Colorado locked up middle-aged women for “lunacy,” old jail ledger reveals
GOLDEN — The leather-bound ledger smells of tobacco and dust, each page listing the names of people booked into the Jefferson County Jail more than 100 years ago.
The men in the ledger, identified in old-timey cursive as immigrants, Native Americans and miners, were mostly booked for crimes typical in Golden’s mining heyday — drunkenness, bootlegging, fighting and murder.
The most common charge for women, however, was lunacy.
Of the 280 charges against women listed in the book, 74 are for “lunacy” or “insanity.” And of those women, at least 31 were sent from jail via train to what was then called the Insane Asylum at Pueblo. That’s 26% of all charges against women.
The Golden History Museum, a collection of dinosaur fossils and mining-era artifacts along Clear Creek, first used the ledger to investigate a 1879 lynching long part of town lore. Two men who murdered a well-liked Golden citizen and stole his wagon were pulled from jail by an angry mob and hung from a trestle bridge.
But as museum curator Stephanie Gilmore and program assistant Bianca Barriskill turned the giant pages of the 1878-1929 ledger, some stained with ink blotches or coffee, what jumped out at them was the number of times women were locked up for being “insane.”
The discovery set Barriskill on a monthslong exploration that included three trips to the old mental hospital in Pueblo, where she read logs listing what the women were wearing when they arrived, who dropped them off and whether anyone ever visited them again. The rich women arrived with si