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Indian Territory by John T. Biggs
Indian Territory by American Indian columnist John T. Biggs
BY 1874, THE YEAR Arch Wolf was born, the best days of the Cherokee people were well behind them. The tribe had been moved by force from their ancestral home thirty-five years earlier. They’d been marched across the country and crowded into Indian Territory beside Choctaw, Chickasha, Muskogee, and Seminole. They were surrounded by land-hungry white settlers, and dominated by the U.S. Government, whose courts and soldiers were right across the Arkansas River in Fort Smith.
The tribe still had its oral history, but those heroic stories of brave warriors, great hunters and rich farmers in the southeastern woodlands of the North American continent must have sounded like fairy tales to young Cherokee men in the second half of the nineteenth century. Things were bad for the tribes in Indian Territory and everyone could see they would be getting worse.
The year Arch turned thirteen, Congress passed the General Allotment Act of 1887 (The Dawes Act). This law authorized taking away land controlled by the Indian Nations, and replacing it with allotments assigned to individual tribal members. The Dawes Commission put the new law in place gradually, on scattered reservations around the country. They held off enforcing it in Indian Territory until they were well acquainted with the reactions they might expect from the five tribes concentrated in that region.
The government didn’t start by using force. They encouraged tribal members to sign up for the rolls and receive title to eighty acres (for a single person) and one hundred sixty acres for a head of household. They underplayed the fact that allotments would be discontinued once the rolls were closed and unassigned tribal land would be available to non-Indians.
Traditional Cherokee, the Keetoowah, figured out the downside pretty early. They refused to cooperate with the Dawes Commission. Traditional boys like Arch Wolf didn’t sign up for their allotments when they turned eighteen. They put their confidence in the tribe with its organized government and skilled statesmen who were accustomed to dealing with white politicians. The Cherokee Nation made its case in the courts and with lobbying efforts. They won a number of legal battles and managed to slow down the inevitable loss of their tribal sovereignty, but it did them no good in the end. In 1898, Congress passed The Curtis Act, a law that eliminated the authority of any tribe to enforce any laws they passed. This marked the end to any legitimate tribal government.
As a member of a Keetoowah family, Arch Wolf remained steadfastly against the allotments as long as he was able. But he never had to worry about the Curtis Act. By the time Congress passed it, he was already in the custody of the U.S. justice system.
THE WRONG PLACE AT THE WORST TIME.
Arch Wolf’s family had close ties with well-known Keetoowah statesman, Ned Christie. Most traditionals were well-acquainted with him. Christie was a member of the executive council of the Cherokee senate and a principal advisor to Chief Dennis Bushyhead. He was one of the most respected traditional activists in the territory, and remained that way until U.S. District Court Judge Isaac Parker made him an outlaw with the stroke of his legal pen.
U.S. Marshal Daniel Maples had been ambushed and killed outside of Tahlequah, the capitol of the Cherokee Nation, while investigating the illegal sale of liquor in Indian Territory. Armed standoffs between whiskey peddlers and U.S. Marshals weren’t uncommon in those times, but federal authorities took it seriously when one of their own was killed. They quickly arrested a Cherokee man named John Parris but released him after he testified Ned Christie fired the gun that killed the officer.
Parris didn’t stick around to see how things worked out, but he’d pointed federal prosecutors in the direction they wanted to go. The prospect of getting rid of a Keetoowah activist was too much for them to resist.
Judge Isaac Parker put a $500 reward on Ned Christie’s head. That got federal lawmen interested. Small posses made several attempts to capture the activist, but he got plenty of warning from sympathetic tribal members and was able to hold them off.
When it was clear Ned Christie wasn’t going to surrender himself to the court, Parker raised the reward to $1000 dead or alive. That was enough money to attract a large group of determined lawmen. On November 3, 1892, U.S. Marshal Jacob Yoes led seven men to Ned Christie’s cabin. Arch Wolf had the misfortune to be visiting at the time.
When Christie saw there was going to be a shoot-out, he sent his wife, Nancy, away and insisted that she take the eighteen-year-old with her. That was fortunate for Arch, because the posse laid siege to Christie’s cabin. They kept him pinned down with a hail of rifle bullets. They followed that with rounds from a small cannon, and when he still wouldn’t surrender, they blew up Christie’s cabin with a charge of dynamite. The Keetoowah activist ran out of the wreckage shooting, and was quickly killed.
When Yoes documented his account of the attack to receive payment, he made no mention of Arch Wolf. That didn’t stop federal prosecutors from tracking the young man down, charging him with two counts of assault with intent to kill and two liquor-related charges thrown in for good measure.
Arch Wolf was held in the infamous jail under Isaac Parker’s courthouse for a year while the government built its case against him. He requested a number of witnesses who could testify that he was not at the cabin when the shooting started, but they were all friends of Ned Christie and were understandably wary of the reception they would get in Isaac Parker’s courtroom.
When no one came to testify for Arch, the young man pleaded guilty. He was sentenced for one count of assault with intent to kill (instead of two) and two liquor related misdemeanors. Judge Parker ordered him to serve a total of six years in the notoriously brutal Kings County Penitentiary in Brooklyn, New York.
ENTRANCE TO THE INFAMOUS KINGS COUNTY PENITENTIARY IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CUSTODY
Life in any nineteenth century U.S. prison was pretty grim, but Kings County was famous for its corruption, mismanagement, and cruelty. It had fallen into political disfavor over the years, and everyone knew it wouldn’t withstand public scrutiny for much longer. Arch Wolf was sent there during its worst period of decline, only a few years before the institution was closed.
With substandard food, chain gang work, and a decaying physical structure, most inmates found life behind the walls pretty depressing. Arch Wolf was a Cherokee speaker with no friends behind the walls, and he was already in poor physical condition from the year spent in the basement jail of the Ft. Smith court house. After another year and a half in Kings County he was depressed enough for prison administrators to declare he was insane and petition for an alternative form of custody.
There was a Cherokee Asylum for the Insane in Indian Territory, and Arch’s family lobbied hard to have him sent there. It would have made perfect sense for the young man to be held at an institution where they spoke his language, where his family could visit, and he would have access to tribal healers. Unlike most mental institutions of the day, the Cherokee asylum had a reputation as a place where people got better. It was not simply a place to warehouse mental patients out of sight of the public.
Instead of sending Arch to the one place where he might actually get some help, the prison system transferred him to the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington D.C. on August 29, 1895. The admitting physician diagnosed him as suffering from acute melancholia resulting from “prison life.” Arch wasn’t as damaged as most of the Government Hospital patients. Considering the state of care for mental patients in those days, he was fortunate he didn’t need much of it.
His family sent many letters to hospital administration asking for information about his condition and about the possibility of his release or transfer, but received no useful responses even after hiring an attorney to handle correspondence for them. They were understandably concerned, because at the end of the nineteenth century, the policy of most mainstream asylums was to keep mental patients confined indefinitely.
After Arch had spent a year in the Government Hospital, the doctors decided he was recovered enough to be released, returned to jail, or transferred to the Cherokee Asylum. They requested a review by the Attorney General.
Arch Wolf’s case got as far as the office of President Grover Cleveland where the young man was considered briefly for clemency. Unfortunately for him, Ned Christie’s reputation had grown well beyond his deeds in the years following his death and federal agents didn’t want anyone associated with the Keetoowah martyr anywhere near Indian Territory.
The Government Hospital held Arch until he could be moved to the first and only federal insane asylum built exclusively for Indians in Canton, S.D. By the time he was transferred on January 17, 1903, he had been away from his family for 9 years—three years longer than his original sentence.
THE HIAWATHA ASYLUM FOR INSANE INDIANS IN CANTON, SOUTH DAKOTA, OPENED ITS DOORS IN JANUARY, 1902.
A SPECIAL ASYLUM FOR INSANE INDIANS
In 1898, the same year Congress passed the Curtis Act, it created a federally funded institution exclusively for mentally ill indigenous Americans. They chose to call it The Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians.
It took five years to get the project underway, but the institution finally opened its doors in January, 1902. Its first administrator was Oscar S. Gifford, a lawyer, rather than a doctor. Gifford had served six years in the U.S. House of Representatives, first as a non-voting delegate from the Dakota Territory, and then as a congressman from the new state of South Dakota. He had also been the mayor of Canton, where the asylum was located.
From the very beginning of the project, there were questions about whether there were enough “insane Indians” to justify the building of a specialty asylum, but funding fell quickly into place and the institution was completed. When the nay-sayers turned out to be correct about the shortage of patients, Oscar Gifford did what he had to do in order to make the project at least seem to work. He took up the slack with alcoholics, the culturally misunderstood, and people who were vocally opposed to government and business interests.
The institution began as a one of the few socially progressive ideas of its time, but like almost every interaction between the U.S. government and Native America, it went terribly wrong.
A PLAQUE MEMORIALIZING THE 121 MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN BURIED IN THE HIAWATHA ASYLUM CEMETERY, NOW LOCATED IN THE MIDST OF THE HIAWATHA MUNICIPAL GOLF COURSE IN CANTON, SOUTH DAKOTA. ARCH WOLF IS LISTED IN THE MIDDLE COLUMN, SEVENTH FROM THE BOTTOM.
THE END OF ARCH WOLF
Since most of the patients in the Canton Asylum were being warehoused rather than treated, no one bothered keeping extensive records on individuals who weren’t causing trouble. That was apparently the case with Arch Wolf. There were record entries that indicated he was doing well, and daily notes on his appetite. There were numerous references to constipation, and nausea—probably reactions to the medications he was given, although it’s hard to be certain because medication logs were kept irregularly.
Arch Wolf never had so much as a diagnosis until 1907, when doctors determined he was a terminal stage paranoid with systematized delusions of expansive tendency. Diagnostic notations at that time said he was incoherent but had parole. He caused no trouble, but was potentially dangerous.
This was the first time he had been diagnosed as paranoid, but it is hardly surprising this potentially dangerous young man who caused no trouble might have developed the idea there were conspiracies against him. Arch’s case was complicated by the fact that his primary language was Cherokee. According to a 1910 count, only four members of his tribe were in the hospital—and they were all patients.
Oscar Gifford turned the asylum into an economic bonanza for the little town of Canton, South Dakota. He purchased supplies locally and ran the medical portion of the institution on a shoestring budget, often refusing to authorize medical treatments. There were numerous complaints of patient abuse while Gifford ran the institution, including one death from the institution’s physician not being allowed to remove gallstones. The final scandal that resulted in Gifford’s forced resignation was the birth of “a full-term bastard imbecile” in 1909, a baby boy who was removed for adoption that never materialized, and who died three months after being taken away from his mother.
Arch Wolf lasted at the institution three years longer than its first administrator. It is doubtful he found the change in leadership a positive one.
Gifford was replaced by psychiatrist Harry Hummer. The new administrator seemed an odd choice to lead an institution populated by indigenous people. He was a member of the American Eugenics Movement. He believed no Indian should be released from his institution without being first sterilized, and since the asylum did not have suitable operating facilities for such procedures, he strenuously objected to releasing anyone.
During Hummer’s years of operating the clinic, over ninety percent of individuals who left the institution did so by dying.
Arch Wolf was one of those patients.
He died on July 2, 1912. Hummer sent the following information to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs by mail:
Arch Wolf had never been documented as having either diabetes or tuberculosis. He was buried in an unmarked grave—along with 120 of his fellow inmates—in what is now the Hiawatha Municipal Golf Course. Their names are listed on a bronze plaque between the fourth and fifth greens.
—John T. Biggs is the author of six novels and hundreds of short stories, and the winner of the Reader’s Digest Grand Prize. His writing is so full of Oklahoma that once you read it, you’ll never get the red dirt stains washed out of your mind. John lives in Oklahoma City with his wife, and they travel extensively throughout the world with their family.
