Prairie Madness

Prairie madness, or prairie fever, was an affliction that affected European settlers migrating to and settling the Canadian Prairies and the western United States Great Plains during the nineteenth century. Settlers arriving from urbanized or more settled eastern regions faced the risk of mental breakdown brought on by the harsh living conditions and extreme isolation of the prairie, with symptoms including depression, withdrawal, changes in character and habit, and violence, sometimes ending in the afflicted person moving back east or, in extreme cases, suicide. Prairie madness was not a clinical condition but a pervasive subject in the fiction and nonfiction of the period describing a fairly common phenomenon; the writer Eugene Virgil Smalley described it in 1893, noting an alarming amount of insanity among farmers and their wives in the new prairie states.