Title: "Woman Walking Ahead -- In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull"
Author: Eileen Pollack
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press 2002
Eileen Pollack writes about Catherine Weldon, a woman from Brooklyn, who twice came to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation to work with Sitting Bull and to paint his portrait.
Her first visit was in 1889, and her second visit was from May 1890 to November 1890. She was a widow with a young son who started to write letters to Sitting Bull after he and 60 chiefs had been brought by the government in October 1888 to Washington D.C. in an unsuccessful effort to work out a new agreement to sell some of the tribal land. Weldon was a representative of the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA). She was opposed to the proposed agreement. She did not have much time on her first visit, having left her son with her husband’s relatives. She stayed on a ranch north of the Cannonball River waiting to see Sitting Bull, who had been ill with pneumonia. When he recovered, he came 40 miles in June 1889 to see her. They immediately got along. She worked with him in writing letters. Because she was white and he was an American Indian, rumors were circulated they had a romantic relationship, which rumors persisted without any basis in fact. When it came time for her to return to Brooklyn, Sitting Bull drove her in his wagon to the steamboat landing, helped her down and lifted down her trunk.
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On April 5, 1890, Weldon wrote to James McLaughlin, the agent in charge of Standing Rock, asking for permission to return to Standing Rock to be with her Indian friends, and he granted her request. Weldon’s plan was to write Sitting Bull’s “biography, paint his portrait, and act as his secretary and translator.” She lived with Sitting Bull, his wives and children in his camp on the Grand River in South Dakota. She sent for her son when his school term finished, and they stayed at his camp until she left to return home. While living in his camp on the Grand River, Weldon was outraged when Sitting Bull asked her to marry him and become another wife. “Sitting Bull had given her the name Woman Walking Ahead. How, then, could he see her as a wife, who must always walk behind?”
During her last visit in 1890, the Ghost Dance reached Standing Rock with the promise of an Indian Messiah who would bring back the buffalo, drive out the white men and recover the Indian dead. It was a time of great anxiety for both the whites and the Indians. Weldon preached against the belief in an Indian Messiah and against the land and culture being taken from them, thus making her a problem for both Sitting Bull and McLaughlin. She left on Nov. 10, 1890, by steamboat for Kansas City. However, her son, who had stepped on a nail, became ill and they got off in Pierre, where he died. The captain of the steamboat promised to deliver her trunk with all her remaining possessions to Kansas City. That was the last she saw of them. It was in Pierre where she learned Sitting Bull and some of his family and followers had been killed when Indian police tried to remove him from his Grand River camp on Dec. 15, 1890.
The problem Pollack had in writing this book was the lack of material available about Weldon; thus to write a full-size book Pollack had to add a lot of history about the time of Sitting Bull and the Ghost Dance which led to his murder and the subsequent murder of Indians at Wounded Knee on Dec. 29, 1890. Pollack proved herself to be a tenacious researcher, and in her last chapter a more complete picture of Weldon emerges. She found Weldon had been born in Switzerland in 1838 as Caroline/Catherine Schlotter, arriving in America in 1871, and married Richard Weldon, having one son, Christopher, born in 1878. She learned Weldon had died on March 15, 1921, and she found her unmarked grave.
Pollack learned Weldon had painted four portraits of Sitting Bull, one of which is on display at our State Historical Society of North Dakota. This is the painting which was on the wall of Sitting Bull’s cabin when he was murdered as they tried to remove him. The portrait is slashed as it was the day he was killed.
If this book was just about Weldon and Sitting Bull, it would have been much shorter. One gets the sense that to fill space and add pages Pollack engaged in a great deal of speculation and “what ifs.” Much of this book is about Pollack and all the work she went through, what she saw and where she visited. The pronoun “I” is used extensively. Weldon’s story is very interesting, making this book a worthwhile read, but it could have been much more compact.