Certainly unpleasant, Mrs. Bouchie may also have been unhinged. Insanity was a common feature of life on the Great Plains, exacerbated by isolation and the dreary confines of tight spaces and bad weather. And these conditions were all too often accompanied by unbearable misfortune—bankruptcies, accidents, fires, suicides, deaths of children—aggravating any predisposition to mental illness. There was a word for it: “shack-wacky.” At the time, it was said to happen “to an awful lot of women.”128
