Woman Walking Ahead

American author Eileen Pollack’s biography, Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull (2002), chronicles the life of Catherine Weldon who, in 1889, travels to the Dakota Territory to live with the Sioux people and one of their prominent leaders, Sitting Bull. In 2017, the story formed the basis for a film adaptation starring Jessica Chastain as Weldon.

On December 4, 1844, Weldon is born in Switzerland with the given name Susanna Karolina Faesch. Her father, Johann Lukas Faesch, is a Swiss mercenary soldier who belongs to a family of Swiss nobility dating back to the 15th century. Leaving Johann behind to fight with the Swiss army in France, Weldon and her mother, Anna Maria Barbara, settle in Brooklyn, New York in 1852. That same year, Anna marries Dr. Karl Heinrich Valentiny, an exiled German revolutionary and physician who runs a medical practice in Brooklyn. The three live together until 1866 when 22-year-old Weldon marries the physician and fellow Swiss immigrant Dr. Bernhard Claudius Schlatter.

Unable to produce a child, the union between Weldon and Schlatter is not a happy one. Ten years after their marriage, in 1876, Weldon absconds with a married man listed in court records as Christopher J. Stevenson. Together, they live in a rented apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, and at some point that year or the following year, Weldon gives birth to a boy named Christie. Shortly thereafter, Stevenson returns to his wife, abandoning Weldon. With her estranged husband unwilling to take her and another man's child into his home, Weldon and Christie are forced to move in with her mother and stepfather. Although they would remain estranged, Weldon and Schlatter do not officially divorce until 1883.



After her divorce, Weldon pursues an interest in painting. Around this time, she also becomes interested in the plight of American Indians. While much of the settled territory in the United States has been purged of American Indians—most of whom are starved, killed, or relocated to reservations—a conflict still rages between the US and the Sioux tribes in the Dakota Territory. In 1887, after her mother dies, Weldon inherits a considerable sum of money, allowing her the freedom to live her life however she pleases. She joins the National Indian Defense Association, an organization headed by the physician and Indian rights activist Dr. Thomas Bland and his wife, Cora. The group's chief objective is to aid the Sioux in their fight against the US government's attempts to remove American Indians from the Great Sioux Reservation to establish white settlements in North and South Dakota. The land-grab is done under the guise of the 1887 Dawes Act, a law that purports to grant American Indians private property rights over the land but which, in practice, is used to deprive them of land.

In 1889, after changing her name to Caroline Weldon to put her past behind her, Weldon and her son, Christie move to the Dakota Territory to live among the Sioux. After meeting Sitting Bull, the leader of the Sioux's traditionalist faction, Weldon becomes his secretary and translator. Over the next year, Weldon has frequent confrontations with James McLaughlin, a federal Indian agent who takes an increasingly aggressive stance against Sitting Bull. McLaughlin even launches a national smear campaign against Weldon, leading to constant vilification in the press and widespread hatred of Weldon among white Americans nationwide. During her time with the Sioux, Weldon paints at least four portraits of Sitting Bull, two of which survive and are currently displayed at museums in North Dakota and Arkansas, respectively.

Around this time, Sitting Bull becomes a strong advocate for the Ghost Dance Movement, a ritual designed to unite the spirits of the living and the dead in a fight against white colonialists. As such, the US government fiercely opposes the Ghost Dance Movement, viewing it as a serious threat to the nation's efforts to subjugate the Sioux people. Fearing that the federal government will use the Ghost Dance Movement as a pretext for launching a military intervention against Sitting Bull and destroying the Sioux Nation, Weldon denounces the movement and urges Sitting Bull to abandon it. This creates a permanent rift between the two. The rift, combined with her son falling ill, causes Weldon to leave the Sioux in November of 1890. On a riverboat near Pierre, South Dakota on her way to her new home in Kansas City, Missouri, Christie dies of his illness.



The following month, Weldon's warnings to Sitting Bull about a military intervention prove tragically prescient. On December 15, 1890, McLaughlin orders the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull. A conflict ensues in which Sitting Bull is shot in the head and killed. Fearing an escalation in hostilities as a result of Sitting Bull's death, the US military sends a detachment of its 7th Calvary Regiment to enter a large Sioux encampment near Wounded Knee Creek where they slaughter upwards of three-hundred Sioux people, over half of whom are women and children.

After living in Kansas City for a brief time, Weldon returns to Brooklyn where she lives out the rest of her years in relative obscurity. On March 15, 1921, Weldon dies at the age of seventy-six, the victim of accidental third-degree burns caused by a candle that starts a fire in her apartment.

Woman Walking Ahead is a fascinating story of one woman's attempt to bridge the cultural gap between whites and American Indians, on the eve of the latter's decimation at the hands of the former.