17

perfectly acceptable to seize people and send them to a local or state insti-
tution, if one existed, for a variety of offenses without “any legal process
whatsoever.”11
Some American reformers, however, reemphasized the idea that it was
society at large’s Christian duty to care for the poor, sick, and infirm.
This slowly evolved into a belief that such individuals could be helped.
This did not change attitudes about asylums: indeed, mid-nineteenth-
century reformers and physicians still agreed that, if one was available,
the only appropriate place for such individuals was the asylum. If such
an individual remained at home, they became “the cause of grief to their
friends, and of uneasiness and alarm to the community, that in almost
every such case the members of the family are rendered unhappy by the
presence of so much suffering, and that often a whole neighborhood are
put in fear and apprehension.” It was precisely such individuals’ disrup-
tive potential that required the state to take an active interest in the
creation and maintenance of asylums.12 The “help” provided was also
sharply limited. Reformers argued that the mentally and developmentally
disabled, in particular, were equivalent to children and thus needed to be
morally educated and then returned to the larger world.
Just as technology in the nineteenth century was moving ahead, so
too, reformers thought, was their ability to help those who previous
generations of doctors had assumed were unreachable. Many reformers
pointed to the advances that were already being made by visually disabled
Americans. When technological advances were combined with Christian
charity and benevolence, reformers believed, hope could only be on the
horizon. “We are indeed living in an age of mental, mechanical, and
moral improvements. The advances made in the sciences and the arts
within the nineteenth century, improvements are so closely trending on
the heel of each other, that one wonder had hardly passed off before we
are struck with another,” an American magazine declared in 1847. Even
the mentally disabled could, it declared, “in eight cases out of ten,” be
cured. “Science has already done so much for several classes of our fellow
beings, whom it was once supposed were place beyond its reach; and now
it remains to be seen in this country what it can accomplish for the poor
idiot.”13
Institutions like asylums were intensely hierarchical worlds, with every
facet of life, from meal times to bedtimes to access to the outdoors, regi-
mented and controlled. The most powerful figure within the asylum was
the superintendent, who sometimes (but not always) also served as its
18 E. V. WALLIS

chief medical officer. As Nancy J. Tomes points out, the first generation of
asylum superintendents in the United States were “moral entrepreneurs”
anxious to establish psychiatry as a field and themselves as a legitimate
part of the medical profession. In the first half of the nineteenth century,
the asylum “was not an established feature of the social landscape. Its
advocates had to convince the public that insanity was a curable disease,
best treated in a mental hospital.”14 Thus, superintendents focused much
of their time and energy on the physical design of asylums and their
management. This was particularly true for private asylums, which had to
compete for paying customers by offering the newest treatments and the
latest modern conveniences. This approach is probably most associated
with Thomas Story Kirkbride, one of the thirteen founders of the Asso-
ciation of Medical Superintendents of American Asylums for the Insane
(the present-day American Psychiatric Association) who wrote extensively
on asylum design and management.15
Although his work was on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
asylums, Michel Foucault’s observations apply almost as well to asylums of
the nineteenth century. He notes the power the doctors heading asylums
had. He terms them the “medical personage,” the “essential figure of
the asylum.” “If the medical profession is required, it is as a juridical
and moral guarantee not in the name of science,” he writes. “A man of
great probity, of utter virtue and scruple, who had long experience in
the asylum would do as well. For the medical enterprise is only a part of
an enormous moral task that must be accomplished at the asylum, and
which alone can ensure the cure of the insane.” Authority and order were
prioritized over medical care.16
Early nineteenth-century asylum developers like Kirkbride argued not
only for the complete authority of the superintendent, but for him also
to have in turn complete authority over the staff. An asylum board of
managers might be created to have some degree of authority over the
superintendent, but they were expected to stay out of the day-to-day
management of the institution.17 Strict discipline and obedience, both
for the staff and for the individuals living within the asylum, were not
just encouraged but expected. The effect was “the establishment of the
unwritten rule so characteristic of total institutions in general, the ‘good
patients’ enjoy better living conditions and more privileges than ‘bad’
ones.” Worse still, as Christopher Lasch explains,
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 19

the humanizing of the asylum made it possible, as it had not been possible
before, to confuse the health of the inmates with the health of the insti-
tution itself. So long as the asylum was no more than a place of detention
and physical punishment, there was little pretense either of therapy or of
efficient administration; administration, in the absence of therapy, being
almost totally unnecessary. Once therapy became the object of confine-
ment, however, and once therapy had been defined as learning to submit
to moral discipline, efficient administration came to be so closely identified
with treatment that in practice the distinction between them was almost
impossible to maintain.18

It is vital, however, not to overstate how much power superintendents

and chief medical officers exercised outside of the asylum walls by the
mid-nineteenth century. The professionalizing psychiatric profession in
the United States and Europe did not itself drive the rising numbers of
confinements in that century. Instead, as David Wright argues, confine-
ment itself was largely “predicated upon the desires of families to care
for and control dependent and violent relatives…as a strategic response
of households to the stresses of industrialization.” This also helps contex-
tualize why most asylums had a relatively small resident population but
a much larger population of individuals who rotated in and out on rela-
tively short stays. These shorter stays are generally indicative of moments
when families who were providing care for an individual decided they
could no longer do so. When a family’s ability to provide care improved,
and/or an individual recovered to the point to placing less of a strain on
their caregivers, they left the asylum. Even within the walls of the asylum,
superintendents and chief medical officers (again, often the same indi-
vidual) did not provide much hands-on care. They were instead “glorified
administrators, inspecting the most interesting cases, attending medico-
psychological meetings and plotting lucrative futures as proprietors of
private licensed homes.”19
Superintendents did, however, largely shape what became known as the
“medical model” of disability, one that, as Brent Ruswick and Elliott W.
Simon point out, was often in “tension with the lived social experience
of disability.” In asylums, poor houses, and hospitals, it was largely super-
intendents who first defined medically what disability was (a malady or
injury of the body and/or mind), and who began to classify individuals
by those disabilities. “With this turn towards custodialism and institu-
tional efficiency came new pressures to classify and segregate people by
ability.”20
20 E. V. WALLIS

Although many of the first asylums in antebellum America were private,

the downside of that approach, as far as politicians and reformers were
concerned, was that they also went to great lengths to exclude the indi-
gent poor. Asylum managers understood that maintaining at least some
sense of exclusivity was a critical part of the appeal of private asylums.
However, this approach posed challenges for states that had initially
hoped private asylums would accommodate at least a few poor individuals
in return for a state stipend.21
By the 1850s, rapid increases in population within asylums and insti-
tutional schools soon challenged the optimistic assumption that these
individuals could be quickly cured and then returned to society. As Steven
Noll explains, as more and more of these institutions became publicly
funded, it in turn “put pressure on institutional leaders and their claims of
helping their patients by curing them.…But high institutional cure rates,
often fabricated or exaggerated by superintendents and physicians seeking
to improve their reputations and increase funding, were dependent on
small numbers of patients, as moral treatment was time consuming and
personal in nature. With increasing numbers of admissions, the cure rates
for those admitted concomitantly went down….This recognition of lower
cure rates for institutions led to problems in funding.” The Civil War
further exacerbated these financial difficulties.22
California embarked on the creation of its first asylum at the same
time other states in the east were becoming increasingly discouraged
about their own and about their ability to create any lasting improvement
for individuals in their care. Essentially, California entered into a system
already in transition away from care and/or cure and toward custodialism:
simply keeping disordered, disruptive, and disabled individuals away from
the rest of society. The eastern model of asylum may not have been a good
fit outside of the Atlantic seaboard, but it was still the model California
and many other states used. This had a direct impact on how California’s
first asylum, and all its subsequent asylums, functioned. Richard W. Fox
argues “in California, ‘custody’ was paramount from the start” and took
precedence over any pretense of care.23
The advent of the gold rush in 1848 triggered rapid population growth
in Northern California. From just 14,000 nonindigenous residents in
1848, the population swelled to 255,122 by 1850. In contrast, one of
its nearest neighbors, Oregon Territory, had a population of just 13,294
that year.24 This population growth in California was extremely uneven,
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 21

largely bypassing Southern California and focusing on cities like San Fran-
cisco, Sacramento, and Stockton and the mining districts to their north
and east. In 1850–1852, San Francisco County alone had a population
36,154 (14% of the state’s population), and most of those individ-
uals were in the city of San Francisco (population 34,776). Sacramento
County, soon to be the home of the state capital, had 12,418 residents,
and San Joaquin County, where Stockton is located, had 5,029.25
Although the southern counties were spared the worst of the upheavals
of the gold rush, they were experiencing upheavals of their own. Southern
California authorities’ preoccupation in the 1850s was with “lawlessness.”
The region was in transition from Mexican to American authority as
it moved from a Mexican pueblo to a predominately Anglo-American
city, resulting in both cultural and linguistic barriers to a functioning
government. This created enormous social and political friction that was
compounded by an extremely rudimentary legal system ill-equipped to
handle the situation. Nowhere was this more the case than in the largest of
the Southern California counties, Los Angeles. Not only was Los Angeles
County home to the largest pueblo in the region (Los Angeles), but
it was also geographically enormous. In 1851, the county’s boundaries
grew to include what is now San Bernardino County. For a time, Los
Angeles County stretched from the Tehachapi Mountains in the north
to Death Valley and the Mojave Desert in the east. The jurisdiction
of the Los Angeles County sheriff, the county’s only official officer of
the law, was thus stretched almost to the breaking point, and the sole
county jail in Los Angeles was not particularly secure.26 Local authorities
thus tended to focus on violent crimes and crimes against property, not
poverty, illness, or health care. Assault and horse theft made up the bulk
of crimes brought to trial in the county in 1850.27 When it did turn its
attention to crimes such as public drunkenness or loitering, the type of
crime that frequently brought the mentally ill and disabled to the atten-
tion of authorities in the Bay Area, Los Angeles County’s legal system
focused its powers almost exclusively on local indigenous peoples. “The
crime of loitering was often interpreted by law enforcement in the most
general terms,” Ronald Woolsey notes, “and Indians were arrested for
no particular reason.” Indigenous residents were in fact frequently the
victims of crime in the county rather than the perpetrators, but rarely if
ever received justice from authorities.28 So intensely racialized were Anglo
authorities’ ideas about who made up the “disordered” elements in the
county that when miners did pass through on the way to the gold fields
22 E. V. WALLIS

or washed up in Los Angeles sick and broke after failing to find gold
and made trouble, authorities found themselves ill-equipped to handle
them.29
Understanding not just overall population growth but the growth of
cities in California is key to understanding how the state approached
hospital and asylum creation in the nineteenth century. American doctors,
reformers, and sociologists had already noticed that there seemed to be
some sort of connection between urbanization and the numbers of indi-
viduals committed to institutions of all kinds. This held true “for both
sexes, and for all regions, races, and nativity groups.”30 An enormous
amount of ink was spilled arguing over what the connection might be.
Suggestions ranged from the large populations of immigrants in cities to
the deleterious moral impacts of urban life. The actual connections were
likely far more prosaic. As Richard W. Fox notes, “There is little evidence
to show that urbanization increased the rate at which people exhibited
mental problems, any more than it increased the incidence of serious
crime. But urbanization in industrializing America did reduce middle-class
tolerance for ‘unproductive,’ ‘inefficient’ behavior, such as public drunk-
enness and loitering, and did promote the establishment of institutions
and professions devoted to the control of deviant behavior.”31
The new California State Legislature focused its political attention on
those areas of the state with both the largest populations and the most
advanced urban development: San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton.
The last, while considerably smaller than the first two, was connected to
both by water, making it a pivotal connection. Those counties with large
populations but no real urban development were bypassed in the state’s
first round of institution-building. For example, El Dorado County, which
bordered Sacramento County, had an estimated population of 40,000
in 1850, making it slightly larger than San Francisco County (popula-
tion 36,154). But El Dorado County was still a mining area. Residents
working in pursuit of gold remained highly mobile, and thus there was
little to no stable town development there. Even if there had been, as
long as the county was focused on mining, conditions there would have
made staffing and maintaining any kind of state institution extraordinarily
difficult. A similar calculation also explains why there was no real state
attention paid to Southern California’s healthcare infrastructure in the
first two decades following statehood. Los Angeles County, by far the
largest of the Southern California counties in terms both of size and
population, had only 8,329 residents in 1850.32
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 23

The sight of mentally disabled individuals in San Francisco “running

about the street friendless and homeless,” as the Alta newspaper had put
it, understandably increased anxiety about how the new state was going
to handle not just the mentally and developmentally disabled, but also
the impoverished and the infirm. There were no existing statewide social
and political structures for California to fall back upon. It was, in essence,
starting from scratch.
Primary sources from the time suggest mental disabilities and disor-
ders were common in California in the 1840s and 1850s, perhaps even
more common than elsewhere in the United States at the time. Like
the observed but misunderstood connections between cities and mental
disability, this phenomenon was also often remarked upon but remained
stubbornly unexplained. In his memoir about his travels in California,
Dr. Praslow noted that “mental diseases occur not infrequently, and one
has opportunities of seeing them among the immigrants who hoped to
be [millionaires,] etc., in a few weeks and were disappointed.” Others
pointed to the uneven ratio of men to women in the state that might
result in celibacy, a state generally regarded at the time as unhealthy for
adult men (celibacy was believed to contribute to both spermatorrhea in
men and masturbation, both considered potential causes of insanity). The
long ship voyage to California, which may have exposed an individual to
all sorts of morally damaging ideas and experiences, was another proposed
cause. Gambling, alcohol abuse, separation from family, manual labor, and
even California’s unique climate were also cited. San Francisco’s climate
was believed to be particularly bad for mental health as some doctors
argued it overstimulated the nervous system. The American cultural belief
that not only did California have more insane than other states, but that
there was something about the state itself that contributed to insanity,
became so prevalent that doctors were still trying to debunk it fifty years
after the end of the gold rush.33
Historians have come up with more grounded possibilities to explain
the numbers of mentally disordered in mid-nineteenth-century California.
In her study of admissions to Pacific Coast asylums in the 1840s and
1850s, Angela Hawk found that most of the earliest reported cases of
insanity in California were actually suicide cases, as suicide and madness
were believed at the time to be two sides of the same coin. Arrests for
relatively minor offenses such as public drunkenness were also common.
Richard W. Fox notes that the relatively high numbers could also reflect
that California might have committed more people for more reasons than
24 E. V. WALLIS

did other states. The connection thus may perhaps be explained by a rela-
tively small percentage individuals who engaged in exactly the kinds of
behaviors most likely to draw the attention of authorities (suicidal ideation
or suicide attempts and public drunkenness). Then those individuals had
been quickly whisked off to jail or, later, the state asylum.34
Whatever the underlying cause might have been, one piece of the
puzzle that was well-understood at the time was that most of these
mentally disordered individuals were newcomers to the state. They
were thus unmoored from traditional support structures (family, church,
community) that might otherwise have provided care. Californians did
not take kindly to seeing the mentally disordered at large in their commu-
nities. Many gold rush migrants came from the eastern United States
and from Europe, where the confinement of the mentally disordered was
already well established. Although now transplanted to California, they
nonetheless still expected their politicians and law enforcement officers
to curb disorderly behavior and, if necessary, to remove such individ-
uals from public view. It was a conversation as much or more about
containment than care.35 But how was this to be done?
The first attempt at a solution came in the form of creating general
hospitals. San Francisco’s city hospital was first established in 1850, and,
after being destroyed twice by fire, once in 1850 and again in 1852, it
was rebuilt in stone with a capacity of 250 to 300 beds. There was also
a German Hospital, which was funded by the German Relief Society and
took only German patients; a French hospital; and numerous small private
hospitals.36 A ship named the Euphemia, originally captured from the
British during the War of 1812, was used as floating insane asylum in San
Francisco Bay from May 1851 until 1852. It had been abandoned when
its crew jumped ship to rush to the gold fields. The two-masted brig had
been offered to the city as a place for the insane for free after it was sold;
previously, it had served as the city prison.37
To meet the high demand for care, California’s first attempts at
creating state hospitals were done by forging municipal contracts with
private hospitals, both in Sacramento and San Francisco. In both cases,
they proved disastrous for the private hospital operators because the cities
often proved unable to repay them for patient care. As a port city with
huge numbers of passengers and sailors arriving every day, San Francisco
also reached out to the US Marine Hospital Service for aid, and in 1850,
Congress authorized the creation of a marine hospital in that city. Located
near the bay on Rincon Point, it served sailors of all nations and the
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 25

American Merchant Marine. It opened in 1854, closed after being badly

damaged in an earthquake in 1868, and then reopened in 1875. A State
Marine Hospital opened in San Francisco as well. It took in sailors and
marines, of course, but unlike the US Marine Hospital in San Francisco,
the State Marine Hospital there also admitted “persons for whom a bond
had been given or hospital money paid; those who had paid five dollars
for a year’s care; and patients sent by San Francisco under agreement
with the State Marine Hospital trustees.”38 Most of San Francisco’s and
Sacramento’s hospitals, perhaps understandably, focused on treating acute
illnesses and contagious diseases rather than disability. New arrivals often
needed treatment for scurvy after their long trip around Cape Horn. Due
to poor sanitation, outbreaks of dysentery, cholera, malaria, and typhoid
fever plagued both California’s mining camps and its cities. Syphilis was
also common.39
In 1851, the state of California moved to create actual state-funded
hospitals in Sacramento and Stockton. The legislature appropriated both
state and local funds for them, with the expectation that both would
admit the indigent and those able to pay for care. The two hospitals were
to serve the entire state, and the Sacramento hospital was also to care
for the insane. A ward for the insane with a $15,000 operating budget
did indeed open at the new Sacramento State Hospital. However, the
Sacramento facility was not secure, and many transfers sent there ended
up right back in San Francisco, infuriating local officials. Costs for both
hospitals quickly spiraled out of control because many counties that either
did not have hospitals yet or did not want to pay for their own patients
sent their cases to the state hospitals. Individuals sent to these hospitals
also had the bad habit of leaving before their courses of “treatment”
were completed. The city of San Francisco was so angry at individuals
leaving the Sacramento asylum only to return to San Francisco that in
May 1852, it recommissioned the Euphemia for another six months rather
than spend the money sending folks back to Sacramento. Up in arms,
both a California State legislative committee investigating the situation
and the state controller recommended closing the state hospital in Sacra-
mento completely. They recommended keeping the Stockton hospital
open, but only as a hospital for the mentally disabled. This transition
began in 1852 and was completed in 1853, with the noninsane Sacra-
mento and Stockton patients being sent to San Francisco to be cared for
at local cost until the new facility had space for them. Other hospitals
26 E. V. WALLIS

were not faring much better: the State Marine Hospital, which had also
proved extremely expensive, was closed in 1855.40
In addition to hospitals, in large communities like San Francisco,
private charities and fraternal orders often helped meet charitable needs
through donations. When California became a state in 1850, the first
California State Legislature made grants for the relief of both specific
individuals in need and for private charities that cared for the aged, the
infirm, and the ill. Both practices were later eliminated in 1879, when the
state’s constitution was revised, on the grounds that they were too easy to
abuse.41 Local private relief was also important because many of Califor-
nia’s early general hospitals refused to serve women and children. Some
didn’t even have women on their nursing staffs. Instead, women and chil-
dren were to go to county infirmaries if they needed care. Unfortunately,
the 1860 legislative act that authorized county infirmaries did not make
opening one mandatory for all counties.42
In those counties thus far left out of the state’s plans, resentment
quickly started to build. In Los Angeles County, the indigent sick were
still quite literally at the mercy of strangers. In an 1854 article, the
Southern Californian newspaper noted the recent arrival in the pueblo
of an American named Humphreys, who fell ill but had no money to pay
for care. A local physician agreed to take on his case without charge, the
paper noted, and a “Spanish family” took him in, with the lady of the
house nursing the stranger until he passed away a few days later. “This
lady is worthy the title of saintess [sic], and deserves the respect of every
American in the community,” the paper reported.

We believe there is hospital fund raised by taxation in this state, but this
county has never received a cent’s benefit from it. Why is it? Do we pay
this tax altogether for the benefit of foreigners? If this tax is paid, why do
not some of our citizens take means to retain it among us for the benefit of
the needy in our community. There are a great many persons who take sick
in the upper country, and come down here to resuscitate their health, and
in many instances without means. They must necessarily suffer for want of
proper medical attendance or obtain gratuitous relief from our physicians.
However humane our physicians may be they cannot give their services
and medicine without some reward. Why not then the state make the same
provisions for us that it has for San Francisco, Stockton, Sacramento and
other places? We think it no more than right and honest that we receive
the hospital fund to which we are entitled, and would urge our officials in
whose power it lies, to obtain it for us—to use such efforts as are necessary
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 27

to get it, and have it appropriated for the relief of the sick and destitute
amongst us.43

Southern Californians might have grumbled, but they did use the
state’s new hospitals. They began to refer to individuals “gone up”
or “sent up” to Stockton. Once the new asylum opened, California’s
southern counties resented the distance involved, and they particularly
resented that state law required all individuals being committed to the
new asylum to be transported by a sheriff’s deputy. County governments
protested that this practice raised the cost of having anyone committed
because counties had to reimburse sheriffs’ departments for their fees
and expenses.44 For those counties farthest from Stockton, the costs
quickly became problematic. Local newspapers grudgingly reported both
the names of individuals transported and the costs involved, which ran as
high as $600 to transport a single individual, a veritable fortune for the
relatively poorer Southern California counties. In San Diego County in
1855, the San Diego Herald newspaper reported that several individuals
had been examined by the courts and

found to be suitable subjects for the State Lunatic Asylum, and were
remanded to the custody of the Sheriff, to be conveyed to Stockton but
from some cause—lack of funds, perhaps—they are still at large, and likely
to remain so. If there is no provision made by law, for cases of this kind,
for God’s sake let the people assemble en masse, and petition the Legis-
lature to pass the necessary enactment, and in the event of their refusal
to do so, let us refuse to pay our taxes into the State Treasury, and bide
the result. There is no other remedy left us. We have been oppressed long
enough.45

Perhaps in response to complaints from the southern counties, in 1855,

California passed the Poor Law of 1855, which made the county boards
of supervisors responsible for relief of the indigent sick in their own areas,
up to and including hospital care. To help cover the costs of providing
care, the Poor Law gave counties the power to levy either a poll tax or a
small ad valorem duty on all real and personal property. In Los Angeles
County, the Board of Supervisors’ Committee of Health began to reim-
burse doctors, pharmacists, and boardinghouse keepers who cared for the
sick for approved expenses on a quarterly basis.46 The passage of the 1855
Poor Law also funded the creation of additional general hospitals in larger
28 E. V. WALLIS

communities up and down the state, although not all counties immedi-
ately built them. In 1860, the legislature revised the law to allow these
new county general hospitals to also care for “the blind, lame, old, and
all those so disabled as to need public assistance.” Bond issues helped
pay for additional hospital construction in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and
San Francisco. By 1871, there were twenty-four county general hospitals
and almshouses. In California, these were most often called county homes
or poor farms or county farms. Some of them were operated by private
contractors on behalf of the county. The quality of care in both these early
county hospitals and the county farms was generally poor. However, since
it was the only option available, the sick, the aged, and the disabled, were
often all crowded together under one roof. In most California counties,
the county hospital served as a county farm as well. Only in San Francisco,
Los Angeles, and Santa Clara Counties were the almshouses functionally
separate from the county hospitals. A statewide vagrancy act followed in
1872, which under the state’s penal code allowed for any person to be
charged with disorderly conduct if they were found lodging in a public or
private place without explicit permission. This pushed more people into
county farms.47
As Frances Cahn and Valeska Bary point out, one of the distinguishing
features of California in the era, particularly compared to older states in
the east, is the rapid increase in the number of almshouses and county
hospital farms at a time when they were already disappearing elsewhere.
In Cahn’s and Bary’s analysis, this did not reflect a shortage of benevolent
sentiment from Californians themselves. Indeed, they argue, “state subsi-
dies to private institutions were far greater [in California] than in eastern
states, and although city and county subsidies were less, the number of
persons in private benevolent institutions [in California] who received
some type of public aid represented a larger proportion of the total
inmates than was general for the country.” They attribute the number of
county farms to the need for California to provide a substitute for “home
life.” The gold rush had created a population that, even by the late 1860s,
was still heavily male. Those men were either single or lived far away from
their families. This occupational pattern of single men worked well in
mining, and it was becoming common in California agriculture as well.
“Thus,” Cahn and Bary conclude, “agriculture as well as mining threw
upon the cities during the winters large numbers of men, only partly
employed, who supported themselves while their money lasted and fell
back upon the community when ill or destitute.” In their analysis of the
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 29

US census of 1880, the first one to give separate figures for almshouses,
Cahn and Bary find that while in the country as a whole the gender
balance was roughly even in almshouses and county farms, in California,
it leaned heavily male. California’s numbers, they also note, show the
foreign-born making up over three-fifths of the population in almshouses
and similar institutions, even though the foreign-born accounted for only
a quarter of the total state population at the time. This is yet another
reflection of how many Californians were dislocated and thus isolated
from family and support structures in the years after the gold rush.48
To control costs, California’s state legislators agreed that aid or any
kind of care or assistance the state might create should only be provided
to residents of the state. Communities like San Francisco that were already
beginning to experiment with providing some level of services on the
local level did the same.49 The fear that individuals from outside the state
might become dependent on it was a recurring one. By 1852, California
had become fearful enough about dependent migrants that they enacted
a passenger act. Modeled on laws in Massachusetts and New York, the law
required shipmasters to either “provide a bond of five hundred dollars or
pay five dollars in head money to the state of California for the entry of
each passenger.” Any passenger deemed to be “lunatic, idiot, deaf, dumb,
blind, cripple, or infirm”; who had been a pauper in another country; or
who seemed likely to become a public charge due to sickness or disease
required an additional $1,000 bond. A governor-appointed commission
of emigration was placed in San Francisco to oversee the enforcement of
the act. The law lasted only until 1857, when it was overturned by the
California Supreme Court. However, this was not the last time California
attempted to restrict who could access services in the state. In 1870, for
example, Judge Wright in San Francisco declared that only citizens could
be committed to the state asylum. He was pointed to the existing state
law, and it appears he quickly dropped the assertion. Similar arguments
continued to crop up as late as 1886, when, in the Stockton Asylum’s
annual report to the state legislature, its superintendent complained that
there were an estimated 140 mentally disabled Chinese individuals in state
asylums at state expense. “The expatriation of mentally defective immi-
grants is, in other places a well-established custom,” he groused. “Less
than one half the amount annually expended for their care and mainte-
nance here would charter a vessel and return the whole number to Hong
Kong, whence they came.”50
30 E. V. WALLIS

The successful transition of a general hospital into the State Insane

Asylum at Stockton, the first asylum in the state, must have seemed to
California legislators, at least momentarily, like a triumph. California had
successfully survived the destabilizing effect of the gold rush and asserted
its own political legitimacy by creating some of its first state-funded and
state-operated institutions. It was also responding to residents’ demands
to deal with the disorderly and disruptive plaguing respectable society by
replicating the same structures of care and control found in the eastern
United States. What could go wrong?
California passed its first law about mental disability, a “lunacy law,”
in 1853. It allowed a county judge, “upon the application of any person
under oath and after the examination by two reputable physicians,” to
order an individual be placed in an insane asylum. Those who could pay
were expected to do so, but if they could not, confinement was to be
at state expense. The following year, the law was amended to require
the judge holding the commitment proceeding to inquire specifically into
the financial wherewithal of the individual being committed. Commit-
ment requiring the testimony of two doctors was becoming common
across nineteenth-century United States as both states and reformers
tried to develop means for making sure no sane people were forced
into asylums by unscrupulous friends or relatives. The court-appointed
“two respectable physicians” were expected to examine the individual
and provide a judge with their diagnosis and recommendations. If the
judge found the individual in question to be “insane,” admission to a state
hospital could be ordered.51 With Stockton’s hospital now rechristened
as California’s first State Asylum, the path from commitment to insti-
tutionalization had been cleared. California’s State Asylum at Stockton
remained the only such institution west of the Mississippi River until
1871.52
By creating a state, rather than county or local, institution for
the mentally disabled, California bucked the national trend in asylum
creation. In other states at this time, such care was usually considered
a local matter, although asylum reform activists, including Dorothea Dix,
were working to change that at both the federal and the state levels. From
its very beginnings as a state, “California established the policy of caring
for its insane with state money instead of forcing the counties to pay a
part of the cost and the state appropriating the remainder.”53 While tran-
sitioning from general hospital to asylum, the Stockton asylum remained
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 31

in the old hospital building at El Dorado and Market Streets. Twenty-

one individuals were sent from the Sacramento Hospital to Stockton
before additional accomodations could even be built for them there.
Sixteen more individuals from San Francisco followed in November 1852.
Of those sent to Stockton in the early years of its operation, all but
one were male. They were a racially and ethnically “remarkably diverse”
group, reflecting the polyglot, multicultural nature of post-gold-rush
California.54 There was some discussion in the state legislature about the
“healthfulness” of the site at Stockton due to proximity to the region’s
many rivers and marshes, but ultimately, financial concerns ruled the day,
and Stockton remained the state’s choice. In 1853, the asylum moved to
a new location further from downtown.55 Two years later, the asylum at
last received a state appropriation of $30,000 for the construction of new
buildings56 The asylum grew one building at a time: a row of wooden
buildings called the Cottage Ward was added in 1869 to accommodate
an additional 160 individuals, and a women’s wing and a new central
wing were finished in 1874, adding 325 additional beds. Construction
at Stockton was not complete until 1884, when a new building for men
(known locally as “the bricks”) opened with 530 beds.57
As stated, admission to asylums like Stockton’s was at least as much
about removing threats to the public order from society as about any
semblance of successfully treating the individual. Capitalism and industri-
alization required the removal of those who could not be productive from
the economy and the movement of caregiving into institutions to free up
families’ time, energy, and attention, and societal norms required order
and peace, even if it was only achieved by removing the disorderly.58 In
the eyes of the state, California seemed to bring out the crazy in people,
and since said individuals might risk their own life or the lives of others,
this required intervention from the state.59
California newspapers routinely played up the presence of such disrup-
tive individuals and stressed the need for authorities to “deal” with
them. When authorities and newspapermen extended any grace at all to
the mentally disordered, it was only to stress the need to distinguish
the “mad” from the criminal.60 In his study of late nineteenth-century
San Francisco commitment records, Richard W. Fox found that in “at
least” six out of ten cases, “it was the presence of socially inappropriate
behavior that constituted the actual grounds for commitment, although
such commitment was contrary to a strict reading of the commitment
law.”61 Chronic alcoholism was also grounds for admission to the state
32 E. V. WALLIS

asylum, as both doctors and the general public regarded it as a moral

failing in need of a “moral” cure, rather than as a disease.62 There were
likely some Californians institutionalized simply because other Califor-
nians did not want to see them. In 1867, San Francisco passed its first
so-called ugly law, prohibiting any individual “diseased, maimed, muti-
lated, or in any way deformed” from begging or simply appearing in
public. Those convicted were expected to pay a fine. If they could not do
so, they were shunted off to the city’s new almshouse. The first person
arrested under the new law was a former Union soldier.63 Individuals
often cycled between different institutions over several months or years.
Most did not emerge, if they emerged at all, from their encounters with
such facilities “recovered” or “rehabilitated.” At best, such carceral insti-
tutions merely provided a respite (shelter on a cold night, regular meals,
rudimentary health care) for individuals who for whatever reason did not
have access to them in their own communities.64
Stockton fancied itself an institution that, like its Eastern counterparts
two decades earlier, promoted the so-called “moral treatment” to restore
individuals to sanity. The reality, however, was that the time for this
idea had already passed when Stockton reopened its doors. The result
was that “whereas many eastern hospitals were thought by contempo-
rary observers and subsequent historians to have ‘declines’ from therapy
to custody, California asylums underwent no such apparent transition,”
Richard W. Fox explains. “From their very beginnings in the 1850s they
were clearly understood to be not simply treatment facilities for the
mentally disturbed, but also detention facilities for ‘imbeciles, dotards,
idiots, drunkards, simpletons, fools,’ for ‘the aged, the vagabond, the
helpless.’ The efforts for superintendents in the 1850s to establish a
humanitarian ‘moral treatment’ regime—modeled after earlier eastern
efforts—was futile from the start.”65 This was not an issue confined to
the American West: even Thomas Kirkbride’s own asylum, the Pennsyl-
vania Hospital for the Insane, often failed to live up to the promises it
had made and struggled with overcrowding and upkeep. “The tendency
of hospital life,” as Nancy J. Tomes notes, “was ever towards disorder and
disintegration.”66
Most of California’s doctors in this era, including the ones who
staffed the Stockton asylum, had received their training in the eastern
or midwestern United States or in Europe and had come to the state
seeking to further their careers. Formal medical training only become
 2 “FRIENDLESS AND HOMELESS:” THE GOLD RUSH TO 1870 33

available in California in 1864 at the Toland Medical School, which even-

tually became the medical department of the University of California.
The state was slowly building its own medical infrastructure, such as
the 1870 creation of the California State Board of Health. The board
initially served as just an advisory body to the state on matters of hospi-
tals, private and public alike, collecting data and conducting inspections.
It had no direct involvement with the state asylum. Thus, as Esther Pond
and Stuart Brody explain, Stockton and California asylums that followed
it were each “a relatively independent entity run by its board of trustees
who exercised almost complete control over the superintendent and the
hospital’s employees.”67
Life in an asylum like Stockton came with a set of expectations. Judges
and doctors alike expected appropriate behavior from individuals confined
to these institutions. Individuals were to acknowledge that they were “ill”
and acquiesce to whatever treatments the doctors prescribed. However, in
asylums across the country, oftentimes “patients refused to be orderly and
content. They grew bored, fought with their ward mates, and complained
almost endlessly about hospital life. By suicide, escape, and destruction,
they continually expressed their resistance to the therapeutic regimen of
the asylum.” Yet resistance in any form was often presumed to be yet
another symptom of mental disorder itself. It could result in anything
from a lengthening of time an individual had to stay institutionalized
(unlike prison sentences, commitments were open-ended) to physical
violence at the hands of attendants, nurses, and doctors. The only “treat-
ments” available were tonics, stimulants, sedatives, and narcotics, physical
restraints, and, in some cases, water therapies. Staff turnover was constant.
Individuals in the asylum were expected to work: to wax and mop floors,
cook, help tend others, and so on. This not only helped ease the strain
of not having enough staff to perform needed labor, but was in and of
itself considered by doctors a form of treatment, a sort of “occupational
therapy” before the term had ever been coined. The idea of having indi-
viduals inside institutions contribute to it through their labor was not new,
of course. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, European institutions
were combining the repressive function of confinement with a demand
that those confined “contribute to the prosperity of all.” In its official
report to the California State Legislature in 1855, the Legislative Hospital
Committee declared that Stockton “would do credit to any similar Insti-
tution in any of the older States,” but expressed hope that soon the
individuals there would have “an opportunity to employ themselves in
34 E. V. WALLIS

the tillage of the soil, which in similar institutions has resulted in great
good in restoring invalids to health.”68 Such labor, whether performed
inside or outside the asylum, doctors believed, prevented “brooding”
while simultaneously making the individual “useful.” As with refusing
treatment, refusing to work was often interpreted as a symptom of illness
rather than a protest.69
During the first ten years, it was in operation, the more than 2,000
individuals confined at Stockton reflected California’s gold rush-driven
demographics. They were relatively young (75% were between the ages
of twenty and thirty-nine); overwhelmingly male (men outnumbered
women five to one); and largely foreign-born (53% of the men at Stockton
were foreign-born, even though they accounted for only 39% of the
overall state population at the time). Forty percent of these individuals
were discharged within six months (“restored to usefulness,” as Superin-
tendent Robert K. Reid put it in the asylum’s first annual report). Reasons
for admission ranged from madness to developmental and physical disabil-
ities to alcohol abuse to epilepsy. The latter became a particularly
contentious issue among doctors, as “epilepsy had always created an
institutional as well as a medical problem for the superintendents (what
constituted an epileptic condition itself was not well defined)….Some
seizures had clear neurological origins, but other appeared to be asso-
ciated with various forms of lunacy.” Other individuals were simply old
and/or ill and had nowhere else to go. Whatever the reason for admis-
sion, the population at Stockton quickly ballooned. By the end of 1853,
the California State Asylum at Stockton housed 102 people; by 1864,
301. Not only was it still the only such institution west of the Mississippi,
but it was also among the largest such facilities in the country. Asylums
in New York State, Illinois, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Washington,
D.C. were the only ones with larger populations in a single facility. More-
over, most states operated more than one state-run asylum by 1864: New
York State took the lead, with six of them. California still had just the one.
By 1871, the State Insane Asylum at Stockton housed 1,090 individuals.
Not until the 1871 opening of the state’s second insane asylum in Napa
County was there any relief on the population strain.70
Even had overcrowding not bedeviled the institution from the start,
the Stockton asylum would still have proved itself to be a deeply trou-
bled institution. Although originally believed to be the best possible site
for an asylum (“Los Angeles is too warm and San Francisco is too cold
and changeable to be favorable,” one doctor opined at the time), the site
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 LE GRAND CONTRAT POUR LA FOURNITURE DU BŒUF
CONSERVÉ
Aussi brièvement que possible, je désire exposer à la nation la part, si
petite soit-elle, que j’ai eue dans cette affaire qui a préoccupé si grandement
l’opinion publique, engendré tant de querelles et rempli les journaux des
deux continents de renseignements erronés et de commentaires extravagants.
Voici quelle fut l’origine de cet événement fâcheux. Je n’avance, dans le
résumé suivant, aucun fait qui ne soit confirmé par les documents officiels
du gouvernement.
John Wilson Mackensie, de Rotterdam, comté de Chemung, New-Jersey,
actuellement décédé, fit un contrat avec le gouvernement général, le 10
octobre 1861, ou à peu près à cette date, pour fournir au général Sherman la
somme totale de trente barils de bœuf conservé.
Très bien.
Il partit à la recherche de Sherman, avec son bœuf. Mais quand il fut à
Washington, Sherman venait de quitter cette ville pour Manassas. Mackensie
prit donc son bœuf, et l’y suivit, mais il arriva trop tard. Il le suivit à
Nashville, et de Nashville à Chattanooga, et de Chattanooga à Atlanta, mais
sans pouvoir le rejoindre. A Atlanta, il reprit sa course et poursuivit Sherman
dans sa marche vers la mer. Il arriva quelques jours trop tard. Mais apprenant
que Sherman s’était embarqué pour la Terre Sainte, en excursion, à bord de
la Cité des Quakers, il fit voile pour Beyrouth, calculant qu’il dépasserait
l’autre navire. Une fois à Jérusalem, avec son bœuf, il sut que Sherman ne
s’était pas embarqué sur la Cité des Quakers, mais qu’il était retourné dans
les plaines pour combattre les Indiens. Il revint en Amérique et partit pour
les montagnes Rocheuses. Après soixante-huit jours de pénible voyage à
travers les plaines, et comme il se trouvait à moins de quatre milles du
quartier général de Sherman, il fut tomahawqué et scalpé, et les Indiens
prirent le bœuf. Ils ne lui laissèrent qu’un baril. L’armée de Sherman s’en
empara, et ainsi, même dans la mort, le hardi navigateur put exécuter une
partie de son contrat. Dans son testament, écrit au jour le jour, il léguait le
contrat à son fils Barthelemy Wilson. Barthelemy rédigea la note suivante, et
mourut:
Doit le Gouvernement des États-Unis.
 Pour son compte avec John Wilson Mackensie, de New-Jersey, décédé:
Dollars
Trente barils de bœuf au général Sherman, à 100 dollars 3.000
Frais de voyage et de transport 14.000
Total 17.000
Pour acquit...
Il mourut donc, mais légua son contrat à W. J. Martin, qui tenta de se faire
payer, mais mourut avant d’avoir réussi. Lui, le légua à Barker J. Allen, qui
fit les mêmes démarches, et mourut. Barker J. Allen le légua à Anson G.
Rogers, qui fit les démarches pour être payé, et parvint jusqu’au bureau du
neuvième auditeur à la Cour des comptes. Mais la mort, le grand régulateur,
survint sans être appelée, et lui régla son compte à lui. Il laissa la note à un
de ses parents du Connecticut, Vengeance Hopkins on le nommait, qui dura
quatre semaines et deux jours, et battit le record du temps; il manqua de
vingt-quatre heures d’être reçu par le douzième auditeur. Dans son testament
il légua le contrat à son oncle, un nommé O Gai-Gai Johnson. Ce legs fut
funeste à O Gai-Gai. Ses dernières paroles furent: «Ne me pleurez pas. Je
meurs volontiers.» Il ne mentait pas, le pauvre diable. Sept autres personnes,
successivement, héritèrent du contrat. Toutes moururent. Il est enfin venu
entre mes mains. Je l’héritai d’un parent nommé Hubbard, Bethléhem
Hubbard, d’Indiana. Il avait eu de l’inimitié pour moi pendant longtemps.
Mais à ses derniers moments, il me fit appeler, se réconcilia avec moi
complètement, et en pleurant me donna le contrat de bœuf.
Ici finit l’histoire du contrat jusqu’au jour où il vint en ma possession. Je
vais essayer maintenant d’exposer impartialement, aux yeux de la nation,
tout ce qui concerne ma part en cette matière. Je pris le contrat et la note
pour frais de route et transport, et j’allai voir le président des États-Unis.
—«Monsieur, me dit-il, que désirez-vous?»
Je répondis:—«Sire, à la date, ou à peu près, du 10 octobre 1861, John
Wilson Mackensie, de Rotterdam, comté de Chemung, New-Jersey, décédé,
fit un contrat avec le gouvernement pour fournir au général Sherman la
somme totale de trente barils de bœuf...»
Il m’arrêta là, et me congédia, avec douceur, mais fermeté. Le lendemain
j’allais voir le secrétaire d’État.
Il me dit:—«Eh bien, Monsieur?»
 Je répondis:—«Altesse Royale, à la date ou à peu près du 10 octobre
1861, John Wilson Mackensie, de Rotterdam, comté de Chemung, New-
Jersey, décédé, fit un contrat avec le gouvernement pour fournir au général
Sherman la somme totale de trente barils de bœuf...»
—«Cela suffit, Monsieur, cela suffit; ce bureau n’a rien à faire avec les
fournitures de bœuf.»
Je fus salué et congédié. Je réfléchis mûrement là-dessus et me décidai, le
lendemain, à voir le ministre de la marine, qui dit:—«Soyez bref, Monsieur,
et expliquez-vous.»
Je répondis:—«Altesse Royale, à la date, ou à peu près, du 10 octobre
1861, John Wilson Mackensie, de Rotterdam, comté de Chemung, New-
Jersey, décédé, fit un contrat avec le gouvernement pour fournir au général
Sherman la somme totale de trente barils de bœuf.»
Bon. Ce fut tout ce qu’on me laissa dire. Le ministre de la marine n’avait
rien à faire avec les contrats pour quel général Sherman que ce fût. Je
commençai à trouver qu’un gouvernement était une chose curieuse. J’eus
comme une vision vague qu’on faisait des difficultés pour me payer. Le jour
suivant, j’allai voir le ministre de l’intérieur.
Je dis:—«Altesse Royale, à la date, ou à peu près, du 10 octobre...»
—«C’est assez, Monsieur. J’ai entendu parler de vous déjà. Allez,
emportez votre infâme contrat de bœuf hors de cet établissement. Le
ministère de l’intérieur n’a absolument rien à faire avec l’approvisionnement
de l’armée.»
Je sortis, mais j’étais furieux. Je dis que je les hanterais, que je
poursuivrais tous les départements de ce gouvernement inique, jusqu’à ce
que mon compte fût approuvé. Je serais payé, ou je mourrais, comme mes
prédécesseurs, à la peine. J’attaquai le directeur général des postes.
J’assiégeai le ministère de l’agriculture. Je dressai des pièges au président de
la Chambre des représentants. Ils n’avaient rien à faire avec les contrats pour
fourniture de bœuf à l’armée. Je fus chez le commissaire du bureau des
brevets.
Je dis:—«Votre auguste Excellence, à la date ou à peu près...»
—«Mort et damnation! Vous voilà enfin venu ici avec votre infernal
contrat de bœuf! Nous n’avons rien à faire avec les contrats de bœuf à
l’armée, mon cher seigneur.»
 —«C’est très bien. Mais quelqu’un a affaire de payer pour ce bœuf. Il
faut qu’il soit payé, maintenant, ou je fais mettre les scellés sur ce vieux
bureau des brevets et tout ce qu’il contient.»
—«Mais, cher Monsieur...»
—«Il n’y a pas à discuter, Monsieur. Le bureau des brevets est comptable
de ce bœuf. Je l’entends ainsi. Et, comptable ou non, le bureau des brevets
doit payer.»
Épargnez-moi les détails. Cela finit par une bataille. Le bureau des
brevets eut l’avantage. Mais je trouvai autre chose pour me rattraper. On me
dit que le ministère des finances était l’endroit exact où je devais m’adresser.
J’y allai. J’attendis deux heures et demie. Enfin je fus admis auprès du
premier lord de la trésorerie. Je dis:
—«Très noble, austère et éminent Signor, à la date ou à peu près du 10
octobre 1861, John Wilson Macken...»
—«Je sais, Monsieur. Je vous connais. Allez voir le premier auditeur de
la trésorerie...»
J’y allai. Il me renvoya au second auditeur, celui-ci au troisième, et le
troisième m’envoya au premier contrôleur de la section des conserves de
bœuf. Cela commençait à prendre tournure. Le contrôleur chercha dans ses
livres et dans un tas de papiers épars, mais ne trouva pas la minute du
contrat. Je vis le deuxième contrôleur de la section des conserves de bœuf. Il
examina ses livres et feuilleta des papiers.—Rien.—Je fus encouragé, et
dans la semaine j’allai jusqu’au sixième contrôleur de cette division. La
semaine suivante, j’allai au bureau des réclamations. La troisième semaine
j’entamai et achevai le département des comptes perdus, et je mis le pied sur
le département des comptes morts. J’en finis avec ce dernier en trois jours. Il
ne me restait plus qu’une place où pénétrer. J’assiégeai le commissaire des
affaires au rebut. Son commis, plutôt, car lui n’était pas là.
Il y avait seize belles jeunes filles dans la salle, écrivant sur des registres,
et sept jeunes clercs favorisés, qui leur montraient comment on fait. Les
jeunes filles souriaient, la tête penchée vers les commis, et les commis
souriaient aux jeunes filles, et tous paraissaient aussi joyeux qu’une cloche
de mariage. Deux ou trois commis, en train de lire les journaux, me
regardèrent plutôt fraîchement, mais continuèrent leur lecture, et personne ne
dit mot. D’ailleurs j’avais eu le temps de m’habituer à ces accueils cordiaux
de la part des moindres surnuméraires, depuis le premier jour où je pénétrai
dans le premier bureau de la division des conserves de bœuf, jusqu’au jour
où je sortis du dernier bureau de la division des comptes perdus. J’avais fait
dans l’intervalle de tels progrès que je pouvais me tenir debout sur un pied
depuis le moment où j’entrais dans un bureau jusqu’au moment où un
commis me parlait, sans changer de pied plus de deux ou peut-être trois fois.
Ainsi je demeurai là, jusqu’à ce que j’eusse changé de pied quatre fois.
Alors je dis à un des commis qui lisaient:
—«Illustre vagabond, où est le Grand Turc?»
—«Qu’est-ce que vous dites, Monsieur, qu’est-ce que vous dites? Si vous
voulez parler du chef de bureau, il est sorti.»
—«Viendra-t-il visiter son harem aujourd’hui?»
Le jeune homme fixa ses yeux un moment sur moi, puis reprit la lecture
de son journal. Mais j’avais l’expérience des commis. Je savais que j’étais
sauvé s’il terminait sa lecture avant qu’arrivât le courrier suivant de New-
York. Il n’avait plus à lire que deux journaux. Au bout d’un moment il eut
fini. Il bâilla et me demanda ce que je voulais:
—«Renommé et respectable imbécile. A la date du...»
—«Vous êtes l’homme du contrat de bœuf. Donnez-moi vos papiers.»
Il les prit, et pendant longtemps farfouilla dans ses rebuts. Enfin, il trouva
ce qui était pour moi le passage du Nord-Ouest. Il trouva la trace depuis si
longtemps perdue de ce contrat de bœuf, le roc sur lequel tant de mes
ancêtres s’étaient brisés avant de l’atteindre. J’étais profondément ému. Et
cependant j’étais heureux, car j’avais vécu jusque-là. Je dis avec émotion:
—«Donnez-le-moi. Le gouvernement va le régler.»
Il m’écarta du geste, et me dit qu’il restait une formalité à remplir.
—«Où est ce John Wilson Mackensie?» dit-il.
—«Mort.»
—«Où est-il mort?»
—«Il n’est pas mort du tout. On l’a tué.»
—«Comment?»
—«D’un coup de tomahawk.»
—«Qui donc?»
—«Qui? un Indien, naturellement. Vous ne supposez pas que ce fut le
directeur général des cours d’adultes.»
 —«Non, en effet. Un Indien, dites-vous?»
—«C’est cela même.»
—«Le nom de l’Indien?»
—«Son nom? Mais je ne le connais pas!»
—«Il nous faut avoir le nom. Qui a assisté au meurtre?»
—«Je n’en sais rien.»
—«Vous n’étiez donc pas là, vous?»
—«Comme vous pouvez le voir à ma chevelure. J’étais absent.»
—«Alors, comment pouvez-vous savoir que Mackensie est mort?»
—«Parce qu’il mourut certainement à ce moment-là, et que j’ai toutes
sortes de raisons de croire qu’il est resté mort depuis. Je le sais d’ailleurs
pertinemment.»
—«Il nous faut des preuves. Avez-vous amené l’Indien?»
—«Sûrement non.»
—«Bien. Il faut l’amener. Avez-vous le tomahawk?»
—«Je n’y ai jamais songé.»
—«Vous devez présenter le tomahawk. Vous devez produire l’Indien et le
tomahawk. La mort de M. Mackensie une fois prouvée par leur comparution,
vous pourrez vous présenter devant la commission chargée des réclamations
avec quelques chances de voir votre note accueillie assez favorablement
pour que vos enfants, si leur vie est assez longue, puissent recevoir l’argent
et en profiter. Mais il faut que la mort de cet homme soit prouvée. D’ailleurs,
j’aime autant vous le dire, le gouvernement ne réglera jamais les frais de
transport et frais de voyage du malheureux Mackensie. Peut-être paiera-t-il
le baril de bœuf capturé par les soldats de Sherman, si vous pouvez obtenir
un vote du Congrès autorisant ce paiement. Mais on ne paiera pas les vingt-
neuf barils que les Indiens ont mangés.»
—«Alors on me doit seulement cent dollars, et cela même n’est pas sûr!
Après tous les voyages de Mackensie en Europe, Asie, Amérique, avec son
bœuf; après tous ses soucis, ses tribulations; après la mort lamentable des
innocents qui ont essayé de toucher cette note!... Jeune homme, pourquoi le
premier contrôleur de la division des conserves de bœuf ne me l’a-t-il pas dit
tout d’abord?»
—«Il ne savait absolument rien sur le bien-fondé de votre réclamation.»
 —«Pourquoi le second ne l’a-t-il pas dit? Et le troisième? Pourquoi toutes
ces divisions et tous ces bureaux ne me l’ont-ils pas dit?»
—«Aucun d’eux n’en savait rien. Tout marche par routine ici... Vous avez
suivi la routine et trouvé ce que vous vouliez savoir. C’est la meilleure voie.
C’est la seule. Elle est très régulière, très lente, mais très sûre.»
—«C’est la mort qui est sûre, et qui l’a été pour tous les gens de ma tribu.
Je commence à me sentir frappé, moi aussi. Jeune homme, vous aimez la
belle créature qui est là-bas. Elle a des yeux bleus, et un porte-plume sur
l’oreille. Je le devine à vos doux regards: vous voulez l’épouser, mais vous
êtes pauvre. Approchez. Donnez votre main. Voici le contrat de bœuf. Allez,
mariez-vous, et soyez heureux. Dieu vous bénisse, mes enfants!»
Voilà tout ce que je sais au sujet de ce grand contrat de bœuf, dont on a
tant parlé. Le commis à qui je l’avais donné est mort. Je n’ai plus eu de
nouvelles du contrat ou de quelque chose s’y rapportant. Je sais seulement
que, pourvu qu’un homme vive assez longtemps, il peut suivre une affaire à
travers les bureaux des circonlocutions de Washington, et découvrir à la fin,
après beaucoup de travail, de fatigue et de patience, ce qu’il aurait pu
découvrir dès le premier jour, si les affaires du bureau des circonlocutions
étaient classées avec autant d’ordre qu’elles le seraient dans n’importe quelle
grande entreprise commerciale privée.
 UNE INTERVIEW
Le jeune homme nerveux, alerte et déluré, prit la chaise que je lui offrais,
et dit qu’il était attaché à la rédaction du Tonnerre Quotidien. Il ajouta:
—«J’espère ne pas être importun. Je suis venu vous interviewer.»
—«Vous êtes venu quoi faire?»
—«Vous interviewer.»
—«Ah! très bien. Parfaitement. Hum!... Très bien...»
Je ne me sentais pas brillant, ce matin-là. Vraiment, mes facultés me
semblaient un peu nuageuses. J’allai cependant jusqu’à la bibliothèque.
Après avoir cherché six ou sept minutes, je me vis obligé de recourir au
jeune homme.
—«Comment l’épelez-vous?» dis-je.
—«Épeler quoi?»
—«Interviewer.»
—«Bon Dieu! que diable avez-vous besoin de l’épeler?»
—«Je n’ai pas besoin de l’épeler, mais il faut que je cherche ce qu’il
signifie.»
—«Eh bien, vous m’étonnez, je dois le dire. Il m’est facile de vous
donner le sens de ce mot. Si...»
—«Oh, parfait! C’est tout ce qu’il faut. Je vous suis certes très obligé.»
—«I-n, in, t-e-r, ter, inter...»
—«Tiens, tiens... vous épelez avec un i.»
—«Évidemment.»
—«C’est pour cela que j’ai tant cherché!»
—«Mais, cher Monsieur, par quelle lettre auriez-vous cru qu’il
commençât?»
—«Ma foi, je n’en sais trop rien. Mon dictionnaire est assez complet.
J’étais en train de feuilleter les planches de la fin, si je pouvais dénicher cet
objet dans les figures. Mais c’est une très vieille édition.»
—«Mon cher Monsieur, vous ne trouverez pas une figure représentant
une interview, même dans la dernière édition... Ma foi, je vous demande
pardon, je n’ai pas la moindre intention blessante, mais vous ne me paraissez
pas être aussi intelligent que je l’aurais cru... Je vous jure, je n’ai pas
l’intention de vous froisser.»
—«Oh! cela n’a pas d’importance. Je l’ai souvent entendu dire, et par des
gens qui ne voulaient pas me flatter, et qui n’avaient aucune raison de le
faire. Je suis tout à fait remarquable à ce point de vue. Je vous assure. Tous
en parlent avec ravissement.»
—«Je le crois volontiers. Mais venons à notre affaire. Vous savez que
c’est l’usage, maintenant, d’interviewer les gens connus.»
—«Vraiment, vous me l’apprenez. Ce doit être fort intéressant. Avec quoi
faites-vous cela?»
—«Ma foi, vous êtes déconcertant. Dans certains cas, c’est avec un
gourdin qu’on devrait interviewer. Mais d’ordinaire ce sont des questions
que pose l’interviewer, et auxquelles répond l’interviewé. C’est une mode
qui fait fureur. Voulez-vous me permettre de vous poser certaines questions
calculées pour mettre en lumière les points saillants de votre vie publique et
privée?»
—«Oh! avec plaisir, avec plaisir. J’ai une très mauvaise mémoire, mais
j’espère que vous passerez là-dessus. C’est-à-dire que j’ai une mémoire
irrégulière, étrangement irrégulière. Des fois, elle part au galop, d’autres
fois, elle s’attardera toute une quinzaine à un endroit donné. C’est un grand
ennui pour moi.»
—«Peu importe. Vous ferez pour le mieux.»
—«Entendu. Je vais m’y appliquer tout entier.»
—«Merci. Êtes-vous prêt? Je commence.»
—«Je suis prêt.»
—«Quel âge avez-vous?»
—«Dix-neuf ans, en juin.»
—«Comment! Je vous aurais donné trente-cinq ou trente-six ans. Où êtes-
vous né?»
—«Dans le Missouri.»
—«A quel moment avez-vous commencé à écrire?»
—«En 1836.»
—«Comment cela serait-il possible, puisque vous n’avez que dix-neuf
ans?»
—«Je n’en sais rien. Cela paraît bizarre, en effet.»
 —«Très bizarre. Quel homme regardez-vous comme le plus remarquable
de ceux que vous avez connus?»
—«Aaron Burr.»
—«Mais vous n’avez jamais pu connaître Aaron Burr, si vous n’avez que
dix-neuf ans!»
—«Bon! si vous savez mieux que moi ce qui me concerne, pourquoi
m’interrogez-vous?»
—«Oh! ce n’était qu’une suggestion. Rien de plus. Dans quelles
circonstances avez-vous rencontré Aaron Burr?»
«Voici. Je me trouvai par hasard un jour à ses funérailles, et il me pria de
faire un peu moins de bruit, et...»
—«Mais, bonté divine, si vous étiez à ses funérailles, c’est qu’il était
mort. Et s’il était mort, que lui importait que vous fissiez ou non du bruit?»
—«Je n’en sais rien. Il a toujours été un peu maniaque, de ce côté-là.»
—«Allons, je n’y comprends rien. Vous dites qu’il vous parla, et qu’il
était mort.»
—«Je n’ai jamais dit qu’il fût mort.»
—«Enfin était-il mort, ou vivant?»
—«Ma foi, les uns disent qu’il était mort, et d’autres qu’il était vivant.»
—«Mais vous, que pensiez-vous?»
—«Bon! Ce n’était pas mon affaire. Ce n’est pas moi que l’on enterrait.»
—«Mais cependant... Allons, je vois que nous n’en sortirons pas. Laissez-
moi vous poser d’autres questions. Quelle est la date de votre naissance?»
—«Le lundi, 31 octobre 1693.»
—«Mais c’est impossible! Cela vous ferait cent quatre-vingts ans d’âge.
Comment expliquez-vous cela?»
—«Je ne l’explique pas du tout.»
—«Mais vous me disiez tout à l’heure que vous n’aviez que dix-neuf ans!
et maintenant vous en arrivez à avoir cent quatre-vingts ans! C’est une
contradiction flagrante.»
—«Vraiment! L’avez-vous remarqué? (Je lui serrai les mains.) Bien
souvent en effet cela m’a paru comme une contradiction. Je n’ai jamais pu,
d’ailleurs, la résoudre. Comme vous remarquez vite les choses!»
 —«Merci du compliment, quel qu’il soit. Aviez-vous, ou avez-vous des
frères et des sœurs?»
—«Eh! Je... Je... Je crois que oui, mais je ne me rappelle pas.»
—«Voilà certes la déclaration la plus extraordinaire qu’on m’aie jamais
faite!»
—«Pourquoi donc? Pourquoi pensez-vous ainsi?»
—«Comment pourrais-je penser autrement? Voyons. Regardez par là. Ce
portrait sur le mur, qui est-ce? N’est-ce pas un de vos frères?»
—«Ah! oui, oui, oui! Vous m’y faites penser maintenant. C’était un mien
frère. William, Bill, comme nous l’appelions. Pauvre vieux Bill!»
—«Quoi! il est donc mort?»
—«Certainement. Du moins, je le suppose. On n’a jamais pu savoir. Il y a
un grand mystère là-dessous.»
—«C’est triste, bien triste. Il a disparu, n’est-ce pas?»
—«Oui, d’une certaine façon, généralement parlant. Nous l’avons
enterré.»
—«Enterré! Vous l’avez enterré, sans savoir s’il était mort ou vivant!»
—«Qui diable vous parle de cela? Il était parfaitement mort.»
—«Ma foi! j’avoue ne plus rien comprendre. Si vous l’avez enterré, et si
vous saviez qu’il était mort...»
—«Non, non, nous pensions seulement qu’il l’était.»
—«Ah! je vois. Il est revenu à la vie.»
—«Je vous parie bien que non.»
—«Eh bien! je n’entendis jamais raconter chose pareille. Quelqu’un est
mort. On l’a enterré. Où est le mystère là-dedans?»
—«Mais là justement! C’est ce qui est étrange. Il faut vous dire que nous
étions jumeaux, le défunt et moi. Et un jour, on nous a mêlés dans le bain,
alors que nous n’avions que deux semaines, et un de nous a été noyé. Mais
nous ne savons pas qui. Les uns croient que c’était Bill. D’autres pensent
que c’était moi.»
—«C’est très curieux. Et quelle est votre opinion personnelle?»
—«Dieu le sait! Je donnerais tout au monde pour le savoir. Ce solennel et
terrible mystère a jeté une ombre sur toute ma vie. Mais je vais maintenant
vous dire un secret que je n’ai jamais confié à aucune créature jusqu’à ce
jour. Un de nous avait une marque, un grain de beauté, fort apparent, sur le
dos de la main gauche. C’était moi. Cet enfant est celui qui a été noyé.»
—«Ma foi, je ne vois pas, dès lors, qu’il y ait là-dedans le moindre
mystère, tout considéré.»
—«Vous ne voyez pas. Moi, je vois. De toute façon, je ne puis
comprendre que les gens aient pu être assez stupides pour aller enterrer
l’enfant qu’il ne fallait pas. Mais chut!... N’en parlez jamais devant la
famille. Dieu sait que mes parents ont assez de soucis pour leur briser le
cœur, sans celui-là.»
—«Eh bien, j’ai, ce me semble, des renseignements suffisants pour
l’heure, et je vous suis très obligé pour la peine que vous avez prise. Mais
j’ai été fort intéressé par le récit que vous m’avez fait des funérailles
d’Aaron Burr. Voudriez-vous me raconter quelle circonstance, en particulier,
vous fit regarder Aaron Burr comme un homme si remarquable?»
—«Oh! un détail insignifiant. Pas une personne sur cinquante ne s’en
serait aperçue. Quand le sermon fut terminé, et que le cortège fut prêt à partir
pour le cimetière, et que le corps était installé bien confortable dans le
cercueil, il dit qu’il ne serait pas fâché de jeter un dernier coup d’œil sur le
paysage. Il se leva donc et s’en fut s’asseoir sur le siège, à côté du
conducteur.»
Le jeune homme, là-dessus, me salua et prit congé. J’avais fort goûté sa
compagnie, et fus fâché de le voir partir.
 ROGERS
Je rencontrai le nommé Rogers, et il se présenta lui-même, dans le sud de
l’Angleterre, où je résidais alors. Son beau-père avait épousé une mienne
parente éloignée, qui, par la suite, fut pendue. Il paraissait croire, en
conséquence, à une parenté entre nous. Il venait me voir tous les jours,
s’installait et causait. De toutes les curiosités humaines sympathiques et
sereines que j’ai vues, je le regarde comme la première. Il désira examiner
mon nouveau chapeau haut de forme. Je m’empressai, car je pensais qu’il
remarquerait le nom du grand chapelier d’Oxford Street, qui était au fond, et
m’estimerait d’autant. Mais il le tourna et le retourna avec une sorte de
gravité compatissante, indiqua deux ou trois défauts et dit que mon arrivée,
trop récente, ne pouvait pas laisser espérer que je susse où me fournir. Il
m’enverrait l’adresse de son chapelier. Puis il ajouta: «Pardonnez-moi», et se
mit à découper avec soin une rondelle de papier de soie rouge. Il entailla les
bords minutieusement, prit de la colle, et colla le papier dans mon chapeau
de manière à recouvrir le nom du chapelier. Il dit: «Personne ne saura
maintenant où vous l’avez acheté. Je vous enverrai une marque de mon
chapelier, et vous pourrez l’appliquer sur la rondelle de papier.» Il fit cela le
plus calmement, le plus froidement du monde, je n’ai vu de ma vie un
homme plus admirable. Remarquez que, pendant ce temps, son propre
chapeau était là, sur la table, au grand détriment de mon odorat. C’était un
vieil éteignoir informe, fripé et déjeté par l’âge, décoloré par les intempéries
et bordé d’un équateur de pommade suintant au travers.
Une autre fois, il examina mon vêtement. J’étais sans effroi, car mon
tailleur avait sur sa porte: «Par privilège spécial, fournisseur de S.A.R. le
prince de Galles», etc... Je ne savais pas alors que la plupart des maisons de
tailleurs ont le même signe sur la porte, et que, dès le moment qu’il faut neuf
tailleurs pour faire un homme, comme on dit, il en faut cent cinquante pour
faire un prince. Rogers fut touché de compassion par la vue de mon
vêtement. Il me donna par écrit l’adresse de son tailleur. Il ne me dit pas,
comme on fait d’ordinaire, en manière de compliment, que je n’aurais qu’à
mentionner mon nom de plume, et que le tailleur mettrait à confectionner
mes habits ses soins les plus dévoués. Son tailleur, m’apprit-il, se dérangerait
difficilement pour un inconnu (inconnu! quand je me croyais si célèbre en
Angleterre! ce fut le coup le plus cruel), mais il me prévint de me
recommander de lui, et que tout irait bien.
Voulant être plaisant, je dis:—«Mais s’il allait passer la nuit, et
compromettre sa santé?»
—«Laissez donc, répondit Rogers, j’ai assez fait pour lui pour qu’il m’en
ait quelque égard.»
J’aurais aussi bien pu essayer de déconcerter une momie avec ma
plaisanterie. Il ajouta:
—«C’est là que je fais tout faire. Ce sont les seuls vêtements où l’on
puisse se voir.»
Je fis une autre tentative.—«J’aurais aimé en voir un sur vous, si vous en
aviez porté un.»
—«Dieu vous bénisse, n’en porté-je pas un sur moi?... Cet article vient de
chez Morgan.»
J’examinai le vêtement. C’était un article acheté tout fait, à un juif de
Chatham Street, sans doute possible, vers 1848. Il avait dû coûter quatre
dollars, quand il était neuf. Il était déchiré, éraillé, râpé, graisseux. Je ne pus
m’empêcher de lui montrer où il était déchiré. Il en fut si affecté que je fus
désolé de l’avoir fait. D’abord il parut plongé dans un abîme sans fond de
douleur. Il se remit, fit le geste d’écarter de lui avec ses mains la pitié d’un
peuple entier, et dit, avec ce qui me parut une émotion fabriquée: «Je vous
en prie. Cela n’a pas d’importance. Ne vous en tourmentez pas. Je puis
mettre un autre vêtement.»
Quand il fut tout à fait remis, qu’il put examiner la déchirure et
commander à ses sentiments, il dit que, ah! maintenant, il comprenait. Son
domestique avait fait cela, sans doute, en l’habillant, ce matin.
Son «domestique»! Il y avait quelque chose d’angoissant dans une telle
effronterie.
Presque chaque jour il s’intéressait à quelque détail de mon vêtement. On
eût pu s’étonner de trouver cette sorte d’infatuation chez un homme qui
portait toujours le même costume, et un costume qui paraissait dater de la
conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands.
C’était une ambition méprisable, peut-être, mais je souhaitais pouvoir lui
montrer quelque chose à admirer, dans mes vêtements ou mes actes. Vous
auriez éprouvé le même désir. L’occasion se présenta. J’étais sur le point de
mon retour à Londres, et je venais de compter mon linge sale pour le
blanchissage. C’était vraiment une imposante montagne dans le coin de la
chambre, cinquante-quatre pièces. J’espérais qu’il penserait que c’était le
linge d’une seule semaine. Je pris le carnet de blanchissage, comme pour
m’assurer que tout était en règle, puis le jetai sur la table, avec une
négligence affectée. Naturellement, il le prit et promena ses yeux en
descendant jusqu’au total. Alors, il dit: «Vous ne devez pas vous ruiner», et
le reposa sur la table.
Ses gants étaient un débris sinistre. Mais il m’indiqua où je pourrais en
avoir de semblables. Ses chaussures avaient des fentes à laisser passer des
noix, mais il posait avec complaisance ses pieds sur le manteau de la
cheminée et les contemplait. Il avait une épingle de cravate avec un morceau
de verre terne, qu’il appelait un «diamant morphylitique», quoi que cela pût
signifier. Il me dit qu’on n’en avait jamais trouvé que deux. L’empereur de
Chine avait l’autre.
Plus tard, à Londres, ce fut une joie pour moi de voir ce vagabond
fantastique s’avancer dans le vestibule de l’hôtel avec son allure de grand-
duc; il avait toujours quelque nouvelle folie de grandeur à inaugurer. Il n’y
avait d’usé chez lui que ses vêtements. S’il m’adressait la parole devant des
étrangers, il élevait toujours un peu la voix pour m’appeler: «Sir Richard» ou
«Général» ou «Votre Honneur», et quand les gens commençaient à faire
attention et à regarder avec respect, il se mettait à me demander
incidemment pourquoi je ne m’étais pas rendu la veille au rendez-vous du
duc d’Argyll, ou bien me rappelait que nous étions attendus le lendemain
chez le duc de Westminster. Je suis persuadé qu’à ce moment-là il était
convaincu de la réalité de ce qu’il disait. Il vint un jour me voir et m’invita à
passer la soirée chez le duc de Warwick, à sa maison de ville. Je dis que je
n’étais pas personnellement invité. Il répondit que cela n’avait aucune
importance, le duc ne faisant pas de cérémonies avec lui ou ses amis.
Comme je demandais si je pouvais aller comme j’étais, il dit que non, ce
serait peu convenable. L’habit de soirée était exigé, le soir, chez n’importe
quel gentleman. Il offrit de m’attendre pendant que je m’habillerais. Puis
nous irions chez lui. Je boirais une bouteille de champagne et fumerais un
cigare pendant qu’il s’apprêterait. Fort désireux de voir la fin de cela, je
m’habillai et nous partîmes pour chez lui. Il me proposa d’aller à pied, si je
n’y voyais pas d’inconvénient. Nous pataugeâmes environ quatre milles à
travers la boue et le brouillard. Finalement nous trouvâmes son appartement.
C’était une simple chambre au-dessus de la boutique d’un barbier, dans une
rue écartée. Deux chaises, une petite table, une vieille valise, une cuvette et
une cruche (toutes deux dans un coin sur le plancher), un lit pas fait, un
fragment de miroir, et un pot de fleur avec un petit géranium rose qui
s’étiolait. C’était, me dit-il, une plante «séculaire». Elle n’avait pas fleuri
depuis deux cents ans. Il la tenait de feu lord Palmerston. On lui en avait
offert des sommes fantastiques. Tel était le mobilier. En outre, un chandelier
de cuivre avec un fragment de bougie. Rogers alluma la bougie, et me pria
de m’asseoir et de me considérer comme chez moi. Je devais avoir soif,
espéra-t-il, car il voulait faire à mon palais la surprise d’une marque de
champagne comme tout le monde n’en buvait pas. Aimais-je mieux du
sherry, ou du porto? Il avait, me dit-il, du porto dans des bouteilles toutes
recouvertes de toiles d’araignées stratifiées. Chaque couche représentait une
génération. Pour les cigares, j’en jugerais par moi-même. Il mit la tête à la
porte et appela:
—«Sackville!» Pas de réponse.
—«Hé! Sackville!» Pas de réponse.
—«Où diable peut être passé ce sommelier? Je ne permets jamais
pourtant à un de mes domestiques de... Oh! l’idiot! il a emporté les clefs! Je
ne puis pas aller dans les autres pièces sans les clefs.»
(J’étais justement en train d’admirer l’intrépidité avec laquelle il
prolongeait la fiction du champagne, essayant de deviner comment il allait se
tirer de là.)
Il cessa d’appeler Sackville et se mit à crier: «Anglesy!» Anglesy ne vint
pas non plus. Il dit: «C’est la seconde fois que cet écuyer s’est absenté sans
permission. Demain, je le renverrai.»
Il se mit alors à héler «Thomas!» Mais Thomas ne répondit pas. Puis
«Théodore!» Pas de Théodore.
«Ma foi, j’y renonce, fit-il. Mes gens ne m’attendent jamais à cette heure-
ci. Ils sont tous partis en bombe. A la rigueur on peut se passer de l’écuyer et
du page, mais nous ne pouvons avoir ni vin ni cigares sans le sommelier. Et
je ne puis pas m’habiller sans mon valet.»
J’offris de l’aider à s’habiller. Mais il ne voulut pas en entendre parler.
D’ailleurs, dit-il, il ne se sentirait pas confortable s’il n’était arrangé par des
mains expérimentées; finalement il conclut que le duc était un trop vieil ami
pour se préoccuper de la manière dont il serait vêtu. Nous prîmes donc un
cab, il donna quelques indications au cocher, et nous partîmes. Nous
arrivâmes enfin devant une vieille maison et nous descendîmes. Je n’avais
jamais vu Rogers avec un col. Il s’arrêta sous un réverbère, sortit de la poche
de son vêtement un vieux col en papier, où pendait une cravate usée, et les
mit. Il monta les marches et entra. Je le vis reparaître presque aussitôt; il
marcha vers moi précipitamment et me dit:
—«Venez. Vite!»
Nous nous éloignâmes en hâte, et tournâmes le coin de la rue.
—«Nous voici en sûreté», fit-il.
Il quitta son col et sa cravate et les remit dans sa poche.
—«Je l’ai échappé belle», dit-il.
—«Comment cela?» fis-je.
—«Par saint Georges, la comtesse était là!»
—«Eh bien, quoi? Ne vous connaît-elle pas?»
—«Si, elle me connaît! Mais elle m’adore. J’ai pu jeter un coup d’œil
avant qu’elle m’eût aperçu. Et j’ai filé. Je ne l’avais pas vue depuis deux
mois. Entrer comme cela, sans la prévenir, eût été fatal. Elle n’aurait pas
supporté le coup. Je ne savais pas qu’elle fût en ville. Je la croyais dans son
château... Laissez-moi m’appuyer sur vous... un instant... Là, je me sens
mieux; merci, grand merci. Dieu me bénisse. Quelle échappée!»
En définitive, ma visite au duc fut remise aux calendes grecques. Mais je
notai la maison pour information plus ample. Je sus que c’était un hôtel de
famille ordinaire, où perchaient environ un millier de gens quelconques.
Pour bien des choses, Rogers n’était nullement fou. Pour certaines, il
l’était évidemment, mais sûrement il l’ignorait. Il se montrait, dans ces
dernières, du sérieux le plus absolu. Il est mort au bord de la mer, l’été
dernier, chez le «comte de Ramsgate».
 L’INFORTUNÉ FIANCÉ D’AURÉLIA
Les faits suivants sont consignés dans une lettre que m’écrit une jeune
fille habitant la belle ville de San José. Elle m’est parfaitement inconnue, et
signe simplement: Aurélia-Maria, ce qui est peut-être un pseudonyme. Mais
peu importe. La pauvre fille a le cœur brisé par les infortunes qu’elle a
subies. Elle est si troublée par les conseils opposés de malveillants amis et
d’ennemis insidieux, qu’elle ne sait à quel parti se résoudre pour se dégager
du réseau de difficultés dans lequel elle semble prise presque sans espoir.
Dans son embarras, elle a recours à moi, elle me supplie de la diriger et de la
conseiller, avec une éloquence émouvante qui toucherait le cœur d’une
statue. Écoutez sa triste histoire.
Elle avait seize ans, dit-elle, quand elle rencontra et aima, avec toute
l’ardeur d’une âme passionnée, un jeune homme de New-Jersey, nommé
Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers, de quelque six ans son aîné. Ils se
fiancèrent, avec l’assentiment de leurs amis et parents, et, pour un temps,
leur carrière parut devoir être caractérisée par une immunité de malheur au
delà du lot ordinaire de l’humanité. Mais, un jour, la face de la fortune
changea. Le jeune Caruthers fut atteint d’une petite vérole de l’espèce la plus
virulente, et quand il retrouva la santé, sa figure était trouée comme un
moule à gaufre et toute sa beauté disparue pour toujours.
Aurélia songea d’abord à rompre son engagement, mais, par pitié pour
l’infortuné, elle se contenta de renvoyer le mariage à une autre saison, et
laissa une chance au malheureux.
La veille même du jour où le mariage devait avoir lieu, Breckinridge,
tandis qu’il était occupé à suivre des yeux un ballon, tomba dans un puits et
se cassa une jambe, qu’on dut lui amputer au-dessus du genou. Aurélia, de
nouveau, fut tentée de rompre son engagement, mais, de nouveau, l’amour
triompha, et le mariage fut remis, et elle lui laissa le temps de se rétablir.
Une infortune nouvelle tomba sur le malheureux fiancé. Il perdit un bras
par la décharge imprévue d’un canon que l’on tirait pour la fête nationale, et,
trois mois après, eut l’autre emporté par une machine à carder. Le cœur
d’Aurélia fut presque brisé par ces dernières calamités. Elle ne pouvait
s’empêcher de ressentir une profonde affliction, en voyant son amoureux la
quitter ainsi morceau par morceau, songeant qu’avec ce système de
progressive réduction il n’en resterait bientôt plus rien, et ne sachant
comment l’arrêter sur cette voie funeste. Dans son désespoir affreux, elle en
venait presque à regretter, comme un négociant qui s’obstine dans une
affaire et perd davantage chaque jour, de ne pas avoir accepté Breckinridge
tout d’abord, avant qu’il eût subi une si alarmante dépréciation. Mais son
cœur prit le dessus, et elle résolut de tenter l’épreuve des dispositions
déplorables de son fiancé encore une fois.
De nouveau se rapprochait le jour du mariage, et de nouveau se
rassemblèrent les nuages de désillusion. Caruthers tomba malade de
l’érysipèle, et perdit l’usage de l’un de ses yeux, complètement. Les amis et
les parents de la jeune fille, considérant qu’elle avait montré plus de
généreuse obstination qu’on ne pouvait raisonnablement exiger d’elle,
intervinrent de nouveau, et insistèrent pour qu’elle rompît son engagement.
Mais après avoir un peu hésité, Aurélia, dans toute la générosité de ses
honorables sentiments, dit qu’elle avait réfléchi posément sur la question, et
qu’elle ne pouvait trouver dans Breckinridge aucun sujet de blâme. Donc,
elle recula de nouveau la date, et Breckinridge se cassa l’autre jambe.
Ce fut un triste jour pour la pauvre fille, que celui où elle vit les
chirurgiens emporter avec respect le sac dont elle avait appris l’usage par des
expériences précédentes, et son cœur éprouva cruellement qu’en vérité
quelque chose de son fiancé avait encore disparu. Elle sentit que le champ de
ses affections diminuait chaque jour, mais encore une fois elle répondit
négativement aux instances de tous les siens, et renouvela son engagement.
Enfin, peu de jours avant le terme fixé pour le mariage, un nouveau
malheur arriva. Il n’y eut, dans toute l’année, qu’un seul homme scalpé par
les Indiens d’Owen River, cet homme fut Williamson Breckinridge
Caruthers, de New-Jersey. Il accourait chez sa fiancée, avec la joie dans le
cœur, quand il perdit sa chevelure pour toujours. Et dans cette heure
d’amertume, il maudit presque la chance ironique à laquelle il dut de sauver
sa vie.
A la fin, Aurélia est fort perplexe sur la conduite à tenir. Elle aime encore
son fiancé, m’écrit-elle,—ou, du moins, ce qu’il en reste,—de tout son cœur,
mais sa famille s’oppose de toutes ses forces au mariage; Breckinridge n’a
pas de fortune et est impropre à tout travail. Elle n’a pas d’autre part des
ressources suffisantes pour vivre à deux confortablement.—«Que dois-je
faire?» me demande-t-elle, dans cet embarras cruel.
 C’est une question délicate. C’est une question dont la réponse doit
décider pour la vie du sort d’une femme et de presque les deux tiers d’un
homme. Je pense que ce serait assumer une trop grave responsabilité que de
répondre par autre chose qu’une simple suggestion.
A combien reviendrait-il de reconstituer un Breckinridge complet? Si
Aurélia peut supporter la dépense, qu’elle achète à son amoureux mutilé des
jambes et des bras de bois, un œil de verre et une perruque, pour le rendre
présentable. Qu’elle lui accorde alors quatre-vingt-dix jours sans délai, et si,
dans cet intervalle, il ne se rompt pas le cou, qu’elle coure la chance de
l’épouser. Je ne crois pas que, faisant cela, elle s’expose à un bien grand
risque, de toute façon. Si votre fiancé, Aurélia, cède encore à la tentation
bizarre qu’il a de se casser quelque chose chaque fois qu’il en trouve
l’occasion, sa prochaine expérience lui sera sûrement fatale, et alors vous
serez tranquille, mariée ou non. Mariée, les jambes de bois et autres objets,
propriété du défunt, reviennent à sa veuve, et ainsi vous ne perdez rien, si ce
n’est le dernier morceau vivant d’un époux honnête et malheureux, qui
essaya sa vie durant de faire pour le mieux, mais qui eut sans cesse contre lui
ses extraordinaires instincts de destruction.—Tentez la chance, Maria, j’ai
longuement réfléchi sur ce sujet, et c’est le seul parti raisonnable.
Certainement Caruthers aurait sagement fait de commencer, à sa première
expérience, par se rompre le cou. Mais puisqu’il a choisi une autre méthode,
décidé à se prolonger le plus possible, je ne crois pas que nous puissions lui
faire un reproche d’avoir fait ce qui lui plaisait le plus. Nous devons tâcher
de tirer le meilleur parti des circonstances, sans avoir la moindre amertume
contre lui.