Prairie Madness

While researching for The Malpais Bride, I came across something I had heard of before but never really looked into closely: prairie madness (also known as prairie fever).

The Great Planes in Nebraska.

It sounds dramatic, like something out of a horror novel, but was a very real thing for people on the American frontier.

Imagine it, you pack up everything you have and move from a town or a wooded area where you know everyone and everything that lives and breathes and suddenly you're in a place where you can see for miles in every direction.  There aren't any hills, trees, buildings, only grass, sky, and wind.  If you're lucky you might see a fellow traveler on the way.  If you're extremely fortunate you might have a neighbor within visual range.

Many settlers, especially women, wrote in letters and journals about the isolation and how lonely they were.  There was nothing but the horizon that just kept on going and going.

Some people lived miles from their nearest neighbor.  Women's husbands were gone for most of the day working the land or cattle.  Some didn't even get the opportunity to speak to another person for days at a time.  Letters could take weeks or months just to get somewhere.

Some of these women were also mail order brides.  Many were married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers and then locked away in their homes.  If fate were merciful they'd get a kind husband.

At the time we didn't have words for touch starvation, isolation, postpartum depression, or the sheer psychological impact of living in a landscape that felt barren.

Lacking the words or the explanation they said that the prairie drove people mad.  

We tend to look at the old west with nostalgia.  We imagine cowboys, settlers, and adventure and freedom that wide open spaces can provide.  That was a part of it, yes, but there's also that other darker side.

Prairie madness wasn't really madness.  It was isolation, grief, being far from all that you knew and knowing you couldn't easily go back.  You were a human living in a place that didn't care if you lived or died.

And for the writer, there's a moment when you learn about it, you immediately think "That's a story."  

Because if the land is big and lonely enough, people start to imagine things.  The brain is sneaky that way.

And that's where prairie madness not only becomes history, but part of a story.