Mary B. found Camping with the Sioux: Fieldwork Diary of Alice Cunningham Fletcher, now digitized, available on the Internet.

The website explains: In the fall of 1881, Alice Fletcher traveled to Dakota Territory to live with Sioux women and record their way of life, accompanied by Susette La Flesche, an Omaha Indian, and journalist Thomas Henry Tibbles. Her trip was unprecedented. An unmarried woman of forty-three, Fletcher had no salary to speak of, no knowledge of Native American languages, and only informal anthropological training. Few people believed she could succeed.

Fletcher chronicled the trials and successes of her 1881 field trip in two journals accompanied by her drawings of the plains, reservations, and her many campsites throughout eastern Nebraska and southern South Dakota. Although they contain scant ethnographic information, Fletcher’s writings provide an important insight into the attitudes of many white scientists and administrators in the late nineteenth century with regard to what they termed “the Indian Question.”