Harmon’s Histories: Lunacy commissions once convened to judge mentally ill, addicted Montanans

By Jim Harmon

The year was 1908. There were a couple of troublesome cases that needed to be dealt with.

A.J. Thompson had been arrested a few days earlier on suspicion of being insane.

According to the Billings Gazette, Thompson’s delusions were “varied and many of them delusional.”

So a “lunacy commission” (a carry-over from old British law) was formed, made up of the Yellowstone County commissioners and two Billings physicians.

The panel was told that Thompson had been claiming that “he came to Billings from Forsyth to get a man who was wanted by the sheriff of Rosebud County, and in the next breath told them that he was the inventor of an air brake and would soon be worth $5,000,000.

He said he was “a sheepherder by profession and that he had relatives in Texas.” He also expressed “strange ideas on religious subjects.”

The commissioners concluded that “it was their opinion that solitude was the cause of Thompson’s insanity.”

Off to Warm Springs with him.

The second case was that of Frank Smith, who was “not insane, but a dope fiend who had, according to press reports, “been giving city and county officers a good deal of trouble.”

“It was decided that the best way to dispose of his case would be send him to the insane asylum where he could be cured of the drug habit.”

That was apparently a common way of dealing with repeat drug users in the early 20th century. In fact, one news report indicated that there were more addicts in Warm Springs than insane people.

In Smith’s case, it was the second time he’d been sent off to Warm Springs. Just a year earlier, he’d been “confined in the asylum about six weeks,” after which he “was discharged as cured of the habit and appeared in the best of health.”

Then there was the case of world-famous contortionist Frank Caswell who performed with the Barnum and Bailey circus.

Caswell, a dope fiend, was declared insane by a three-member lunacy commission in 1909, and was promptly sent to the Warm Springs asylum.

According to the Billings Daily Gazette, Caswell had broken his neck in a fall, and had been hospitalized in Spokane, where they had “attached a 20-pound weight to his head in an effort to cure him.” In order to alleviate his pain he had been given “enormous doses” of morphine.

Physicians attending Mr. Caswell all believed that “the possibilities of his recovering from the drug habit at Warm Springs are good, as he is possessed on an unusually bright mind and is anxious to be cured.”

References in the press to “lunacy commissions” declined significantly in the 1930s, and by the end of that decade had virtually disappeared.

Drug addiction is now treated as a disease, although criminal activity due to addiction is still dealt with in the judicial system.

According to Find Law dot com, “A few states don't allow the insanity defense against criminal charges: Idaho, Kansas, Montana and Utah. All of those states, with the exception of Kansas, allow "guilty but insane" verdicts instead of the defense of insanity. This means a defendant with a mental disorder is sent to a mental institution instead of prison.”

Jim Harmon is a longtime Missoula news broadcaster, now retired, who writes a weekly history column for Missoula Current. You can contact Jim at fuzzyfossil187@gmail.com. His best-selling book, “The Sneakin’est Man That Ever Was,” a collection of 46 vignettes of Western Montana history, is available at harmonshistories.com.