Post by deadwoodgultch on Sept 11, 2017 14:41:34 GMT
The article by Lee and Michele might be of interest.
All,
Lilah Morton Pengra’s well-researched, informative biography of Isaiah Dorman clearly illustrates the challenges to writing about secondary figures on the historical stage: they typically leave few records of their lives and they are not the subject of extensive, first-hand documentation. However, she appears to have left “no stone unturned” in her quest to discover the true story of Isaiah’s life and refute the myths perpetuated about him, notably that he was “a runaway slave,” which Army payroll statements deny, according to the attached Battlefield Dispatch article.
Although considerable conjecture and gaps remain about Isaiah’s family and early life, Dr. Pengra has crafted a compelling image of a free-born, intelligent, literate and versatile African-American who died at Little Big Horn during the Reno Valley Fight: military servant, Civil War observer, army mail courier, wood cutter, rancher and, finally, U.S. army guide and interpreter. Through exhaustive primary source research we learn, for example, that commanders of Fort Rice, Dakota Territory, entrusted Dorman with important assignments that transcended his official duties as an interpreter, for example, to recruit several men from nearby Grand River agency as Indian scouts. In 1875, Major Joseph Tilford of the 7th Cavalry dispatched Dorman with an arrest detail to identify a horse thief. Of special interest is the successful effort to explain the Dakota-Lakota context of “kinship” and other cultural concepts to identify Dorman’s relationship with his wife’s extended family.
The message conveyed by this profile of Dorman is that the culture and demographics of the late 19th Century Frontier were more diverse and complex than the perspective of conventional histories. For no other reason this book merits close attention because of its exemplary research standards.
Lee & Michele Noyes