A 15-year volunteer effort is helping identify the fates of thousands of Alaskans who were shipped to a controversial psychiatric hospital in Oregon between 1904 and the 1960s. The patients were committed after being deemed by a jury “truly insane.
In this Sept. 29, 2023, photo at the grave of Lucky Pitka McCormick, her granddaughter Kathleen Carlo, left, and McCormick’s great-great-grandchildren Lucia, center, and Addison Carlo place candles and stones on the grave during a reburial ceremony in Rampart, Alaska. Pitka was one of the Lost Alaskans sent to a mental hospital in the 1930s. Her grave was recently discovered, and family members brought her back to Alaska for a proper burial. .
There were no facilities to treat those with mental illness or developmental disabilities in what was then the Alaska territory, so they were sent — often by dog sled, sleigh or stagecoach — to a waiting ship in Valdez. The 2,500-mile journey ended at Morningside Hospital.They are known as the Lost Alaskans.
They combed through dusty Department of Interior records at the National Archives, the Alaska and Oregon state archives, and old Alaska court records for any tidbit: the results of commitment trials, cemetery files, death certificates, old newspaper stories and U.S. marshals reimbursement records for the costs of escorting patients.
Perdue said that while she was health commissioner, from 1994 to 2001, many people approached her with similar stories of long-missing relatives. That pain had been passed down in the families for decades — “intergenerational trauma,” Perdue said. A variety of Alaskans wound up there: miners, housewives, Alaska Natives, a co-founder of Juneau, a banker from Fairbanks. Causes included postpartum depression, cabin fever, epilepsy, addiction and syphilis. The youngest patient was 6 weeks old; the oldest was 96.
From Portland, Cordingley documented burial sites at several cemeteries and obtained 1,200 Oregon death certificates.
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