Caroline Weldon was a 19th-century artist and activist with the National Indian Defense Association.
Background
Caroline Weldon was born Susanna Carolina Faesch on 4 December 1844 in Kleinhüningen, Canton Basel, Switzerland. Her father was Johann Lukas Faesch, a career Swiss mercenary military officer serving in a Swiss regiment in France. Her mother was Anna Maria Barbara, née Marti.
She arrived in America in 1852 at the age of 8 years, together with her mother, settling in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York. That year, her mother was remarried to the exiled German revolutionary, Dr. Karl Heinrich Valentiny who ran a medical practice in Brooklyn.
Career
In Brooklyn, New York on 30 May 1866 Susanna Carolina Faesch was married to Dr. Bernhard Claudius Schlatter, a physician, and fellow Swiss. The marriage ended in divorce a few years later. Thereafter she met, cohabited and had a son with a man named Weldon who would eventually abandon her. Weldon pursued her interests in art.
After her divorce on 18 July 1883 from Dr. Claude Schlatter and having been abandoned by Weldon, she became committed to the cause of Native Americans. In the summer of 1889, Caroline Weldon traveled to Dakota Territory to fulfill her dream of living among the Sioux. She had joined NIDA, the National Indian Defense Association embarking on a quest to aid the Sioux in their struggle to fight the US government’s attempt under the Dawes Act to expropriate vast portions of the Great Sioux Reservation for the purpose of opening same up for white settlement with the intent of rendering the creations of the two new states of North Dakota and South Dakota economically viable.
She befriended Sitting Bull, leader of the traditionalist faction among the Sioux acting as his secretary, interpreter, and advocate. The subsequent events of Sitting Bull’s murder and the Wounded Knee Massacre the following December proved her right adding to her sense of futility and failure. Her son Christy died on the 19th November 1890 near Pierre on the riverboat Chaska while on her way to her new home in Kansas City MO. She disappeared into obscurity soon after. Weldon also painted four portraits of the chief.
One is now held by the North Dakota Historical Society. Weldon died in her Brooklyn apartment, alone and forgotten on 15 March 1921. Cause of death was accidental third-degree burns from a candle to her face and body. She was interred at the Valentiny family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY - Lot 13387, Section 41. He features Native American history together with that of the demise of the Native Arawak people in St. Lucia, in the Caribbean.