The number on the historical marker reads 121. It is wrong. That marker stands at the site of the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, the only asylum the United States ever built exclusively for Native Americans, and it lists 121 names against the roughly 374 people who were actually sent there. The story of what happened inside is one of padlocks, chamber pots, and an ankle chain borrowed from the county sheriff.
The institution was born in 1897, when a United States Indian agent at the Cheyenne River Agency wrote to his senator. State asylums did not want Indian patients, and when they accepted them, they charged rates the Indian Office called exorbitant. On reservations, the only place available for someone who had lost their mind was often the guard house, a jail. The agent estimated there were two insane Indians on every reservation in the country.
The senator was Richard F. Pettigrew, one of the first two men South Dakota sent to Washington. He was not a reformer. He chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs and had a young state to build.
On May 8, 1897, he introduced a bill to establish an Indian insane asylum at Canton, South Dakota. It was read twice and referred to his own committee. Only then did he ask how many insane Indians there were. The Bureau of Indian Affairs collected reports from agents across the country.
The count came back as 58 insane, with six more described as idiotic, spread across 21 reservations. Seven Indians were already confined in institutions, five of them at St. Elizabeth’s in Washington. That was the entire case for a national asylum: 64 people.
The opposition made the case even thinner. The superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s, the only man in America then running a federal asylum, wrote to the Secretary of the Interior saying there were far too few insane Indians to justify a separate facility. The secretary agreed and opposed the bill.
Congress passed it anyway, not as its own law. In 1899, it went through attached to the Indian Appropriation Act for the following fiscal year, carrying $45,000. Most institutions of this kind were forced open by scandal. Someone walked into a poorhouse and wrote down what they saw.
Canton had no scandal behind it. The site was never in question. Canton got it because Pettigrew wanted it there and because Oscar Gifford, a Canton lawyer and former congressman, did the paperwork. The bureau purchased 100 acres in Lincoln County, two miles east of town, at $30 an acre.
$3,000 of federal money was spent in a town that had been promised a great deal more. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had never built an asylum, so it hired an architect named John Charles, whose credentials were the Trempealeau County Asylum and the Home for Feeble-Minded, both in Wisconsin. H. S.
Pelton and Company of Milwaukee won the contract on the lowest bid, and work started in 1900. What went up was one building with four wings, two stories, brick on a stone foundation. Inside were 120 electric fixtures and coal-stoked boilers. The water came from a well, and it was hard water, bad for laundry and bad for bathing.
It turned the sheets gray. Around everything ran a woven steel fence seven feet high, with two steel gates lettered “Hiawatha Asylum. ”
In November 1901, with the building unfinished, the Indian Office named its superintendent: Oscar Gifford. He was a lawyer, a judge, a former mayor of Canton, a former congressman, and a man with no medical training of any kind.
His entire staff a year later was 12 people, exactly one of them a doctor. On December 31, 1902, the first patient arrived, a Sioux man, 33 years old, sent straight from the Santee reservation in Nebraska. Sources disagree on the exact day and on his name. By the end of 1903, there were 16 people inside.
In 1903, the Secretary of the Interior approved the regulations: two chapters, nine rules for the superintendent, 43 for everybody else. The rules forbade employees to kick a patient, strike a patient, or shake, choke, or throw a patient to the floor. Only a physician could order mechanical restraint. Staff were to speak to patients kindly, never with ridicule and never with threats.
Every one of those things happened at Canton anyway, not once but routinely, for 30 years, in a building that kept the prohibition typed up and filed. Here is the engine underneath the whole story: Canton would not let people go. Its superintendent would release anyone he called mentally deficient only after sterilization, and Canton had no way to sterilize anybody. So the people he himself admitted were sane stayed.
The institution held them because it could not perform the operation it required in order to release them. The only reliable way out of the Canton Asylum was the ground. In 1908, Harry Hummer arrived. He was 29, held a psychiatry degree from Georgetown, and had seven years at St.
Elizabeth’s behind him. On paper, an upgrade. He ran Canton for 25 years. To understand what happened inside, you first have to understand how the building worked at night.
At bedtime, the women were locked in behind ordinary doors. The men were locked in behind padlocks. Steel guards were padlocked over the inner window frames. Each floor of the main building offered two sinks and two unventilated toilets.
In the hospital, it was one toilet and one bathtub per floor. A dormitory held eight people. Overnight, it held eight people and eight uncovered chamber pots behind a locked door, with the windows sealed. The psychiatrist who inspected the place in 1929 called the conditions intolerable and gave the institution the phrase that has followed it since.
He called it a place of padlocks and chamber pots. The rooms were bare, iron beds and nothing else, because Hummer had decided furniture would only become weapons. Nobody had a toothbrush, and there was no dental care at all. Restraint came in three forms: a camisole, the institutional word for a straitjacket; ten pairs of metal wristlets used to lock a person to a bed frame; and an ankle chain one foot long and extendable to six, which the asylum did not own.
It borrowed the ankle chain from the sheriff. The rules said a doctor had to order all of it. In practice, an attendant signed a device out of the financial clerk’s vault, used it, and never explained why. Two patients were left fastened to their beds for months.
When the keys went missing, staff cut people free with hacksaws. The word the paperwork used for locking a man alone in a room was “seclusion. ” One man spent three of his six years in seclusion. There were also swings.
When the Indian Office fitted out its boarding schools with playground equipment, Hummer took the leftovers: six swings, a giant slide, a seesaw. Indoors, there was dancing, though native dancing was forbidden. The entertainment was dull enough that patients propped the screen doors open to hunt flies. Violence survives only in personnel files.
In September 1930, an attendant knocked Lita Williamson down and kicked her; three patients backed her account. That summer, a laborer drove a woman out of the asylum and returned her three weeks later. The Justice Department opened a file. Nobody was charged.
Seventeen people escaped in 30 years, and 11 made it. One was a boy whose father promised to fetch him in June 1909 and never came. He let himself out. They caught him at Flandreau and sent him home on the grounds that his mental condition was comfortable.
The population was 16 in 1903, 61 in 1910, 97 in 1924, 92 in 1932, and 90 in the autumn of 1933 when it ended. By the standards of American asylums, that is not a catastrophe of overcrowding. The hospital finished in 1916 lifted capacity to 85, and the place ran a little above that for a decade. Canton was not bursting at the walls.
Canton was stranger. It was engineered to stay exactly the same size. By then, it had taken in 306 people from 18 states and 53 tribes: 68 Lakota and Dakota, 40 Chippewa, 17 Navajo, 12 Papago carried 1,000 miles from the Sonoran Desert. Over half were under 30; four were under 10.
Only nine were over 60. That makes Canton the opposite of almost every asylum of its era: not a place where old people were dumped, but a place where young people were stored. And they stayed. In 1927, Hummer reported that of 92 people confined, 65 had been there five years or more.
Canton ran on eight attendants: four men, four women, on 12-hour shifts and 72-hour weeks, with rules forbidding them to attend patients of the opposite sex. At night, the whole institution was covered by one man and one woman. Do the arithmetic: one attendant, one night, 45 people. Give each of them a single minute, and you need three-quarters of an hour just to look at them all once.
In July 1925, the commissioner of Indian affairs toured Canton and found exactly one attendant on duty for more than 90 people across two buildings. He also met a naked man walking unattended through a ward and a man in steel anklets on a short chain, the hardware used on convicts. Hummer’s written answer was that they had gotten along reasonably well for 17 years. Roughly 20 people applied for admission every year and were turned away.
There was no room, and the room only ever came from one place. Here is how you got into Canton, step by step. A reservation superintendent decided you were a problem. Sometimes he put you in the agency jail while the paperwork moved.
He wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for permission to commit you. The commissioner, with no reason to doubt an agent he had never met about a person he had never seen, gave it. That was the process. State courts had no jurisdiction over federal Indian wards, so their assent was collected anyway.
The Interior Department’s acting solicitor explained why when the secretary finally asked what the legal basis was: the courts were there to avoid any charge of depriving people of liberty without due process. He then reported that the bureau held no commitment documents at all. Not incomplete records. None.
If you were a child, a school superintendent could request it. Parental consent was neither required nor obtained. Roughly 374 people passed through here. In 1933, a federal psychiatrist went through the files and found a court inquiry in nine cases: John Martin, James Fishtrap, Maggie Blanchard, John Brown, William Drohan, Luke Stansbim, Abraham Hopkins, Peter Peacot, George Papin.
Nine out of 374. Most hospitals of the period used parole and trial visits, where a patient went home for a week to see how it went. In the letter Samuel Silk wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs on October 3, 1933, he recorded no case in the whole existence of Canton of anyone released on parole or sent home on trial. Not one.
Silk walked the wards and pointed out patient after patient with no active mental disease, people who could live in any community. Hummer agreed with him. Then Hummer explained his position: these people were mentally deficient and could only be discharged once sterilized. He had no means of sterilizing anyone.
In Silk’s words, there was nothing left but to keep them there. The Supreme Court had ruled eugenic sterilization constitutional in 1927. Doctors in South Dakota sterilized some 577 people. Hummer was not unusual in what he believed.
He was unusual in lacking the equipment to act on it. Here is what that produced: about ten discharges a year. Nine of the ten were by death. Silk’s conclusion was that the policy of the institution appeared to be keeping the population stationary.
There is almost no medical record to examine. There was almost no medicine, no urinalysis, no blood tests for syphilis, no sputum tests for tuberculosis, no ward records, no histories, no case summaries. For most deaths at Canton, the only surviving statement is the death certificate. The hospital had a solarium built for tuberculosis patients and never used it for them.
It had a hydrotherapy room which the staff filled with coal. It had a refrigerating plant and no ice. When a patient ran a fever or had a lung hemorrhage in the night, the nurse’s only option was to walk to the superintendent’s house and ask his wife for a few cubes. The story is not over because this place was not closed by a report.
It was not closed by Congress, which read the warnings and voted the money anyway. It was not closed by the 13 employees who filed charges in 1909, or by the 100-page federal survey that sat in a drawer for four years. It was closed because in July 1933, a woman at Santa Clara Pueblo walked up to a new commissioner of Indian affairs and asked him to let her husband out. He went back to Washington, pulled the file, and read the survey nobody had acted on for four years.
Thirty years of institutional failure ended because one person got a minute of a stranger’s attention. The record does not give her name either. Almost nobody who went into Canton is famous, and that is part of what was done to them. Most names survive only because an inspector wrote them down.
Start with the one you should remember. Elizabeth Alexis Faribault was born in 1882, the first child of Zeanakooyak and Manzakoyake Suim, listed in American paperwork as Henry and Mary Alexis. She grew up on the Sisseton reservation in a family that spoke Dakota and had made itself conspicuous by refusing to assimilate. She married Jesse Faribault.
In 1915, an agency policeman and a physician came to the house and took her to Canton. The evidence was that she was alcoholic and insane. Jesse came home to find his wife gone and the two youngest children alone. Eleven years later, in September 1926, Elizabeth gave birth inside the asylum to a girl of five and three-quarter pounds.
She named her Cora Winona. Hummer told Washington the pregnancy proved her inherent defectiveness. Her mother campaigned to get them out. The bureau sided with the superintendent.
Elizabeth Faribault died at Canton in 1928. Cora stayed with asylum staff two more years, then went to an orphanage in Arizona at age four. She was raised there and in Indian boarding schools. In 1945, she had a son in a Phoenix home for unmarried mothers, where staff pressed her to give up her rights.
He was adopted and never met a Faribault. The others deserve their names, too. Emma Amiata had a stroke in Canada in 1923 and recovered in an Alberta hospital whose superintendent wrote that she needed no institution at all. Hummer had that letter.
He held her ten years. William Drohan came from Nebraska in 1931, blind and unable to walk, already under treatment for the syphilis behind both conditions. At Canton, he got none. He spent two years on a locked ward.
John Brown entered in 1909. The nurses said he was not insane. Twenty-four years later, Hummer wrote that he needed the institution’s guidance. Albert Blaine Jr.
of the Yankton agency is the man whose name went on the lawsuit to keep the asylum open. Nothing in his file records an objection to going. Arch Wolf was Cherokee, a cousin of Ned Christie. He escaped Christie’s dynamited cabin in 1892, was sentenced at Fort Smith, and was refused transfer to his own nation’s asylum.
He died here at 39. Two people tried to stop this from inside the building. One account, and only one, records an employee named Norman Ewing, also called Flying Iron, reporting the treatment of patients to the bureau in 1915. He was transferred to Montana.
That record is thin. The other is better documented. Grace Phyious arrived in 1928, the second attempt in 25 years to put a trained nurse in the building. Hummer responded by demanding a federal audit of his own institution, then accusing her of drinking.
An inspector concluded one of them had to go. Phyious left. Hummer stayed another four years. Follow the money and it goes somewhere unusual, because Canton sold nothing.
No convict leasing, no prison industry, no product line. What it had was unpaid labor that never appeared on a ledger. Patients ran the farm, the dairy, the kitchens, the laundry, and the sewing room. Not one hour of it shows up as a line item anywhere.
So follow what was not spent. Pettigrew’s original bill asked for $150,000. Congress authorized $45,000. Canton had been told to expect $100,000 a year flowing into a town of a few thousand people.
And the money came. In 1926, Congress found $34,170 for another 228 acres of farmland. More land, not more nurses. When Silk went through the books in 1929, he compared them to 49 veterans hospitals, which were spending 75% of their budgets on salaries.
Canton was spending 50%. And there is one figure that explains this institution better than any description of a ward. In 1928, Harry Hummer, running a hospital with eight attendants, no dentist, no laboratory, and no ice, returned $2,000 of that year’s appropriation unspent to the United States Treasury. That sounds like thrift until you see what Washington did with it.
Congressman Lewis Cramton, a leading advocate for cutting federal spending, toured Canton in 1925, pronounced Hummer “certainly very economical,” and spent four years blocking every attempt to shut the place down. He never read the Silk Report. Compare what he was defending. In 1933, St.
Elizabeth’s held 4,981 patients at about $180 a day for each patient, and Silk’s judgment was that no mental hospital under 500 beds could be run decently on any reasonable budget. Canton had 90. When closure came, Canton’s congressional delegation did not argue that the patients were well treated. Congressman Fred Hildebrandt telegraphed the Secretary of the Interior to say the citizens of Canton would suffer a severe financial loss.
The land is a golf course now, a city-owned nine-hole course, and the website advertises the scenery and the casual atmosphere. It does not mention the cemetery. What the ruin earns today is not on public record. Which brings us back to the number you were given at the start: 121.
That figure is published by Wikipedia. It is cast into the South Dakota historical marker erected beside the site in 2011. Minnesota Public Radio used it in 1997, and almost everything since has copied it. Here is where it came from.
The superintendent recorded each burial on a chart that hung on his office wall, not a register. A chart on a wall, kept by the man whose record Samuel Silk called practically valueless. His replacement filed the final version in February 1934, and everything anyone knows about who lies at Canton descends from it. Now, the primary source.
The 1998 National Register of Historic Places nomination for the cemetery describes the burial stone placed there in 1970 and counts the names cast into the bronze. There are 120. And in 2016, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma ran ground-penetrating radar across the plot. They found five graves that were not on the map.
They also found further anomalies that nobody has excavated and nobody has explained. So the real figure is at least 126, and the record cannot tell you the ceiling. At least 126 out of 374 is roughly one in three, in a place that admitted people for fighting with a husband. The graves are unmarked because the bureau informed the superintendent that stone markers were an unwarranted expense.
One more correction. In 1981, the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic published an article on Canton that leaned on Hummer’s own reports and stated there was no evidence restraints of any kind were ever used there. A peer-reviewed journal printing the superintendent’s version 50 years on. Canton was never mythologized the way these places often are.
It was dropped, and a false number filled the hole. The end took 91 days. Collier became commissioner in April and set a closing date. On September 6, Silk arrived to examine 90 patients and expected the work to take four or five days.
The records were disarranged. Four patients were discharged during his stay. Logan Lovejoy went to relatives. David Zephier went to his sons.
Reuben Taylor’s release was authorized in writing, and Hummer sat on the order. Ida Rubido, bedridden for two years, went back to Rosebud to die at home. Washington postponed the removal twice to give the South Dakota delegation time to lobby its senators. On the 18th, a patient’s wife visited.
Hummer telephoned a Chamber of Commerce man named Mennen and sent her into town. She came back coached and argued the asylum’s case. On Friday the 22nd at ten in the morning, Hummer took a call and left in a rush for Sioux Falls, on the day the petition reached the judge. On Saturday the 23rd at about two, Silk was served.
The order restrained the commissioner, the superintendent, and Silk himself from removing Albert Blaine Jr. or anyone else. On the 25th, seven attendants arrived from St. Elizabeth’s, and the train was held at Mason City, Iowa.
That evening, Silk was recalled. Then it moved fast. On October 5, Collier charged Hummer with practically a complete failure of medical administration. On the 15th, Interior told the press that a score of sane Indians were held at Canton through greed and inhumanity.
On the 16th, Ickes dismissed him. Hummer called it a lie, hired a lawyer, and never pressed for a hearing. In December, the court threw out the injunction, holding that Indian patients had no vested right to any particular asylum. On the 19th, a woman already cleared for release died of tuberculosis.
She went home as a body. Her name is not in the sources available. On the 21st, 69 people left by train for Washington with one doctor and 14 attendants. Sixteen were let go outright, judged not deranged enough to hold.
Some had been inside 16 years. Nobody was charged. Nobody was prosecuted. Nobody was fined.
A superintendent lost his job. A laborer lost his. Two attendants were transferred. A nurse left town before anyone questioned her.
That is the accounting. The state took the buildings and ran them as a branch of the penitentiary for first offenders. In 1946, the property went to the city. Three years later, the old asylum hospital reopened, remodeled, and still operates there.
In the late 1940s, the main building came down. Go there now, and you will find a nine-hole municipal course on United States Highway 18. Between the fourth and fifth fairways sits a fenced rectangle about 120 feet by 80, listed on the National Register since 1998 and closed to the public. Part of the original front entrance survives, built into the golf course sign.
The split-rail fence went up around 1992 to stop golfers playing through it and was replaced in 2024. Now look at comparable places. St. Elizabeth’s, the hospital that argued Canton should never be built and then received its survivors, closed in 2003.
Its west campus is the headquarters of Homeland Security. Thousands of its own patients lie in unmarked graves there, and its buildings now face demolition. Yankton opened before Canton and is still an operating state hospital. Its cemetery is locked.
You need a security escort to walk in. And Carlisle, the flagship Indian boarding school, the sister institution of the same policy. Nearly 200 children died and were buried there, and every one has a named headstone. Since 2017, the Army has run a federally funded repatriation program with forensic specialists from the Corps of Engineers.
Fifty-eight children have gone home. Canton has never had a headstone, never had a federal program, never had an answer on who would pay. In 1982, the Comanche Nation brought home one relative who died there in 1920. One in 92 years.
They came from 53 nations. They came from desert country and the Great Lakes. They came because an agent signed something. They came without a hearing and without an interpreter.
This ground has been an appropriation line, an asylum, an advertised attraction, a prison annex, a hospital, and a golf course. The brick did not last. It came down in the 1940s. What lasted is the dirt and a stone listing 120 names.
They could not leave because the operation their release required could not be performed. The question for the Bureau of Indian Affairs is whether it means to bring these people home. The ground has been waiting since 1903.