Isaiah Dorman PDF Download

This meticulously researched ethnohistorical biography of Isaiah Dorman, 1832?1876, the only African American killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, traces his life from his birth in Water Street, Pennsylvania, to his marriage in Minnesota to Celeste St Pierre, a Hunkpatina (Sioux) woman. While working for General Alfred Sully, Dorman participated in the Civil War and then on three Northwestern Indian Expeditions in Dakota Territory. He carried mail for the Army one winter, guided the Northern Pacific Railroad survey crew and then operated his own wood yard. In 1871, he was hired as interpreter at Fort Rice and soon after built a horse ranch ten miles south of the fort which his son, Baptiste Pierre, operated. The author, a retired anthropologist, interviewed Dorman's descendants at Standing Rock Indian Reservation; she also researched documents and artifacts at over 50 archives, museums and courthouses in 19 states in her 15-year search to solve the mysteries and myths that have obscured Dorman's life story. The book is composed of seven chapters that describe Dorman's life and seven comprehensive sidebars that discuss issues of interest to the more specialized reader. For example, Dorman has often been assumed to have been a runaway slave and ?very large and very black? but the author presents information that proves otherwise. Pengra interprets other documents in cultural and linguistic context. Throughout the biography, she develops themes of social invisibility of African Americans in nineteenth-century America, the impact on Native Americans of white colonial expansion, and Dorman's successful self-advocacy. Extensive genealogical information about his forebears in Nigeria, Jamaica and Pennsylvania as well as about his wife and their descendants in North Dakota is included as well as 50 photographs and maps, endnotes, bibliography and index.