![]() ![]() “There was some romantic tension,” Pollack says. It’s an understandable question watching the Sitting Bull character de-robe in front of Weldon in a tent in the film. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Were Sitting Bull and Catherine Weldon Romantically Involved? “She didn’t save anybody but she helped.” “, that differentiated her from other whites - her generosity,” Pollack says. The people she helped rewarded her with a name: “Woman Walking Ahead.” But the four portraits of Sitting Bull she painted during that time were not the main reason she went out there, contrary to the impression some might get from watching the film. Pollack tells TIME that Weldon, 52 years old at this point, went to Standing Rock (in June 1889 and again in May 1890) first and foremost to be Sitting Bull’s “advocate and translator.” The scene in the movie in which Weldon, who was not very wealthy, gives her money and possessions to feed the hungry people is fairly accurate. According to Pollack, their letters - which don’t survive today but were mentioned in other Weldon papers - contained details of these talks, fair prices for Dakota land and maps of the government’s plans to reduce the size of the tribes’ reservations. Sitting Bull traveled to Washington, D.C., for negotiations about fair prices for the land in October 1888, and Weldon began corresponding with him shortly after. By forcing Native Americans to live on designated farm plots, Utley explains, Washington moved toward the dual dubious goals of “civilizing” Indians and also opening up what had been their land to white settlement. Utley, author of Sitting Bull: The Life and Times of an American Patriot and former National Park Service historian. The policy was “the white man’s effort to remake Indians as white men in all but color,” says Robert M. ![]() The Dawes Act of 1887 confined the Sioux to smaller reservations, and the reduced land led to food scarcity and rationing. she might have been inspired to action by the newspaper coverage of the Indians losing their land during westward expansion. Native American culture was a subject of fascination in Switzerland during the time of her youth, and Pollack says that after she came to the U.S. What exactly prompted Weldon to travel to see Sitting Bull is unknown, but her biography provides several clues. Though her personal life could be chaotic, she found her purpose in advocating for Native American rights as a member of the National Indian Defense Association. When she moved out West, she changed her surname to Weldon, thought to be an attempt to cover up the divorce and the fact that she had a son out of wedlock. They got a divorce, and she ran off with a lover and got pregnant with her son, Christopher. (She was not a widow, as the movie suggests.) She first married a Swiss doctor, Claude Schlatter, but that marriage didn’t last. She made her living selling her embroidery. As explained by the book that inspired the movie, Eileen Pollack’s Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull, she was born Susanna Faesch in Switzerland in 1844 and immigrated to Brooklyn, N.Y. Though such shows were founded on the exploitation of stereotypical ideas, they were also a chance for Native Americans to make money and meet people who may be sympathetic to their cause, according to the National Museum of the American Indian. Sitting Bull became famous after the battle through his role in Buffalo Bill Cody’s variety show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. soldiers are thought to have died in what’s sometimes called Custer’s Last Stand. The Sioux emerged victorious, and about 260 U.S. The confrontation was sparked by Custer’s troops discovering gold in the Sioux-controlled Black Hills, now in South Dakota, in 1874. ![]() One of history’s most famous Native American leaders, he’s most well known today for defeating General George Custer’s army at The Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in what was then Montana Territory. Here’s what to know about the real people and historical events that inspired the movie. But the story of the painting, which plays a much smaller role in the real history of Sitting Bull and Weldon than it does in the movie, is actually a window into a pivotal moment in American history. The movie Woman Walks Ahead - opening Friday, starring Jessica Chastain, Michael Greyeyes and Sam Rockwell - centers on what might seem like a minor moment in history: the 19th century efforts of Catherine Weldon, a white woman from Brooklyn, to paint a portrait of Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull.
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