Caroline Weldon
Caroline Weldon , nee Susanna Carolina Faesch (born December 4, 1844 in Kleinbasel ; died March 15, 1921 in Brooklyn ) was a Swiss - American civil rights activist and artist of the late 19th century and an activist in the National Indian Defense Association (NIDA). Weldon was Sitting Bull's confidante and private secretary during the time when the Plains Indians took over the spirit dance movement .
Youth and education
Caroline Weldon was born in Kleinbasel , Switzerland under the name Susanna Carolina Faesch on December 4, 1844, the third and youngest child of Johann Lukas Faesch and Anna Maria Barbara Marti. Her father was a mercenary officer in the French military service.
Around 1848 the mother met and fell in love with the German revolutionary Karl Heinrich Valentiny, who was living in exile in Basel . 1849 followed the divorce of their parents, which left Valentiny 1850 Basel and emigrated to America, where he received a doctor's office in New York district of Brooklyn opened and operational. Anna Maria Barbara followed him in 1852, accompanied by her youngest daughter, Caroline, and married Valentiny.
Caroline was educated in New York, she showed great talent for languages and also for art. She was also heavily influenced by her intellectual stepfather. In 1865 Bernhard Claudius Schlatter, a young doctor who was born in Schaffhausen , Switzerland, came to Valentiny's house as a guest. He took a liking to Caroline, now 21 years old, and asked for her hand, and they married on May 30, 1866. Schlatter opened his own medical practice in Brooklyn. The marriage remained childless, Schlatter was unable to reconcile Caroline's intellect and lively, artistic lifestyle with his own, rather prudish ideology, and the separation ensued. Caroline moved back to her stepfather and mother.
From a relationship in the summer of 1876 with a man named Christopher J. Stevenson, who soon left her, Caroline had a son, named "Christie". The resulting scandal caused Caroline to withdraw. During this time she became interested in the fate of the Native Americans, the North American Indians . She read in the newspaper reports about the freedom struggle of the western prairie nations of the Lakota , Cheyenne and Arapaho against the troops of the USA and the annihilation of the 7th US Cavalry Regiment under George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 by the allied Indian tribes under the leadership of Sitting Bull and his later flight to neighboring, neutral Canada .
Career
After Caroline was formally divorced from Schlatter on July 18, 1883, she continued to pursue her artistic and idealistic interests. After her mother's death in 1887, she inherited a small fortune, and in the summer of 1889 she was able to realize her long-cherished dream of traveling to the Dakota Territory in the west and living with the Lakota Indians. During this time she formally adopted the stage name Caroline Weldon . She became a member of NIDA, the National Indian Defense Association , and began working as an activist for the Lakota in their fight against the US government, which was about to use the Dawes Act to protect large parts of the land of the Great Sioux Reservation to expropriate and clear for white colonization. This should create the economically sensible basis for the establishment of the two US states North Dakota and South Dakota .
Weldon befriended Sitting Bull , the leader of the traditionalists within the Lakota nation. She became his mouthpiece, secretary, interpreter and lawyer. She moved to Sitting Bull's camp on the Grand River on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation with her young son Christy and shared a house and hearth with him and his family. Their confrontations and their open resistance to the Indian agent James McLaughlin made them largely unpopular. This then began a rumor campaign that she was Sitting Bull's white mistress and was a slave to him, which degenerated into open hatred of the neighboring white population towards her. She was reviled and ridiculed in the national press.
In the summer of 1890, when the ghost dance movement spread like wildfire in the western Indian reservations, she warned Sitting Bull that the US government could use her as an excuse to arrest him and destroy the Lakota nation with military intervention.
Sitting Bull turned away from her, and because her son Christy was seriously ill with sepsis , she decided to move away in November of that year. The attempted arrest of Sitting Bull in December, which ended with his murder, as well as the ensuing massacre at the Wounded Knee at the end of the month confirmed her premonitions and also made her feel helpless and failing. Her son Christy died of blood poisoning on November 19, 1890 , on the Chaska river steamer near Pierre , South Dakota, en route to her new home in Kansas City , Missouri . She lived there for a short time with her nephew, the teacher Friedrich William Schleicher, and later moved back to Brooklyn, New York. Weldon soon disappeared from the public eye.
Caroline Weldon painted four oil portraits of Sitting Bull. The two surviving are in the collection of the North Dakota Historical Society in Bismarck and in the Historic Arkansas Museum in Little Rock, respectively
End of life
Weldon died in her humble apartment, alone and forgotten on March 15, 1921. The cause of death was third-degree burns to her face and body. She was buried in the Valentiny family grave in Green Wood Cemetery, New York, Lot 13387, Section 41.
In pop culture
The poet and writer Derek Walcott mentions Caroline Weldon and her life in the play The Ghost Dance and in the epic poem Omeros . The film The Woman who precedes ( Woman Walks Ahead , USA, 2017) directed by Susanna White with Jessica Chastain in the lead role tells about Caroline Weldon's life with Sioux Sitting Bull. Screenwriter Steven Knight took a lot of literary liberties so that the film is in little agreement with historical facts.
Individual evidence
- ^ Faesch Family Archives, State Archives of the Canton of Basel, Basel, Switzerland, (signatures StABS, PA397a, court archives U152, Uc7)
- ^ Caroline Weldon genealogy
- ↑ Eileen Pollack: Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull . University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2002
- ↑ Heather Cox Richardson: Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre. Basic Books, New York 2010
- ↑ James McLaughlin: My Friend the Indian. 1910
- ↑ Norman E. Matteoni: Prairie Man. The Struggle between Sitting Bull and Indian Agent James McLaughlin. Guilford CT 2015
- ↑ Stanley Vestal Papers, University of Oklahoma Library Archives, Prof. Walter Stanley Campbell (1877-1957) https://digital.libraries.ou.edu/whc/nam/collection.asp?cID=1224&sID=7
- ^ Vestal, Stanley (aka Campbell, Walter Stanley). New Sources of Indian History 1850-1891, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, OK, 1934; transcripts of letters written by Caroline Weldon
- ↑ Susanna Carolina “Caroline” Faesch Weldon. In: Find A Grave.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Weldon, Caroline |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Faesch, Susanna Carolina (maiden name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss-American civil rights activist and artist, activist in the National Indian Defense Association |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 4th December 1844 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Kleinbasel |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 15, 1921 |
| Place of death | Brooklyn |