Sandoval/Sanderville

So, we begin with this fellow named Isidoro Sandoval, from New Mexico, a Shoshone speaker and an engage of the American Fur Company about the time James Kipp built a fort at the mouth of the Marias in 1831 or so. Isidoro married a Piegan woman, “Catch for Nothing,” and was a guide for Prince Maximillian of Wied-Neuwied. You remember that we saw the latter lolling about the German forest with Pomp, Sacajawea’s son, in a famous painting.

Soon after Maximilian went home, Isidoro led a packtrain up the Teton River and then north along the Rockies, maybe heading for the St. Mary Valley. They were looking for mountain goat hides. It was a good place to look, and they took two Kootenais because it was a Kootenai hunting ground at that time. Unfortunately, a Kainah Blackft party ran out both Kootenai hunters and Sandoval’s little pack string, but at least he got a good look at the country at a time few whites knew it.

In 1837, the midst of a smallpox pandemic, Sandoval took charge of Fort McKenzie for Alexander Culbertson. About 1840 he was murdered by an engage named Harvey. Isidoro and Catch for Nothing had had two children, a boy and a girl. The boy, named Isidoro for his father, stayed with Malcolm Clarke at a fort on the Marias that came under siege by Arikaras. When the gates were hastily barred, Isidoro, Malcolm’s baby daughter Helen, and a blind girl were left outside. Before Malcolm and a Frenchman could get out there to rescue them, the blind girl was killed and little Isidoro was wounded.

In 1862 Malcolm married the younger Isidoro’s sister, Good Singing, in a Catholic ceremony celebrated by Father DeSmet. Isidoro, Jr., married a Piegan named Margaret, daughter of Red Bird-Tail. One could say these families (Clarke, Sandoval, Kipp, et al) were half-breeds produced by Euros taking advantage of native American people, or you could say that these were people who made their living at the interface between two nations -- in the process becoming blended, the boldest of both worlds. Factually, they interpreted, traded, and transported materials for T.C. Power, I.G. Baker and the US Cavalry -- as well as the occasional aristocrat or artist.

Isidoro Jr. had two sons with Margaret: Oliver (b. January, 1862) and Richard (b. April, 1867). Oliver (aged ten) was living with the Clarkes on what is now the Baucus ranch when Malcolm was murdered. When things got so rough (the Baker Massacre), Isidoro Jr. and Oliver went to Canada to work for Mounties and the Canadian officials organizing the reserves and treaties up there. Isidoro is said to have interpreted for meetings with Louis Riel, but in 1881 Isidoro Jr. was killed in a drunken brawl at Dupuyer, a little town not far from Valier. (The last killing that I know of in Dupuyer was a Piegan in 1990 who had laid siege to the Ranger Bar by pounding on the door and yelling. The new owner of the bar, an old man with no reservation experience and dramatic notions of the 19th century, got a rifle and shot the unarmed drunk.)

Oliver’s career continues. Called Inoyinam or Looks Furry, he carried the mail between Choteau and Old Agency along Badger Creek. In 1883, the Starvation Winter, he guided James Willard Schultz and other Good Samaritans on a hunting trip north through the reservation -- they returned distributing carcasses among the families. Maybe not all the meat was wild.

From 1894 to 1897, Oliver interpreted for agents Allen, Baldwin, Catlin, Steele and Cook and was a tribal policeman for Steele. Oliver and Mary, daughter of Fast Buffalo Horse, lived in Heart Butte and had a boy named Johnnie. Oliver clerked at the Sherburne Merc in Browning for six years and was active in tribal politics. In 1908 death claimed him during a visit to his niece and nephew in Hayes, Montana, and he was brought home for burial at St. Anne’s in Heart Butte where this time of year baby’s breath seeded from generations of bouquets spreads out a lacy cloth across the graveyard.

Richard Sanderville, often called Dick Sanderville, and sometimes “Chief Bull,” took quite a different path. Educated at St. Ignatius and then Carlisle, he became very active in Methodist circles where money was raised by selling china dishes with his logo on them. An activist who was key to the building of the Museum of the Plains Indian, he swung aboard Secretary of State Ickes’ train in order to pressure his cooperation. His aunt, Good Singing, once married to Malcolm Clarke, had a daughter named Judith Patterson, who left her children with Tom Dawson at Midvale (Now East Glacier). Perhaps this was the connection that pulled Dick Sanderville into the circle of writers, naturalists, and personalities who swirled around the Big Hotel in summer.

(The keeper of the 1907-08 census says that Pablo Starr -- founder of Starr School -- and Isabelle Cooper were half-brothers to Isadore Sandoval Sr. and that he should be called Pablo Sanderville. No way to check all this out. The matter is ignored, or at least no one changed the name of the town.)

Otherwise, Dick Sanderville claims:
A full brother: Oliver Sanderville
A full sister, Cecile, wife of Yellow Wolf, whose niece is Fine Shield Woman, the beloved wife of James Willard Schultz and mother of Hart Schultz.
A full sister, Louise, who married John Croff.
A half-sister, Ellen, who married James Welch, the GRANDfather of James Welch Jr. who is actually the third with that name.
A half-brother, Tom Sanderville.

Dick Sanderville married first Eloise Tear Lodge, full Piegan, who at the time of the census was remarried to John Eagle Ribs. Dick and Eloise had one daughter, Agnes, 19 at the time of the census, and was married to Henry Horn.
Dick married a second time in 1894 to Nancy Sheppard in a Methodist ceremony. Nancy was 36, 3/8th Piegan. Her father was Newton Sheppard, a white man, and her mother was Julia, 3/4 Piegan. Julia’s father was Joseph Finley, 50% white.

The children of this marriage were:
Bridget Sanderville, 8 years old at the time of the census, and Martha Sanderville, born February 23, 1911. (This information must have been added later since the census was in 1907-08.)

Getting back to Ellen Welch, she was first married to George McMullen but they had no children.
On November 13, 1905 at Browning she married James Welch, 33, one-quarter Cherokee. The ceremony was Methodist.
At the time of the census, Cora Lucretia Welch was an infant born on February 10, 1908. There’s no reference to the novelist’s father, who must have been born in 1914, since he was a classmate of Bob Scriver. He is presently in Browning in the nursing home.

This grandfather Welch had been previously married to a woman named Mary who lived in North Carolina on the East Cherokee Reservation and who remained there.
Their children were:
Lloyd Welch (10 yrs at the time of the census)
Theodore Welch (8 yrs)
Clarence Welch (6 years)

One wonders if any of these children became writers. Many of the Sanderville, Kipp, Clarke descendants have been gifted artists and writers.

I'm indebted to most of this material to Jack Holterman's "Who Was Who in Glacier Land" which is available from the Glacier Historical Society in West Glacier, Montana.