Isaiah Dorman

Isaiah Dorman (c 1820? – June 25, 1876) was a former slave who 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. 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 was living with the Lakota tribe as a trapper and trader. He was married to a young woman of Inkpaduta's band of the Santee Sioux, and settled near Fort Rice in the Dakota Territory, where he supported himself by cutting wood for the garrison. There is a story Fact|date=March 2008that his wife was a god-daughter of Sitting Bull and that the two were friends.

He was hired in November 1865 to carry the mail on a 360-mile round trip between Forts Rice and Wadsworth for $100 a month - good pay at the time even for a white man. It is said Fact|date=March 2008that he had no horse and walked the entire distance with his sleeping bag over his shoulder and the mail in a water-proof 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 Fact|date=March 2008 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 Fact|date=March 2008 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, he accompanied the detachment of Major Marcus Reno in the valley fight, where he was pinned under his dead horse and left behind when Reno retired across the river to high bluffs. His body was found just out of the timber, near Charley Reynolds's. 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 led the Army to them.)

His body was recovered after the fight and buried on the Reno battlefield. It was reinterred in 1877 in the Little Bighorn 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 widow could not be found and the account may be still drawing interest somewhere in the Army bureaucracy.

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 like it to them. There are no known photographs of him, and the only descriptions we have is that he was "very big" and "very black".

References

* [http://pages.prodigy.com/custer/dorman.htm Dorman biography]
* Evan S. Connell; "Son of the Morning Star," (1985)
* Ken Hammer, ed., "Custer in '76: Walter Camp's Notes on the Custer Fight", Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1976.