Child Found in Dead Mother’s Arms is Reared to Womanhood by Whites

Omaha, Nebraska, November 10. – Nineteen years ago last winter, when the battle of Wounded Knee was fought in South Dakota, over the Nebraska line, on the Pine Ridge Indian reservations, between the Sioux Indians and the government troops, there was a slaughter of Indians, both men and women.

The Indians were surprised early in the morning.  As the soldiers rode down upon the camp, intending to capture it without a fight, some Indian, by accident, discharged his gun. 

This was a signal for a conflict, and the soldiers poured volley after volley into the tepees, where but a moment before the Indians had been sleeping.

Among the Indian survivors was a little girl.  The soldiers named her Linta Lannui, Sioux for “Lost Bird.”

This child, a babe a few months old, was found clasped in the arms of its dead mother, who had been killed by a soldier’s bullet, both wrapped in a blanket and laying in a tepee.

General L. W. Bolby, of Beatrice, Nebraska, was in command of the state militia that supported the regulars.  Grieved by the fate of the Indian  mother , he took the little girl to his camp, and when opportunity offered sent her to his home at Beatrice, where, after the close of the war, she was christened Margareta Elizabaeth Colby and legally adopted.

She was a bright child and was given every possible attention, clothed in rich apparel and treated as one of the family.

When old enough she was sent to the public schools and then to a finishing school in Washington, D. C., where she lived with a sister of General Colby and became quite a favorite in society.

Having finished her education, she returned to Beatrice, and a couple of years ago went to Portland Oregon, where she has since lived with her foster mother, who moved there.

Now come the word from Portland that the Indian maiden has been married to Albert Chalivat, a French Canadian, who has Indian blood in his veins, and that she and her husband will reside in the Hudson Bay Country, where Chalivat’s father has a vast tract of land.

Trenton Evening Times – November 10, 1909