The Two Earliest Stories of Recovery in Oregon

The history of mental health in Oregon begins with the stories of two fur trappers, both starting in the early 19th century. The first was Archibald Pelton and the other, a better-known name in Oregon, John Day. Each had a connection to the grandiose intentions of a New York businessman, John Jacob Astor, considered to be America’s first millionaire, whose mission in life was to monopolize and control a triangle of trade: starting with furs in the Northwest, selling them in China, and bringing the profits and a lot of pottery back to New England. Pelton was inadvertently rescued by Astor’s first exploratory party and Day was accidentally found and rescued by another Astor party on its way to founding the first base of operations, Astoria, Oregon.

Both Pelton and Day were viewed as “mad” or “crazy” in different ways, and these stories are also about recovery from traumatic experiences, partial for Pelton and what appears to be a full recovery for Day.

There are lessons in the accounts of both men. This history may serve as example for other states—stimulating a greater understanding of their own histories and illuminating some lessons that may be of value for reshaping today’s mental health systems. One of these lessons is that recovery is not a new phenomenon, that it may take several forms, and that it can take place far from the systems in place now, even without professional interventions and psychiatric drugs.

Archibald Pelton

To understand the context of the recoveries of these two fur trappers, one must see them in light of Astor’s mission and the way in which it led these two explorers to experiences that surpassed their capacities to cope and resulted in what were viewed, even at the time, as severe mental disorders. Astor’s commercial goal was composed of two parts: an ill-fated seagoing venture which sent a crew around the tip of South America, and the Overland Party, the one with which Pelton and Day were connected—each in different ways, but with similar experiences of trauma.

The Overland Party got its start in St. Louis with a team of 60 people, one of whom was John Day. Only half of those survived, but near the endpoint of what became Astoria, Oregon, in 1812, decimated and traumatized themselves, they discovered Pelton, who had been living with the Nez Perce tribe for two years. According to the great historian of Oregon medicine, Olaf Larsell, they considered him recovered enough to finish the trip and start over in Astoria.

Archibald Pelton was born in 1794 on a Massachusetts farm. By the time he was just 18 years old, he was in what is now northwest Oregon and Idaho. His family never heard from him again. He had become one of a number of independent men seeking their fortunes several years after the Lewis and Clark expedition by trapping fur-bearing animals, selling them at high prices, and—hopefully—becoming rich.

In about 1810, he was the lone survivor of a massacre of 10 other trappers by a Blackfoot tribe. Peter Stark, in his book Astoria, wrote that “He had gone mad. He spoke incoherently and acted strangely.” He had wandered lost and confused in the Idaho and Snake River area for several years before being discovered by a friendly tribe, probably the Nez Perce. In a 1945 article titled “History of Care of Insane in the State of Oregon,” Larsell wrote that Pelton was surprised that they hadn’t killed him too, but that the Nez Perce had taken pity on him out of superstition.

Whether or not that was the case, the Nez Perce have become known as hospitable to those outside their tribes and for having a culture characterized by democratic principles far more advanced than the white culture from which Pelton came. Their leadership was elected and accountable to community councils. Their culture was based on a sense of family and community rather than the individualism of most white cultures, and was attuned to natural environment in which they lived. This way of life was a reflection of centuries of their tribal evolution.

Given the characteristic culture of the tribe, Pelton experienced an unexpected hospitality in a world very different from the European-American world from which he came. He must have spent most of those years outside in a natural state, likely exposed as well to traditional ceremonies celebrating and embracing spirituality, methods of healing, and the gifts of adaptable herbs, food, and rivers in season that gave them salmon, sturgeon, and other fish. He somehow adapted to their language and accepted their form of housing. He must have experienced a calm and safe environment or he would not have stayed there for those few years.

For Larsell to claim then that all of Pelton’s acceptance was the result of the Nez Perce superstition does not square with the reality of his life there. In fact, maybe stretching the analogy a bit too far, it has the look in many ways of what the Huguenots and Quakers were at the same time developing in Europe—the approach of “moral therapy” in the 1700s. The keys to that treatment were hospitality, acceptance, access to nature, good food, and a kind of therapeutic environment. So it is really no wonder that when he was found in 1812 by the Astor Overland Party he had “recovered his sanity.”

By comparison, had he been in white culture at that time, considering the trauma of seeing the massacre of his fellow trappers and his subsequent disorientation and confusion related to several years of survival, he would have been almost certainly in a “madhouse.” He would have been severely mistreated, as described by Robert Whitaker in Mad in America, to interventions that had no respect for his humanity—dunking patients in water, pouring buckets of water on the patient from a great height, using machines and pumps that would tumble the patient with a torrent of water, and employing other methods of inflicting pain. This would have been quite a radical departure from the way Pelton actually lived in those years.

After his discovery by Astor’s party, Pelton still exhibited some oddities, which may have led to the later perception that he was “mentally ill.” He was described by a contemporary who knew him as a very odd-looking young man with frightening-looking eyes that resembled a bear’s. Indeed, the story goes that he had once encountered a bear, let out a piercing scream, and his penetrating eyes even frightened off the animal!

On the other hand, according to Oregon Encyclopedia author James Finley, a contemporary trader saw him as jovial and well-liked by his comrades. Everywhere he went, he would hold mock trials and admonish everyone to abandon their evil ways. For these reasons, he was considered an unusual character. This may have affected way his mental health problems were understood, though it is clear that he had experienced trauma so severe that he would inevitably show symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Eventually his disturbed behavior became aggravated even more as he ended up lost and wandering in the Idaho and Snake River area for almost two years.

The party that found him after that experience, members of the Pacific Fur Company, was led by Donald McKenzie and Wilson Price Hunt, a businessman who had Astor’s trust but who knew nothing about the wilderness they had entered. Their party even included a woman who had become pregnant and her children. Theirs was a story of extreme hardship which ended up covering over 2,000 miles. Due to a late start, they spent a winter in the mountains. They lost men in accidents because they found themselves in rivers which were impossible to navigate, with canoes that weren’t built for them. They lost horses in the rugged terrain, and struggled through the winter cold and other harsh conditions. The party that rescued Pelton had seen their own tragedies, with only about half of the 60 individuals who started their journey in St. Louis in 1810 having survived. These explorers had become disoriented enough themselves in seeking a route to the Columbia River that they had split into four parties, one of which had barely survived when they came across Pelton.

Notwithstanding all these conditions, Larsell described Pelton as being considered well enough to be brought back with them to the new trading post of Astoria founded by the Overseas Party. We can reasonably assume that his recovery had come about with the time he spent with the Nez Perce. His recovery allowed him to work in a sturgeon fishing center, as well as in a coal mine. He was known as the best logger in the forests.

He would still wander off unexplained for several days at a time and survive in the wilderness by eating blackberries. So he was described by the others as “our madman” or even more pejoratively as “our fool.” Nevertheless, he can be considered the first historically documented white man to recover enough to lead a functional life.

While Pelton was not free of all “symptoms” and remained considered an odd person, he was nonetheless well enough to hold down a (somewhat flexible) job and live his life as a frontiersman. This anticipates the notion (which Julian Leff described later in the 20th century) of there being two kinds of recovery: one revolving around functioning and quality of life, versus the other being a complete absence of symptoms. Pelton’s ability to function tells us that he recovered by Leff’s first definition and this can therefore be considered the first account of recovery in the history of Oregon.

Over time a number of tribes began to use a version of his name to identify people in their own world who had some sort of instability. Using a name to describe someone associated with a characteristic for which they no name was a common way of describing new things in their world. Their word for a person with the unusual reactions we now call “mental illness” became “Kahkwa Pelton,” meaning “like Pelton.”

Archibald Pelton’s story had a tragic ending, unrelated to any mental health challenge, and that was that he was murdered by several members of the coastal Tillamook tribe in a case of retribution for the killing of one of their members. The two members involved were tried and found guilty by a jury of both whites and tribal members and is considered the first murder trial in the Oregon territory. The guilty men were hanged.

John Day

A better-known story of another historical figure with a major mental health problem in early Oregon was that of John Day. Day had been born in Virginia around 1770. He was described as by Washington Irving in his nonfiction book on the Northwest, Astoria: Or, Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains, as tall with a “handsome, open, manly countenance.” He was “a prime woodsman, and an almost unerring shot.”

His story has some similarity to Pelton, in that he had become separated—in this case, from the Astor Overland Party, which he had joined in 1810 in Missouri. He had become ill and was accompanied by another member of the party, Crooks, on a different route after being left behind. They too experienced severe hardships. They wandered for months, nearly dying at one point from eating a “death camas.” Then they were attacked by a wolf, but being the excellent shot that he was, Day felled the wolf and they fixed a broth to bring back some health.

However, they then encountered another party of Native Americans who threatened them as a revenge for a killing of two of their members by another member of main group of the Overland Party. They were tortured and stripped naked, but, before being killed, at the advice of some of their elders, Crooks and Day were released and walked naked for four days. Here was another instance similar to the revenge killing witnessed by Pelton and it must have been severely traumatic. Likewise, the experience was aggravated by being lost in wilderness; Crooks and Day ended up spending the whole winter in a shelter they constructed.

Fortunately, in the spring, they encountered a couple of friendly Shoshones who guided them to the Columbia River, where they very accidentally encountered the Astor Overland Party. They gained their attention by shouting at them from a distance on the river in English. Stark wrote that Day had shown signs of derangement on the trip west; before long, in Astoria, Day began to show signs of conspiracy thinking and was viewed as “crazy.” Before long, he and a few others decided to quit the settlement and headed back east. He began to seem “restless” early on, spoke incoherently, and soon was talking of suicide around other members of the return party. In some way, he secretly gained access to firearms and shot himself in the head. Stark says that in spite of being a sharpshooter, he shot “too high.” Somehow, he survived, but it was decided that it wasn’t safe for him to continue the return expedition to St. Louis. So the party’s leadership arranged a trade with a cooperative band of Native Americans who agreed to take Day back west to Astoria. He recovered enough that he worked as a fur trader for a number of years there and in Eastern Oregon before he passed away in 1820.

He must have made enough of an impression that his gravesite became a marker in Central Oregon for others who were on their way to or from the Pacific coast. Not only that, but there are two rivers and a town named after him in Oregon.

These are the first accounts of men with major mental health problems, both of whom had traumatic experiences, but both of whom had their recoveries without our modern methods of treatment. They were both able to work despite some continued signs of mental disturbances. Both were supported in their recovery journeys by Native Americans, despite the fact that both of their traumas were because of attacks clearly conditioned by white men who had mistreated and even killed members of their tribes. There are lessons in these experiences about the ability of these men to move beyond their reaction to severe traumas and what today would certainly be psychiatric diagnoses. They were both able to lead productive lives in different ways in the Pacific Northwest.

What lessons can we learn from the stories of Pelton and Day? Psychiatry today is concerned with annihilating the experience of psychosis, primarily through drug treatment via neuroleptic tranquilizers (“antipsychotics”). But the goal of mental health treatment does not have to mean stamping out every unusual experience or expression of it. Men like Pelton and Day were able to function, survive the harsh realities of life as frontiersmen, and engage in paid labor, despite being considered a bit eccentric.

Another lesson comes from the indigenous cultural practices that both men experienced, which may have been integral to their recovery. In modern psychiatry, people with hallucinations and delusions typical of psychosis are excluded from society, locked in hospitals, and drugged against their will. But is that the best we can do? Perhaps we could learn to include people in community, give them a cultural place, and provide them with whatever support they desire to help them function in the world.

Finally, what of the role of trauma? The stories of Pelton and Day reiterate the notion that traumatic experiences are central to the development of extreme states we call “mental illness.” Far from being biologically-driven sicknesses of the brain, the unusual behaviors characteristic of Pelton and Day were very clearly related to the horrifying experiences they had, witnessing massacres and death in the wilderness.

These examples lead us to alternatives that are the very opposite of psychiatry, which tends to deny that psychosis has any meaning beyond being a sickness of the brain, and which isolates people and attempts to drug their experiences away. Instead, we can look to such ideas as Open Dialogue, Soteria, the Hearing Voices Network, and more—empowering, community-building interventions that involve the act of making meaning out of extreme states, collaboratively through social connections, with an understanding of the central role of trauma.