Charles Lee was decided insane at an inquiry of the board Monday night and will be placed in the asylum at Jamestown. He had been about town a couple of days since his return from Miles City Saturday, said that he had eaten nothing for three days, and told things so improbably and talked to eratically
{sp} that he was jailed and fed. His case is one that appeals to the writer as being particularly pathetic: a negro, tempestuous and rough, ignorant, driven on by his own headstrong desires, justifying himself always in his unruly acts by his wild reasoning, he spent the greater part of the last three years in jail on one charge or another, because his condut
{sp} did not conform to law. He was becoming possessed of some property of stock on an up-river ranch when he first offended the dignity of the state by cohabiting with a white woman, to clear himself from which charge he signed away or mortgaged his property to lawyers; then, smarting under injustice, and not understanding the full significance of deeds of writing, he attempted to extricate himself by violence. He was jailed repeatedly. Never reasoning from a correct premise nor appreciating the sequence of a cause—never having been strong in reason—he battered his poor intellect against elements of which he knew nothing, until, like a caged animal or a man haunted by an incubus, his trouble absorbed his mind. A strong man, constantly groping for justification of his acts, dreaming and worrying, melancholia got him. He reminds one of a great, badgered, hopeless animal, unsafe at large. Poor devil, I say.
Golden Valley Chronicle, 9/22/1911
A telegram was received Monday from the superintendent of the insane asylum as Jamestown, stating that Charles Lee was dead. Lee was sent there in September, 1911, after a series of stormy transactions with neighbors and county officials, and had been a dreaded man. It was one reported that he had been shot in self defense by a guard of the institution, but that was found to be in error; even at that time he was nearly helpless from paralysis, an ailment from which he died.
Golden Valley Chronicle, 12/13/1912
