On the Borders: Towns, Mobility, and Public Health in Mojave History

On March 22, 1916, an Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway passenger train clanked west across the bridge spanning the lower Colorado River.¹ When it reached the El Garces Depot in Needles, California, a Mojave woman and her ailing teenage brother stepped off.² It had been a tiring journey from East Farm, the Phoenix Indian School's tuberculosis sanatorium where George M. had been a patient for the past ten months.³ The doctors at East Farm did not think that George M. was well enough for the three-hundred-mile trek to his sister's house in Needles.⁴ But it had cost Alice B. days and precious dollars to retrieve her brother from Phoenix and so she took him with her. Although George M. survived the train ride home, he needed immediate medical attention upon arriving home. Since Alice B.'s home in Needles was off-reservation, according to the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA), the siblings had limited options for medical care. Officially, they could travel the ninety miles downriver to Colorado River Agency headquarters to see the agency physician, or they could wait and hope that the physician from Fort Mojave School twenty miles to the north would make his weekly rounds in the Mojave villages in and around Needles. Unofficially, they could cross the river to Mojave healers, or they could hire a private physician in town. Due to her brother's rapidly declining condition, Alice B. opted to call on a local physician named Arthur Boland to care for her brother. Despite medical attention, and just a week after returning home, George M., age sixteen, passed away on March 29, 1916, at 10 o'clock at night.⁵

In the aftermath of her brother's death, Alice B. asked the Colorado River Agency to pay Boland's fees because she could not afford them. Alice B. could not save her brother nor upend the structures within which he contracted tuberculosis, but she did convince the agency's superintendent to pay the six-dollar physician's bill.⁶ Just as Alice B. defied East Farm's officials to take her brother home, she also defied governmental healthcare regulations to act in her family's best interests: she chose to stay in Needles and, in doing so, asserted her family's and tribe's medical autonomy and claims to that land.⁷

Map of the lower Colorado River region. Created by the author.

In late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Arizona (as elsewhere), disease, and human responses to it, revealed a web of social, cultural, and economic worlds. Historians of medicine have illuminated the ways public health policies and practices of the day tended to reinforce difference, to lay bare what in non-epidemic times was often implied: that only some people were included in "the public."⁸ What was true at the turn of the century is just as true in 2020: germs have a way of exposing the fantasies of the elite and the structural violence enacted on their behalf, but also the autonomies of everyday people and the sovereignties of tribal nations who continue to make their own medical choices.⁹

A growing literature has begun to show that mobility and movement are critical to understanding how American Indians' bodily and tribal autonomy were formed, negotiated, and contested.¹⁰ Public health is another arena in which mobility figures broadly. Moving bodies and the germs they carried were always coming and going, following newly forged train lines and ancient trails alike. But assimilation practices like child removal, boarding schools, and the breaking up of reservations into individual allotments wreaked havoc on Native American life. Meanwhile, the haphazard, segregated healthcare system that the OIA cobbled together demonstrated that Native people were not fully-fledged members of the public health communities in which they lived.¹¹ In response, many Indigenous people sought medical care both near and far, inside and outside of the OIA's ad hoc system. They asserted...