Written by Kate Phillips
Settling the frontier in America is something that has been extremely romanticized, from Western films to cowboy songs to pictures of horses running across a beautiful open plain. However, it is often unrecognized how different the prairie was, for many, a somewhat maddening place.
“Prairie fever” was a combination of depression, paranoia, and loneliness that afflicted many people moving west from Canada to the Dakotas in the 1800s. After the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers were expected to care for and live from approximately 160 acres of land for five years, with ownership of the land granted as a reward. This meant that not only were settlers separated from their lives in other countries or on the East Coast of the U.S., but they were reliably separated from each other. As “prairie fever” became a common literary motif of the nineteenth century, different groups were deemed more susceptible than others. Some claimed farmer’s wives, not only alone but stuck inside, were particularly at risk. Others have noted statistics that Scandinavian immigrants total the highest percentage of insane asylum patients – suggesting that it was really the isolation, not the cold or elements, that caused the illness. Rasmus Nielsen, who left Denmark for Nebraska after the Homestead Act, said that Nebraska, having been a promised “Garden of Eden,” was instead to him a “Siberia.”
Some authors have used “prairie fever” to speak against colonialism. For example, Gabrielle Wynde Tateyuskanskan, a Dakota author, uses “prairie fever” as a metaphor for the sickness and destruction of colonialism. Indeed, prairie fever does seem like a haunting consequence of the ignorance and malignance that comes from viewing a place as your pot of gold or exotic paradise. Perhaps the best way to describe the prairies in colonial days is “unbalanced.” The paradox of trying to settle a canvas filled with judgments, expectations and lure, only to stutter at its blankness. A blankness that, too, is not reality, but a result of ignoring the life and the people that were already there.
Given that “prairie fever” has been reported since the mid-nineteenth century, some have treated it with a more scientific outlook. Journalist Eugene Smalley blamed prairie fever, which he called an “insanity,” on the silence of the prairies – or, at times, the groaning of the wind. Paleoanthropologist Alex D. Velez recently conducted psychoanalytic sound studies to focus on urban versus rural soundscapes and their respective mental responses. He noted that even if quiet, piercing soundscapes are deemed to be more unsettling for the human ear, “prairie fever” was still a term that was used centuries ago. The ways in which we have defined mental health have changed.
Perhaps it is not important to pin down the exact science behind “prairie fever.” The real interest can be found not in the surprise of the unsettling nature of silence, or the risks of depression from isolation. Instead, studying prairie fever should exist as a sort of warning, a message about what happens when the true nature of a place is replaced with production-obsessed dreams, and replaced again with the dismantling of not only those dreams but the place itself. After all, the silence of the prairie was only a threat to those colonizing them – they went in with expectations, and their new world was not what they expected.
For indigenous peoples like the A’aninin, Nakoda, Dakota, Lakota, Nehiyawak, and many others, the prairie served as a place of transformation, a sanctuary, necessary for survival. Buffalo were abundant, camps were established in the grasslands and in surrounding bluffs. A symbiotic relationship existed between the buffalo, the grass, and the people – the prairie was at the heart of that relationship. The prairie wasn’t just grass – it was cool spring needle and thread grass, summer blue grama grass, winter shrubs. Indigenous peoples learned to nourish the grass with controlled fire; women found medicinal plants that grew in soil disturbed by buffalo hooves. The prairie was seen as it truly was. And thus, the prairie was far from silent – a place not of sickness, but of interdependence and vitality.
However, it is dangerous to paint prairie fever as a “payback” for colonialism. The phenomenon, while certainly real, was exacerbated by literary sources, especially juxtaposed with the traditional star-eyed wonder at the American West. Prairie fever does not balance out the damage of colonialism. In anthropology and other disciplines, there is always a danger of prioritizing progress. The danger here might be environmental in particular – seeing the Earth as it truly is, adopting an interconnected view of the world, are perspectives that are now inviting more and more the recovering of indigenous wisdom. However, is this wisdom really recovered when we make the problem only an environmental one? Prairie fever was not simply to do with the inability to understand the prairies as an environment (settlers were able to farm there, after all.) It was a result of a colonial attitude of production and progress, a western search for exoticism, and a forefront example of the “successful” American being prioritized over the “other.” While indigenous wisdom should certainly be valued in modern ecological efforts, we must not use this valuing to imply that the colonialist’s only mistake was to fail to see the land a certain way. The symptom of prairie fever might have been failing to see beyond the prairie’s silence – but the cause was a bigger colonial machine that shattered more than just the environment.
Bibliography
https://exchange.prx.org/pieces/171970?m=false
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/prairie-madness-study-silence-great-plains
https://parks.canada.ca/pn-np/sk/grasslands/culture/autochtone-indigenous
https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-american-buffalo/indigenous-knowledge-grasslands-and-bison
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