What about poisoning from something either in the environment, or brought with them that they would have contact with every day?
It is windy on the prairie, though. I never thought of it as especially quiet though. Tons of insects and grass rustling.
Therefore the people who lived on the plains for millenia before the settlers came must have been deaf?
Being in a large, flat, open area freaks me out. I can’t look at the sky without getting vertigo and a felling like I might fall up. Hills mitigate that feeling and trees end it completely, even if they’re a few hundred feet away. But Kansas flat would drive me mad.
Good catch, I think. Ingalls-Wilder has a chillingly detailed description of ‘prairie madness’ in her “These Happy Golden Years” book. The mother in the family she lodged with during her first teaching post was deeply troubled. And the husband’s unresponsive helplessness was… like out of a psych textbook.
It’s possible the script writers were working off the material in Ingalls-Wilder’s book. It’s easy to forget when watching some video clip from c. 1980 that she recorded the lives of real people, back in around 1885.
A friend of mine who was raised in the Texas Panhandle says that the madness was a known historical fact among the locals. Within living memory? Not sure.
She did say that unrelenting wind in Amarillo is merciless. “Nothing between the Panhandle and Canada except a barbed wire fence.” In the winter it was, she declares, awful.
People who are put into an unfamiliar environment and subjected to stress and fear often develop mental illness. Look at the fallout from the virus crisis.
There’s some wooded and/or hilly places in Kansas, but about an hour west of Wichita you can stop and look around you and there’s not a tree in sight for 360 degrees (at least when I saw it back in 1990).
Schizophrenia is over represented among refugees in Europe. IIRC it’s specifically among lone male refugees. I think one could perhaps talk of an ‘end of the journey’ phenomena. Until you get there you can keep your mind occupied on the journey and the hope of improvement. Once there, all you can do is to sit there and wait for time to pass. Often digesting the bad memories of what drove you to go there in the first place.
There’s an essay by, if I remember correctly, Tim Cahill, in which he talks about living in a house in a part of the Rockies where the wind blows unrelentingly and has the reputation for driving people mad. He said that the previous owners of his house finally snapped and the husband ended up firing a shotgun through the bathroom door while his wife cowered in the bathtub (both, he stresses, survived, although their relationship was never the same afterwards).
Some of the damage was still visible and Cahill said that whenever visitors asked “Wow, what did THAT?” he would simply answer “The wind.”
People act like I’m being silly whenever I mention the connection between wind and madness, but it just makes sense.
In most places wind signifies change in the weather and the season, and it distorts our perception of the long-range environment. So of course it pushes a button in our animal brains that says there’s change a-comin’. If that button is held down constantly, why wouldn’t you tilt toward madness.
Personally, I really like the city soundscape where I live, but I make a point of keeping windows open as much as possible, and I live in a city that developed organically over a thousand years and has trees everywhere. I can imagine that there are cities whose soundscapes would make you bonkers.
I’ll tell you what’s maddening about the wind in Kansas. It’s when you’re a schoolkid trying to ride your bike home against freezing high velocity wind gusts in March.
Never spent any time there, though i can imagine. Other side of the Rockies, but i remember one camping trip near dinosaur national monument that was cut short after one night of hellacious nonstop winds.
Mystery? All you have to do is take a trip to Kansas and the mystery will be solved. Place is empty, flat and boring as hell. Hard pass.
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No, I was about to say the same thing. Being put on a featureless plain would horrify me, I think. Like being adrift on the ocean.
Or the modern version
That’s how God intended it. So much of Kansas with trees in it is very very new, in the grand scheme of things.
As for the question of “How did the Natives do it for thousands of years”. Well the big thing is 1) They were born here, so everything is normal to them. Settlers that moved in are coming from much different environments and so everything is foreign and sticks out as different. It is why “prairie madness” didn’t continue to be a thing. and 2) They weren’t isolated. Native Plains Indians had very large communities. You didn’t have just one family living on a plot of land with out another soul for miles around.
Example of large plains community, Etzanoa.
Same with my experiences. The crickets and locusts can dominate my thinking sometimes.
Now death valley, that is what I think of as deafening silence. Without a single object to bounce sound around it’s almost like my own voice is lost just inches in front of my face.
My partner is from KS and frequently laments not being able to see the horizon where we live. I, on the other hand, am a coastal dweller and have spent much of my life on boats. I’ve tried to convince my partner that being at sea should have the same appeal - there’s nothing but horizon. They’re not buying it.
… plus zero mention in this “study” of the First Nations people who lived there for thousands of years’ somehow not going mad.
American exceptionalism is like water to the fish. You don’t even notice it.
