Civil Rights/Slavery

CA 201CA 201

1936 Gum Inc gum card from the series G-Men & Heroes of the Law. Card #106 is an interesting account of a negro questioned about a murder of a judge. He was arrested on suspicion, confessing under pressure, then it was learned he had been abducted by a white man and intimidated into killing the judge. The white man was sentenced to death and the negro, declared mentally unbalanced, was given a life sentence. A rare card in a rare set. B

Price: $80.00

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Belgian chocolate card album on Bufallo Bill, published c1950. All 120 cards are present. It talks about Cody’s actions to help slaves and his time serving under the Anti-Slavery leader Colonel Lane in Kansas. It writes:

To Defend Slaves - Friends of the Negro have banded together to defend them against the partisans of slavery. They form an armed troop commanded by Colonel Lane. As soon as he learns, Father Cody leaves his refuge and will join Lane's army.

The war spreads - In the region, as in all of America, the whites are increasingly divided. It is a fight to the death between the partisans of slavery, the slavers, and the anti-slavers who are, like Father Cody, partisans of black freedom. For several months, Mr. Cody and his son roam the country and gather friends who will hold opponents at bay. B

Price: $120.00

Note from Wikipedia: James Henry Lane, also known as Jim Lane, (June 22, 1814 – July 11, 1866) was a partisan during the Bleeding Kansas period that immediately preceded the American Civil War. During the war itself, Lane served as a United States Senator and as a general for the Union. Although reelected as a Senator during 1865, Lane committed suicide the next year.CA 200

The son of Amos Lane, Lane was born in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, where he practiced law when he was admitted to the state bar during 1840. During the Mexican–American War, he successively commanded the 3rd and 5th Indiana Regiments. He was a U.S. congressman from Indiana (1853–1855) where he voted for the Kansas–Nebraska Act.

He relocated to the Kansas Territory during 1855. He immediately became involved with abolitionism in Kansas and was often termed the commander of the Free State Army ("The Red Legs" or Jayhawkers), a major Free Soil militant group. In 1855 he was the president of the convention that drafted the anti-slavery Topeka Constitution.

CA 200On October 27–29, 1862, U.S. Senator Jim Lane recruited the 1st Regiment Kansas Volunteer Infantry (Colored) who debuted at the Skirmish at Island Mound. They are the first African-American troops to fight in the war, a year before the 54th Massachusetts. In their first action, 30 of their members defeated 130 mounted Confederate guerrillas.

Speech made in the US Senate by a Senator James Henry Lane from Kansas. "I would like to live long enough to see every white man in South Carolina in hell, and the Negroes inheriting their territory. It would not wound my feelings any day to find the dead bodies of rebel sympathizers pierced with bullet holes in every street and alley of Washington. Yes, I would regret this, for I would not like to witness all this waste of powder and lead. I would rather have them hung, and the ropes saved! Let them dangle until their stinking bodies rot and fall to the ground piece by piece."

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Sitting Bull card album published in Belgium. All 120 cards pasted in. The interesting thing about the album is the story of the interpreter Isaiah Dorman, which shows a paternal Sitting Bull taking Dorman in. It writes:

The Negro Isayah - Where the sioux lived in peace with the whites, they were always at peace with the other Indians. Several times already, Sitting Bull communicated with the Crows, the Assiniboins and the Flatheads. He had managed to dissociate his troops and get their guns delivered. One day he met a Negro named Isayah on the bank of the Missouri, who was willing to follow him. and Sitting Bull charged the Negro with a long journey to Wyoming.

The Astonishment of Isayah - As the travelers penetrated deep into the mountains as they hunted the mouflon, Isayak fell from one surprise to the next. He was very impressed to find a geyser in the midst of the snow, spouting warm water. Returning to Missouri, the Southerner related that he had visited a fairyland, an actual garden of the gods: I either return from Paradise or enter Hell.

Isayah's Last Wish - When Sitting Bull returned to the site of the first battle, he noticed a wounded man moving among the corpses. He recognized the Negro Isayah, who had taken himself up with the Whites. "Isayah wanted to see the beautiful mountains of Big Horn again," murmured the black. "Before dying Isaya longs to drink ..." Sitting Bull went for water, but when he came to work Isayah was already dead.

This is the only example of Isaiah Dorman portrayed in Europen popular culture that I am aware of. B

Price: $150.00

Note from Wikipedia: Isaiah Dorman (died June 25, 1876) he served as an interpreter for the United States Army during the Indian Wars. He perished at the Battle of Little Bighorn, the only black man killed in the fight.

Not much is known of Dorman's early life. Date of births of both 1832 (in Philadelphia, as a freeman) and 1840 exist. Other records suggest that he was a slave in the 1840s in Louisiana to the D'Orman family and may have escaped and gone out West. By 1850, he had settled near Fort Rice in the Dakota Territory, where he supported himself by cutting wood for the garrison. He was on friendly terms with the Indians and probably knew Sitting Bull, according to Evan Connell's bestselling 1985 book Son of the Morning Star.

CA 199He lived with the Lakota tribe as a trapper and trader in the 1850s and married a young woman of Inkpaduta's band of the Santee Sioux. The Sioux called him 'Azinpi', which translates to '(Buffalo's) Teat', perhaps because his black skin and curly hair reminded them of one. Or perhaps his name, Isaiah, sounded similar to them. There are no known photographs of him, and the only existing descriptions describe him as "very big" and "very black". An Indian pictograph of Reno's retreat shows a black man in Army uniform flat on the ground beside a prostrate white horse, with "an abnormally thick right thumb."

In November 1865, he was hired to carry the mail on a 360-mile (580 km) round trip between Forts Rice and Wadsworth for $100 a month - good pay at the time. It is said that he had no horse and walked the entire distance with his sleeping bag over his shoulder and the mail in a waterproof pouch. He did this for about two years.

In September 1871, he served as a guide and interpreter for a party of engineers making the Northern Pacific Railroad Survey. He may have accompanied the 7th Cavalry on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition; there are references to Custer's servant 'Isa', which may have been him mistaken by people who didn't know who he was.

In the late spring of 1876, George Armstrong Custer hired Dorman as an interpreter for his expedition to the Little Bighorn Country. (At least one report says that Dorman had not started out with the rest of the Montana Column, but had caught up with it at the Rosebud with a message and when he attempted to return to Fort Lincoln, Custer ordered him to remain. However, Custer's request for his assignment still exists and is dated May 14.)

On June 25, 1876, Dorman accompanied the detachment of Major Marcus Reno into the battle and was left behind when Reno retired across the river to the high bluffs. According to most accounts as in Connell (1985), he gave a good account of himself- shooting several braves with a non-regulation sporting rifle. According to the account of one Indian survivor of the battle:

We passed a black man in a soldier's uniform and we had him. He turned on his horse and shot an Indian right through the heart. Ihen the Indians fired at this one man and riddled his horse with bullets. His horse fell over on his back and the black man could not get up. I saw him as I rode by.

According to Connell 1985, white survivors tell a similar story. Dorman had been unhorsed but continued to fire at the Indians:

Pvt. Roman Rutten, unlike Vestal [Stanley Vestal; in reference to the story mentioned below], did fight at the Little Big Horn and his report of Isaiah's last stand rings through. Rutten was on a horse that hated the odor of Indians so his immediate problem was how to stay in the saddle. During a wild ride he passed Isiaih, whose horse had been shot. The black man was on one knee, firing carefully with a non-regulation sporting rifle. He looked up and shouted, "Goodbye, Rutten.

CA 199Other eyewitness accounts from survivors indicate that Dorman was tortured by a group of women who pounded him with stone hammers, slashed him repeatedly with knives, and shot his legs full of buckshot. One odd detail reported is that his coffee pot and cup were filled with blood. A report that he had been 'sliced open' may be a translator's error; near his body was that of one of the Ree (Arikara) scouts, which had been slashed open and a willow branch stuck in the opening. To the Indians, mutilations were characteristic of different tribes and particular marks meant certain things. As for the torture, the Indians considered him a traitor who had fought with the bluecoats against them.

Sioux medicine man Sitting Bull reportedly offered Dorman a last drink of water on the battlefield.

Dorman's last stand at the Little Bighorn is documented in Stanley Vestal's Sitting Bull-Champion of the Sioux (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1932), "Isaiah Dorman and the Custer Expedition" by Ronald McConnell, Journal of Negro History, 33 (July 1948), and Troopers with Custer: Historic Incidents of the Battle of the Little Big Horn by E. A. Brininstool, 1925, 1989. Vestal relates that Dorman was shot and wounded by the Indians on the field of battle. The Sioux chief Sitting Bull recognized the black interpreter and stopped during the fighting to give him a last drink of water. According to Vestal:

The Negro asked for water and Sitting Bull took his cup of polished black buffalo horn, got some water and gave him to drink.

Connell holds that Dorman and Sitting Bull most likely knew each other, but doubts the veracity of the Sioux chief's drink offer, noting that similar stories of European style chivalry were common at the time. Some writers on Sitting Bull repeat the account as credible however, suggesting that it had little to do with sentimental notions of grand chivalry, but rather a practical gesture by the Sioux leader towards a doomed man. The water given and the 'stop order' was therefore a temporary reprieve, one last acknowledgement of the interpreter the medicine man had once personally known.

A 2008 biography of Sitting Bull by the prominent historian Robert Utley notes the incident in more detail. According to Utley, Dorman fell, badly wounded in the chest, and several warriors gathered around to finish the job. Dorman made a final plea in the Sioux language to "my friends", asking that they not count coup on him, since he was already dead. Sitting Bull rode up and said "Don't kill that man, he is a friend of mine." The Sioux leader then dismounted, poured water into a buffalo-horn cup and gave it to the black man. His obligation thus discharged, Sitting Bull mounted up once more, and rode on. Eagle Robe, a Hunkpapa woman scouring the battlefield, dispatched Dorman with a rifle shot, and others following mutilated the body. This was done so that the enemy would not look good in the spirit world. Whatever the exact details most writers agree that Dorman was friendly with the Indians, but this did not save him once the battle was joined.CA 199

Dorman's body was found just out of the timber, near Charley Reynolds's and he was buried on the Reno Battlefield. It was reinterred in 1877 at Custer National Cemetery.

In Quartermaster Nowlan's official report on the 7th's 1876 Campaign, an item of $62.50 is listed as being owed to Dorman for services rendered in June 1876. A man named Isaac McNutt, who was a handyman at Ft Rice, attempted to claim the wages; but his claim was dismissed for lack of proof of connection. Dorman's Indian widow could not be found and the account may be still drawing interest somewhere in the Army bureaucracy.

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