Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman

Raised in a sheltered, puritanical household in New England, Elaine Goodale Eastman (1863–1953) followed her conscience and calling in 1885 when she traveled west and opened a school on the Great Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Over the next six years she witnessed many of the monumental events that affected the Lakotas, including the inception of the Ghost Dance religion and the fallout from the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890. She also fell in love with and married Charles Eastman, a Dakota doctor with whom she had six children, and went on to help edit his many popular books on Sioux life and culture. This biography draws on a newly discovered cache of more than one hundred letters from Elaine that were collected by one of her sisters, Rose Goodale Dayton, as well as newly discovered family correspondence and photographs. Previous books about Elaine—including her own autobiography—emphasize her work on the Sioux reservation and association with her famous husband. Access to her personal papers, however, enabled Theodore D. Sargent to shed new light on the dynamics of her thirty-year marriage to Charles and its ultimate demise, the importance of her own literary contributions during this period, and the challenges and successes of her life following their separation. The result is a long overdue multidimensional portrait of the relationships and aspirations that impelled and troubled this fascinating woman and her extraordinary life.

“Sargent brings Charles and Elaine Eastman to three dimensional lives. His writing is little short of brilliant, holding his reader’s interest and turning a scholarly biography into a compelling page-turner.”—Denver Westerners Roundup, “Elaine Goodale Eastman is an important historical figure, and Sargent should be commended for lifting her from obscurity.”—Renee Laegreid, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, “Readers will find this text easy to move through and well complemented with family photos that add a nice touch to the cast of characters who both influenced and blocked Mrs. Eastman’s career as a writer.”—Becky Faber, Nebraska History, “Historians of late nineteenth-century women will find Eastman’s experience illustrates the struggle between family and independence, home life and career, and the ‘search for meaning in woman’s life’. . . . Sargent has written a solid biography of Elaine Goodale Eastman. The newfound letters allow the author to provide insight into Eastman’s personality and her decision to separate from her husband.”—Linda M. Clemmons, South Dakota History, “Sargent faithfully tells Goodale’s story without romanticizing her life or portraying her as an unsympathetic woman. Rather, he allows the reader to peel away some of the complex layers that defined her and restricted her tolerance. However one wishes to interpret Goodale’s history, she did nevertheless leave a lasting impressing on literature, most likely as a result of her completely unique circumstances.”—Anne Allbright, Chronicles of Oklahoma

Theodore D. Sargent is professor emeritus of biology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.