So disturbing to Major McLaughlin was their friendship that on at least one occasion he would not even see Sitting Bull when he sought permission to leave the reservation for a visit with Catherine at a nearby ranch. He assigned the task of refusing a travel pass to an underling named Louis Faribault, who walked Sitting Bull to the guardhouse and implied that he wanted the pass so he could kidnap Catherine and rape her. “If you take her anywhere in that wagon of yours,” Faribault said, “you will end up in the penitentiary.”
Upon hearing these “vile insinuations,” Catherine later said in a letter to Red Cloud, Sitting Bull’s heart ached. He told Faribault that he would have shielded and protected her from harm. To spare Sitting Bull from more trouble, she announced that she was leaving the reservation immediately. Sitting Bull offered to drive her to the Missouri River, where she could board the ferry for Winona, a small town where the public roads began. What these two spoke of en route we do not know. Catherine had been trying to learn Lakota and Sitting Bull had picked up some English over the years, but no matter. Here were two kindred spirits, both trapped by cultural constraints (though certainly one was free to go anywhere), sharing what was very likely a tender moment, heading across the wide-open space that had shaped Sitting Bull and called Catherine Weldon. Perhaps they heard the familiar trill of the meadowlark as they made their way over the rutted trail to the port, or caught sight of ravens on a thermal; maybe there was a passing thundercloud and it smelled like rain, or quite possibly there was a stiff wind blowing across the plains and it might have carried the promise of change and hope. Alas, there were those who rendered what was surely a tender meeting between two spirits from different worlds into something tawdry. Immediately following the short trip, there appeared another scandalous report. According to the Sioux City Journal, Catherine had told a local sheriff that she had come from New York to marry Sitting Bull and that McLaughlin tried to prevent their meeting. Again, it was a fabrication. “I never saw nor spoke to this man,” Weldon wrote to Red Cloud. “All this is the Agent’s work. He fears Sitting Bull’s influence and pretends to his face that not politics were his motives for refusing the pass, but my welfare & he took this opportunity to humble the old chief & make his heart more than sad.”
With Weldon’s departure, many observers figured that the sign-off on the Dawes Act was a done deal. Yet it was not so quick to happen. There was dissension in the ranks at the less hostile reservations, with younger men opposed to approving the treaty changes. But much politicking ensued, with key Lakota figures reversing their positions at the eleventh hour, perhaps succumbing to pressure or suspecting that the game was over, or both. The Dawes Act was finally endorsed, but Sitting Bull never did sign it. Even so, approval of the legislation was an emasculation, and his enemies began to circle. Soon, the government pressured him for capitulation via a visit from his brother-in-law, Grey Eagle, at the behest of Major McLaughlin. Grey Eagle had recently converted to Catholicism, McLaughlin’s path, and urged Sitting Bull to follow suit on this and other fronts. According to Stanley Vestal, Grey Eagle came calling with gifts, in particular a log cabin and a number of horses. “Brother-in-law,” he said, “we have settled on the reservation now. We are under the jurisdiction of the government now. We must do as they say. We must stop roaming about, and obey them. We must give up these old dances.” He was referring to the ghost ceremonies that many were now participating in, hoping to trigger the apocalypse.
“Yes, you are right,” Sitting Bull said. “But I cannot give up my Indian race and habits. They are too deeply seated in us. You go ahead and follow the white man’s road, and do as he says. But as for me, leave me alone.”
“Well, if you’re not going to obey,” Grey Eagle said, growing angry, “and do as the whites say, you are going to cause a lot of trouble and lose your own life. I have sworn to stand by the government. We have been friends a long while, but if you will not obey the orders of the agent, we shall not be together any more.”
From then on, Sitting Bull rarely visited agency headquarters, sending others to pick up supplies and communications, finding comfort ever more in the ways of his youth. It was at this moment that the Dawes Act was signed that the seeds of friendship between Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull began to flourish.
Was there an unspoken understanding between Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull that she would return? Did their body language suggest such a possibility? Had Catherine learned how to inform Sitting Bull of her plans for just this occasion? In any case, while she was back in Brooklyn, Sitting Bull seems to have consumed her thoughts. She began selling possessions such as sterling silver items and jewelry and sending him the money. She became fervently involved in the NIDA, attending more meetings and issuing impassioned pleas on the Indians’ behalf to congressmen. Soon she was writing to Major McLaughlin, asking again for permission to visit Sitting Bull, and stating her desire to live nearby. “I suppose it is needless to state that I have no intention to become either Sitting Bull’s wife or a squaw, as the sagacious newspaper editors surmised,” she wrote in her final try for approval. “I probably would not be able to dispose of first class paintings or plush lambrequins or be able to teach modern languages on the prairies. . . . I honor and respect S. Bull as if he was my own father and nothing can ever shake my faith in his good qualities. . . . I regret that at the present time he is so universally misjudged.” Implicit in her letters was the idea that she would try to bring the finer points of white civilization to Sitting Bull. With this last entreaty, McLaughlin agreed that she could return.
It was in May of 1890 that she did, just several months after she had left. Within weeks, she divested herself of many belongings, packed up several suitcases and trunks, proceeded to Grand Central Terminal, and headed west again. After a short stay with her old friends at the ranch near Grand River, she moved in with Sitting Bull and his two wives, their children, and grandchildren. This of course triggered more speculation that the two were lovers, yet she herself never said such a thing, and it is not likely that his wives would have permitted it. Although it was said that they were actually very jealous, and soon were chasing her around camp with butcher knives. Shortly after her arrival, she sent for her thirteen-year-old son, who by all accounts quickly took to the Great Plains, succumbing to a life unfettered by convention, learning the ways of a young warrior from Sitting Bull’s boys, and from Sitting Bull himself, how to ride a pony. As for Catherine, she expressed her gratitude and devotion in many ways. Upon her return, she presented Sitting Bull with a little golden bull, which he wore as a watch charm. She also gave him a revolver, a surreptitious act and a seditious one, as Indians had relinquished their arms as a condition of surrender and were not allowed to have weapons, though some still had hidden caches. She immediately pitched in as a domestic caretaker, washing dishes, sweeping the floors, and cooking for him. She learned Lakota. She read aloud, tales of Alexander, Napoleon, and Achilles—martial glory all—most likely translating, or trying to, as she went along. She also served as Sitting Bull’s secretary, writing letters on his behalf, and continuing to advocate for the Lakota cause. During this time, Catherine began painting a portrait of Sitting Bull, letting her passion for making art take flight. When it was over, she had painted four of them—as far as we know, her life’s work as an artist, for none of her other paintings have surfaced.
Sitting Bull was devoted to her. He once prevented her from mounting a wild horse lest she be thrown off and suffer a broken neck. He took a keen interest in her son, and eased his way into his family. Finally, true to the rumors that were flying, Sitting Bull asked Catherine Weldon to marry him. He had had five wives so far, and it would not be unusual to add a third to his current two. But as Weldon told it in her journal, she seemed to have been insulted: “Is this the reward after so many years of faithful friendship which I have proved to you?” We do not know why Catherine responded that way, or how her reaction was received by Sitting Bull. Certainly he had experienced
a parade of white people who behaved in strange ways over the years. But Catherine had never lied to him and he was a man who honored those who heeded their hearts. She may have been living life exactly the way she had imagined it, away from cities and crowds and people who did not appreciate her true gifts, and perhaps that was enough. She continued her service to Sitting Bull, completing a final portrait and hanging it on the wall of their cabin. Yet there was something that bothered her, and possibly this was why she rejected Sitting Bull’s proposal.
Yards away from their cabin, the ghost dancing grew more intense as the days and weeks went by. It was not something that Catherine Weldon liked, as she knew it meant trouble for her friend. Although Sitting Bull did not participate, he gave the dancers his blessings; they were his people, after all. They were starving and their spirits were broken. They chanted and stomped by the hundreds, sending up great clouds of dust, and lo and behold, some of the wasichu on the reservation grew fearful and clamored for a halt. Mary Collins, the missionary, had erected crosses in plain sight of the dancers, hoping to ward off evil and show them the way. In response, Sitting Bull had placed buffalo skulls on pikes. It seemed like angels and demons were arranging themselves and one day as the singing reached a new height and people prostrated themselves on the ground and then were roused, announcing that they had seen their ancestors and the return of the buffalo, Sitting Bull’s wasichu friend Mary Collins became more alarmed than ever, retreating to her nearby church and banging out “Nearer My God to Thee” on the piano. It was a most peculiar sight: the impassioned devotee of Christ hoping to squelch the cries of the fallen, a lone voice against hundreds, and the dancers, convinced that their ecstatic calls would end their pain, if only they could break through to the Great Mystery—and the demons and angels wrestled with each other until dusk fell and it was time for all to go home.
With white citizens aroused and demanding an end to the ghost dancing, Catherine Weldon advised Sitting Bull to end the ceremonies. He would not. Their disagreement on this issue deepened, and he came to resent her urge to save him. One night, she moved out of their cabin and into a smaller one on his farm. The dancing of the Indians “sounded awful in the stillness,” she wrote, “and they kept it up until I could stand it no longer, so I arose and went through the crowd. It was dark, and there was the width of a street between me and Sitting Bull’s house. I told Sitting Bull I would go away at daylight if he did not stop it, and he did. The next morning I asked him to have no more dances, as the troops would come and there would be a battle. He said it was not his doings, but the [other] chiefs’, and he would be glad if the soldiers would kill him, for he wanted to die. ‘If you want to die, kill yourself, and do not bring other people into trouble,’ I said.” So he told the dancers to move to the foot of a nearby hill, where their sounds would not irritate Catherine.
She tried in other ways to intervene in the dancing, conferring with other influential Indians, and importuning them to call a halt. Even so, some of Sitting Bull’s enemies blamed her for the dancing, suggesting that it was her money that was funding the subversive activities and if she left the reservation, things would return to a state of calm. The friendship between the two seemed to have run its course, and on October 22, Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull made their final drive together, retracing their first passage and heading back to Fort Yates over the rutted terrain. They did not see it as their last time alone, or at least Catherine did not write of the trip that way. But Sitting Bull was dressed for burial, with a black cloth around his head. Perhaps a meadowlark called out again, the great songster of the plains reminding Sitting Bull of his fate, and adding a melodic touch to an otherwise silent journey in the gathering late autumn cold. The buckboard was hauled by the horse that Buffalo Bill had given to him upon his departure from the Wild West show five years earlier, the one he rode during his performances. As they approached the fort, he got down and walked before the horse; if soldiers started to shoot, he wanted to make sure they got him instead of Catherine. But he was not taken captive and he did not have to mount a fight. Instead, the officers shook his hand.
Major McLaughlin knew that Sitting Bull had never been an active proponent of ghost dancing. And he knew that the dance posed no threat to the stability of his agency or the others. Yet he had long wanted to get rid of his old nemesis and regarded fear of this religious outbreak as a cover. Now the timing was right, and in the days following Sitting Bull’s return to Grand River, he began laying the groundwork for his arrest, telling reporters and others that the chief was the instigator of the troublesome dance. The reservation was a cauldron of rumors, stoked by facts on the ground, decades of distrust between natives and Indian agents, and intra-tribal rivalries. It was of utmost importance to save face; after all, the situation here involved two warrior cultures with men who wore badges for taking the lives of enemies. In fraught times such as this, all men were on guard, hyper-aware, understanding that a state of siege was at hand. Edges were to be found and maintained, lest a point of weakness become manifest, obscuring the way back. Sitting Bull had spies planted among McLaughlin’s staff and the major had his own informants among Sitting Bull’s allies. The stage was set and it was time for the final act to unfold. Ever the showman, Buffalo Bill would soon make an appearance, along with an entourage.
On November 17, one week after Catherine Weldon had left, McLaughlin and his interpreter, Joseph Primeau, headed to Grand River to gauge the ghost dancing’s fever. When they arrived, there were about one hundred people circling around a pole, crooning, shrieking, and swooning, as another hundred looked on. A woman fainted and was carried into Sitting Bull’s tent. Sitting Bull put his ear to her mouth and she whispered of the promised land and ancestors she had seen. Deciding that it was a bad time to intervene, McLaughlin and Primeau spent the night at the nearby home of Bull Head, a lieutenant in the Indian police and enemy of Sitting Bull. At dawn, McLaughlin returned to Sitting Bull’s camp as the chief was stepping out of a sweat bath. Sitting Bull looked “very thin and more subdued than I had ever seen him,” McLaughlin later wrote. He wrapped himself in a blanket and shivered in the morning chill as McLaughlin made one more pitch against the ghost dance. Sitting Bull made a counteroffer, suggesting that the major accompany him to the other agencies and find the men who had visited the messiah. “I will demand that they show him to us,” he said, “and if they cannot do so, I will return and tell my people that it is a lie.”
McLaughlin told him that would be a waste of time, and that when he came to Fort Yates on the following morning, as per monthly instructions, he could spend the night and they could continue the conversation. Suspecting that this was a trap to detain him, Sitting Bull never made that trip, sending his friend Strikes-the-Kettle instead, who explained that Sitting Bull couldn’t come because one of his children was sick. Twenty other men from Sitting Bull’s encampment sent their wives for their rations. McLaughlin immediately issued an order stating that no family could receive supplies unless a male head of the household came to get them. So now, with conditions at Sitting Bull’s camp already deteriorating, he and his followers were being starved out. But the dancing continued, even as winter unfolded; true to a prediction of Sitting Bull’s, the season had been mild, as if favoring the display.
From then on, there followed a strange series of crossed wires and near-misses, desperate attempts at heading off the inevitable mounted by an increasing number of players. Under the auspices of Kicking Bear and men of influence at the other agencies, some of the dancers had fled to a remote place in the Badlands known as the Stronghold, where they continued their quest. Sitting Bull wanted to join them—not to participate, but to talk to them, see what was what. He needed permission to leave the reservation, and sent McLaughlin a poorly translated and badly spelled note, in which he seemed to threaten the major, allegedly saying among other things that “I will let you know something . . . the Policeman told me you going to take all our Poneys, gund, too . . . I want answ
er back soon.” McLaughlin had read many such notes from Indians over the years, given that they rarely had access to good translators. He could not, and did not, act on all of them; he was a smart man and well knew that often enough the messages were inaccurate. But this one indicated that Sitting Bull planned to leave Grand River and head to Pine Ridge in search of his compatriots. Right or wrong, it was one more pretext for the major to dispatch Sitting Bull. McLaughlin sent a letter ordering him to remain at his cabin. In other words, Sitting Bull was under arrest, and he knew that the Indian police would be coming.
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