women adventurers

Ani Pachen – Brave Tibetan Buddhist nun and warrior

Ani Pachen | Nicolehood [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

Ani Pachen wanted to spend her life in simplicity and quiet contemplation in a Buddhist monastery in Tibet. Instead, she became a resistance fighter against the Chinese invaders in the 1950s, was captured and spent over 20 years in prison. But she was finally able to fulfill her lifelong dream. Her story is one of great courage and steadfast endurance.

Ani’s Commitment

Ani Pachen was born in 1933 and she grew up as a privileged daughter of a chieftain in eastern Tibet, in the town of Lemdha in the Kham province. Buddhism was the religion of Tibet, and she had an early calling to be a nun.

At 17, she overheard her parents discussing a man they were going to force her to marry. She was NOT going to marry, she decided. She got help from one of her parents’ servants when she threatened to jump off the roof, and she went to a monastery. Her father finally relented and said she didn’t have to marry; only then did she agree to come home.

When she came back, she settled into her life of contemplation. Then, in 1950 everything began to change. The Chinese invaded Tibet.

Ani as Rebel Leader

Her father was a chief and he and others began resisting as they saw the Chinese takeovers of villages and the humiliations and torture of Buddhist monks. The Chinese first promised a lot of things, but gradually things got worse, and it was obvious the Chinese were going to wipe out the Tibetans and their Buddhist heritage. “We have to make plans,” her father said.

In 1958, her father’s health began to decline and he died. He had groomed her to take over for him, even training her how to shoot if necessary. She wasn’t sure she could do it, but she knew she had to fight for Tibet.

Tibet’s culture at the time was one of equality; women and men worked side by side and women were fighters. As soon as her father died, the resistance fighters turned to her as a leader.

“That day I passed from my childhood. In a moment, I knew that my dream of a life devoted to meditation and prayer was no longer possible. Unable to follow my heart, I was bound by duty to carry on my father’s work. With my country threatened and my family in danger, I set about making preparations for war. From that time forward, my life was never the same.” (SM, p. 123)

Ani Pachen had to make decisions on where and when to fight. She was responsible for many lives and she had to keep encouraging them to fight. She had to be tough with her “troops;” at one point she ordered a man whipped who disrespected her. She hated doing that; it went against all that her non-violent Buddhist training had instilled in her. Even though she had a gun, she wasn’t sure she could kill.

More and more Chinese troops were pouring into eastern Tibet. The resistance fighters were able to buy weapons and the American CIA began to help them, mostly training resistance fighters. Ani’s troops headed for Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, but then they learned it had already fallen to the Chinese. They learned later that the Dalai Lama had already fled to India.

Tibetan monks in captivity | unknown. Public Domain.

Capture and Prison – For Over 20 Years

“Fear always followed us: fear of being captured, fear of being killed. At times the fear had no object, but floated like a vapor around us.” (SM, p. 163)

The Tibetan resistance fighters and their families lived scattered about Kham province, waiting for food and weapon drops by the Americans. Then the Chinese attacked from all directions. Ani and her fellow resisters tried escaping over the Himalaya mountain passes to India, but Ani and about 100 others were captured and marched away.

Ani Pachen spent the next 20+ years in various prisons and work camps. Each one was terrible, some more so than others. Her autobiography Sorrow Mountain tells of her life during those years. She was interrogated, beaten, starved, tortured, lived in squalor, held in isolation, and denied the ability to worship. Her treatment was worse than for other women because of her “crimes” (resistance) and her status as a “commander in chief.”

Many times she was told to give up and confess to receive special treatment. She didn’t believe the Chinese and she said she would never confess.

In one prison she worked in a laundry washing the clothing of Chinese soldiers; the clothing was full of lice. In keeping with her belief in no-violence, she would brush off the lice and seep them onto the ground so they wouldn’t be boiled and killed. She had to be careful not to let the guards see her.

For several years she was in a prison close to her mother and she was able to see her occasionally; after she was moved from that prison, she never saw her mother again.

During the Cultural Revolution in 1966, she was forbidden to speak Tibetan, wear Tibetan clothing, or practice Tibetan customs. The sacred texts were burned all over the country and any monasteries still left were destroyed.

“Seeing the smoke rise up from the direction of Sera [monastery] was more painful to me than being beaten.” (SM, p. 220).

She had a special turquoise bead that she had kept hidden in her clothes for many years. She hit it in a chink in a wall above a toilet. The guards tried to find it but didn’t. When she went back for it, it was gone.

After Her Release – a Dream Come True

Someone asked her many years after she came to Dharamsala, “What kept you going?”

“The wish to see His Holiness….”

Dharamsala, India | Gayatri Priyadarshini [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]

The 14th Dalai Lama is a special person to Tibetan Buddhists. They call him “The Precious One” and believe he is the reincarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion. He was the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet and he is still a symbol of Tibetan freedom. The Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet in 1959 freed the Tibetans to continue their resistance.

Since his escape, the Dalai Lama has been living in Dharamsala, India, as head of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Thousands of escaped Tibetans have come to this city to be near him.

After her release, Ani Pachen spent several years on pilgrimage throughout Tibet, including several years in solitude in a cave. Then she came to Lhasa to participate in the continuing resistance there. Finally, in January 1981, with the Chinese watching her again, she was persuaded to escape to India.

It was shortly after her arrival in Dharamsala that she was able to meet with the Dalai Lama. They talked for a long time and cried when they spoke of their sorrow at what was happening to Tibetans.

Ani Pachen continued to live in Dharamsala in a nunnery. She died in 2002, at the age of 69. At the end of Sorrow Mountain, she said,

“As for me, the story will go like this: She led her people to fight against the Chinese. She was present at the protest in Lhasa. She worked to save the ancient spiritual teachings. When I die, just my story will be left. “ (SM, p 282)

Ani- Pachen’s life, her resistance, and her 20-year endurance were a testament to her faith. Could any of us endure as long as she did, continuing to fight for what we believe in?

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Sources:

Most of my information and the quotes above are from this book:

SM: Sorrow Mountain: The Journey of a Tibetan Warrior Nun. Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelly. Kodansha International. 2000. It’s part autobiography and part reflections. Although the accounts of her ordeals in prison were disturbing, I found the book interesting and inspiring.

I also got information from Buddha’s Warriors about the last days of Lhasa, the escape of the Dalai Lama, and the CIA’s involvement in aiding the Tibetan resistance.

You might also be interested in another book called Escape from the Land of Snows, which tells more of the dramatic story of the fall of Lhasa and the young Dalai Lama’s “harrowing flight to freedom.” I found this book at a library book sale and it has started a multi-year study of Tibet, Tibetan adventurers (like Alexandra David-Neel), and the history of Buddhism.

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Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive (a little) money if you buy a book from one of these links.

Marthe McKenna: Codename Laura – A Brave World War I Spy

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Are spies adventurers? I’d say yes. Case in point: Marthe McKenna, a brave young woman who spied against the Germans in World War I.

Life in Belgium in the first part of the 20th century must have been idyllic. In 1892, when Marthe Mathilde Cnockaert was born in the village of Westrozebeke in the Belgian province of West Flanders, it would have been quiet countryside. But then came World War I, and the German army barrelled through on their way to Paris. And, worse, they stayed.

German troops invading Belgium. Deutscher Sturmwagen in Roye/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-P1013-316 / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]

Life Under German Rule

Life was bad for the people of Belgium. The Germans took all the good food and supplies and left the people with almost nothing. There was bacon, putrid stuff nicknamed “Wilson” (after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson) and a kind of maize (corn) called “Hoover” (chair of the U.S. Relief Committee and later U.S. president) by the residents.

The Germans took their clothing to make sandbags, so they had to use blankets, tablecloths, curtains, and sheets for clothing.

Animals were also hard to find because the Germans took them too. One of Marthe’s neighbors had a goat that she loved and that gave good milk. She trained the goat to hide every time someone came into her house, by climbing into a hole between two houses!

How Marthe Got Started Spying

Marthe and her family were burned out of their home and had to move to a different town. She had been enrolled in a medical school, but it closed because of the war, so she found the only work she could do – as a nurse in a German hospital.

Like Rose Zar in World War II, Marthe was for a while living “in the mouth of the wolf” by working alongside the Germans. It was ironic that the Germans valued her services so much she was awarded their Iron Cross for distinguished service.

The dilemma for Marthe, like many people in Europe during wartime, was whether to help the hated Boche, as they were called to keep her family alive and get privileges or to resist and possibly be killed. Marthe found an uneasy balance – she worked with the Germans but she also spied on them. It was a dangerous life for a young woman with almost no training. She was even asked by one German officer to spy for the Germans and get more privileges! If she had said no, she would have been under his suspicion. She did some spying, but very little, toward the end of the war.

Marthe’s spying began when an acquaintance noted her liked Marthe’s cool, calm personality and intelligence and she persuaded her to spy for British Intelligence. She learned how to recognize fellow resistance fighters by the “two safety pins” they wore under their coat lapels. in the Philippines in World War II, Marthe worked in her father’s café in the evenings, where she passed on information she overheard. Like Joey Guerrero in World War II in the Philippines, she delivered messages and noted troop movements. Later she was asked to get information, which involved getting into restricted areas, a more dangerous task.

It’s ironic that women in Belgium during World War I were not able to vote or hold political office, but they could serve – and die for – their country by spying.

How Marthe’s Dilemma Played Out

The central dilemma of all spying is whether or not to act on the information you have found. If you find out about something by spying, and you act on it, you might be able to stop the enemy temporarily, but the other side knows you were spying on them and they find new ways to communicate. If you don’t act on the information, you take the risk that your own troops or civilians will be killed.

Several times Marthe’s spying cost Allied lives. At one point, she notified the Allies of a big German ceremony in another town. The doctor at the German hospital wanted her to take some of the wounded German soldiers to the parade. Marthe had already told the Allies about the parade and she knew they were planning on disrupting it, possibly with bombs.

When she found out that she would have to be there, she tried to get word to the Allies, but it was too late. She was lucky that she wasn’t in the area where the bombs went off – it could have cost her her own life.

Mata Hari | Lucien Walery [Public domain]

Marthe Was Not a Mata Hari

One part of the spying business that Marthe didn’t like was having to deal with German soldiers and officers. According to Tammy Proctor,* “Women, particularly working-class women, were seen as sexually available by many soldiers.” Woméen who ran boarding homes or cafés were particularly vulnerable and Marthe’s family ran a boarding house with a restaurant attached.

She had to pretend to be the girlfriend of a German officer and even spend a night with him, in order to get information. She always managed to avoid becoming intimate (or so she reports in her autobiography), but it was difficult.

The Most Terrible Secret Marthe Found

Marthe and another spy were digging in a yard when they found some suspicious cylinders.

Gas attack. United States. Army. Signal Corps. |[Public domain]

They reported the cylinders to the British authorities, who didn’t think they were important and called Marthe’s suspicions “highly speculative.” The true purpose of the cylinders became obvious on April 23, 1915, when the first choline gas attack was launched against the French at Ypres, Belgium. This was after the tear gas attacks and before mustard gas was used. Terrible way to kill people.

Marthe’s Life after the War

Marthe managed to survive the war without being captured. She was awarded honors by Britain, France, and Belgium for her espionage work. She married a British army officer named John “Jock McKenna.

During World War II, she was living in Machester, England, but she was still under suspicion by the Nazis and listed in Hitler’s “Black Book” to be arrested if they invaded Britain. She died in 1966.

In his Foreword to her autobiography, Winston Churchill said,

“[She] fulfilled in every respect the conditions which make the terrible professional of a spy dignified and honorable. She reported the movement of troops; she destroyed, or endeavored to destroy, ammunition dumps; she assisted the escape of British prisoners; she directed the British airplanes where to strike at the billets, camps, and assemblies of the German troops, and thus brought death upon hundreds of the enemies and oppressors of her country.”

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Sources: Most of the information for this article came from Marthe’s autobiography, I Was a Spy. The New York Times, in its article on Marthe McKenna in its Overlooked series, said, “Much of the account was later determined to be invented….”

*I also used information from the section on Marthe in Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War. Tammy Proctor. NY University Press 2003

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Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive (a little) money if you buy a book from one of these links.

Anita Garibaldi – A Warrior and Adventurer for Love

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Anita Garibaldi. By Gaetano Gallino (1804 – 1884) [Public domain]

Anita Garibaldi was a bright flame who shone briefly in her native Brazil and Italy. She was the companion in arms and wife to Giuseppe Garibaldi and a hero in her own right. Her story is wonderfully romantic and tragic.

Anita’s Early Life

Born in 1821 in Brazil, Anita (named Anninha) was her father’s daughter. She loved being with him breaking horses or helping with the herds, rather than sewing for her wedding chest. She had her father’s love for the outdoors, mountains, streams, flowers, and trees.

When he died in a construction accident, Anita was devastated, and her mother was left destitute.

Statue of Guiseppe Garibaldi, Nice, France. Miniwark [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Women in South America at that time were expected to marry, in part because they had no other way of making a living. Anita’s mother remarried quickly after her husband’s death, and she expected her three daughters to marry too. But Anita was willful.

Her father had said she would probably want to find her own husband. She agreed. But when her mother begged her to marry a shoemaker who was much older, she did, to get stability. He turned out to be a brutal, violent man. Her life was boring when he was sober and terrifying when he was drunk.

Then Anita met Guiseppe Garibaldi.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was a larger-than-life figure in European history. He was a freedom fighter who fought throughout his life for the cause of Italian liberation and unification. At the time they met in 1836 he came to South America as a political exile but also to help the Brazilians fight for their freedom.

He had long red-gold hair, dark blue eyes, and great charm. Just the sort of person Anita might fall for. It was love at first sight, for both of them. He was 29, and she was just 15. When he sailed on a short journey, she begged to go with him. He told the crew she was his wife. Anita loved the life of the sea and she quickly took on sailor’s duties and won the admiration of the crew.

Her Most Dangerous Adventure

Anita became Garibaldi’s companion in arms, went everywhere with her “Jose,” as she called him. She fought with him and cared for the troops as a nurse after the battles were over. A few years after they met, on a campaign against the Brazilian empire, she was captured and put into prison. She shared her daily meal with other prisoners, refusing special treatment because she was a woman.

She managed to escape from the prison and hid in the woods until dawn. She got some help from a farmer and his wife and she headed south on a horse, through a summer storm. For two days and two nights, she got little rest and food, eating grass to keep going.

On the third day, she crossed a desert and a raging river. As she stepped out of the river, an imperial guard saw her, as her hat came off, revealing her hair. He fled as if he had seen a ghost. She finally found Garibaldi and his soldiers.

It didn’t take long for her to become pregnant, but she didn’t let it stop her from traveling with Jose as a guerrilla fighter. Twelve days after she had the baby (a boy named Menotti) she wrapped him in a blanket, slung him on her saddle, and rode with the men.

Italian Flag. I, Sailko [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]

In 1840, Jose and Anita and their son went to Uruguay. He tried to settle down, but it wasn’t the type to do that. He soon took a post with the Uruguayan navy.

It was during this time that she made his famous “red shirt” uniform, and his comrades in Italy took on that name when they fought for freedom.

They had three more children, one dying from pernicious anemia. Garibaldi wanted to go back to Italy, even though he had a death sentence on his head in Sardinia.

Anita and the children went ahead of him in 1847 and lived with his mother in Nice. When they left, Anita told him she was taking red, white, and green cloth with her on the journey, to make him a flag to carry when she met him on his return to Italy.

Sure enough, in June 1848, she met his ship with the flag waving by her side.

Fighting in Italy – and Her Death

Garibaldi stayed only a few days in Nice after he landed. He took off immediately for Rome and she followed, leaving the children with his mother, determined to fight by his side.

They couldn’t conquer Rome, so they headed for headed off to fight in Milan. I can see her in her legionnaire uniform of “red shirt, baggy pants tucked into her boots, large round hat with a plume, concealing her hair.”

Anita was pregnant again, but she refused to go home. The Apennine mountains were difficult, and she was feverish and in pain. Her tent was lost on a pass, and she slept on a bed of leaves. In Venice, a doctor told her not to travel further, but she lied to Jose and didn’t tell him about the doctor’s orders. Through her “amazing willpower” she kept going as Garibaldi and his legionnaires tried to avoid the Austrian troops and escape to Switzerland to avoid a death warrant on him. She was weaker and weaker, stubbornly continuing to walk.

Finally, they found her a bed in the home of supporters and her body finally gave in. She died on August 4, 1849. Garibaldi had to leave immediately after she died because the Austrians were chasing him

Anita – After Her Death

Anita Garibaldi’s body was buried as an “unknown woman” to keep the Austrians guessing, but the neighbors knew exactly where she was. In 1859, Garibaldi and his two surviving children took her body to Nice to be buried.

You may be wondering why she would leave her children to fight with her husband. It’s simple. She said,

“I love my children, but…I love Jose more than I love any other creature in the world.”

Anita Garibaldi’s Monument in Rome / Sergio D’Afflitto [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

In June 1932, her ashes were taken to Rome, where a monument to her still exists. The Lisa Gergio, the author of the biography below, says,

“On the summit of [the hill of] Janiculum, her body outlined against the Roman sky, she leaps with her horse, not as an Amazon, but as a wife and mother who had turned warrior for the sake of the man she loved and of the freedom she learned to love.”

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Sources:

Most of the information in this article and all the quotes come from I Am My Beloved. Unfortunately, the price of this book is high ($45.19).

I also found information in Rejected Princesses: Tales of history’s boldest heroines, hellions, and heretics by Jason Porath. 2016.

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If you enjoyed this post and want to learn about more amazing women, you can Join the Women Adventurers Club and receive a Timeline of Women Adventurers and updates when I publish new articles.

Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive money if you buy a book from one of these links.

Rose Zar – A Courageous Woman In World War II Poland

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Like many Jewish women in World War II, Rose fought for her life. Hers is a story of courage in the face of the threat of Auschwitz and death. Some of this is difficult to read but I wanted to share Rose’s story with you. She was truly a courageous adventurous woman.

Rose tells her own story in the book she wrote in 1983 called In the Mouth of the Wolf. Here are the highlights:

Fleeing the Ghetto – and the Extermination Camp

Rose Zar was born in 1922 and she was 19 and living in Piotrkow, a small town just outside Warsaw when the people there heard that the Nazis were rounding up Jews to be taken to extermination camps.

Rose’s father Herman Guterman, a smart man, realized that two of his children – Rose and her brother Benek – had a chance to get away and live hidden in plain sight. He said to them:

“If you’re ever on the run and have to hide, the best place is right in the mouth of the wolf.”

Rose and Benek didn’t look especially Jewish and they spoke Polish with no Jewish accent. They had also been taught enough about Catholicism that they could talk about it if necessary. Herman got them real Polish passports, changed their names to more Polish ones (she became Wanda Gajda) and added their photos. He told them not to stay together because one person could hide while two was too suspicious. So Rose was on her own – alone.

Benek found a job in another city and Rose found one in Warsaw in a leather shop making leather uppers for shoes. She said it was difficult because she had to listen to the anti-Semitic remarks by the shopkeeper and she had to watch them tear up copies of the Torah (the Jewish bible) for shoe linings. “It was hard wearing that mask,” she said in her book. “Very hard.”

This was only the first of many times she found it heartbreaking to be Jewish and not be able to react to anti-Jewish people. Finally, the repeated sexual advances by the shopkeeper forced her to leave.

Warsaw Ghetto. National Archives and Records Administration [Public domain]

About this time she found out that her father was forced to go to the ghetto in Poland but his wife and six-year-old daughter were sent to the prison camp. I found this part difficult to read, but it might have been terrible for her to learn about.

Hiding in Plain Sight

For a while, Rose went from job to job and shelter to shelter, always trying to stay inconspicuous. She said, “The key to survival under false papers lies in making yourself as inconspicuous as possible.” She learned to keep her papers and some money sewn in a belt, so she could walk away from a situation if she felt it was dangerous.

Sometimes she had to leave a house quickly, with no place to stay. One Christmas Eve she was staying with an old man and woman. The woman decided Rose/Wanda had to go. Rose couldn’t be out after curfew so she found a little shelter behind a garbage can in the cold and snow. As she tried to sleep she heard Christmas bells and thought,

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men. But not for Jews.

She said she could never hear church bells the rest of her life without thinking of that moment.

One day she met a man she knew from her home town who was also a hidden Jew. She liked him and was eager for a Jewish friend, someone who remembered the town. But she was also concerned that he was too open. He kept coming to her work and his presence outside made her conspicuous. He also has some problems with Polish, saying some things with a Jewish accent. Something as small as that could mean being arrested and taken to a prison camp.

Rose wasn’t interested in him romantically. She had a boyfriend back in the ghetto and she knew she couldn’t afford the luxury of a love affair.

The Germans occasionally took her and interrogated her, trying to trick her into revealing herself One German sang Ave Maria to see if she could recognize it. (Luckily, she did.) She had several close calls and learned to trust her instincts. She had been receiving letters from her family and she didn’t want to throw them away. But one day she decided to clean them out. That night, walking home from work, she had a premonition that she shouldn’t go home. After taking a long way home, she learned that a Nazi had been looking for her and had left just before she arrived home.

Rose in the Mouth of the Wolf

Krakow, Poland, WWII. S. Frąckiewicz [Public domain]

Finally Rose got what seemed like a dream job, as a housekeeper and companion to the wife of a Nazi colonel, the Kommandant in Krakow. She and the Kommandant’s wife became friends, and she took care of their baby when it was born.

She lived every day in fear of being found out, but she knew that she was probably safer in the home of a Nazi than just about anywhere else. The Colonel liked her and wanted her to marry a nice Nazi.

He was a cruel man, to his wife and to Rose/Wanda. Once, when his wife was away, he made her drink seven glasses of brandy; to the end of her life, she couldn’t stand the smell of it.

She would go to concerts with the colonel’s wife and sit with Nazi officers and their wives. She thought about sitting there with them not knowing she was Jewish. They couldn’t tell!

About this time, she read Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s classic story of the fall of the culture of the South. It had a profound effect on her. She said that before she read it, she had thought that after the war everything would go back to the way it was and they would all live happily ever after. Now she realized she was fooling herself. The Pietrkow of her childhood was gone.

Never again would I walk those familiar streets…that world was gone forever….No matter what the future may bring, it will never bring back the past.

In 1944, the Germans were in retreat from Poland as the Russians advanced. The Colonel sent his wife and child away. When he was ready to leave for Germany, she hid from him, coming out only when she was sure the Germans had left.

Life After the War

If you talk to people who lived during this time in Europe, their lives seem to be divided strictly in terms of “before” and “after” the War. The people of Poland welcomed the Russians (formerly their enemies) as they took over Poland.

Rose went back to Piotrkow and married her childhood sweetheart. They helped smuggle Jewish children out of Soviet-occupied Poland and lived in Germany for a while. Finally, they went to the U.S. and spent the rest of their lives in South Bend, Indiana. You can read more about Rose’s work after the war in the “Overlooked” article about her in 2018 in the New York Times.

The Courage of Rose Zar

Courage comes in many forms. Rose Zar had a strong will to live and she spent over three years in constant danger, but she focused on survival. How exhausting it must have been for to have been always looking over her shoulder, wondering when she might be grabbed. Every word, every gesture, could bring her to the attention of the Nazis and a trip to Auschwitz, which was only an hour away from Krakow.

Was Rose Zar an Adventurous Woman? Well, her adventure wasn’t a choice. Like Ada Blackjack, she was forced into her adventure by circumstances. And she certainly had adventures. But her attitude toward her fate and the courageous way she fought to stay alive makes her, I believe, truly an woman adventurer.

Rose’s story is worth reading. It would make a great book club book.

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If you enjoyed this post and want to learn about more amazing women, you can Join the Women Adventurers Club and receive a Timeline of Women Adventurers and updates when I publish new articles.

Disclosure: The books featured in my posts have links to Amazon.com, and I receive money if you buy a book from one of these links.

Caroline Weldon and Sitting Bull – The True Story

by Jean Murray Leave a Comment

Sitting Bull. By Susanna Carolina Faesch, a.k.a. Caroline Weldon [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Caroline Weldon was an Indian rights activist who decided she wanted to help the Sioux in their fight against the Indian Affairs people. She also wanted to paint Sitting Bull, the head of the Hunkpapa Sioux tribe and one of the most famous Native Americans of all time. Her story has been told in books and in a recent (2018) movie Woman Walks Ahead.

Movies and books often take artistic license by revising situations to suit narrative flow or other artistic interpretations. But this movie goes too far. A review on Rotten Tomatoes accused the movie of “grave historical inaccuracy.” Rolling Stone called the movie “one big falsehood” and says it “promotes a feminist agenda by painting over the pesky facts to make the story more palatable to lovers of romance novels.”

I was doing my research on Caroline Weldon when I came across the movie and I was appalled at the misrepresentation of her and of Sitting Bull. So I’m changing my usual narrative to contrast the “facts” with the movie version. I don’t want to stop you from enjoying the movie, just be aware that it’s far from historically accurate.

Why Caroline Weldon Came to the Dakotas

Caroline in 1915. Henry Sauerland, Mount Vernon, NY, USA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Caroline Weldon* was born Susanna Karoline Faesch in Switzerland in December 1844, which would make her about 45 at the time she was with Sitting Bull (not the beautiful 30-something portrayed in the movie.) Sitting Bill, chief of the Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux, would have been about 59 at his death in 1890 (not the virile 40-something of the movie). Yes, she was overdressed and she did, as the movie shows, tame down her wardrobe and hair after she came west..

Caroline was a widow with a young son, Christie (his existence is ignored in the movie). She was involved with a group called the National Indian Defense Association, who were protesting the break-up of the tribes. Her plan was to help Sitting Bull by being his secretary and translator and to paint his portrait.

A bit of background:

The U.S. government had been gradually taking over Native American lands. At first, they sent the tribes to reservations; the Five Nations owned about 21 million acres of land. The U.S. government believed the tribes would be “better off” if they had their own plots of land and farmed (the tribes didn’t want to farm). The Dawes Act of 1887 allowed the government to divide tribal land into allotments. The “excess” land would be sold to whites at market prices. (You can see where this is going.)

At the time Caroline was with Sitting Bull, government land agents were working hard to get the tribes (men, of course) to sign agreeing to the allotments. The situation was made more difficult by several things:

Gold had been discovered in the Dakotas. On Native American land.
The Indian rights people were trying to persuade the tribes not to sign.
The land agents were cutting food rations for the tribes, trying to force them into signing.
The U.S. Army still hated the tribes for Little Bighorn, where General Custer and his troops were all killed. Sitting Bull was blamed for leading the battle, but he actually wasn’t in the fight that day.

The final event that caused the government to become more aggressive was the emergence of a messianic cult that was inciting the Sioux and other tribes into a phenomenon called Ghost Dancing. The dances made the settlers and the Army nervous; they were afraid the tribes were getting ready to strike.

Back to the story…

Caroline made three trips to what was then called “Dakota,” to Ft. Yates and the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where Sitting Bull lived. Her first visit was just for a few weeks, without her son. The second time, with Christie, she spent some time living with two women on a ranch 25 miles from Sitting Bull, and for a brief time moved to his home (but she stayed in a small house, not his cabin). The Sioux started calling her “Woman Who Walks Ahead” because she walked ahead of or with Sitting Bull, which a Native American woman would never have done.

Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill. Henry Sauerland, Mount Vernon, NY, USA [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

She was forced to leave by the Indian Agent, McLaughlin. He twisted her words and portrayed her in the press as insane. (Really.) The press didn’t like the idea of a woman acting out of character for that time. They castigated her for leaving her son in New York, and they reviled her for bringing him into danger in Dakota. She couldn’t win with them.

Major James McLaughlin is portrayed in the movie as a terrible man. He at first liked the Indians, as long as they were compliant. McLaughlin actually wrote a book called My Friend the Indian (1915)! He personally hated Sitting Bull, in part because of Little Big Horn. He liked to show off Sitting Bull, taking him on trips, including one to Washington, D.C. to “discuss” the Dawes Act.

McLaughlin told Sitting Bull what he could do and where he could go. In 1885 he allowed Sitting Bull to go to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where the chief rode in the opening parade for a few months.

What Happened in the End?

Caroline begged McLaughlin to be allowed to come back to Dakota a third time, with her son. She returned in October 1889, planning was to spend the rest of her life living with Sitting Bull and his people. She loved the prairie and the Sioux way of life, and she had nothing and no one back East.

She came back to a volatile situation, with the Ghost Dancers stirring up trouble and Sitting Bull sick and tired, looking years older. She accosted the messiah and denounced him, which didn’t go well with the tribes – and Sitting Bull. He sided with his people and turned his back on her. He said he was ready to die, and in fact, he predicted his own death.

One source quotes her as saying,

“There I had been working for his interest and the interest of the Indians for years, was ready to share all the dangers, and he was foolish enough to believe me to be his enemy.”

She was furious with him for not stopping the Ghost Dances because she was (rightly) afraid that their actions would lead to violence. But Sitting Bull, as chief, couldn’t and wouldn’t interfere with the right of his people to celebrate their religion.

She left with her son for Kansas City. Her son, who probably had tetanus, died on the way. Sadly, she was castigated by the press for “neglecting” him (she didn’t).

McLaughlin, convinced that Sitting Bull was “in open rebellion against constituted authority, was defying the Government,” decided to arrest him. Sitting Bull was arrested by the Army and some of his own people on December 15, dragged out his bed. He protested the indignity, and in the process, he was killed accidentally by One Bull, his adopted son. Caroline had already left for Kansas City and she was nowhere near Dakota when he died. (That dramatic movie scene where she runs around in the snow never happened.)

One incident that’s true – kind of – is the horse. The horse, a circus horse, was a present to Sitting Bull from Buffalo Bill. The rumors were that when the horse heard the gunshots in the fight, he followed his training and started dancing (the movie version). Another rumor was that he bowed his head. Who knows?

What Was the Relationship Between Caroline and Sitting Bull?

Caroline’s role with Sitting Bull was as a secretary, translator, and liaison. They were very different, culturally and personally, but they clearly liked each other. Were they romantically involved? There’s absolutely no evidence of that. Sitting Bull had 5 wives and more than one at a time. (No wives in evidence in the movie.) And she did paint several portraits of him, one of which was hanging in his cabin when he was killed.

There is evidence that he asked Caroline to marry him. She was insulted and refused. It’s quite possible that the proposal was a way of protecting her from rumors, but not because he “loved” her. That concept wouldn’t have been in his vocabulary. And the steamy scenes in the movie would never have happened.

The movie portrayed her as being instrumental in getting Sitting Bull to fight the allotments, but a Native American man probably wouldn’t listen to the advice of a woman.

He wanted peace, but he also wanted freedom. Tough dilemma.

Of her life in Dakota with Sitting Bull and the Sioux, she said (quoted in Woman Walking Ahead),

“No one in the world was as happy as I, and I wish that all might have shared in that happiness. A city seems a prison to me….I enjoyed the freedom of the wilderness…I love the solitude, …and I was loath to leave it. But I had to go, as my life was in danger.”

Caroline went back to New York and obscurity. Unlike other women of the time, she never published any memoirs. Maybe the memories were too difficult to bear. She died in 1921 and is buried in Brooklyn, N.Y, in Green-Wood Cemetery. In 2018, the cemetery featured her in a celebration for Women Who Walked Ahead.

Sources:

This NPR article interviews Michael Greyeyes, who plays Sitting Bull in the movie. He discusses the changes in the portrayals of indigenous people in tbe movie.

Willis Fletcher-Johnson. The True Story Behind “Woman Walks Ahead”- A Brief Historical Account of Caroline Weldon (part of a larger work). Johnson notes that Weldon didn’t begin using the name “Caroline” until after she left the reservation.

*Eileen Pollack. Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Bookbaby, 2018. Pollack, on the basis of Johnson’s book (above), chooses to use the name “Catherine.” Because she is included in Wikipedia as “Caroline,” I chose to use this name to make it easier for readers to find information about her.

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