THE RENDEZVOUS OF THE COUNTERFEITERS 
OLD ROB JINCADE'S GENERAL STORE DWELLERS IN 
THEVALEOFSIDDEM 
A True Story of the Social 
Aspect of Feeble-Mindedness 
BY 
A. C. ROGERS 
Late Superintendent of the Minnesota School for 
Feeble-Minded, and Colony for Epileptics 
AND 
MAUD A. MERRILL 
Research Assistant in the Department of Research of 
the Minnesota School for Feeble-Minded and 
Colony for Epileptics 
BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 
THE GORHAM PRESS Copyright, 1919, by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 
MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. PREFACE 
The story of the Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem is 
a study in feeble-mindedness in one of its various 
aspects. It was written in fulfillment of a plan of the 
authors to publish in story form the family history 
studies made at the Minnesota School for the Fee- 
ble-Minded with a view to portraying the conditions 
just as they have been found in the investigation of 
the homes of the institution children. It was Dr. 
Rogers' purpose to add his own commentaries and 
conclusions drawn from the wealth of his experience 
acquired during his thirty-three years of work with 
the feeble-minded. 
The death of Dr. Rogers in January, 1917, when 
the work on the stories was but started, made it im- 
possible to carry out the plan as at first outlined. It 
was his wish that I complete the work in accordance 
with the original plan. In its conception, the whole 
idea and purpose of the study are Dr. Rogers. In 
partial fulfillment of that plan I am publishing the 
present story which is one of a series of studies of 
feeble-mindedness which will appear later. 
The authors' grateful acknowledgments are due 
to Miss Saidee C. Devitt whose work in the collec- 
tion of the data for the study made the work possi- 
ble, also to Miss Marie T. Curial, fieldworker, and 
to Dr. F. Kuhlmann whose constant help and encour- 
agement have been invaluable. 
Maud A. Merrill. 
May, 1918. CONTENTS 
Page 
Introduction 9 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 19 
Yaks 23 
Coreys 26 
Tams 30 
Descendants of Lige Yak 34 
Jim Yak 40 
Descendants of Kate Yak 42 
Chads 43 
Descendants of Jo Yak and Lou Chad 48 
The Household of the Glades 50 
Little Tommy 61 
The Counterfeiters 68 
The Doctor's Story 72 
The Cost 76 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
The Rendezvous of the Counterfeiters, Old Job 
Jincade's General Store Frontispiece 
TO FACE PAGE 
Entrance to One of the Caves of the Region. . 20 
The Last of Smoky Row ... 22 
The Home of Belle Marie and Old Ben. .t. . . . 36 
The Ruins of the Old Log Cabin that Sheltered 
the Household of the Glades 52 
The Home of Beck, the Mulatto 58 
Old Moose Silver's Cabin 62 
The Home of the Rats . . . 1 66 INTRODUCTION 
In 1911 were begun, at the Minnesota School for 
the Feeble-Minded and Colony for Epileptics, stud- 
ies of the family histories of the inmates of the insti- 
tution. The story of the "Dwellers in the Vale of 
Siddem" is a description of the conditions that were 
found in one section of the state where for several 
generations the descendants of a few families had 
lived and continued to intermarry. Starting with the 
case study of a child in the institution, all living rela- 
tives in the state are visited and interviewed, and 
such people who know the family, doctors, lawyers 
and officials, as are able to give information about 
them. These studies revealed an appalling amount 
of mental deficiency in particular districts of the 
state. Further investigations revealed the family 
connection of several children in the institution who 
were not known to be related. They were from a 
certain valley, where in one county we found such 
numbers of feeble-minded and degenerate people 
that we have selected that section for special investi- 
gation. 
The data have been recorded as received from 
each member of the family who has been interviewed 
together with all additional information that could 
be gathered from people who knew the families. We 
have thus the testimony of a number of people in 
regard to each individual studied. These actual 
9 10 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
facts tell the story. In the making of the charts and 
where it has been necessary to express a judgment, 
we have classified a person as feeble-minded accord- 
ing to these criteria: 
1. "One who is capable of earning a living under 
favorable circumstances, but is incapable, from men- 
tal defect existing from birth or from an early age, 
(a) of competing on equal terms with his normal fel- 
lows; or (b) of managing himself and his affairs 
with ordinary prudence."1 
2. (In so far as practicable we have used the tests 
of intelligence to measure mentality). "An other- 
wise feeble-minded person passing the social test"2 
(that is possessing the ability to maintain existence 
independent of external support) and "A person 
with a mental retardation less than that of feeble- 
mindedness but failing in the social test."3 
We mean, then, by the mentally deficient or fee- 
ble-minded, those people whose mentality has never 
reached the normal level, whose development has 
been progressively retarded or whose approximately 
normal rate of development has been arrested at 
some point prior to the attainment of mental matur- 
ity. The evolution of the mental faculties seems to 
be complete about the age of puberty, sometime be- 
i. Definition suggested by the Royal College of Physicians and 
adopted by the Royal Commission appointed by the English Gov- 
ernment in 1904 to investigate the conditions of feeble-minded- 
ness in the British Isles. 
2. "What Constitutes Feeble-mindedness." F. Kuhlmann, Jour. 
Psych.-As. XIX-4. 
3. Ibid. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
11 
tween the fifteenth and twentieth year. If the rate 
of development has been so much slower than the 
normal rate as to incapacitate the individual for nor- 
mal functioning in his environment or if his normal 
rate of development has been arrested before men- 
tal maturity, we called the resulting condition feeble- 
mindedness. 
And there are people, who though they seem to 
have all the intellectual faculties properly developed, 
yet lack self control; they have no power of inhibi- 
tion; they have no will power; and we have been 
designating them, for lack of a better term, "moral 
defectives." They are the "feebly inhibited" of Dav- 
enport's later classification. And among these dwel- 
lers in the Vale of Siddem are many whom one must 
classify as moral defectives. 
Or "if the recognition of the condition" (feeble- 
mindedness) "has come as a result of some overt act 
of the individual, the latter would be known as a de- 
fective delinquent." 
From the standpoint of eugenic consideration the 
existence of such communities as the Vale of Siddem 
makes our present attempts to care for the feeble- 
minded quite idle. The sources of the apparently in- 
exhaustible supply of mental defectives remain unaf- 
fected. It is like trying to stamp out malaria or yel- 
low fever in the neighborhood of a mosquito breed- 
ing swamp. 
That feeble-mindedness is hereditary is no longer 
open to question. In 65 per cent, of our own cases 12 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
it is directly traceable to hereditary causes. The 
percentage is probably even higher were all the data 
available. Goddard finds 65 per cent, of his cases 
directly traceable to heredity. Tredgold gives 64.5 
per cent, traceable to neuropathic stock. Dr. Lapage 
found that 48.4 per cent, of feeble-minded children 
in the Manchester public schools had a neuropathic 
inheritance, and states that were all details available 
this percentage would undoubtedly be higher. Other 
ratios as high as 75 per cent, have been found in 
some investigations. There remains yet to be de- 
termined, however, the modus operand! of this inher- 
itance. Several investigators, notably Davenport 
and Goddard, have concluded from their data that 
feeble-mindedness follows the course of the Mende- 
lian law. 
Mendel's law applies to what he called "unit 
characteristics." Unit characteristics are such sin- 
gle contrasting traits as, for instance, tallness or 
dwarfness in the pea, or in human beings such traits 
as hair and eye color. If the Mendelian formula can 
be applied to human inheritance and if we assume 
that feeble-mindedness is a recessive trait due to the 
absence of a determiner for normality in the germ 
plasm, then the following possible combinations 
would result: 
Feeble-minded parents would have only feeble- 
minded children. 
A normal parent and a feeble-minded parent 
would have only normal children all of whom would Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
13 
be capable of transmitting feeble-mindedness to their 
offspring. 
In the case of a normal parent capable of trans- 
mitting feeble-mindedness and a feeble-minded par- 
ent, half of the children would be feeble-minded and 
half normal but capable of transmitting feeble-mind- 
edness. 
Normal parents capable of transmitting feeble- 
mindedness would have both feeble-minded and nor- 
mal children in the ratio of one of the former to 
three of the latter. Two out of three of the normal 
children being capable of transmitting feeble-minded- 
ness. 
In the case of normal parents one of whom is 
capable of transmitting feeble-mindedness all of the 
children would be normal but half of them capable of 
transmitting feeble-mindedness. 
Normal parents would have only normal children. 
The small number of offspring in the human fam- 
ily and the consequent limitation of the various pos- 
sible combinations that might occur, makes it very 
difficult to apply this law of Mendel's, which is a law 
of averages, to the human family at all. And then, 
too, it seems improbable that so complicated a thing 
as general intelligence can be considered a unit char- 
acter. Our definition of feeble-mindedness is a shift- 
ing one. A few years ago we did not recognize the 
high grade moron4 as feeble-minded. And as Dr. 
4. "Moron" is a term adopted by the Amer. Assoc, for the 
Study of the Feeble-minded in 1910. It was originally suggested 
by Dr. Goddard and is from the Greek meaning literally, lacking 14 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
Terman says,5 "To regard feeble intelligence as al- 
ways a disease, which, like smallpox, one either does 
or does not have, is a view which is contradicted by 
all we know about the distribution of mental traits. 
It becomes merely a question of the amount 
of intelligence necessary to enable one to get along 
tolerably with his fellows and to keep somewhere in 
sight of them in the thousand and one kinds of com- 
petition in which success depends upon mental ability. 
It is possible that the development of civil- 
ization, with its inevitable increase in the complexity 
of social and industrial life, will raise the standard of 
mental normality higher still." 
In our efforts to determine the biological causes of 
that social inefficiency which we call variously de- 
generacy, criminality and mental deficiency, we have 
made it our own first task to discover the sources and 
habitat of these conditions. We are seeking the facts 
of race development that we may be able, if possible, 
to prevent some of this appalling waste of human en- 
ergy7. It is not the idiot or, to any great extent, the 
in judgment and common sense. It denotes a grade of intelli- 
gence just less than normal. When expressed as a ratio between 
age and mental age, the moron grade of intelligence is that range 
between 50 and 75 per cent. From 25 to 50 per cent constitutes 
the imbecile grade and from o to 25 per cent, the idiot grade. This 
percentage expresses mental development as a constant ratio be- 
tween the development of the individual and the normal rate. 
For example if a twelve year child has a mental age of six years, 
he has attained only fifty per cent of what an average twelve 
year old should have attained. The intelligence quotient, as this 
ratio is called, indicates what Dr. Kuhlmann has called the child's 
"capacity for development." 
5. Terman, L. M. The Standard Revision of the Binet-Simon 
Scale, Educ. Psych. Mon. No. 18. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
15 
lowgrade imbecile, who is dangerous to society. Inhis 
own deplorable condition and its customarily accom- 
panying stigmata, he is sufficiently anti-social to pro- 
tect both himself and society from the results of that 
condition. But from the high grade feeble-minded, 
the morons, are recruited the ne'er-do-wells, who 
lacking the initiative and stick-to-it-iveness of ener- 
gy and ambition, drift from failure to failure, spend- 
ing a winter in the poor house, moving from shack 
to hovel and succeeding only in the reproduction of 
ill-nurtured, ill-kempt gutter brats to carry on the 
family traditions of dirt, disease and degeneracy. 
Such communities as the Vale of Siddem bear elo- 
quent testimony to the futility of trying to cope with 
such social inefficiency from the standpoint of the 
criminologist of holding the individual responsible 
for his misdeeds when he is fundamentally irrespon- 
sible, or from the point of view of the philanthropist 
improving his condition and helping him to help him- 
self when he is fundamentally incapable of self help. 
A laissez faire policy simply allows the social sore to 
spread. And a quassi laissez faire policy wherein we 
allow the defective to commit crime and then inter- 
fere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defec- 
tive the personal liberty to do as he pleases until he 
pleases to descend to a plane of living below the ani- 
mal level and try to care for the few of his descend- 
ants who are so helpless that they can no longer ex- 
ercise that personal liberty to do as they please- 
such a policy produces such communities as the Vale 
of Siddem. DWELLERS IN THE VALE OF SIDDEM DWELLERS IN 
THE VALE OF SIDDEM 
"All the wicked people 
In the Vale of Siddem 
Thought of things they shouldn't do 
And then they went and did 'em." 
NE day when we were looking for the great 
uncles and aunts and cousins and forty-second 
cousins of a very small boy in our institution, we 
came quite unexpectedly upon the Vale of Siddem. 
The things the people in that valley could think of 
that they shouldn't do are equalled only by the things 
they couldn't think of that they should do. And this 
is because so many of them have minds that are so 
curiously twisted that we call them insane, or are so 
lacking in judgment and sense that we call them fee- 
ble-minded, or because they and their fathers before 
them, have for so long lived in degradation utterly 
heedless of moral values and of self help, that they 
seem to have lost the power to live decently, and we 
call them delinquents and degenerates. Among the 
worst of their "sins of commission" is marriage and 
inter-marriage and marriage again. And their chil- 
dren are legion among whom, the traditions of the 
family are not lost. 
In the valley of the Mississippi, a river which is 
one of its tributaries, flows through a land whose 
19 20 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
wild rugged beauty of wooded hills and rocky 
ravines makes it a place fit for the gods but which is 
inhabited instead by "grandchildren of the devil." 
Thickly wooded valleys harboring mysterious caves, 
open into still other wooded valleys, sometimes the 
water course of a little stream tumbling riotously 
along to join the river. Or a little ravine may end 
abruptly, its rocky tree grown sides well nigh inac- 
cessible. The caves of the region have taken on a 
sinister aspect; the dark little ravines have grown 
forbidding; the shadowy forks leading from the 
river valley seem menacing; the region has acquired 
an unsavory fame in all the surrounding country. 
And the dwellers in this Vale of Siddem are known 
to the surrounding country folk variously as "timber 
rats" and "bark eaters." The ravine is luridly known 
as "Dry Run," "Hog Hollow," or "Hell Hole," and 
the old settlers in the county will tell you how, in the 
early days, a group of squatters were driven out of 
New York State for fraudulently settling on Indian 
lands. These people started west, after a general 
fracas with the government officials when they 
threatened to blow up the court house in revenge for 
being driven off from the Indian land. ' The dwellers 
in the hollow are their descendants. The families 
have intermarried and their children and their chil- 
dren's children have for generations lived in little 
shacks and dugouts in the ravine. 
Twenty years ago if a fugitive horse thief could 
reach this region and hide in some cave or wooded ENTRANCE TO ONE OF THE CAVES OF THE REGION Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
21 
gulch of the valley, he was safe from pursuit. Even 
if the sheriff had the hardihood to follow him into 
the ravine "the man was dead who'd seen him." 
Some nuggets of gold were found near the river bed 
and more families moved into the valley. The gold 
was never found in paying quantities and a gaunt row 
of abandoned shacks known as "Smoky Row," 
marks the flurry. A murder was committed; horse 
thieves were traced to the mouth of the ravine and 
the earth swallowed them; counterfeit money was 
circulated; and finally one of the dwellers in the Vale 
was convicted. The hollow was the scene of con- 
tinual feuds and quarrels. But if one of these folk 
had a quarrel with an outsider not a man, woman or 
child in the hollow could be found who knew any- 
thing about it. And for years no one interfered. 
Of late years as the timber has been cleared, the 
conditions in the hollow have somewhat improved. 
A church was built, but that was torn down by the 
inhabitants after the religious fervor of their revival 
subsided. The children still carry open knives to 
school; every little while someone gets slashed in an 
argument and the doctor is called. Dances in the 
hollow are associated with drunken brawls and the 
social ideals of the community may be measured by 
their surroundings. 
Among these people, we have found some of the 
ancestors of our institution children. The stories of 
several families interwoven by marriage, show with 
striking vividness that these folk seek their own kind 22 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
and that whether they live in the secluded fastnesses 
of the ravine or move to the city or to the fertile 
farm lands of the state their condition varies but lit- 
tle and exceptions are notable. They are still per- 
sistent dwellers in the Vale of Siddem. THE LAST OF SMOKY ROW YAKS 
TN 1855 the Yaks, journeying West from New 
A York, with the rest of the crowd who were driv- 
en off from the Indian lands, drifted at length to the 
ravine and most of their descendants have lived in 
the hollow or in the neighborhood ever since. There 
wrere eight of them originally; two of the brothers 
died under thirty years of age and left no progeny; 
the other six, three brothers and three sisters have 
intermarried with the descendants of other squat- 
ters, all people of the ravine, until there exists a 
veritable network of interrelationships. The topo- 
graphical isolation of these people has given rise to 
a curious social life. Many of them are defectives 
and more of them are simply incapable, and they 
are the descendants of others who in similar condi- 
tions have been likewise incapable. To quote Dr. 
Jordan, "in a world of work where clear vision and 
a clear conscience are necessary to life they find them- 
selves without sense of justice, without a capacity of 
mind, without a desire for action." So close are the 
ramifications of these clans that, in spite of the con- 
tinual quarrels, feuds and bickerings among them- 
selves, there is a tribal solidarity that defies justice 
and the interference of the advocates of decency and 
order. 
In the study of the Yaks 641 individuals are in- 
cluded. Of this number 53 feeble-minded, 24 insane, 
23 24 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
io epileptics, 44 grossly immoral and 39 habitual 
alcoholics include the direct descendants and con- 
sorts of the six Yaks, who originally settled in the 
ravine. 
There were Tildy, Lige, Kate, Jo, Delia and Jim? 
Tildy Yak married a Corey and left the ravine. A 
daughter of Tildy's married one of the Tams; in 
this family the prevalence of insanity and epilepsy is 
particularly striking. Of the 79 descendants of Til- 
dy 10 were insane, 15 feeble-minded and 8 epileptic. 
The direct descendants of Jim numbered only 8 
among whom, is one insane person. Lige and Kate 
married into the Sadhun family of the ravine. Their 
descendants number no of whom 11 are feeble- 
minded and 2 are insane. This branch of the fam- 
ily remained in the hollow and added materially to 
its burden of misery. Their moral standards, their 
petty thievery, neglect of decency, carelessness and 
vindictiveness stamp them, even where they are not 
mentally deficient, as thegravest sort of social menace. 
Both Jo and Delia Yak married representatives of 
the Chad clan. Degeneracy is the outstanding char- 
acteristic of this group. Their 205 descendants in- 
clude 14 feeble-minded, 6 convicted criminals and 17 
who were flagrantly immoral. 
In these people of the hollow is "humanity stript 
of its adventitious social trappings." Exposed by 
the candid hand of Gorky, these "ugly cancers of the 
i. It is understood, of course, that all names used throughout 
the story are purely fictitious. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
25 
social system" would not alone "shame the devil" 
but outrage the community. The complacent Amer- 
icanism of us who regard with such patriotic superi- 
ority the evils of London slums and the pauperism 
and organized vice of an efete old world civilization I 
The commonwealth of Minnesota, young and vigor- 
ous, harbors already such nests of social incompe- 
tents, degenerates, defectives and criminals as ex- 
isted in the Juke's ancestral mountain fastnesses. 
Mental deficiency is indigenous to the same soil that 
produces criminality, sex laxity, alcoholism and pau- 
perism. Whatever the relation of cause and effect 
in the matter, the sociological evidence is indisput- 
able. COREYS 
Descendants of Tildy 
T N the days when a horse thief could lose himself 
suddenly and completely in the hollow, the Coreys 
lived and prospered in its wooded defiles. Where 
By Corey came from originally no one knows, but 
his wife, Tildy Yak, came from New York State at 
the time the squatters were driven off from the In- 
dian lands. By was a queer old fellow. Legend 
concedes him insane streaks and the gossips call 
them "Corey spells." To hang a cow bell round his 
neck and run up and down the street to annoy his 
neighbors when the spell was on him, to steal chick- 
ens and run them up and down the streets to hear 
them cackle-these were "Corey spells." By Corey 
and Tildy were a common sight on the street corner 
of the nearest village, each with a chicken secured by 
the leg with a string, and By would swing his about 
his head shouting "I'm crazy, crazy, crazy"-"And 
gosh darned if he wasn't right," affirmed old Caleb 
Sadhun, my informant. "We could a told that any- 
how." The story goes that when he was drafted for 
the Civil War he played on the popular notion that 
he was crazy to avoid military service. Whenever 
his regiment was off duty he would take a string out 
of his pocket, tie it to the end of a stick and sit 
26 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
27 
around wherever he happened to be diligently pre- 
tending to fish. The officers and doctor would come 
by, look at him and shake their heads. Finally he 
was told he had better go home. By lost no time; his 
curt comment to the soldiers, "Boys that was what I 
EXPLANATION OF CHARTS 
The squares indicate males and the circles females. A 
horizontal or oblique line joining a square and a circle in- 
dicates a marriage if a solid line, and illicit sexual relations, 
if it is a broken line. A perpendicular line dropped from a 
line joining a square and a circle indicates descent. Small 
solid black circles indicate still births or miscarriages. A line 
under a symbol indicates institutional care. The hand in- 
dicates patient in the institution from which the study was 
made. The letter N in a square or circle indicates the person 
is known to be normal. F means feeble-minded; Sx. sex- 
ually immoral; A alcholic; T tuberculous; D deaf; I insane 
(with a small s beside it senile dementia); C criminalistic; 
P paralyzed; M migrainous; S syphlitic; W wanderer; and 
d. inf. died in infancy. A short perpendicular line through a 
line indicating marriage signifies separation; two short per- 
pendicular lines divorce, 28 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
was fishing for"-attested a degree of cunning. Af- 
ter his return from "the war," By developed epi- 
lepsy. His last years were spent in a Soldiers' Home 
where he died at the age of eighty years of paralysis. 
The sons and daughters of By Corey were four- 
teen in number. Of these nine were insane, seven 
having been cared for in hospitals and asylums, and 
one was feeble-minded. None of these children has 
remained in the ravine. One of them married a fee- 
ble-minded man from the hollow and remained in 
the neighborhood until she was sent to an insane asy- 
lum. All but two of these children married. Of the 
consorts two were feeble-minded, four are known to 
have been normal, one of the others is presumably 
normal and the mental status of the rest is unknown. 
Of the thirty-four grandchildren one is insane, one 
epileptic, ten are feeble-minded, five died in infancy, 
two are known to be normal, and the mental status 
of the rest is unknown. Among the thirty-nine great 
grandchildren are two feeble-minded and eight who 
died in infancy. 
The principal occupation represented in this group 
is farming; there is, however, one insurance mana- 
ger, one photographer, one bookbinder and one 
teacher, who became insane. These people are scat- 
tered from Minnesota to California and their econo- 
mic status varies from indigence to the moderate 
prosperity of the middle class tradesman. The poor- 
est home was that of the insane women who married 
her feeble-minded cousin from the hollow. She was Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
29 
cared for in an asylum and there were no children. 
The best home is that of the woman who married 
a normal business man of moderate means. .This 
woman developed insanity. One of her children is 
feeble-minded, and one is a university graduate. 
And these are the Coreys who came from "Hog 
Holler at the Crossroads." TAMS 
A I A HE oldest daughter of old By Corey, who lived 
A at the Cross Roads in Hog Hollow, was Roxy 
Anne. Roxy Anne was ambitious; she attended 
school and assayed to teach. But her teaching and 
the sewing, which she took up and the marriage with 
Washington Tam, which later engaged her atten- 
tion, were interrupted by her sojourns at the hospital 
for the insane, whither her spells of mania depres- 
sive insanity carried her. Roxy Anne developed epi- 
lepsy in middle life and her last years were spent in 
an asylum for the insane where the last phase of her 
trouble was a religious mania. 
30 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
31 
The oldest daughter of Roxy Anne and Washing- 
ton Tam is an erratic votary of the muse of science 
and has studied the family, as she says, with a mind 
attuned to the "symphony, precision, and rhetorical 
analogy of psychology." Her garishly furnished 
mind harbors a motley throng of ideas. A paranoiac 
exultation of personality and a certain Malapropish 
use of polysyllabic words make the daughter's ac- 
count of her family and connections grotesquely vivid 
in the light of her psychopathic heredity. Her fath- 
er, Washington Tam, though a day laborer, it seems 
was an averted philosopher. A man "as tranquil as 
the deep sea, he was never excited except over vital 
issues;" he was a "square peg in a round hole." This 
daughter brought her illegitimate son, who began 
life as "an unusually brilliant and precocious child," 
to the school for the feeble-minded because at four 
years of age "a nervous hunger set in which caused 
him to lose his power of speech-aphasia." Her 
scientific study of him revealed to her "that things 
denied him made him resentful and apparently left 
a vacuum, filled with aimless occupations." We have 
found it so 1 
This psychological daughter was one of two chil- 
dren. When a young girl, "young and foolish" as 
she loftily explains, she had an illegitimate child by 
a man of good family whose parents objected to his 
marriage with the daughter of Roxy Anne. This 
child, an idiot, is the one she brought to the institu- 
tion with a note-book full of psychological observa- 32 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
tions on his early precocity. McDane, the father of 
the child, was excessively alcoholic at the time of his 
conception. McDane and his feeble-minded brother 
were the unruly members of a well regulated family. 
The paternal McDanes belong in the class of "re- 
spectable married people with umbrellas" of Stev- 
enson's category. McDane and Sons appeared at 
the store on Monday as religiously as they went to 
church on Sunday. Father was mayor of the town, 
his armour of middle class respectability pierced 
only at one point, the notorious conduct of these two 
sons. But Roxy Anne's daughter married another 
man,-like the Kallikak woman, she didn't object to 
the marriage ceremony when it was attended to for 
her,-and by her husband she has four children. 
These children are not mentally defective and show 
as yet no mental abnormalities though all are ex- 
tremely nervous. The oldest is only seven. The 
father of these children is very alcoholic and syphili- 
tic. 
The other daughter of Roxy Anne and Washing- 
ton Tam is an epileptic, like her mother. Her hus- 
band is alcoholic. Of her five children the youngest 
has not developed normally. 
Washington Tam was one of thirteen children of 
whom five were epileptic and one was insane. Only 
three of his brothers and sisters married and of the 
nine offspring, two are normal. One of these normal 
grandchildren of the Tams married a normal 
woman. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
33 
Old Jeremiah Tam, who was the father of Wash- 
ington and his brother-hood, came to Minnesota 
from Ohio in the days when land was very cheap and 
was able to stock a farm, from which he succeeded 
in making a poor living for his wife and thirteen 
children. The wife was a woman who ruled her 
children by fear, caprice, and a birch rod. Both hus- 
band and children suffered under her insane temper. 
And the parents of Jeremiah, the grandparents of 
Washington Tam, were a notorious pair. Old Gideon 
was a great drunkard and his wife who had been 
crippled by a fall in her youth was an epileptic. She 
had had an illegitimate daughter before her mar- 
riage to Gideon. There were seven epileptics among 
the descendants of this pair. DESCENDANTS OF LIGE YAK 
z I $ O Lige Yak and his wife Leda were born six 
A children. In the sunless gulch, which was their 
home a gaunt shack, one of the old "smoky row," 
still bears testimony to Lige's short lived interest in 
the "gold diggings" of 1855. Lige was never ambi- 
tious. His laziness was proverbial. A stranger 
drove up before the shack that passed for a general 
store and inquired of the solitary lounger for Lige 
Yak. "He-e don't live here no more," he drawled. 
"Moved, has he?" 
"Ya-as he's moved, he's dead." 
Lige's son Ben still lives in the hollow. In the 
34 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
35 
neighborhood, Ben is known as the "Old bear," for 
he lives all alone in a little dingy shanty to go near 
which is the dare of the boldest passing school chil- 
dren, for the demented old man growls at them in 
much the fashion of his namesake. But old Ben is 
shrewd; he never commits himself about affairs in 
the ravine. He boasts of chicken stealing for a liv- 
ing but other things he cunningly forgets. 
Before Belle Marie died it had been the custom of 
this deluded pair to engage their days in the pursuit 
of happiness by way of cards. While the one had 
lost his mind, the other had never had much of any 
to lose; Belle Marie was an "almost." And the two 
would sit day in and day out in their barren shack, 
shuffling the same grimy old deck and dealing the 
cards on an upturned dry goods box that served for 
table, till their numbed fingers and the gauntness of 
hunger at last aroused their dull consciousness to a 
sense of too insistent realities. Thus spurred they 
would get up shivering, go to a neighbor to beg or 
"borrow" enough flour to "make up a bit of some- 
thing," drag in a little fire wood to mend their dying 
fire and then return to their interminable game. The 
children of old Ben and Belle Marie were three 
daughters. Ellie was an "almost" like her mother. She 
was twice married, deserted by her first husband and 
divorced by her second. To each she bore a fee- 
ble-minded son. Nell was brighter than her sister, 
but as the New Englander says, "not over an' above 
bright herself." She was deserted by her husband. 36 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
a second cousin. Nell has thirteen descendants whose 
history has not been fully traced. The third daugh- 
ter, Lillie, was a woman of the streets. She married, 
also, and has had four children. 
Belle Marie had been the Widow Bun before her 
marriage to old Ben. Now Bun was a white man but 
Belle Marie's children were both white and black. 
When Belle Marie died she was buried with much 
pomp and ceremony dear to the heart of her be- 
reaved family, and at the funeral her negro children 
rode in one carriage and her white children in an- 
other. 
The second child of Lige Yak was a daughter who 
married a man of average intelligence and has no 
living children. This woman was very nervous but 
never became unbalanced. 
Two sons of Lige, John and Jesse, married, both 
consorts being women from the ravine, and their 
homes were ordinarily decent but without the ameni- 
ties of education. 
Huldah, the fifth child of Lige, married Caleb 
Sadhun of a family which had been brought up with 
the traditions of the place and its customs. The Sad- 
huns were among the earliest settlers in the hollow. 
But Caleb is a man of normal intelligence. A man 
without education, lacking the initiative to change 
his ancestral condition, he has yet an innate fineness 
of nature quite foreign to the native stock of the hol- 
low. He is now an old man past eighty and he tells 
with the detached view of old age of the people of THE HOME OF BELLE MARIE AND OLD BEN Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
37 
the hollow and their ways. A gentle, white haired, 
old man, he sits most of the day in his old arm chair 
at the sunny window of his little cottage on the out- 
skirts of the ravine and will tell you, if you ask him, 
with rather keen insight and no malice about the folk 
of the hollow and of the early days. Huldah, his 
pitiable little wife, has been for years harmlessly in- 
sane. She will finger you with the curious eagerness 
of a child and will ramble on aimlessly following a 
thread of conversation of which she has caught a 
snatch as you talk with Caleb. And Caleb is alto- 
gether gentle with her and forbearing. 
There were nine children of Caleb and Huldah. 
Four daughters lived to grow up and each married a 
man of the ravine. One of them was feeble-minded 
and never developed normally physically. Her hus- 
band, also, was feeble-minded and a miserable repro- 
bate, alcoholic, sexually immoral and abusive. This 
daughter died shortly after her marriage. Another 
of Caleb's daughters had a daughter who was men- 
tally normal but vicious. She was a thief, was alco- 
holic and a drug addict and a degenerate. This girl, 
married to a feeble-minded man of her mother's 
choosing, left her husband to live with another of 
the same kind. Then left the second for a third, and 
when partially under the influence of the drug to 
which she had become addicted, robbed him, was con- 
victed and sentenced for six years. Paroled, she 
stole money from a sister of her original husband 
with whom she had encamped on leaving the peniten- 38 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
tiary. She has now left the state. Another daugh- 
ter of Caleb's has a daughter who married a mem- 
ber of the notorious Silver Family. Their noisy 
quarrels and midnight brawls often result in knife 
wounds, for the ancestral Silvers were Indians ac- 
customed so to settle their arguments. Then the 
long suffering doctor is called; some one meets him 
with a lantern and he is led back into the woods to 
the shack where he sews up the wounds and is again 
lighted back to the road. And still another of Caleb's 
daughters married one of the Hanks. The cousins 
of her children are mulattoes. 
The other Sadhun-Yak marriage was that of Ezra 
Yak and Nan of the Sadhuns. Poor old Ezra's only 
companions are his horses and a feeble-minded cou- 
sin, Bill Sadhun, with whom he keeps house alone on 
his little farm. Bill, he salvaged from a dugout on 
the hillside beyond the stable lean-to built against 
the side of the ravine and covering the entrance to 
Bill's dugout. Ezra's horses are the more compan- 
ionable and he is a great talker. His wife, Nan, 
"never did stay by" him much. "You jes' never 
knew when you had her." She liked to go off with 
other men but after a month or two would ask to be 
forgiven and allowed to come back, and Ezra was 
"glad to get her back as she took good care of the 
house and was a good cook-good as could be when 
you had her, but you jes' couldn't keep her." Ezra 
is a sort of a philosopher of the soil in his own queer 
way. These descendants of Lige Yak are the aris- Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
39 
tocrats of the family. Ezra's son and heir, accord- 
ing to his father's testimony, is not much of a stu- 
dent. He didn't go far in school, but never-the-less 
can "read fair, write pretty fair, and Agger some!" JIM YAK 
T IM YAK married a woman of the hollow, one of 
the Barts. In the Bart family the prevalence of 
insanity is appalling! Jim's wife was one of five 
brothers and sisters, three of whom were insane. Of 
the fourteen descendants of these five Barts, seven 
are either feeble-minded or insane. 
When the Civil War broke out Jim enlisted but 
never returned. His wife thereupon married and 
went down South to live with her new husband. But 
Bill, her brother-in-law, wanted her, so after the 
death of Bill's wife, he went down South to get 
Philura. Philura deserted her second husband as 
soon as she found out Bill wanted her and together 
40 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
41 
they returned North to the ravine. This time Philura 
didn't trouble about the marriage ceremony as that 
would involve the formality of obtaining a divorce 
from husband number two. Philura, like two of her 
brothers, was mentally unbalanced at times. The 
insanity of the Barts took the form of harmless pecu- 
liarities or mild melancholia. For days sometimes, 
Philura would stay shut up in the house and would 
speak to no one. 
Philura's children numbered six. Five of these 
children are Yaks, daughters of Jim and the sixth is 
the son of Bill, the brother-in-law. The feeble-mind- 
ed daughter, Lib, has been married but has had no 
children. The daughter who became insane married 
a normal man by whom she had two normal sons. 
The other three daughters were bright women. One 
married another of the Yaks, a second married a 
Chad, who is a descendant of Delia Yak and Jake 
Chad, and a third, finding the society of her step- 
father more congenial than her mother had found it, 
left her own husband to live with her mother's de- 
serted second husband. 
The family solidarity of these people is truly re- 
markable. Such marked preference for their own 
people is seldom met with! The man "marries his 
deceased wife's sister" happily ignorant of Carlyle's 
jeremiades; the daughter consoles her mother's dis- 
carded second husband; and other daughters marry 
men of the same name or remotely connected. DESCENDANTS OF KATE YAK 
'TA HERE were six children of Kate Yak and an- 
■*- other of the Sadhuns of the hollow. Four died, 
only one of them leaving any descendants. A fifth, the 
feeble-minded companion of Ezra, the son of Lige, 
married a Corey who was the insane daughter of 
Tildy Yak and By Corey. There were no children. 
The sixth was Vina Sadhun who married a brother 
of the deserted second husband of Philura Yak. 
The descendants of Kate have not been traced 
further. 
42 CHADS-DESCENDANTS OF DELIA 
A | s HE tribe of Chads, who are the descendants of 
A Delia Yak and Jake Chad are scattered from 
the hollow, North as far as counties bordering on 
Canada and in their wake they have left a trail of 
criminals, paupers, and degenerates who will patron- 
ize our county jails, poor houses and houses of pros- 
titution for several generations. 
Jake himself was the Don Juan of the hollow, 
and a sordid tale it is, of this sorry old reprobate and 
his miserable adventures. The legend is that he 
had a wife in every town in which he had sojourned. 
And certain it is that his progeny is legion. He was 
married by process of law three times. Jake was by 
trade a plasterer, by choice a counterfeiter. Indeed 
before coming to dwell in the ravine he had served a 
term in Sing Sing for counterfeiting. While a dwell- 
er in the hollow Jake became involved with the Jin- 
cades in other counterfeiting schemes and escaped ap- 
prehension for his misdeeds, it is said, by enlisting in 
the U. S. Army when rumor connected one of the 
Jincades with counterfeit money which had been 
passed in the neighborhood of the ravine and an ar- 
rest of the younger Jincade followed. But possibly 
Jake could not pass the physical examination (it was 
at the time of the Civil War) or possibly he was dis- 
charged for incompetency, in any event he put in an 
appearance again long before the close of the Civil 
War. 
43 44 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
There were seven children, the offspring of Delia 
Yak and Jake Chad. 
Hal, the son of Jake, was feeble-minded but Lizer 
Anne was a degenerate. Lizer Anne did not marry 
Hal, for Hal was her uncle but she lived with him 
and bore him twelve children than whom a more mis- 
erable abjectly wretched set can scarcely be imagined. 
Five at least of them are feeble-minded. Three of 
these feeble-minded ones married and two have off- 
spring. One, a gambler and thief has been appre- 
hended for his crime and sent to the reformatory. 
The prevalence of sexual laxity among them is a 
foregone conclusion. One can scarcely call them im- 
moral. They are quite unmoral. 
Of Rob and Martha, another son and daughter of Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
45 
Jake, little definite information has been available. 
Martha married and moved out west years ago and 
the family ties of these people are not strong enough 
to withstand the strain of distance and the lapse of 
years. Rob was killed some years ago in a drunken 
brawl, and the village folk say "his family turned out 
very bad" but of his children no trace remains in the 
neighborhood, though, Chads of the same character 
and mental calibre appear in the investigations of 
other neighborhoods not far distant. 
But the record of Doble, the son of Jake, out 
Herods Herod in the sum of abject degeneracy 
among his descendants. Doble married Deborah 
who bore him one daughter. And Deborah's daugh- 
ter lived with her half brother, Dick, who was one of 
Doble's eight children by a second wife. The ille- 
gitimate daughter of Deborah's daughter lived with 
her father's brother and bore him one child. Now 
Deborah was a woman of more intelligence than Do- 
ble. She left Doble and married Vide. But the 
daughter of Deborah and Vide married the feeble- 
minded son of Doble and his second wife ! 
Nic, a son of Sarah, who was a feeble-minded 
daughter of Jake, has been in state prison for burg- 
larizing a post office with a gang from the hollow. 
This man who has offended against the state, against 
chastity, against decency and against reason, is just 
feeble-minded and his son is likewise feeble-minded. 
He has been imprisoned twice for robbery and once 
for indecent assault and is again at large to commit 46 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddetn 
more crimes against society! Society would not so 
treat a boy of his mental capacity, exacting of him 
the penalty for the betrayal of responsibilities which 
he is unable to shoulder and then thrusting him out 
again to undertake the same responsibilities of living 
but with even worse preparation, as punishment has 
made him vindictive and revengeful. 
A brother of Lizer Anne, and grandson of Jake's 
who was always called "Jobey," presumably to miti- 
gate the biblical solemnity of Job, spent seven years 
in state prison after he held up and almost murdered 
a sober homeward bound farmer at a lonely spot in 
the road. Jobey asked for a lift and was accommo- 
dated by the farmer who invited him to a seat be- 
side him. But Jobey preferred the wagon box as he 
was going but a short distance and there was a con- 
venient spade there on the grain sacks. By some 
lucky chance Jobey's blow from the rear didn't kill 
the farmer and Jobey was apprehended at his own 
home with the money, by means of the farmer's 
half delirious babbling of a man in a gray cap, and 
Jobey's gray cap was a familiar feature. Jobey 
passed in the neighborhood for a desperate charac- 
ter but the story doesn't say whether he was brought 
up on the lurid tales of the Jesse James gang; though 
the gang is said to have had a rendezvous in a cave in 
the hollow. A cave, it was, which fairly cried out 
for a robber gang to infest it. Its chief entrance is 
in an open field where a lookout could descry a man 
as far as he could see him with never so much as a Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
47 
stone to cover his approach; its other secret entrance, 
and exit when trouble threatened is, nobody knows 
just where, in the wooded defiles of the ravine. The 
villagers point it out to you with a mingled sense of 
historic pride. But whether Jesse James haunted it 
or not it is no myth that the inhabitants of the ravine 
found it a very convenient means of effecting a quick 
disappearance when the sheriff became too curious. 
Two of the Chads, a son and daughter of Ezra, 
the son of Jake, rose conspicuously above the family 
level by affiliating their interests with the church. 
The son became an adventist minister and the daugh- 
ter married a man of the same persuasion. The 
other sons and daughters of Ezra were not vicious 
nor were they given over to bad practices of any 
sort, living for the most part in farming communities 
where they followed their occupations without con- 
spicuous success or conspicuous failure. DESCENDANTS OF JO YAK AND LOU 
CHAD 
T O Yak also married a Chad. Lou is variously de- 
scribed as "the meanest woman that ever 
breathed," "the devil's granddaughter" and other 
titles which bear eloquent testimony to her evidently 
ungentle character. Poor old Jo met his end by 
drowning while he was crossing the lake in a row 
boat in company with his wife, Lou. Lou was one 
of the many daughters of Old Jake. She was indeed 
her father's own daughter. Lou wanted another man 
and it is supposed she took this convenient way of 
disposing of husband number one. 
The two daughters of Jo and Lou have lived in 
48 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
49 
the ravine and their children and their children's 
children. In them the vicious practices of the Chads 
are continued without alleviation. The elder, Mag- 
gie, is a feeble-minded woman of the moron type. 
Maggie has outlived two husbands and is now so- 
journing with her third, to whom her former hus- 
band sold her for a shotgun. Maggie's stupid grand- 
daughter was the passive victim of the vicious prac- 
tices of her five cousins, sons of Maggie's younger 
sister. These five sons live with their mother in a 
miserable little shack, in the woods near the ravine. 
The mother and sons all occupy the same bed room, 
sleeping on filthy rags on the floor. Their dull cou- 
sin had come to help with the so-called "housework" 
of the shack. The son of one of the men paid the 
jail penalty for the vicious conduct of the five. THE HOUSEHOLD OF THE GLADES 
IX/TAKING your precarious way down the steep 
sides of the ravine, expecting momentarily to 
meet destruction around the next turn in the road, 
you find yourself shortly in the very heart of the 
hollow. The few widely scattered shacks evince few 
signs of life. Occasionally a ragged child stands 
staring to watch you pass and sometimes a slattern 
woman watches you listlessly from the doorway of 
her home or some curious one shows a very lively 
interest in your course as you drive on along the 
river deeper into the heart of the ravine. At length 
you arrive at the crossroads. The right fork, which 
you follow leads you into one of the thickly wooded 
gullies that join the hollow. Deeper and deeper you 
penetrate into its wooded fastnesses. There are no 
more huts, no ragged children or barking cur dogs. 
You reach a footpath through the woods. Here 
you must leave your team and pick your way along 
the little used path wdiich leads you finally into a 
ravine beyond, which is so shut in by dense woods 
and hills as to be inaccessible except by the way you 
have come. 
In this ravine, where the sun shines only four 
hours in the middle of the day, lived the Glades. 
Their home was a deserted log hut whose unchinked 
crevices allowed the winter winds clear sweep, and 
50 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
51 
bitter cold it was when a Minnesota blizzard howled 
down the gulch. Later they were found living in a 
dugout in the hillside, the entrance boarded loosely 
and the doorway hung with old carpet. 
An infrequent winter visit of a neighbor revealed 
the children bare-foot in mid-winter clothed in a sin- 
gle calico garment. Summer solved for them the 
problem of clothes; the dress was kept for whatever 
school attendance was compelled and for the rest, 
they went naked. On the rare occasion when a 
stranger put in an appearance, the children wild as 
hares, ran for cover. On one such occasion the place 
seemed quite deserted when presently a shock of 
sunburnt hair popped curiously from behind the door 
of the shed. The stranger was persuasive and lured 
by sweet meats, shortly a small brown body appeared 
clad in a hastily donned gunny sack. 
The parent Glades were a "do-less" pair. The 
father was as little inclined to provide for his off- 
spring as the mother was to utilize what was pro- 
vided. On one occasion the clothes, which had been 
furnished and made by some charitably inclined wo- 
man from the town in the vicinity, were found, rain 
soaked and muddy, back of the cabin where the 
mother had thrown them rather than wash them. 
Serenus Glade, the father, spent most of his active 
time "shanging." The people of the ravine pride 
themselves, and it is their only known source of pride, 
on their knowledge of herbs. This knowledge of 
herbs was presumably acquired from the Indians, 52 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
with whom some of the dwellers in the hollow inter- 
married. "Shanging" in native parlance, means 
gathering ginseng which they brew for remedies. 
But Serenus was not over-ambitious even about 
"shanging" as most of his time was taken up with 
smoking; seated on the overturned soap box by the 
back door of the cabin, it was his steadiest occupa- 
tion. Any money that came into his hands, Serenus 
invested in alcoholic beverages for his health. There 
is a court record, in proof of the contention that he 
worked for a living, that he once helped a man husk 
corn for two days. 
Delilah the wife, is a daughter of the Cams of 
the ravine, a woman of excitable temper, loves her 
bottle, and when over excited and nervous is subject 
to mild epileptic attacks which the children call 
"throwing a fit when she gets mad." 
The eleven children born of this union are all liv- 
ing except the two youngest who died before they 
had had time to become acclimated to the life of cold, 
starvation, and blows upon which the others seemed 
to thrive. With the exception of one all of these 
children have functioned as feeble-minded.1 
i. This is one of the very few instances where we have found 
an apparently normal individual the offspring of feeble-minded 
parents. The boy in question gives every evidence of normal 
mental ability, his school record is excellent, his social reactions 
normal and his traits seem to be abnormal in no respect. Since 
the sexual morality of the mother is very much open to question 
the reputed father may not be the real father. The mother is 
now living in open adultery with a feeble-minded man and it is 
not improbable that the father of the normal boy was a normal 
man. THE RUINS OF THE OLD LOG CABIN THAT SHELTERED THE 
HOUSEHOLD OF THE GLADES Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
53 
The eldest daughter, Eilie, feeble-minded and 
tuberculous, married an "herb doctor." Eilie and 
her husband are both morons and the "professional" 
character of the husband's o.cupation, selling herbs 
to the ingenuous natives oi the hollow, lends an air 
of condescension to Eilie's social intercourse with her 
relatives of inferior social strata. There are three 
children not yet of school age-the "potentially fee- 
ble-minded" of Goddard. 
Annie Glade married a typical scion of the Chad 
family. He has always been able to make a sort 
The other instance (occuring on Chart IX) is that of a normal 
man the son of feeble-minded parents. In this case the indi- 
vidual in question is a man of fifty who owns a store and has 
made a decent living for his wife and ten children all of whom 
are of average mentality. The evidence for the feeble-minded- 
ness of the parents of this man seems indisputable. The mother 
was, in this case also, however, notoriously immoral. 54 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
of a living for himself and his feeble-minded wife 
working under direction as a farm hand. And, as he 
is a dull rather faithful worker he has never been a 
troublesome member of society except once when he 
tried to steal oats and was attacked by a woman with 
a pitchfork. There are no children. 
Mike has, until recently, been working as a farm 
helper. Mike, also of weak mentality, did not marry. 
He, too, is tuberculous and is now in a county sana- 
torium. 
Five younger children, when the home was broken 
up, were committed to an institution whence, two of 
them were later transferred to the Minnesota institu- 
tion for the feeble-minded. These two feeble-mind- 
ed sisters, Rita and Maggie both pretty girls of the 
moron type, were taken, against the urgent protest of 
the superintendent, from the institution by a well- 
meaning relative, sponsored by a minister who prom- 
ised to be responsible for them. The extent of that 
responsibility may be judged from the results. 
Rita is married. Her husband is Bill Hemp, the 
feeble-minded son of Hank Hemp and a feeble-mind- 
ed woman. Hank was feeble-minded. He and the 
woman cared for nothing except something to eat 
and a place to loaf. Bill has a feeble-minded twin 
brother also married. Bill's former wife was a fee- 
ble-minded prostitute, who, while living with Bill 
gave birth to a feeble-minded daughter who doesn't 
belong to Bill. This feeble-minded daughter is now 
living with the son of old Rob Jincade the counter- Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
55 
feiter of the ravine, a worthless degenerate wretch. 
Bill has a feeble-minded uncle whose wife died at 
the poor farm of the county a number of years ago. 
Danny a son of this man's works around for the 
farmers in the neighborhood of the ravine, his labor 
bought with the promise of "a nice woman for 
Danny." It is Danny's one ambition to get married 
but the women of the ravine won't have poor simple 
minded Danny. This is Bill's family, citizen of Hog 
Hollow. When Bill married Rita he took her home 
to live with his former wife and Rita "got mad and 
left him." She is now a prostitute. 
There is Maggie. For awhile, she worked in 
cheap restaurants. Then she married, not however 
a citizen of the hollow, but a feeble-minded man like 
herself. On the night of her wedding there was a 
family celebration. The groom and his friends be- 
came so intoxicated that they were dumped uncon- 
scious on the only bed the establishment furnished 
and the bride and her relatives slept on the littered 
floor. 
Another daughter of the household of Serenus 
and Delilah was the victim of her vicious adopted 
father. The man is serving a penitentiary sentence 
for the crime. The younger children with one ex- 
ception are slow in school and show the characteris- 
tics of mental deficiency. One child of the eleven is 
normal in every way. 
Serenus finally succumbed to tuberculosis and 
Delilah took up her abode with Jake Rat, the wife 56 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
and one child of the not over-ambitious Jake having 
deserted him for non-support. Jake and Delilah 
live at the expense of the parents of Jake whose 
father draws a small pension and on which the whole 
family subsists. Jake's drunkenness and disorderly 
conduct landed him in jail for a sojourn of from ten 
to thirty days, four times within a twelve-month. 
The Glades have been, for the four generations of 
which we have knowledge, people of the ravine. 
Among those who have remained in the vicinity of 
the hollow eight are feeble-minded. The fraternity 
of Serenus consisted of thirteen brothers and sisters 
and Serenus senior was feeble-minded. The maternal 
progenitor of Serenus Glade and his twelve brothers 
and sisters is intricately related to our ravine friends 
the Sadhuns, the Jincades and the Yaks. They are 
steeped in the traditions of the hollow. A brother 
and one sister of Serenus are known to have been 
feeble-minded, the brother lives alone in a miserable 
little shack in the hollow made of sheet iron and 
boards. This brother is an insatiable drinker. His 
poverty is his greatest blessing as he cannot always 
command the price of a drink. The feeble-minded 
sister, Mattie, married a shiftless brother of Jobey 
and Lizer Anne. Their children are all mentally 
slow. One sister, however, is a bright capable wo- 
man; her home is comfortably furnished and well 
kept; her husband is a successful farmer; and her 
children are normal attractive youngsters. Anoth- 
er sister married a full-blooded Indian and bore him Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
57 
seventeen children. One other of normal mentality 
married a man of the hollow also normal, a man who 
owns a small farm in the ravine. The son is rather 
erratic but a fairly industrious fellow, a carpenter by 
trade. The others are average people. 
The Cams were the ancestors of our Glade house- 
hold on the maternal side. Delilah, originally wife 
of Serenus and later consort of Jake Rat mother of 
children for the most part feeble-minded, was one of 
nine children. Of these seven were feeble-minded, 
the offspring of an epiliptic, feeble-minded father 
and an immoral mother. These children are the fol- 
lowing: 
i. Cally Cam is a slovenly woman whose home 
bears witness to her total unfitness for the responsi- 
bilities of parenthood. When she married she moved 
away from the ravine but her paternal home in the 58 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
hollow was not dirtier or more carelessly kept than 
her own in a city removed by the width of the state 
from her old environment. The husband is not so 
incompetent as his feeble-minded wife but he is not 
a man of normal mental ability. The visits of the 
school nurse to this home reveal the futility of the 
feeble-minded mother in coping with her responsi- 
bilities. A six year old child with a severe cold was 
barefoot in mid winter because his mother "can't 
make him wear shoes when he doesn't want to." 
2. The children of Robert Cam and his feeble- 
minded wife were taken from them and placed in 
orphanages. Dick proved to be feeble-minded, 
one boy has been lost track of and a third was 
brought before the court for neglect and ill treat- 
ment. He was found to be covered with sores. His 
testimony was eloquent of the neglect of his step- 
mother. "My aunt Cally gave me a bath last fourth 
of July and dad gave me one when school began, 
and I guess I ain't had any since." The step-mother 
too is feeble-minded, and now there are two children 
born to her. 
3. Dell Cam by a woman of average mentality 
had ten children who are mentally "up to par." 
4. Another brother, William, just manages to eke 
out a miserable existence on a little farm in the 
ravine. His wife is feeble-minded of feeble-minded 
stock and he has an imbecile child who is crippled. 
5. Lon and his fourteen year old wife used to live 
in the ravine, but poor feeble-minded Lon could not THE HOME OF BECK, THE MULATTO Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
59 
long satisfy the lurid fancy of his wife and she went 
to live with another gentleman friend of hers. After 
three years she moved again. Then she became a 
professional prostitute and later was arrested and 
convicted for burglary. 
6. Beck, the last sister with whom our story deals, 
was a mulatto. Her father was "Nigger Ned" who 
used to hang around the ravine. Beck's husband is 
Al Harder, a worthless cruel brute. Her children 
show their negro heritage. The oldest boy is an im- 
becile with very vicious tendencies. He will steal 
whenever the opportunity offers, carries a revolver 
to school and threatens the teacher and will draw a 
knife like a flash in a quarrel. The little girl is a nor- 
mal child and exhibits none of the vicious tendencies 
of her brother and the other boy is an average child. 
The maternal grandparents of the household of 
the Glades continue the same dull tale. Old Ik, the 
father of Delilah, was feeble-minded and an epilep- 
tic. So, too, was old Dell her mother. Old Dell had 
a passion for jewelry and whenever her husband's 
pension came she would invest it in tawdry laces and 
cheap jewelry. Ik had a brother, "Uncle Ned" every- 
body called him. Uncle Ned was a benevolent old 
soul whose idea of bliss was a pipe and a bottle and 
no work to do for eons and eons. Uncle Ned had 
tried two matrimonial ventures. Mary, the first 
wife, was a normal woman so far as we can learn. 
She died of tuberculosis after having given birth to 
five children. Then Uncle Ned took unto himself 60 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
another wife, this time however his helpmate was a 
feeble-minded woman of his own stamp. The four 
children of his second wife were all feeble-minded. 
Of the five children of the first wife only one was 
feeble-minded and one insane. Ry, the eldest was a 
gambler. He was very ugly and neglected and 
abused his wife, later he became insane. His wife 
was a bright woman and his daughter became a 
school teacher. Len was a great drunkard, married a 
feeble-minded woman, the illegitimate child of name- 
less parents. Len deserted her for her fairer cousin 
who ran away from some other man to join Len. Two 
of the childrenwere epileptics also a grandchild. Two 
daughters of Uncle Ned had normal children and a 
feeble-minded daughter had two feeble-minded chil- 
dren. The three sons and one daughter of Maria 
Bride, Uncle Ned's second wife, are all feeble-mind- 
ed and three of the six surviving grandchildren are 
likewise feeble-minded. 
Is it to be wondered at that the household of the 
Glades are dwellers in the Vale of Siddem? LITTLE TOMMY 
T ITTLE TOMMY is the son of Old Moose Sil- 
■^ver, the half-breed, and is known to fame as the 
desperado of the hollow. In the very heart of the 
hollow on one side the river, on the other the sheer 
wall of the ravine, lives old Moose Silver in the little 
one room log cabin where Little Tommy and his 
seven brothers and sisters were born and raised, or 
rather allowed to come up. 
Surrounded by his children who have built little 
shacks in or near the ravine, old Moose lives now as 
he has lived for fifty years drinking when he can get 
anything to drink-and whiskey always maddens the 
old man-stealing wood, grain and chickens from 
61 62 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
the more prosperous farms in the neighborhood and 
enlivening the monotony of existence by disputes 
with his sons and daughters which frequently take 
the form of physical violence. Father, one son, the 
son's wife and a troop of ragged children journeyed 
into the village in their old ramshackle wagon one 
day and we arrived simultaneously at the door of 
the sheriff, Pete with a black eye and a pocket full 
of hair which had been extracted the night before in 
an argument with his brother and Pete's wife. Later 
I saw Pete's wife a dejected sodden creature with a 
bedraggled child hanging on her skirts, waiting for 
old Moose and Pete who were fortifying themselves 
at the corner saloon. 
Moose Silver is a picturesque old fellow, his griz- 
zled hair straight and harsh, his large nose and high 
cheek bones bear testimony to his Indian origin. 
Moose never could stick at a job. He hired out to 
the farmers in the vicinity but was a firm believer in 
conserving his energies when the farmer's back was 
turned. He has always lived in abject poverty and 
when not intoxicated is rather stupid and sluggish. 
Moose combines the worst elements in both races, 
the cruelty and vindictiveness of the Indian with the 
vice and degeneracy of the white man. Moreover, 
he is mentally deficient. Years ago he had a violent 
quarrel with his brother-in-law. The day after the 
quarrel, the brother-in-law, forgetting all about their 
differences, went hunting with Moose. The broth- 
er-in-law never came back. When later the body of OLD MOOSE SILVER'S CABIN Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
63 
the brother-in-law was found with a bullet hole 
through the back and Moose was accused of shoot- 
ing him, he stoutly affirmed it was an accident and 
pretended to go insane through grief. He was tried 
but was not convicted. 
But none was so daring and none so clever as Lit- 
tle Tommy. He has served prison sentences in Iowa, 
Kansas, Missouri and Minnesota. Three times has 
he been convicted of larceny and once of bigamy. Of 
the eighteen years Little Tommy was out of the state, 
he served twelve years in some prison or other. Lit- 
tle Tommy is not more immoral than the rest but he 
did things on a more daring scale. Instead of chick- 
en thieving, he indulged in horse stealing; instead of 
one wife at a time he had three; instead of county 
jail and work house sentences he served his terms in 
the penitentiary. With the sheriff on the watch for 
him and several indictments hanging over his head, 
Little Tommy frequently returns to the hollow and 
the utmost vigilance fails to trap him now. Night 
after night the sheriff has watched for him driving 
from a town lower down the river and after night- 
fall, hitching his horse in the woods, watched the 
mouth of the ravine for Little Tommy to slip down 
the river. He has sometimes been hiding for weeks 
in the caves of the hollow and then has mysteriously 
dropped out of existence. Once in the sheriff's ab- 
sence, he made his escape from the county jail by 
throwing a lamp at the head of the sheriff's wife 
when she cameto give him his supper, and chokingher 64 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
into insensibility, fled. They are all a little proud of 
Little Tommy and more than a little afraid of him. 
Little Tommy has not been seen around the hol- 
low for a number of years, and the people of the 
ravine say that he and Dut Jincade are bold, bad 
"hold-up men out west." They were, indeed, impli- 
cated in a train robbery in Montana but they some- 
how escaped conviction. The memory of Little 
Tommy's exploits is still rife in the minds of the 
people of the hollow. 
With the exception of Jerry all of the rest of the 
sons and daughters of old Moose, have remained in 
the ravine. Jerry went out west and has not been 
heard from for many years. 
Hal Silver married a descendant of the Sadhuns, 
a feeble-minded woman. Their home is in the 
ravine. Hal drinks and carouses with the rest of the 
family. He and Pete and old Moose are the cronies 
of the Jincades and the Chads, though the Silvers are 
the most quarrelsome and frequently "fall out with" 
all their friends. 
Jennie Silver, sister of Little Tommy, a woman 
of the moron type, and her quarrelsome spouse live 
in the vicinity of the hollow. Jennie is very lax in her 
morals and her husband is a drunkard. Jennie's hus- 
band's mother was a half-sister of Jennie's father. 
Maida Silver married a normal man but not until 
she had already given birth to two children whose 
fathers were men of the hollow. One child, a fee- 
ble-minded boy, belonged to one of the younger Sad- Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
65 
huns, the other who is on the borderline between 
feeble-mindedness and normality belongs to a man 
intermarried with the family. Maida is a moron her- 
self and one of her children, by her husband, is a boy 
whose vicious tendencies are already apparent and 
he is now only a school boy. The little girl of this 
union is a normal child. 
The other two sisters "went wrong" when young 
but have since "married and settled down." The 
husbands are both men of the ravine. One family 
has remained in the vicinity of the ravine and has 
done fairly well. The farm is ordinarily prosperous, 
the children are in school and are doing average 
work. The other family has left the neighborhood. 
Little Tommy's brother, Pete, lives about a stone's 
throw from the cabin of old Moose in a little tumble- 
down shack, poor shelter for cattle. Pete it was, 
who won the affections of the fifteen year old wife of 
Lon Cam. She left Pete with two children and then 
Pete married his feeble-minded cousin, Mamie Rat, 
daughter of Muskrat Charlie and niece of Jake Rat 
whose consort was Delilah of the Household of the 
Glades. Pete is feeble-minded. 
The family of Pete's wife can almost equal Pete's 
in point of social inefficiency. In a fraternity of nine 
of whom Mamie's father was one, the three living 
brothers are all feeble-minded. Mamie's paternal 
grandmother was a twin sister of Moose Silver. And 
Mamie's father was Muskrat Charlie, her mother 
Lizzie Redky whose ancestors came to the hollow in 66 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
the early days. Both parents were feeble-minded but 
the mother was the "better man" of the two. It was 
the custom of this family to live on a rented farm as 
long as the owner could tolerate them, and then 
move on to the next. At the time of our story they 
are tarrying awhile at a "farm" consisting of unim- 
Cto't IT Ja<« K«t 
proved land,-land covered with stumps and under- 
growth which Lizzie and the children are grubbing 
in the hope of raising a patch of corn. The stress 
of a regular occupation is too much for the unstable 
constitution of Muskrat Charlie and if he labors for 
two or three days, he has to stop and go "on a 
drunk" for a couple of days to "rest up." At one 
time when money was unusually scarce he sold the 
cow and invested the proceeds in whiskey. 
There were eleven children in this household, 
Mamie and ten brothers and sisters of whom three THE HOME OF THE RATS Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
67 
died shortly after birth and the rest are feeble-mind- 
ed. Two of the older girls are married and estab- 
lished in other households of that ilk. 
Little Tommy and his family are the kind of citi- 
zens that the stock and the conditions of the Vale of 
Siddem produce. They combine all the vice and the 
only virtue-if a rather picturesque indigence can be 
called a virtue-of the ravine dwellers. THE COUNTERFEITERS 
A BOUT twenty years ago counterfeit money be- 
1 ^gan to be circulated in the vicinity of the ravine. 
Suspicion at once fastened on the dwellers in the Vale 
of Siddem and, shortly, arrests followed. Three 
brothers were suspected. The Jincades, Rob, Dut 
and Lem, were a rough set, brawlers, hard drinkers 
and as untrustworthy as any in the hollow. Rumor 
connects them with almost every disorderly occur- 
rence in the neighborhood. 
Rob Jincade was a giant of a man and as quarrel- 
some as a cross grizzly. His voice rumbled along 
like the thunder which so often reverberated through 
the little winding valleys of the ravine. Technically 
he kept a general store in the hollow but the energies 
of Rob were not by any means confined to store-keep- 
ing, even though store-keeping in the hollow was not 
the easy-going country store variety with its cracker- 
box philosophers and its wood-stove politicians. In- 
deed any certified resident of the hollow knew that 
Rob's "back-room" was a short cut to the saloon just 
beyond in the village. Raw alcohol and corn whis- 
key, the popular beverages of the hollow, were kept 
for the convenience of his customers and friends. 
Once Rob and one of his "pals" "filled up" a sixteen 
year old boy with alcohol. Thinking the unconscious 
boy was dead, Rob and his cronies carried him out 
68 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
69 
into a field and buried him under a hay stack. Fortu- 
nately they were seen by a farmer out looking for his 
cattle, the boy was pulled out and resuscitated but 
Rob escaped punishment. 
Yet sometimes justice is swift in the hollow. Rob 
was caught stealing flour in the house of neighbor 
Chad. Rob was arrested and brought before the 
county court on the charge. But with fine contempt 
for our clumsy methods of meting out justice the ac- 
cuser sent his wife, while his trial was in progress, to 
retaliate by stealing corn from Rob. 
In Rob's old store were carried out the counter- 
feiting schemes of the Jincades. Neither Rob nor 
his brother was clever enough to escape detection, 
but somehow or other, whether through his colossal 
stupidity or through the fear that his brawling man- 
ners seemed to inspire, Rob always escaped and only 
Dut was convicted and served a term in the peniten- 
tiary for the crime. Rob lived and died in the ravine 
and Dut, after having served his penitentiary sen- 
tence, went farther west and has accumulated prop- 
erty. 
There were eight of the Jincades originally, two 
sisters and six brothers. Since Rob's death almost a 
year ago, only two are left in the ravine. Lem man- 
ages to make a living at farming his little strip of 
ravine land. His wife, a Sadhun of the Sadhun 
tribe who originally settled the ravine, and four re- 
maining offspring constitute the household of Lem. 
Lem himself is very alcoholic and his sons are like 70 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
their father but the daughter is a bright capable girl. 
Lem is the most desirable member of the family. 
Emmy, the other Jincade remaining in the hollow has 
always been regarded by the other members of her 
family as "rather simple" but it does not appear that 
she is feeble-minded. Emmy's husband is "the 
Squire." Two of Emmy's daughters have married 
and done well; one remained in the neighborhood of 
the hollow but moved out of the valley itself. An- 
other daughter was driven out of the town to which 
she had moved after her marriage, for disorderly 
conduct and has returned to her parents. The son's 
wife, another Sadhun woman, and daughter are pros- 
titutes, and the son himself is a good for nothing fel- 
low who cannot be trusted in any way. 
It is regrettable that we have no means of knowing 
what sort of people the other members of the Jin- 
cade fraternity have become in their new environ- 
ment. 
Rob appears to have been a feeble-minded man. 
His large frame and blustering ways,-he had the 
strength of an ox,-were yoked with the judgment of 
an immature boy. He was twice married. The first 
wife was divorced and had dropped out of existence 
before the story began for us. No one has been 
found who could bear accurate testimony as to her 
mental status. There were two sons. One was an 
idiot and suffered from epilepsy. His limbs were 
paralyzed and he walked with his hands dragging the 
helpless body. He was an inmate of our institution. Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
71 
The other son is a degenerate wretch. Rob's second 
wife was a feeble-minded woman who had a feeble- 
minded son by a former husband when she married 
Rob. The second wife has a feeble-minded sister 
who is the mother of another child in our institution. 
And there is Dut. He was a horse thief when he 
lived in the hollow. Rumor connects him with the 
murder of an old man of the hollow but no proof 
could be found sufficient to convict him. Yet his old 
neighbor, now that Dut has left the country, "knows 
he did it." Dut has a wife and several children and 
since he has completed his term in the penitentiary 
for the counterfeiting, he has left the state and be- 
come well-to-do. Dut unlike his brother, Rob, is a 
shrewd scoundrel but for all that was not so fortm 
nate in escaping the consequences of his misdeeds. THE DOCTOR'S STORY 
qp\ HE Hollow? Well I should think I did know 
x those people. Bark eaters, we used to callthem 
and the timber rats!" The Doctor's professional air 
vanished as he dropped into his office chair and lean- 
ing back, grinned reminiscently. 
"I was a kid just out of college then. Happened 
to go into practice in the village of N about 
five miles from the hollow, and used to go down 
there to sew up their cuts. Many a time I've been 
down there in the night. They used to have their 
rows and cut each other up. They'd meet me with a 
lantern and conduct me through the woods and when 
I was through escort me back to the roadway. But 
just let me tell you once I nearly got caught." 
The Doctor had forgotten all about his long line 
of waiting patients and was again revelling in the 
boy's spirit of adventure. 
"One night I was returning from a long drive to 
see a patient some miles beyond the ravine. It was 
very cold, the snow was drifted deep in the hollows 
but it was late and we had driven about forty miles 
that day and the road through the ravine made the 
journey back to the village several miles shorter than 
going around by the prairie. We decided to take it. 
My driver was cold and the horses tired out after 
their long day's trip. I slipped my revolver into one 
of the fur mittens that I wore. 
72 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
73 
"Everything was quiet in the hollow. The occa- 
sional shacks looked lifeless and only the trees and 
clumps of dead underbrush cast weird shadows 
across the snow in the moonlight. We had passed 
the Gold Diggings and Smoky Row when suddenly 
from a road joining the ravine we were hailed by a 
couple of men driving the inevitable jaded old horse 
and familiar tumble down box on runners which was 
the winter conveyance of the timber rat. 
" 'That you Doc?' One of the men called. 'Woman 
awful sick up here at the forks, we were goin' in to 
get yuh.' 
" 'It's Doc all right' I assured them, 'but I'm not 
going up to the forks tonight for any sick woman. 
My horses are tired and I've driven forty miles to- 
day. Not on your life am I going to the forks to- 
night.' 
"But the woman was 'suffering terrible' they in- 
sisted and maybe wouldn't live till morning. They 
would take me with their own horse and bring me 
clear into town so my horses needn't make the trip. 
"Well-I went. Climbed into their old junk boat 
and started up the steep narrow gulch that leads to 
the forks. I didn't like the looks of things; the men 
were surly and kept muttering together in under- 
tones. I took care to keep behind the fellows who 
were seated on a board laid crosswise on the box for 
a driver's seat. They had been drinking just enough 
to make them ugly. 
"Afraid? Hum, not of those rats. I used to be 74 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
something of an athlete in college and-well I wasn't 
afraid." 
And I could well believe he was not afraid. A 
man of about forty, he is now, cleancut and vigorous, 
with a closely knit frame, clear gray eyes and a firm 
mouth and chin. No, the Doctor was not a man to 
fear timber rats. 
"They were not intending that I should go back 
to the village. They stopped at a narrow point in 
the trail but drove on again at my sharp command. 
Finally we reached the cabin. It was a God-forsaken 
spot where the gully forks, one branch ending in a 
sharp inaccessible wall, the other winding out toward 
the prairie. It was then about midnight. The cabin 
was a story and a half shack built partly into the hill 
and surrounded by gaunt trees. 
"I entered. The shack was the scene of a brawl- 
ing swearing crowd, about a dozen of them, I should 
say, drinking and gambling in the flare of two or 
three smoky lanterns hung from the grimy beams. 
The sick woman was in the loft above as her occa- 
sional moans directed. I scaled the ladder nailed 
against the side wall of the shack with one hand on 
my revolver and my back to the ladder. After tend- 
ing the woman I descended in the same way. Then 
the fun began. They had no idea of taking me back. 
In fact, they assured me, they had only brought me 
out there to kill me. You see, I knew too much 
about them and besides they owed me a good many Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
75 
bad bills. Well, I backed into a corner and invited 
them to come on. . 
"Afraid of that crew? I should say not. They 
are abject cowards every one of them. There is a 
yellow streak in all of them. Some of the bunch I 
knew, Old Rob Jincade and one of the Sadhuns. 
Young Jim Silver was among them and Muskrat 
Charlie. They're all sneaks and don't dare attack 
a man except from the rear. 
"Remember Jobey? He was one of the Chad 
tribe who robbed and almost killed a farmer as he 
was driving home after selling his grain. But Little 
Tommy-he was the son of old Moose Silver, the 
half-breed-was the only real desperado of the hol- 
low. The rest are a lot of defectives and degener- 
ates. Those people didn't know the meaning of 
morality. They lived with each other's wives and 
stole anything they could lay their hands on. Did 
you ever hear about that fellow one of the Chads, I 
think, who traded his wife for a shot gun? He said 
'the other fellow would a got her anyhow' and he 
was a shot gun ahead. I don't think you could find 
another section in the country to compare with that. 
"Did I get home that night? You bet, I did. They 
hitched up their old raw bones and landed me safe in 
town before daylight I" THE COST 
TT would be well nigh impossible to estimate how 
Amuch these dwellers in the Vale of Siddem have 
cost the commonwealth in toll of human misery. 
Moral obliquity, pauperism and vice, and the dead- 
ening social burden of deficiency and dementia have 
been their chief contribution to the life of the times 
and to posterity. 
Of the sixteen hundred individuals who have been 
charted as inhabitants of the hollow or their de- 
scendants in other parts of the state, sixteen per cent, 
have been mental variants, epileptic, insane, or fee- 
ble-minded. Moreover these sixteen hundred indi- 
viduals include only people of American ancestry. 
This is particularly striking as it indicates their fam- 
ily solidarity in a part of the state where the popula- 
tion is to a certain extent made up of foreign ele- 
ments. 
The ethical standards of this group are such that 
one can scarcely measure their behavior in terms of 
ordinary social values. One hundred and twenty- 
five have been classified as sexually immoral. This 
includes only prostitutes and those whose illicit rela- 
tionships were flagrant. The fifteen classified as 
criminals have, for the most part, been guilty of 
some felony. Misdemeanors, for which the offender 
received only a jail sentence or which more often 
76 Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
77 
passed unnoticed, have not been included. The ar- 
rests of ravine inhabitants recorded in the court 
house of the county between 1895 and 1917 are for 
the following offenses: 
Larceny, 35% Arson, 6% 
Rape, 33% Forgery, 3% 
Assault and battery, 20% Drunkenness, 3% 
It is a significant commentary on our social order that 
it is the offenses against property which are prosecut- 
ed though the actual occurrence of such crimes is less 
frequent than offenses against persons. Arson is a 
crime very infrequently committed as also forgery, 
the latter probably because of the inferior mental 
status of the group in general, but that only three 
per cent, of the arrests are for drunkenness indicates 
that the condition is so common as to escape drastic 
action. One hundred and thirty-four of the inhabi- 
tants are classified as habitual alcoholics and by "al- 
coholic" we mean not the occasional drinker but an 
individual who drinks habitually and to excess. This 
region has been represented in the institution by ten 
inmates; the number is now only six; three having 
been withdrawn from the institution and the fourth 
died. That means that in this one section out of 199 
individuals known to be mentally defective only 
about five per cent, have been cared for in the insti- 
tution for the feeble-minded or by any sort of super- 
vision or guardianship! 78 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
That our present methods of treating this problem 
of mental deficiency are costly and ineffective is 
scarcely open to argument in view of the facts which 
our studies lay bare. The "liberty to act as they 
please without check or hindrance, in so far as they 
do not violate the criminal laws," is liberty only in 
name. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 adds, 
"The liberty of the subject does not consist in allow- 
ing persons who are not responsible nor accountable 
for their actions to commit crime, to drift into in- 
temperance and immorality, to be cruelly treated or 
neglected or to injure the community by reason of 
their uncontrolled reproduction of their type, but 
rather by an organization that is humane and adapta- 
ble to mould their lives and conduct so as to secure 
for them the maximum of comfort and happiness 
conformable with social order"- 
The classification of the dwellers in the Vale of 
Siddem is as follows: 
Normal 156 
Feeble-minded 199 
Epileptic 15 
Insane 34 
Sexually immoral ..125 
Criminalistic 15 
Alcoholic 134 
Tuberculous 47 
Paralyzed 12 
Migrainous 24 
Nervous 96 
Miscarriages 17 
Died in infancy .... 87 
Died young 27 
Unclassified ....... 892 
Total 1619 
The classifications frequently overlap; the same in- 
dividual may be classified at the same time under Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
79 
several headings as for instance feeble-minded, sex- 
ually immoral and alcoholic. Nor does it necessar- 
ily mean that we have no information about the indi- 
vidual if he is listed as unclassified. In many cases 
the symbol has been left open when the information 
about the individual has left us in doubt as to wheth- 
er he should be classified as normal or feeble-minded. 
Often we are not satisfied to mark the individual 
feeble-minded and yet his reactions are such that he 
cannot be considered normal. In all such cases where 
there is any doubt about the classification the case has 
been considered doubtful and counted among the un- 
classified. 
And what are we going to do about it? Certainly 
the first step must be to find out where the mental 
defectives are and who they are and whence they 
came. Until we know the extent and proportions of 
our problem, we are but working in the dark, trying 
to fill a bottomless pit shovel-full by shovel-full. 
The dwellers in the Vale of Siddem have surely 
been "allowed to multiply themselves to an alarming 
extent and in their degradation and misery to be as- 
sociated with the pauper, inebriate, criminal and im- 
moral classes." They are themselves not only the 
chief source of feeble-mindedness in the next gen- 
eration, but as Dr. Kuhlmann says "give rise to a dull 
low level of intelligence in normals to whom the de- 
fect is transmitted in minor degree." When we real- 
ize that such communities as the Vale of Siddem ex- 
ist not only in the older eastern states but in Minne- 80 
Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem 
sota and the younger states; when we realize that 
our special schools and classes care for the feeble- 
minded only until they reach the most dangerous age 
for society and then turn them out without supervi- 
sion; when we recognize the fact that many of the 
people whom our charity organizations carry from 
year to year are feeble-minded; when we realize that 
the institutions for the feeble-minded care for about 
4.5 per cent, of the total number of feeble-minded1- 
then we begin to realize something of the magnitude 
of our problem. 
I. F. Kuhlmann: Part played by the State Institutions in the 
Care of the Feeble-Minded. Jour. Psycho-Asthenics, Vol. XXI, 
Nos. i, 2, 1916.