To quell increasing tension on the reservation, McLaughlin had an interesting plan. It had to do with the actual standing rock from which the reservation took its name. The rock resembles a woman with a child on her back—and in fact, it is more than a resemblance; it appears to be a petrified woman with child. It was so lifelike and startling that even McLaughlin subscribed to the origin story of the sacred rock that the people at Fort Yates revered and had kept since ancient times. “It was the common property of the Teton Sioux,” the major wrote in his memoir, My Friend the Indian, “but it lay for years in the section occupied by the Lower Yanktonai, and that band was the protector of the rock.” McLaughlin proposed that the rock be carried from its location five miles from Fort Yates and set up on a pedestal overlooking the Missouri on a rise known as Proposal Hill. It was called thusly because it was where young men and women did their courting as they strolled above the riverbank.
A great council was called to discuss the idea, and it was accepted. After much consideration, the Indians chose Fire Cloud, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, to perform the dedication ceremony. “Fire Cloud had been a hostile,” McLaughlin wrote, “and his peculiar virtues were intensely Indian and therefore not of a character to appeal to whites.” But he was considered a powerful spirit worker, and the major said that he had never heard pleadings and prayer as eloquent as Fire Cloud’s when the spirit so moved him. The stone was readied for dedication and Fire Cloud prepared himself as well, purifying heart and body. On the day before the ceremony, he painted a woman on the rock, following its contours, using many colors and making stripes whose meaning was known only to medicine men. That night, the rock was wrapped in a blanket, and the following day, Indians and whites who manned the fort gathered for the unveiling. “Sitting Bull was there,” McLaughlin wrote, “his spirit apparently tamed, and he a peace advocate for the first time in his life.” That statement was partially true; while we do not know the state of Sitting Bull’s spirit at that moment, he was indeed there.
McLaughlin began the ceremony, telling everyone that it was fitting for the rock to be preserved and kept above the Missouri. That way, travelers who saw it from afar would know that the Sioux lived and were protected in the land that was their fathers’. Standing at the rock, Fire Cloud gave a moving invocation, asking the Great Spirit for a lasting peace across the land, among Indians and whites and among the Indians themselves as well. He also asked for a blessing upon the rock and the place, and that the rock “be regarded as a pledge for eternal cessation of warfare.” Sitting Bull and his people gave “guttural assent with many Hows,” McLaughlin wrote, “which sounded like Amens.” Fire Cloud then asked the Great Spirit to bless his red children and make their crops prosperous, withholding the hail that had destroyed their fields in the previous year. He concluded by saying that those among them who did not have clean heart and hands should stand abashed and humbled before the woman of the Standing Rock and the Great Spirit, and he called on everyone to repent and lead clean lives from then on. McLaughlin performed the unveiling, removing the blanket. Fire Cloud added a few more painted symbols to complete the medicine. For a brief time—moments, hours, perhaps even days—the spirit of peace invoked by Fire Cloud presided over “the land of the Teton Sioux to the west of the Missouri.”
But it was not long before the situation at Standing Rock was roiled by the arrival of a paleface from the tribe of East Coast bohemians. Her name was Catherine Weldon, or, as she was eventually renamed by Sitting Bull, Woman Walking Ahead. She had been married twice (widowed and divorced) and had a son. At heart, she was an artist, and she had wandered Long Island, painting Indians. To date, those paintings have not surfaced and, like other women of her era, she was not encouraged to pursue this endeavor. Her income came from her family and although she indulged herself with fine things, she also used her money to help Indians. A member of the NIDA, she wanted to do more than just speak up for the tribes, and so one day she left the confines of city life and headed to the plains to seek the most famous of them all, Sitting Bull. Moreover, in a time when women often found more freedom in the West than they did among forward-thinking members of their own communities in the East, she sought a way of life that would nourish her as an artist and a woman with a son and no husband.
Weldon was not the first white woman to have made such a westward journey in search of communion with Native Americans. Prior to her arrival at Standing Rock, there was Mary Collins, a missionary, writer, and Indian advocate who planted herself in the Dakota Territory in 1875. Inspired by a Sabbath school teacher to help Indians, she came with considerable talents and skills. She was well educated, with an MA from Ripon College; she was an accomplished horsewoman; she knew something about medicine and the law, and soon learned to speak Lakota. All of this helped her forge friendships with Indians at Standing Rock, and she often spoke on their behalf at lectures around the country. Closest of all was her friendship with Sitting Bull; she nursed his children and helped him with many tasks. According to one of Sitting Bull’s primary biographers, Stanley Vestal, Collins “knew him better than almost any other white person at the agency.” She made ongoing efforts via regular church services to convert Indians to Christianity, and Sitting Bull considered Collins a relative.
Whether Mary Collins was still part of Sitting Bull’s family when Weldon arrived, and if so, whether she considered Catherine Weldon a rival for Sitting Bull’s attention or favor, we do not know. Collins was a missionary through and through, with no seeming greater design other than to help foundering Indians by way of various pathways and spiritual conversion. Yet she did not like the NIDA and what it represented, and may have resented the group’s intrusion into her world. However, from the time of Weldon’s arrival in 1889, her first departure shortly thereafter, her return in 1890 and final departure soon afterward, she seems to have been the primary white female in Sitting Bull’s life—and throughout her tenure on the reservation, there was speculation of a romance between the two, with some newspapers referring to her as “Sitting Bull’s White Squaw.” It is noteworthy that in his final days, as it became clear that the gates were closing, both Catherine Weldon and Mary Collins would try desperately to save him in ways that befitted each. Their last-ditch efforts were dramatic, cinematic even, and not heeded by Sitting Bull. And how else was he to have reacted? He was a man of heightened instincts, one who had recently learned from a meadowlark—one of his key allies—that he would soon be assassinated by some of his own people. The four-leggeds and winged creatures had always been right; the buffalo, for whom he had been named, had provided him with a good life. Now they were gone and it was his time. But for a while, there seems to have been a moment of grace in the months that Catherine Weldon spent with Sitting Bull and in fact he gave her a new name.
It had all started with a series of letters that Catherine wrote to Sitting Bull from her apartment in an artists’ enclave in Brooklyn. Her apartment on Baldwin Street was near the Brooklyn Bridge, and it may have been at the opening of the bridge that her interest in the Lakota was heightened. On May 24, 1883, the bridge opened to much fanfare. The parade included many dignitaries, various spectacles of the day such as elephants provided by P. T. Barnum, and a band of Native American students from the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.
One day, as the Lakota Luther Standing Bear wrote in his book, My People the Sioux, members of the band were told they were going to New York City to play before thousands of people. Their clothes were to be neat and clean in order to create a good impression. The students drilled every day. When the time came, they boarded a train and headed to Philadelphia, and from there took a boat to New York. They assembled in a park, and the captain asked Luther Standing Bear if he could lead the band. He told him he would try. “We were instructed to keep playing all the way across the bridge,” Standing Bear wrote. “When the parade started I gave the signal, and we struck up and kept playing all the way across the great structure. So the Carlisle Indian band of b
rass instruments was the first real American band to cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and I am proud to say that I was their leader.”
Perhaps Catherine Weldon was among the spectators who had gathered to pay tribute. As a woman who was drawn to Native Americans, she may have been particularly struck as the Carlisle Band crossed the structure, playing an American anthem, noting their skill and wondering about what music they had been forbidden to play once they arrived at the Indian school. As a member of the NIDA, she may have read the first issue of the Council Fire, which included an account of the arrival of three boatloads of Sitting Bull’s followers at Standing Rock two years earlier. Now here were members of his tribe participating in a ceremony heralding one of the great feats of modern engineering.
Four years later, in 1887, with the Indian wars nearly over, the government turned to other tactics. The Dawes Act was introduced by liberal senator Henry Dawes. Before passage of the act, the Lakota Indians had been living on the Great Sioux Reservation, under the jurisdiction of various federal agencies. It was a fragment of the land that the Sioux had once called theirs, but it was one half of what is now South Dakota. The idea was to divide this land into six smaller reservations (named for already existing communities)—Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Lower Brule, Crow Creek, Rosebud, and Pine Ridge. As Eileen Pollack wrote in her book Woman Walking Ahead, “The sum of these reservations would be less than the whole. On each reservation, each family would be allotted 160 acres. The total of these plots would be smaller than the expanse the tribe had held in common.” In addition, the nine million acres left over after the division would be sold to white homesteaders for fifty cents an acre. An outrage today, the plan was heralded by many politicians of all parties, as it promoted the belief that the best hope for the survival of the Native American was to live like the white man on self-contained parcels of land that he could own and farm, and through this commitment gain citizenship and then vote. As Pollack notes, the only Americans who opposed the Dawes Act were the National Indian Defense Association—and the Indians themselves. As a member of the NIDA, Catherine Weldon was one of the voices most strongly opposed to the legislation.
There was one roadblock to passage of the act. The 1868 treaty that established the Great Sioux Reservation stated that any change to the reservation must be approved by three fourths of the adult male Indians who lived there and were on the official census rolls. Federal commissioners headed west, seeking assent from each of the six agencies. On July 23, 1888, they arrived at Standing Rock. Sitting Bull would not see them—for weeks. The commissioners blocked the Indians from tending their livestock and crops. Upon return to Washington, one of them tried to push the act through without the Indians’ approval, but by then there was sufficient outrage to stop him. In October, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs brought Sitting Bull and sixty other chiefs to the capital to work out a new agreement, putting them up at the Belvedere Hotel, and taking them on a tour of the Smithsonian, where they viewed Indian paintings by George Catlin—the artist who had taken Native Americans to Europe decades earlier in the first traveling Indian spectacle. At the conference about the Dawes Act, the secretary of the interior increased the government’s offer for the Lakotas’ land; now it was one dollar per acre. To everyone’s surprise, Sitting Bull was ready to negotiate, or so it seemed, upping the ante to one dollar and twenty-five cents. The meeting was adjourned so that Congress could ponder the counteroffer.
Having learned of Sitting Bull’s latest travails, Catherine Weldon wrote him a series of letters, some of which included lists of fair prices for Dakota land and maps of the plans to carve up the reservation. “Showing the Indians maps was no small act of subversion,” Pollack wrote. “The whites counted on the Indians not to understand exactly how much land their tribe could lose if the big reservation were divided into smaller ones, each smaller reservation divided among its members, and the rest sold off to whites.”
In 1889, after the Dakotas had been granted statehood, commissioners in Washington agreed to Sitting Bull’s price. But the Indians refused to sign, and a new federal delegation traveled to the plains, hoping that in-person appeals would secure signatures at each agency, saving Sitting Bull and his followers at Standing Rock, the most intransigent group, for last. Weldon arrived at Standing Rock while the commissioners were at the other agencies, with a rigorous and rugged itinerary in mind: she wanted to travel to each reservation—miles apart over paths that in some cases were not even dirt roads—with Sitting Bull, rallying the other chiefs to hold their ground.
Such a journey would not have been her first, or even her second, into the deep northern plains. To get to Standing Rock, she had already taken a train from Brooklyn to Bismarck, stopping several times, and finally taking a ferry and then a stagecoach, which then took her to a small settlement near the Cannonball River, the northern border of the reservation, where she was staying. She had met some of the native residents of the little town during a previous trip. “I had long ago contemplated a visit to Dakota, to visit some Indian friends,” she wrote later to Red Cloud, Oglala headman at Pine Ridge, with whom she regularly corresponded. “Some are at Cannon Ball now, some at Standing Rock and some at the Yankton Agency. I was glad to get away from the busy world to breathe [the] air of Dakota once more & to see the faces I liked to look upon.” At the time, Sitting Bull was “almost dyeing,” she told Red Cloud, “& was reported even dead.” Among the local white community, people were taking bets on when Sitting Bull would “head to the happy hunting grounds,” as one wag put it. And certainly, his enemies within his own tribe were counting down. Moreover, the idea was reverberating favorably beyond the reservation. The Yankton Daily Press wrote that “the report that Sitting Bull is dying of pneumonia is not generally received with sorrow throughout Dakota.” On June 15, 1889, the Bismarck Weekly Tribune confirmed his deteriorating condition, reporting that photographer D. F. Barry visited Sitting Bull in his tent, where he was confined. “Sitting Bull . . . is able to set up,” he said, “and although he has failed perceptibly during his illness, he is still defiant, outspoken and resolute.” Although wanting to continue the battle, Sitting Bull felt that he was at a disadvantage, Barry said, because he didn’t have a trustworthy adviser who spoke and read English. “The white is wise in books,” he told Barry. “He can read and write and we cannot. We know nothing about books, and the whites have fooled us. Now we are approached with another treaty, but us old men will not sign it. We are not able to deal with your people, but in a few years our young men will know how to handle papers. They are going to school and will soon know how to trade with the government.”
Such was Sitting Bull’s state of mind as he received letters from Catherine Weldon saying that she wanted to visit. He knew that Major McLaughlin had to sign off on the comings-and-goings of all residents, particularly his own, since he was still viewed as a troublemaker. Perhaps he thought that with a white woman accompanying him, McLaughlin would provide him with a pass. Or perhaps he did not think it possible at all. In any case, he wanted to meet her. Unbeknownst to him, McLaughlin was already turning Weldon down. Meanwhile, there were numerous attempts to discredit her, including an article that ran in the Bismarck Daily Tribune on July 2 of 1889. “SHE LOVES SITTING BULL” ran the headline, with the subhead, “A New Jersey Widow falls victim to Sitting Bull’s Charms.”
“A sensation is reported from the Standing Rock Agency,” the article said. “Sitting Bull has many admirers, and among them is [Catherine Weldon]. During Sitting Bull’s recent illness she visited him at his camp, and when he recovered sufficiently to travel she made arrangements with him to convey her in his wagon from Standing Rock to the Rosebud Agency. It is against the rules to leave their reservation without permission. . . . No sooner had Agent McLaughlin refused than [Catherine Weldon] flew into a rage.”
But Weldon had not visited Sitting Bull at his camp. Instead, for days, she waited for a response to her various entreaties for him to travel with her
to the other agencies, convinced that he was on his way. Indeed, he had responded, but his messages were intercepted or delayed. Finally, Weldon learned from an Indian messenger that Sitting Bull wanted to speak with her, but was too ill to travel. Then one day she received word that Sitting Bull was heading her way. He had just recovered from pneumonia, and as Eileen Pollack recounted, he was “driving forty miles in a rickety wagon over dusty roads in the oppressive heat.”
From Stanley Vestal’s sparse account of their first meeting, we know that Weldon was “swept off her feet by the old man’s charm.” He also noted that “she had come to see a great man and was not disappointed. In him she saw the integrity, the wholeness that her baffled heart looked for in vain in that travesty of culture which had frittered her talents away. To her he seemed like a rock in a weltering sea. She did not foresee that she herself would soon be beating vainly on that rock.”
We do not know what Sitting Bull thought when they first met. Recall that he was a man who had traveled far during his time with Buffalo Bill, and understood that Catherine had come from a great distance to see him. He knew a little about her from her letters—that she had a son, that she was not married, that she had taken up the cause of his people. And recall too that he was a man of great instinct and perception, and was wary of white people. Most likely, he did not consider Weldon a frivolous person or take her for a liar; if he did, he would not have undertaken his own journey to meet her, especially in a weakened state. The universe, the Great Mystery of Lakota parlance, his own heart, must have been urging him to meet this stranger from afar, and so he did—and because of that, we have a window on his final days. This is not to say that his family and friends could not and did not bear witness. They did. But perhaps Sitting Bull wanted an emissary from the Grandfather’s world to watch him exit the stage. Or maybe he was hoping that here was a white person who could do something for his people. She was a member of the NIDA, after all, the only Indian organization that allied itself with natives on the subject of the Dawes Act, and they were having an effect. Was there not that crazy wasichu who had been scalped but kept speaking up for the Indians, for humanity? Maybe Catherine Weldon could help Sitting Bull’s children and grandchildren make their way in the new world, see that they kept some of the old ways as they learned the new. There was nothing much else that the old medicine man could do. And in the end, maybe he just wanted more company, a fan, especially. He was, after all, a superstar, stripped of power before his own people, yet throwing off sparks around the world. Here was a woman who believed in his magic and had succumbed to it, for all to see. And she did not care what others thought of her for doing so. For a while, she helped him, and he helped her, and many assumed that they were lovers.
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