Wannaskan Almanac blog post of Thursday March 18, 2021

 

The Art of Convergence

Susan Mable Deloria was an abstract artist, who was born in 1896 and died in 1963, whose nom de plume artist’s name was the same of that of her mother. She had her difficulties.

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s passing --
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon the mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of attention
Like stone.

Emily Dickinson, poems, volume 1, book 1 (life), X111 (1890)

There was a man (1821-1879) who liked to paint, draw, and act on stage as had his parents before him; his father, (1783-1872) and his mother (1779-1867). The man’s father became one of the founding members of Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Society; as well as studied painting with learned masters, becoming well known for his 1824 portrait paintings of John Quincy Adams and the Marquis de Lafayette; as well as Thomas Jefferson, Queen Victoria, James Polk and a few hundred others, including Indian killer Andrew Jackson, the 7th President of the United States.

The man born in 1839 became a surveyor, as had been his father in Davenport, Iowa. In 1861, as a young man seeking adventure, The Surveyor enlisted at Fort Snelling as a private in the Minnesota Volunteer Cavalry as a mounted rifleman attached to Curtis Horse, an independent regiment of cavalry that was later designated 5th Iowa Cavalry. As a mounted rifleman, versus a mounted infantryman, The Surveyor was trained to to fight on horseback or dismounted with sabre, revolver, or rifle; whereas a mounted infantryman merely used horses as transportation and fought dismounted. As a highly mobile unit of firepower, the deployment of cavalry soldiers evolved through the experiences of the Civil War as a great advantage, during which The Surveyor served primarily in Tennessee. His unit fought under different commands as the surviving numbers of troops were transferred to combine greater numbers wherever needed.
 

An 1841 graduate of West Point, the first man, now twenty-years old, was an officer who had served as an infantry commander during the Mexican War (1846-1848) during which time he sketched military positions, landscapes, battles, and camp life. In his later career, he ventured back into his love of oil painting. In May of 1857, he sent a box home to Philadelphia from Fort Pierre, in Dakota Territory, just prior to his transfer to Fort Randall. Inside the box was a letter explaining the pair of moccasins, and three oil paintings on canvas; two being of Indian villages, and one of two ‘Sioux Indian Maidens,’ one of whom he identified as Red Crane Woman (Susan Pehánlútawin (1838-1909) ) and with whom, he failed to mention, he may have fathered a child to be born in early 1858; and who, the baby’s mother named Akičitawiŋ/Soldier Woman. The child was one of several others the officer fathered with Native women during his preceding four year tenure as commander of the occupation in California, three years before.


Meanwhile The Officer left the Dakotas for a short stint in the Civil War himself in 1862, during which he was attached to General George McClellan, who sadly later became Lincoln’s first failing commanding general. This association proved detrimental to The Officer’s own rising star as a military commander, when during the summer a vicious conflict developed in Minnesota because of a series of events incurred by the United States that included treaty violations with the Minnesota Santee Dakota over late annuity payments of food and supplies. The behavior of inscrutable Indian agents and traders; and the frustration felt by young Dakota men and leaders alike ignited the conflict called The Dakota War that ran from August through December 1862, and ended in Minnesota, when on December 26, the United States hung 38 Dakota men simultaneously in Mankato, Minnesota; the largest mass execution in the United States.

The United States held convicted Indian prisoners for almost four years; over 1600 Dakota non-combatant men, women, and children were interned on Pike Island in the Mississippi River, below Fort Snelling. More than 300 died there in the winter of 1863 as the federal government abolished reservations, invalidated Minnesota Dakota treaties, and sought to expel every Dakota from Minnesota while the state initiated a $200 bounty for every Dakota scalp turned in.

As the Dakota War erupted across Minnesota, The Officer, already experienced in the region from his 1857 tour, was transferred from the Civil War battlefields back to the Northern Plains where he commenced punitive military campaigns towards the total annihilation of Dakota tribes.

It was rumored that in the spring or summer of 1863, The Officer entered a Yankton Dakota village and gave the headman an ultimatum of either giving up all the Minnesota Santee refugees he knew they were hiding, or face his command as enemies. The headman, named Saswe, of cross-culture French ancestry and mixed-blood traders, discussed the issue with others and came up with the idea of killing one of the refugees and offering his body up as the only refugee they had in their camp. The Officer accepted the story. But by September of 1863, the story must of made its rounds, for The Officer wasn’t so amiable. He attacked a Dakota village at Whitestone Hill of five hundred lodges, killing warriors, women and children, a full year after the Dakota War was over.

Detached from 5th Iowa Cavalry February 25, 1864, The Surveyor’s regiment was re-designated Brackett's Battalion, Minnesota Cavalry, at Fort Snelling, Minnesota until May 2, 1864 when it was attached to Pollock's 1st Brigade, District of Iowa, of the Northwestern Indian Expedition June 4 to November 10, 1864. He participated in the Battle of Killdeer Mountain July 28, 1864, the whole of the force numbering 2200 men.  The Surveyor was at the Battle of the Badlands, August 8–9 1864, where in some places the men had to dismount, lead their horse through narrow ravines and watch out from attack from above. 

Surviving that engagement, The Surveyor, now a Corporal in Company A of Brackett's Battalion returned to Minnesota and was stationed at Fort Ridgley, until spring of 1865. His regiment returned to fight Indians again, in minor engagements, May to October, 1865. He was on patrol duty from Sioux City to Fort Randall from October, 1865, to May, 1866. His battalion was mustered out on June 1, 1866 after serving four years and nine months. The Surveyor drifted northeast over the ensuing years employed in various roles including stagecoach driver, a doctor’s assistant, and later, a land surveyor. 

The Yankton Dakota headman, Saswe, was a leader of a half-breed band. His name was a Dakota pronunciation of Francois Des Lauriers. He was a medicine man; a cultural go-between, and when necessary, had been a killer of four human beings: a matter of some great torture for him, for when he raised a cup to drink he could see all those faces of the dead taunting him. One of his great joys was after his baptism in the Episcopal Church, in 1871, was the erasure of those ghosts. 

 He had entered the church through efforts of his son, Tipi Sapa/Black Lodge, son of Blackfoot Woman/Sihasapawin (1827-1899) and was one of the first Dakota men to be ordained as a minister of the Episcopal Church. Tipi Sapa also had another name, it being Philip J. Deloria, who, at the time when his father Saswe, and the officer met at the Yankton Dakota Camp in 1863, he was ten years old -- and Susan Pehánlútawin’s daughter Akičitawiŋ/Soldier Woman was five; the two children moved in the same circles in Yankton camps along the Missouri.

In 1875, Philip Deloria married Annie Brunot, who died in childbirth four years later. He married Jennie Lamont, to lose her in 1887, after the birth of their second child; he was then twice married with small children.

Akičitawiŋ in the meantime married a mixed-blood rancher named John Bordeaux, a cattle rancher on what became the Rosebud Reservation. Bordeaux was killed accidentally by a stray bullet fired by drunken cowboys celebrating a cattle sale in Valentine, Nebraska, leaving her widowed with two small daughters.

In 1888, Tipi Sapa/Black Lodge/Philip J. Deloria, and Akičitawiŋ/Soldier Woman were married together mixing affection, pragmatism, and a life long familiarity; and created a blended, mixed-blood family. Four children blessed their union: Ella Deloria (1888-1971); Phillip Ulysses Deloria (1893-1902); Susan Mable Deloria (1896-1963); Vine Deloria Sr. (1901-1990); and Barbara Deloria Eastburn (1908-1990).

Susan Mable Deloria was a Dakota abstract artist whose first name was in honor of her grandmother Susan Pehánlútawin; and her nom de plume artist’s name became the same of that of her mother, Akičitawiŋ/ Mary Sully, and title of the book authored by Philip J. Deloria, her great-nephew, titled,   

“Becoming Mary Sully: Toward An American Indian Abstract.” 

 Susan Mable Deloria aka Mary Sully's grandfather’s name was Brig. General Alfred Sully. Her great grandfather's name was Thomas Sully.

In 1902, The Surveyor laid drunk in the gutter along a street in Roseau, Minnesota. By then he was white-haired with a scruffy dirty white-gray beard, and dirty clothes, that included a long tailed coat and knee-high leather riding boots. He talked on about being in Brackett’s Battalion in the war, fightin’ Indians ‘way out west, and driving a stagecoach in the Dakotas. The man was helped to his feet by Roseau County’s first Clerk of Court, Iver Torfin, an office he held from 1895-1905, who offered him a roof over his head and a family to take care of him, on one condition: he had to stop drinking completely. This, the man did. He was buried in the Palmville Cemetery on August 23, 1920. His name was Edwin A. Evans.

 

 

University of Washington Press/Seattle  2019

Langdon Sully, “No Tears for the General; The Life of Alfred Sully (1821-1879)  Palto Alto: American West Publishing, 1974.