Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull - New and Updated Edition

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Leaving Brooklyn

Years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors suggested I write a book about a mysterious white woman who lived with Sitting Bull during the last years of his life. This woman and her son took a train to the Dakotas and moved in with Sitting Bull. She read him stories about Napoleon, painted his portrait, and gave him advice about how to fight the government. He proposed marriage, and that upset her. She left the reservation. Her son died. No one knew what became of her after Sitting Bull was killed.

My professor couldn't recall the woman's name or the book in which he found her. All he knew was that she made an authentic gesture of friendship toward someone unlike herself at a time when such gestures were rare. My professor, who is black, grew up in Savannah, Georgia, fatherless and poor, before desegregation. Unexpected gestures of friendship helped him stay alive, as his own gifts to his friends and students helped us get by. I was touched by his generosity, his faith in my ability to unearth the buried shards of this forgotten woman's story. But I was reluctant to start a project so outside my expertise.

Months went by. Years. One snowy afternoon I was wandering the stacks of the Boston Public Library when I came across a biography of Sitting Bull published in 1932 by a writer named Stanley Vestal. Chapter 34 was called "Sitting Bull's 'White Squaw.'"

Catherine Weldon was a representative of the National Indian Defense Association, who had come all the way from Brooklyn, New York, to see [Sitting Bull].... She was a lady, well dressed, and not bad looking, indeed overdressed, with many showy rings and brooches, and fashionable clothes. Her hair was graying, for she was nearing, if she had not already reached, that age at which some women suffer a change and do unaccountable things. A strange apparition at Standing Rock.

In another of Vestal's books, I found copies of three letters Weldon wrote to Sitting Bull, along with a letter she wrote to Red Cloud, chief of the Oglala Sioux at Pine Ridge, and five notes she sent the agent in charge of Standing Rock, the reservation where Sitting Bull lived. Also included in Vestal's book were fragments from the journal Weldon kept at Standing Rock and the text of a speech she delivered to Sitting Bull's warriors to convince them that their belief in an Indian messiah was "misguided." Her voice was flighty, temperamental, manipulative, brash.

I kept rereading those few letters. They provided all anyone seemed to know about Weldon's life. As far as I could tell, she traveled out to Standing Rock in June 1889 to help Sitting Bull and his tribe withstand the government's coercion to sell great portions of their land. Sitting Bull, who was then in his fifties, lived forty miles from the agency, at a remote site on the Grand River. Bitter and despairing, he was recovering from a nearly fatal bout of pneumonia. Yet he roused himself from his sickbed and drove all that way to meet her.

If Vestal's account is to be believed, Sitting Bull found an attractive, middle-aged widow in fashionable but ostentatious clothes that set her apart from the drab wives of the soldiers at nearby Fort Yates. Her aggressive behavior baffled him, but she treated him as a great leader, enjoyed confronting the agent on his behalf, and seemed dedicated to helping his people keep their land. And if Weldon's own version of their meeting is reliable, Sitting Bull welcomed her offer to act as his lobbyist, translator, and adviser. With the help of the small Indian-rights organization to which she belonged, she supplied him with maps and lists of fair prices for his land. So vociferously did she campaign for Sitting Bull's rights that the agent in charge of Standing Rock ordered her to leave. ("SHE LOVES SITTING BULL" ran the headlines. "A New Jersey Widow falls victim to Sitting Bull's Charms.")

In Weldon's absence, a panel of commissioners from Washington held a meeting from which Sitting Bull was barred and bullied his followers into signing away their land. With the cession now law, Weldon returned to Brooklyn. But she couldn't forget Sitting Bull or the beauty of the Plains. The following spring, she wrote a letter to James McLaughlin, the agent in charge of Standing Rock, begging to be allowed to return.

Strangely, he granted her request, and in May 1890, Weldon traveled back to Standing Rock. A few weeks later, she sent for her son. At first, they lived with two mixed-race women, Alma Parkin and Louise Van Solen, on the prosperous Parkin Ranch just north of the reservation. Then Weldon took Christie and moved to Sitting Bull's camp, where they lived with his two wives and their children and two hundred members of their band, the Hunkpapa Sioux. Weldon joined the women in their chores and kept her friends alive during the ferocious drought that year by selling her possessions. Toka beya mani win, they named her, Woman Walking Ahead. If one credits Weldon's diary, Sitting Bull considered her a friend. He even proposed marriage, but Weldon grew insulted and turned him down. Afterward they had a more serious fight. A religious ceremony called the Ghost Dance found its way to Standing Rock. The Indians believed that if they performed this dance, a messiah would appear, wipe out all the whites, and bring back the dead Indians, along with herds of buffalo, fresh grass, and vanished game. Weldon scoffed at the possibility. She told Sitting Bull that the army would use this talk as an excuse to attack the dancers and get rid of him.

But Sitting Bull wouldn't listen. Angry and afraid—many of her former friends saw her as a traitor—Weldon took Christie and left the reservation. The new religion spread. The white settlers grew frantic. The government sent in troops. The Sioux "uprising" of 1890—91 was the last significant Indian war; the aftermath included the murder of Sitting Bull, his young son Crow Foot, and six Hunkpapa warriors, as well as the massacre of two hundred Sioux at Wounded Knee, among them twenty or thirty refugees from Sitting Bull's camp.

The press held Weldon responsible. Reporters claimed that she had stirred Sitting Bull's "martial ardor" by providing him with gifts and throwing feasts for his people to restore his standing in their eyes. In a way, the charge was true. Although Weldon repeatedly told Sitting Bull that the messiah would never come, she did revive his spirits when he was ill. Her gifts helped to feed his followers. Sitting Bull's resistance to breaking up the reservation into privately owned allotments kept alive the ideal that Indians should live as Indians and hold their land in common.

Although Weldon on her own would have left little trace on history, by befriending Sitting Bull, she threw a much larger shadow. How many women besides Helen of Troy have been held responsible for a war? In her own day, Weldon's name would have been as recognizable to her contemporaries as Jane Fonda's or Patty Hearst's name is to us. At the least, she was guilty of supporting a leader whom few other whites would recognize as great for decades to come. She traveled to a reservation and lived among the Indians, not to study or convert them or transform them into whites, but to help them live as Indians. She painted four portraits of Sitting Bull, apparently from life, at Grand River, yet all but one seemed lost. She barely is mentioned in the most up-to-date biography of Sitting Bull. Here was a woman who walked ahead of the most radical white Indian-rights activists of her century. She abandoned safety and sense, her possessions, her beloved son, and, for all her efforts, history abandoned her.

I wanted to follow Weldon's shadow and see where it might lead. But writing such a book would require that I scour archives throughout the East and Midwest. I would need to visit Standing Rock, whose inhabitants, I had heard, were still hostile to most white outsiders. Weldon followed her vocation across rigid ethnic lines, an activity to which society still objects, though for different reasons now. In writing a book about a white woman who traveled to the Dakotas and foisted her "help" on Sitting Bull, moved into his house, then burst out in indignation because he asked her to marry him, a woman who claimed to be the Indians' friend but grew so exasperated with their "backward" notions of religion that she dismissed them as "poor mis-guided beings . . . groping blindly for the true light & not finding it," I would betray my own prejudices. I would offend every Indian I interviewed (did one even call them "Indians"?).

If you are a white liberal who yearns to do good among those of another culture, you needn't hunt far for excuses to stay at home. If you are a mother, that's the best excuse. No one wants to be like Mrs. Jellyby, that lady of very remarkable strength who spends every moment Dickens allots her in Bleak House worrying about the unfortunate natives of Borrioboola-Gha while her own unkempt children go bouncing down flights of stairs. Weldon was a mother. She left her son in Brooklyn the first time she traveled west, and the press accused her of deserting him. When she moved to Standing Rock for good, she sent for her son, and her relatives accused her of disregarding his welfare in favor of "dirty-blanket Indians," thereby exposing him to the dangers that led to his death. If I traipsed around the country following Weldon's tracks, I would be abandoning my own son, who was then only three. Year after year, I kept putting off my search.

Once, as a sort of substitute, I tried to write a play in which Weldon and Sitting Bull acted out their tragedy on a stage devoid of scenery, relieving me of the need to describe a reservation I had never seen. But...