Immigrants were particularly at risk for prairie madness. Some coping mechanisms to escape the emotional trauma of moving to the prairie was to continually move around to new locations, or to move back East. Others tried to adapt to the entirely new way of life, and abandoned the old ways, but still fell victim to madness. Many stayed very attached to their way of life back East, and their attempts to make their new homes in the West adhere to the old ways sometimes triggered prairie madness. The landscape is desolate and dry between late summer (August) and spring (April), for around 8 months per year. Panorama of the flat Northern Colorado prairie. Some settlers specifically spoke of the wind that rushed through the prairie, which was loud, forceful, and alien compared to what settlers had experienced in their former lives. There were few trees, and the flat land stretched out for miles and miles. Farmers would be stuck in their houses under several feet of snow when the blizzards struck, and the family would be cramped inside for days at a time. Once winter came, it seemed that all signs of life such as plants, and animals had disappeared. This caused a lot of trauma for the parents, and contributed to prairie madness.Īnother major cause of prairie madness was the harsh weather and environment of the Plains, including long, cold winters filled with blizzards followed by short, hot summers.
This isolation also caused problems with medical care it took such a long time to get to the farms that when children fell sick they frequently died. This particularly applied to women who were often left behind to tend to family and farm while the men went to town.) Those who had family back on the East coast could not visit their families without embarking on a long journey. (In many areas, towns were usually located along the railroads and 10–20 miles apart-close enough for people to bring their goods to market within a day's travel, but not close enough for most people to see town on more than an infrequent basis. The lack of quick and easily available transportation was also a cause of prairie madness settlers were far apart from one another and they could not see their neighbors or get to town easily. Although there were thriving Indigenous nations and communities, there was little settlement of Europeans on the Plains and settlers had to be almost completely self-sufficient. The farms of the Homestead Act were at least half a mile apart, but usually much more. This act stipulated that a person would be given a tract of 160 acres if they were able to live on it and make something out of it in a five-year period. One explanation for these high levels of isolation was the Homestead Act of 1862. Most examples of prairie madness come from the Great Plains region. The level of isolation depended on the topography and geography of the region. Prairie madness was caused by the isolation and tough living conditions on the Prairie.
It was described by Eugene Virgil Smalley in 1893: "an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives." Causes Prairie madness is not a clinical condition rather, it is a pervasive subject in writings of fiction and non-fiction from the period to describe a fairly common phenomenon. Prairie madness sometimes resulted in the afflicted person moving back East or, in extreme cases, suicide.
Symptoms of prairie madness included depression, withdrawal, changes in character and habit, and violence. Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the East faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels of isolation on the prairie. Prairie madness or prairie fever was an affliction that affected settlers in the Great Plains during the migration to, and settlement of, the Canadian Prairies and the Western United States in the nineteenth century.
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