The new film “Woman Walks Ahead” opens with a prim Jessica Chastain — in black Victorian widow’s garb — stepping out of her horse-drawn carriage and chucking a painting of her late husband into the East River. The year is 1889, and Chastain’s frustrated painter, a corseted Brooklyn bourge🔜ois named Catherine Weldon, has decided to take advan🎐tage of her newfound freedom to travel out West and paint someone who, unlike her husband, she considers a truly great man: the notorious Lakota Chief Sitting Bull.
The decision — based on actual events — wꦍill set Weldon off on an eye-opening journe🦋y. In the movie, she lands in the Dakotas, gets woke and becomes Sitting Bull’s confidante, moving in with him and his family in Standing Rock, the reservation where the Lakota tribes, part of the Sioux Nation, lived.
That largely happened in real life, too, although it was Weldon’s activism, not her art, that drove her to Standing Rock. (She did, however, paint at least four fairly realistic portraits of the chief.) In fact, her passion for the Laꦉkota people, her meddling in their affairs and her defiant determination to live among them would make her one of the most hated women in the United States: the Victorian era’s “Hanoi Jane.”
Now is Weldon’s time for redemption. After languishing 12 years in preproduction, “Woman Walks Ahe💮ad” will hit theaters and on-demand on Friday. Earlier this year, Kindle Books reissued Eileen Pollack’s 2002 biography of Weldon, “,” with a new epilogue, revealing a trove of recently unearthed information about the feisty agitator, including the fact that she actually went by the name Caroline. It turns out that Weldon’s story is much more colorful, shocking and sad than even her opponents — who labeled her “Sitting Bull’s white squaw” — could ever imagine.
“She was an extraordinary woman,” Susanna White, director of “Woman Walks Ahead,” told The Post. “If Weldon had been a man and done what she did, I think there’s a good chanc🙈e we’d know everything about her.”
Weldon was born Susanna Karolina Faesch on Dec. 4, 1844, in Basel, Switzerland. Her father was a militia captain who came from a wealthy merchant family; her mother, Anna Maria Barbara Faesch, was a firebrand.
Shortly after Susanna was born, Anna took up with a handsomeꦡ young physician named Karl Heinrich Valentiny, a Prussian revolutionary and fugitive wanted by the German government. When Valentiny decamped for America, Anna left her two older children with her dull husband and followed her paramour to New York with 6-year-old Susanna in tow. The trio settled in Brooklyn, and Susanna was rechristened Caroline.
Caroline took an interest in Native American culture as an adolescent. In a rare interview published in the Chicago Tribune in 1891, Weldon described seeing an Iroquois man, wearing a feathered headdress and peddling beads and trinkets in what is now Cobble Hill when she was a teen. She invited him int🗹o her family’s house, fed him and listened for hours “while he doled out the sorrows of his race.”
The meeting had a profound effect on her. As the Tribune reported, the young Caroline “wrote poetry, she painted pictures, but ever the theme was the same 🤪— the coming of the whites and the going of the redmen.”
Valentiny became concerned about his stepdaughter’s growing obsession with Native American culture and, according to the Tribune, married her off in 1866 to a young Swiss military surgeon named Claude Bernhard “in the hope that new duties and new pur⭕poses would bury forever the memories of th🥂e old Indian’s tales.”
It didn’t work. The♛ 21-year-old bride continued to gobble up news stories about the Sioux Wars and the eventual defeat of Army Lt. George Custer.
Weldon also j𝕴oined a group called the National Indian Defense Association, studied maps and legislation relating to Native Americans, and taught herself the Lakota language.
“The fact that she was interested in Indian rights at all was radical,” Weldon’s biographer, Pollack, told The Post. “But even liberal activists scorned the group she was in, the NIDA, who thought Indians shouldn’t assimilate, that they didn’t haveജ to become Christi🍃ans.”
Worse, in 1876, C✃aroline had an extramarital affair with a married man, moved with him to Hoboken, NJ, and had his child, a boy named Christy, before the so-called “adventurer” abandoned her and went back to his wife.
“Victorian women didn’t leave their husbands and run 🍌off with some guy in Hoboken and have an illegitimate child,” Pollack said. “It was a scandal.”
‘I thought — like so many women, people of color or gay people — she was one of those people that history just got wrong’
- Eileen Pollack
Humiliated, Caroline slu⛎nk to her parents’ place in Brooklyn. She earned her money through embroidery, working at an arts-and-crafts store. She continued to paint throughout her life as a hobby, with an amateurish folk-art feel. At some point after her divorce, in the 1880s, she began using the surname Weldon. That’s how she signed the letter she sent to James McLaughlin, the government agent who oversaw ﷽the Lakota reservation, asking him for permission to visit Sitting Bull at Standing Rock.
In June 1889, at the age of 44, “Mrs. C. Weldon” left Christy with frꦿiends and took the train by herself to the Dakotas, hoping to help Sitting Bull mobilize the other tribal chiefs in the area to resist the Dawes Act, which would divvy up 150 million acres of naℱtive land into allotments that Native Americans willing to sever their tribal allegiance could buy, with any excess sold to whites.
Traveling alone through the territories as a white woman was extremely dangerous, but that didn’t deter Weldon. After meeting with Sitting Bull, she successfully visited other tribal chiefs to get them to side with him, inciting the ire of McLaughlin — a believer in assimilation who had married a Sioux himself and who was under pressure from the US government to get the n꧅atives to cooperate.
But it was Weldon’s subsequent visit, in 1891, that caused a sensation. Not only did she bring Christy on the treacherous trip, but she also moved onto the reservation with Sitting Bull’s family, including his two wives and multiple children. She gave the tribe money to buy food after the government cut their rations in an effort to coerce them into complying with the Dawes Act. Sitting Bull treated Christy like his own son, and gave W🃏eldon a Lakota name, “Toka heya mani win,” or “Woman Walking Ahead.”
The press went crazy. She was labeled Sitting Bull’s “white squaw”; one h🦩eadline in The Bismarck Weekly Tribune read “She Loves Sitting Bull: A New Jersey Widow Falls Victim to Sitting Bull’s Charms.”
“They said she was carrying his love childꦛ, that his wives were running around after her with knives,”𒐪 said Pollack. “It just was all slander.”
“You have to think of the time period,” said Mark Halverson, archivist at the State Historical Society of North Dakota, which has one of the two known surviving portraits Weldon pai🃏nted of Sitting Bull, found in the chief’s cabin upon his death. The idea that a white woman would touch, let alone live with, a Native American “was pretty damning.”
Yet in some ways, the fierce Weldon was in over her head. Although Sitting Bull respected her, he didn’t understand why she would leave herself and her son so vulnerable without the protection of a husband. When he asked her to marry him, Weldon was furious, scribbling in her diary, “I think myself just as꧑ great as Sitting Bull.”
The final rift came during their disagreement about the Ghost Dance, which began sweeping the Western reservations in the summer of 1890. The ritual required Native people to dance until exhaustion to summon their ancestors, who would takඣe back their land from the white people who had stolen it. Sitting Bull did not want to resist the movement, but Weldon denounced it as ridiculous and predicted that the government would use it as an excuse to send in troops and destroy the Sioux Nation.
She ended up being right about the second part, but h🐟er insensitivity to native spirituality galled the chief, and didn’t endear her to his descendants. Sitting Bull’s great-great-granddaughter, Ina McNeil, told Pollack that as a w♋hite woman, there was a lot about Lakota culture Weldon didn’t understand. McNeil also downplayed Weldon’s influence on Sitting Bull: “My great-great-grandfather was not a man who had no insight into what was happening to him” or his people, she said.
That November, Weldon left the reservation and heade𝐆d to Kansas City, where a nephew and niece of hers lived. During the journey, Christy developed tuberculosis and died. “Away from the Dakotas, my🌳 boy gone forever, what is there left for me?” she wrote Sitting Bull, who, upon receiving the news, “sought solitude for several days,” according to The Bismarck Weekly Tribune.
A month later, worried that Sitting Bull would incite further rebellion, McLaughlin ordered his arrest, but the Native American police who arrived at his cabin on Dec. 15, 1890, ended up shooting and killing him. The ensuing chaos and fighting ended in the Wounded Knee Mไassacre of Dec. 29, which saw the deaths of as many as 300 Lakota peop𓆉le. In the end, they were forced to comply with the Dawes Act. By 1934, Native Americans owned just 48 million acres of land of the original 150 million.
Weldon — dejected and heartbroken, an outcast in Kansas City — eventually found her way back to Brooklyn, resuming her embroidery and even befriending some fellow Swiss. She didn’t tell them about her past lives. She died on March 25, 1921, at the age of 83, after her rented room on Baltic Street caught fire. She was buried alongside her mother and stepfather at Green-Wood Cemetery. And there she remained, an obscure, largely forgotten historical footnote. When Stanley Vestal published his bi꧃ography of Sitting Bull in 1932, he made little mention of her, and when he did, misidentified her as “Catherine” Weldon.
It was an error that persisted for more than 70 years, with Pollack eve🐈n referring to her as Cat🎐herine in her biography.
“I thought — like so many women, people of color or gay people — she was one of those people that history just ﷺgot wrong,” Pollack said about her difficulty finding information about her subject.
“But then, of course, itܫ turns out that she tried to hide her own history. And it all started b꧟efore she even went out West,” when she changed her name to Weldon.
Yet both Pollack and film director White agree that Weldon wouldn’t mind being in the ဣspotlight in the yea🌳r 2018.
“I think what’s exciting about our ﷽time now is we’re starting to revive things and telling these forgotten stories,” said White. “Male history has chosen not to tell female stories𝔉. And I think it’s time to redress the balance.”