Isaiah Dorman
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.
[3] He 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 named Celeste St. Pierre.
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.
"[5] 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 (~$1,990 in 2023) a month - good pay at the time.
He may have accompanied the 7th Cavalry on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition; there are references [citation needed] to Custer's servant 'Isa', which may have been him mistaken by people who didn't know who he was.
(At least one report says [citation needed] 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.
He looked up and shouted, "Goodbye, Rutten.Other 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.
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.
The Sioux chief Sitting Bull recognized the black interpreter and stopped during the fighting to give him a last drink of water.
[8]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.
[9] 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.
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.
In the 1991 television mini-series on the American Broadcasting Company, Son of the Morning Star, a Black man is seen fighting under Marcus Reno's command.
