Early Life and Service With The US Army
Not much is known of Dorman's early life. Records suggest that he was a slave in the 1840s in Louisiana to the D'Orman family and may have escaped and gone out West. By 1850, he had settled near Fort Rice in the Dakota Territory, where he supported himself by cutting wood for the garrison. He was on friendly terms with the Indians and probably knew Sitting Bull, according to Evan Connell's bestselling 1985 book Son of the Morning Star.
In November 1865, he was hired to carry the mail on a 360-mile round trip between Forts Rice and Wadsworth for $100 a month - good pay at the time. It is said that he had no horse and walked the entire distance with his sleeping bag over his shoulder and the mail in a water-proof pouch. He did this for about two years.
In September 1871, he served as a guide and interpreter for a party of engineers making the Northern Pacific Railroad Survey. He may have accompanied the 7th Cavalry on the 1874 Black Hills Expedition; there are references to Custer's servant 'Isa', which may have been him mistaken by people who didn't know who he was.
He lived with the Lakota tribe as a trapper and trader in the 1850s and married to a young woman of Inkpaduta's band of the Santee Sioux. The Sioux called him 'Azinpi', which translates to '(Buffalo's) Teat', perhaps because his black skin and curly hair reminded them of one. Or perhaps his name, Isaiah, sounded similar to them. There are no known photographs of him, and the only existing descriptions describe him as "very big" and "very black". An Indian pictograph of Reno's retreat shows a black man in Army uniform flat on the ground beside a prostrate white horse, with "an abnormally thick right thumb."
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