Henrietta Martindale's first meeting with Ohiyesa has not yet been revealed to the researchers in this project. By studying the circumstances of each of their lives, certain conclusions can be drawn. Factual evidence will be another hunt for the future.

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Ohiyesa's own life has been well documented. He was born in 1858, a full-blooded Sioux, near Redwood, MN. His mother died shortly after giving birth, and he was taken under the wing of his grandmother. During the "Sioux Uprising of 1862", he was separated from his family, and his father abducted. Believing his father dead, he left with other Santee Sioux members to Canada, to live a life in exile. For the next 11 years, he would learn the life of a Sioux warrior. When he returned to the place of the uprising, on his own war path in order to avenge his father's death, his father reappeared as Jacob Eastman. He had converted to Christianity and taken a new name. 

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Reluctantly, Ohiyesa followed his father to a new life. Despite his reluctance, he excelled in his studies and integration. Now known as Charles Eastman, he was accepted into preliminary studies at Beloit College, where he would meet Stephen Martindale IV, Henrietta's father. Ohiyesa moved on to Dartmouth College in NH, graduating in 1887, and pursuing a medical degree at Boston University.

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He would meet his wife, a white woman, Elaine Goodale, poet from New England, while working as Government Physician for the Sioux at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. For most of his career, he would not be recognized as a medial doctor, but rather as a lecturer, reformer, writer, and advocate for Native American rights. He and his wife started a summer camp for (white) girls in NH in 1915 in order to teach them the ways of his people. Henrietta would attend this summer camp in the summer of 1918. 

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This is the beginning of what really interests us as researchers for this project. In late summer 1918, Ohiyesa loses his oldest and cherished daughter Irene to the Influenza epidemic. He is devastated. He and his wife cannot grieve together, for reasons unknown (but are no doubt revealed in the collection of her personal papers at Smith College). Their marriage had always been a difficult one with financial troubles and philosophical differences as to the assimilation of Native Americans into a white society. Alone at the camp site to grieve his daughter's death, Henrietta was also there to help him through this emotionally difficult time, when people are vulnerable. H writes to her family of these times, declaring her love for Ohiyesa, but describes her feelings for him more as a paternal love. 

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At any rate, a child is conceived. Although Ohiyesa refuses to admit that the girl is his, the Eastman couple separates, never to reconcile. Most historical researchers and biographers never knew exactly why they separated, and the literature reflects this central question, at times hinting of a "mystery woman". 

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When digitization started to redefine access to collections, a certain researcher who had written a biography of Elaine Goodale, Theodore Sargent, persevered in his search for the "mystery woman", and after several years, came across the Martindale name in the newly digitized finding aid of the Katharine Martindale Family Papers, on the Wisconsin Historical Society's website. He flew to Madison, WI, had selected letters between K and H sent to him from Murphy Library for study, and wrote the first scholarly article to reveal the identify of the "mystery woman" as our very own Henrietta Martindale, in the journal South Dakota History (fall 2010, vol 40, no 3).

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This was the genesis of our project.