OPINION: Alaska’s gold rush, mental health and the places we’re from

After I read Joan Didion’s obituary — she died in December 2021, at age 87 — I began ordering her books, including her memoir, “Where I Was From.”

The journalist, novelist and screenwriter was from California.

“Where I Was From” is a quirky title, as Didion uses the past tense. Most of us would use the present tense in describing our origins. In my case, I am from Fairbanks. If I “was” from Fairbanks, I would no longer be from the Golden Heart City.

Didion died in Manhattan. Perhaps she used the past tense because the California she had been born into in 1933, specifically Sacramento, had vanished under urban sprawl and agricultural-industrial development.

Sacramento was a child of the California gold rush, and in the 1850s, it would have been a city of miners, just as Fairbanks was a city of miners 50 years later. Didion met miners in her youth but not survivors of the California rush. As a boy in the 1950s, I met survivors of the Interior gold rush, usually impoverished old men living in small cabins.

Researching the history of California, Didion discovered that shortly after the gold rush, the Golden State led the nation in involuntary incarceration of the mentally ill and those who authorities deemed difficult or offensive. The first California state mental institution was the Stockton State Asylum for the Insane, opened in 1853.

Didion quoted the Stockton resident physician of 1862, complaining that he received patients who, “if affected in their minds at all it is the weakness of old age, or intemperance, or perhaps most commonly both together.” A later report on a San Francisco asylum found that most of those institutionalized — “put away” in a common California phrase — exhibited only “odd or peculiar behavior.”

By 1880, the federal census reported one in every 345 Californians as insane. By 1900, the number was one in every 260, and the asylums, Didion notes, had “passed capacity.”

How did California authorities explain mass mental illness? Didion said the Stockton facility specifically was designed for those “driven mad by the gold fields.” Gold-rush fever. There was no known cure for the fever. So — detention.

Didion quoted the State Board of Health explaining in 1873 that “the speculative and gambling spirit of California” diminished the sound mind, as did “change of climate, habits and modes of life,” plus “being isolated, without sympathy, deprived of all home influence.”

“This environment was well-calculated to break some link in reason’s chain,” the Board of Health reported.

Well, “reason’s chain” failed in Alaska too, where Alaskans, especially gold-rush single men, broke under the strain of isolation, lack of sympathy, deprivation of “home influence.” Alaska didn’t have a mental institution for most of its history. Men and women of the gold rush and after were “put away” in Morningside, the legendary Portland institution.

I have read many of their records in state and federal archives. The records typically start with sanity hearings — or U.S. Marshal reports that provoked sanity hearings. In the early days, The man or woman whose sanity was in question would be examined by a physician with no training in psychiatry and jury impaneled for the hearing, under the guidance of a judge or commissioner who would issue a finding. If you appeared before a court, you almost certainly would be “put away” if there was a place to put you.

And there were those who should have been put away. A Nenana man who repeatedly burned down cabins, for one. He might have burned the whole town in time. But many of those placed in detention were single and had no one to care for them.

Reviewing the old records, which include many records of suicide, I concluded far more Alaskans died of loneliness and despair than froze to death, as the protagonist did in Jack London’s mythic gold-rush tale, “To Build a Fire.”

I would like to write to Joan Didion about these matters. I can’t. I have only her books to re-read.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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