“Men with Queer Nerves” The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine

Moosehead Lake in Northwest Maine is lumberjack country. The largest body of water in the state, its contoured shoreline ostensibly resembles the head of an antlered moose. In his posthumous book The Maine Woods (1864), Henry David Thoreau describes Moosehead as “a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood.”¹ Moosehead Lake is also the source of the Kennebec River, once a major waterway for the logging industry, where trees from the North Maine Woods were felled by lumberjacks and floated downriver to paper mills and sawmills. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the lumberjacks near Moosehead Lake were French Canadians from the nearby provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. Most of them lived in rural areas, but they were not an uncommon sight in the small towns and resorts that dotted the lakeshore. The French-Canadian lumberjacks were close-knit, private, mysterious, and, according to one contemporary journalist, “reported to have more than the conventional number of both . . . wives and children.”² A later writer added that some families would even “run out of names and use numbers instead (I recall a Vingt-Six Gagnon).”³ In addition to its role in the lumber industry, Moosehead was a popular vacation destination for Mainers, other New Englanders, and even the occasional New Yorker, seeking hunting, fishing, and relaxation by the water. Some of these travelers, though, were on the hunt for lumberjacks.

One such visitor was the anonymous author of an article titled “Men with Queer Nerves”, which was published in the New York Sun on July 7, 1878. The author’s story begins by recounting a February sleigh ride from Shirley, Maine, to nearby Greenville on the southern end of Moosehead Lake. He is in town on business and hosted by Mr. Long, “an old schoolmate from New York, now a sawmill owner.” Long and the author are being trailed by two of Long’s French-Canadian employees riding in a “rude pung”. When the author steps out of his sleigh to warm his feet by walking around, he inadvertently knocks Mr. Long off his seat and into a snow pile. Long jumps up and laughs at his misfortune, but the two French Canadians, to the astonishment of the author, instantly throw themselves from the sled in the exact same manner. Long and the author find this amusing, but the two laborers are unhappy: one of them has sprained his neck. We are then presented with the following curious exchange:

“Well,” said Long. “I’d no idea those fellows were jumpers.”

“Jumpers?” I asked. “What’s jumpers?”

“Why didn’t you ever hear of jumping Frenchmen?”

“Never in my life.”

“These are jumping Frenchmen. They tumbled out of that seat just because they saw me tumble, and they couldn’t have helped it to save their lives. This country is full of jumpers.”

“Can’t they control their conduct in any way?”

“Oh, yes; in most ways, when they are not jumped; but you jump one of them and over he goes.”

“Jump one of them! Come, explain. You’ll have to make your joke plainer.”

“No joke, ‘pon honor. By ‘jumping’ one of them I mean surprising him. Startle him in any way and you get him going at once. I’ll show you a lot of them when we get to Greenville.”⁴

Mr. Long follows through on this promise. In Greenville, he and the author enter a small hotel where several of his sawmill workers are sitting down for supper. As they enter the dining room, Long suddenly raises his hands above his head, points at the ceiling, and says, “Shh!” To the author’s surprise, all the men around the table instantly jump from their seats, point upward, and copy Long’s hushing sound. In doing so, several of them break dishes or knock over their chairs. Once they realize what has happened, the lumberjacks become taciturn and surly. Mr. Long has touched — or, perhaps, jumped — a nerve.

Baffled by this inexplicable scene, the author returns for a two-week stay in April and witnesses several remarkable occurrences. Jumpers who will cry out if you touch them on their neck or hand, spurring on other jumpers in the process. Jumpers who will strike out whenever ordered to do so, even if it means hitting a friend or co-worker. And jumpers who speak no English but will repeat back English phrases spoken in their presence without a second thought (or, the author strongly implies, a first one). In writing about the Jumping Frenchmen of Moosehead Lake, the author characterizes them as unintelligent (“they are thick as dogs, and . . . not much more intelligent”) and connects this supposed intellectual deficiency to their status as French-Canadian “half-breeds”. As historian Mark Paul Richard points out, English-speaking North Americans often used “negative and discriminatory language and actions” against Francophone minority populations, with some newspapers replacing the author’s phrase “thick as dogs” with “thick as frogs”, an ethnic slur for French and French-Canadian people.⁵ In his book on the industrialization of the North American forests, Jason L. Newton suggests that this “rough treatment” of French Canadians may even have been the cause of “the famous French-Canadian ‘jumping’ disease”, which he characterizes as “a type of posttraumatic stress disorder reported in a few Northeastern camps”.⁶ It is often the case that unusual physical or psychological disorders are localized in isolated, and often marginalized, communities, so it is certainly possible that the climate of discrimination that the French-Canadian lumberjacks of Maine experienced contributed in a meaningful way to the medical phenomenon of “jumping”. Given how little is ultimately known about the condition, it is impossible to rule it out.

“Men with Queer Nerves” was widely reprinted, appearing in dozens of newspapers throughout the United States, informing many readers for the first time about the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine. This was not, however, the first newspaper story about them. Seventeen years earlier, in 1861, the Reverend M. R. Keep published a story in the Aroostook Pioneer titled “Jumping Frenchmen of Madawaska”, which was reprinted several times, sometimes using the title “Jumping Frenchmen of Canada”. Keep reports that one quarter to one third of the French Canadians in the area of Madawaska, Maine, are jumpers. Jumping, as Keep describes it, involves involuntary leaping, screaming, striking, and throwing, performed without any sense of caution or self-control. Although the Frenchmen will sometimes “jump” (that is, startle) each other for amusement, the act of being jumped is both painful and a source of considerable anxiety. “The victims dread it, and will often beg of their comrades not to jump them”, Keep writes.⁷ He ends his story with an account of one Mr. Blake of Portage Lake who had two Jumping Frenchmen working for him. One Frenchman was jumping the other all winter until his victim accidentally struck him in the face and eyes with an axe, an injury that left him incapacitated for a fortnight. Several of the newspapers that reprinted this story substituted “Mr. Blake” for “Mr. Blade”, presumably to introduce an axe-themed pun into a story that most readers would view as broadly comedic. Or perhaps it was an unconscious slip.

Keep’s story did not capture the public imagination, and the Jumping Frenchmen remained largely unknown until “Men with Queer Nerves” appeared in 1878. This story resonated with readers in several different ways. While most papers reprinted the story without comment, some added their own editorial speculations about the Jumping Frenchmen phenomenon. An article on “Current Wonders” in the Philadelphia Times highlights the “jumping” aspect of the Jumping Frenchmen, stating that “the Frenchman has been well nicknamed Johnny Crapeau”.⁸ A different story, written by Adam Newbegin and published in the Portland Daily Press on August 17, 1878, connects the Jumping Frenchmen with the Salem witch trials, of all things. Newbegin recounts a conversation with a friendly widow about George Burroughs, a non-conformist preacher who was hanged in Salem during the witchcraft panic of 1692. The widow, shocked that so many innocent people could be executed based on unreliable witness testimony, asks Newbegin if the witnesses “were entirely false in their testimony” and if “their fits were feigned.” He responds with a sensible answer that indicates he has been keeping up with the news in his own time, as well as in the seventeenth century. “I think the fits were wrought by nervous excitement which they could direct and partially control”, Newbegin writes. “We have similar examples in the history of all ages, and to-day the curious stories about the ‘Jumping Frenchmen’ in Madawaska . . . are remarkable illustrations of it.”⁹ In a less rational age, Newbegin implies, “jumping” could be seen as a sign of Satanic influence.

Two weeks after “Men with Queer Nerves” was published, the New York Sun ran a follow-up story. Titled “Those Jumping Frenchmen: Some Facts About the Queer People in Maine’s Woods”, the article’s author, J.A.H., was inspired to write to friends in northern Maine to confirm the unusual stories he had heard about the Jumping Frenchmen. Several of them responded and J.A.H. published their replies. Mr. B. P. Dexter of Newport, Maine, reports that one jumper struck a wall so hard that “blood flowed from his wounded hand”, while Mr. Samuel Cole of Greenville claims that a jumper “would strike his own mother if told to do so”. The author then discusses his own trip to Maine and his “personal examination of the strange phenomena”, citing numerous instances of the jumpers’ bizarre behavior: “I have seen a hundred men within the month throw their pipes away and break them all to pieces, because they had heard somebody say, ‘Throw it!’” — but he finds himself “unable to explain its origin”. The symptoms of the condition are also hard to pin down. In addition to jumping, hitting, and throwing, some of the jumpers will even vomit on command; yet he tells us they cannot be ordered to run, sing, laugh, or cry. J.A.H. assumes that jumping is a “nervous disease”, so when he returns to New York City, he consults the nation’s leading expert on such illnesses: George Miller Beard. The author tells Beard what he has seen and heard about the Jumping Frenchmen and reports that Beard told him, “I shall certainly investigate them.”¹⁰

It turns out Beard was already on the case. On June 21, 1878 — some two weeks before “Men with Queer Nerves” was first published in the New York Sun — Beard gave a talk on the Jumping Frenchmen at the fourth annual meeting of the American Neurological Association.¹¹ Shortly thereafter, an abstract of Beard’s talk was published in the weekly journal The Medical Record under the title “Jumpers, or Jumping Frenchmen, of Moosehead Lake, Maine”. Beard states that he learned about the Jumping Frenchmen while researching “automatism of the involuntary life”, though at this point he had no first-hand knowledge of the jumpers. After running through a list of symptoms typically associated with the Jumping Frenchmen — throwing, striking, jumping — Beard speculates that the jumpers may be “an extreme illustration of what we all are — that is, they possessed far less inhibitory power than we all possessed.”¹²

Beard was one of the most prominent members of the American Neurological Association, best known for popularizing the term “neurasthenia” to describe a state of nervous exhaustion and depression. Perhaps the most famous depiction of neurasthenia is in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Diagnosed with neurasthenia, Gilman’s female narrator is forced to undertake the “rest cure”: essentially a long period of social isolation and bed rest. Driven insane by this protocol, she becomes entranced — and horrified — by the garish yellow wallpaper in her bedroom and the ghostly female figures she sees in its baroque patterns. The contrasts between Gilman’s narrator and the Jumping Frenchmen are obvious: she is an upper-class woman, they are rural male laborers. She is confined to her bed, they are constantly moving and working in the woods. She is exhausted, they have an abundance of nervous energy. How can two ailments as seemingly different as neurasthenia and “jumping” both fall under the category of “nervous disease”?

In addition to the gendered dimension of neurasthenia (the majority of those diagnosed were women), it was also seen as a particularly American disease, with some ever referring to the ailment as “Americanitis”.¹³ Beard was among those interested in the national character of neurasthenia, a concept he explored in his book American Nervousness (1881). “The greater prevalence of nervousness in America”, he writes, “is a complex resultant of a number of influences, the chief of which are the dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country under such climactic conditions.”¹⁴ Despite this capacious description of what it is that makes Americans nervous, Beard emphatically states that the Jumping Frenchmen do not qualify. While sufferers of neurasthenia appear tired and enervated, the lumberjacks of Moosehead Lake are “among the best examples of physical hardness and endurance”. Beard makes a distinction between “nervousness” and “unbalanced mental organization”, aligning the jumpers squarely with the latter category. The closest analogue Beard can find for the Jumping Frenchmen are “Middle Age epidemics”, like the so-called dancing plagues that periodically occurred in Europe during the late Middle Ages and early modern period. The victims of these epidemics had “but little intellectual strength and very much emotion”, a description that he implicitly associates with the Jumping Frenchmen as well. For Beard, the Jumping Frenchmen cannot suffer from modern American nervousness because — as Canadians, as francophones, and as rural laborers — they are not really modern Americans. Rather, they are “precious curiosities, relics or antiques that the fourteenth century has, as it were, dropped right into the middle of the nineteenth.”¹⁵

The Jumping Frenchmen first appear in a lengthy footnote to Beard’s 1878 essay “Are Inebriates Automatons?”, which was republished as a standalone article several times in the following year, usually under the title “The ‘Jumpers,’ or ‘Jumping Frenchmen’”. But Beard still lacked any firsthand experience with the jumpers. In the spring of 1880, he sought to correct this oversight. In an essay titled “Experiments with the ‘Jumpers’ of Maine”, published in the December 1880 issue of Popular Science Monthly, Beard recounts his visit to Moosehead Lake earlier that year.¹⁶ When he arrives at his hotel, Beard discovers two jumpers working there and wastes no time beginning his “experiments” with them. Curious about the connection between language and jumping, Beard startles one of the hotel’s jumpers by loudly reciting the opening lines of the Iliad (in Ancient Greek) and the Aeneid (in Latin), which the jumper repeats instantly, though only the first few words. “He would not repeat a whole line, or even half a line, but simply a word or two”, Beard writes. “In these, as in the mind-reading experiments, I was able to establish my conclusions by exclusion — that is, by proving that only the involuntary action of mind on body could produce the phenomena.”¹⁷

This emphasis on the mental aspect of jumping helps lead Beard toward his diagnosis of what jumping “is”. He makes a distinction between physical hysteria (like neurasthenia) which has some somatic cause, and psychical or mental hysteria, which does not (and which explains why jumpers are not physically exhausted like neurasthenics). Once again, Beard finds an analogue for the jumpers in the hysterical epidemics of the Middle Ages, but also with the “Holy Rollers” of various religious revivals, who would roll on the ground in a state of uncontrollable religious ecstasy. While throwing a pipe or hitting your friend might seem very different from communing with the Holy Spirit, Beard sees them as deeply related, if distinct, forms of human behavior.

Beard notes two crucial differences between the jumpers and every other form of psychic hysteria. The first is the “momentary character of the manifestations”. While other forms of psychic or mass hysteria can last hours or days, the action of the jumpers is both immediate and short lived. “The explosion of the Jumper, like the explosion of a revolver, is sudden and instantaneous”, Beard writes. “If we look at a Jumper five seconds after he has been jumped, we see no indication of what he has just done.” The second key difference is “the persistence and permanence of the liability to be excited”. People tend to move on from other forms of psychic hysteria. Once the medieval peasants stop dancing, or the Holy Rollers stop rolling, they return to their regular lives. Not so the Jumping Frenchmen, for whom jumping is a lifelong condition.¹⁸ Beard considers that jumping may be hereditary — he notes that many of the jumpers he met belong to the same extended family. He also speculates that jumping may have been “an evolution of tickling”, noting that many jumpers are ticklish, and that jumpers deliberately prank one another “in lieu of most other sources of amusement”. But ultimately Beard concludes that “[e]verything about this subject is incredible”.¹⁹

Despite an initial skepticism — an 1882 article claims that nine out of ten people in Manhattan think “the jumping Frenchmen is less a reality than the Flying Dutchman” — jumpers have found their way into the annals of medical history.²⁰ Beard himself notes commonalities between jumping and “similar phenomena on the other side of the globe, among the Malays.”²¹ Although he did not have detailed information about this condition, Beard is referring to “Latah”, a culture-bound syndrome that exists in Malaysia and other Southeast Asian countries. He was not the only person to note this similarity. In an 1885 review of Henry O. Forbes’ A Naturalist’s Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago, the Portland Daily Press describes “people hysterically affected like the ‘Jumping Frenchmen’ of our own State, so that they imitate the sudden motion of others”,²² while an excerpt of Forbes’ book published in the Ellsworth American was titled, “Lata. A Strange Disease in Java. Something Like the Trouble of the Jumping Frenchmen.”²³ Indeed, there are a number of cultural-bound syndromes around the world that bear some resemblance to Jumping Frenchmen of Maine Syndrome, including “Imu” among the Ainu people of Japan, and “Mali-Mali” in the Philippines.

Beard passed away from pneumonia in January 1883 at the age of forty-three. Not long after he died his work was taken up by a French medical student named Georges Gilles de la Tourette, who was studying under the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Tourette translated Beard’s work into French and connected Beard’s theories about the Jumping Frenchmen with the cases of motor and vocal tics that Tourette had observed in patients in France, and which would later be named (by Charcot) as “Tourette’s Syndrome”. Given that neurasthenia is no longer recognized as a medical diagnosis, the Jumping Frenchmen may be Beard’s most lasting contribution to the field of medicine. As for the Jumping Frenchmen themselves, the decline of logging in Maine’s Northern Woods in the twentieth century meant that the lumberjack — that once ubiquitous cultural figure — slowly dwindled as well. If jumping was a culture-bound condition, produced in and sustained by the isolated, woodland atmosphere, and amplified by the cultural marginalization faced by French Canadians, it stands to reason that the syndrome would disappear with the logging camps. And yet the syndrome does still exist in some individuals, with studies as recent as the 1980s documenting jumpers in both Quebec and Louisiana.²⁴ It seems that a nerve, once jumped, remains “queer” forever. Or as Beard himself put it, “once a Jumper, always a Jumper”.²⁵