Wicahpi Owin, whose Lakota name translates as Woman Dress, was the younger sister of Hunkpapa war chief Gall, one of the greatest Native American leaders of the late nineteenth century. She was born near present-day Pine Ridge, South Dakota, in 1845.
Her famous brother, the Hunkpapa war chief Gall Phizi was just five years older than Woman Dress. Born in 1840, Gall was orphaned as a young boy and earned his name after eating the bitter gall bladder of an antelope. It’s said that the boy didn’t flinch.
His sister didn’t flinch often either.
In 1863, she was at Fort Laramie, where she was known as Lizzie.
In March 1864, Lizzie married Jules Lamoureaux.
Jules was an adventurer, a classic western character who did a little bit of everything before settling down in Fremont County, Wyoming.
Jules was born on October 28, 1836, near Saint Hyacinth, Quebec. When he was 12, he ran away from home. He found work as a cabin boy on a Mississippi River steamboat.
Life on the steamboat exposed the young Lamoreux to stories of the wild west. He took the stories to heart and moved to Fort Laramie.
He met Lizzie at the fort.
After marrying Jules, she was commonly called Lizzie by non-Natives, although among the Lakota, she remained Woman Dress.
Their first child, Elizabeth, “Lizzie,” arrived on Christmas Eve, 1864, at Fort Laramie. On November 24, 1866, their second child, a son, Richard, was also born at the fort. There was a gold rush going on 200 miles west of Fort Laramie on South Pass. Jules loaded his young family and headed west along the Oregon Trail for the gold fields. With him was another man who would make his future mark on Fremont County, Worden P. Noble.
There were a dozen wagons in the train, Jules owned five of them.
Annals of Wyoming – April 1957, Volume 29
Jules Farlow added interest by telling the following story.
“In the spring of ‘68 when the gold excitement was at its height in South Pass and Atlantic City, there was a party made up of miners and teamsters in Fort Laramie who wanted to go to South Pass City. On the 10th day of March in 1868 fifteen men, one woman, two children, and eight wagons mostly drawn by ox teams left Fort Laramie to go to South Pass. In this party of western men was W. P. Noble who was driving an ox team for Jules Lamoureaux. Mitch Seminole was also along. Lamoureaux told me of this trip more than once. W. P. Noble also verified his statements.”
An earlier interview by Noble was also printed in the Annals of Wyoming story.
Noble, in his later life, was a millionaire sheepman on Nowood Creek south of Ten Sleep and north of Lost Cabin in the far northeast corner of Fremont County. They were at Split Rock on the Sweetwater River when the attack came.
Annals of Wyoming – April 1957, Volume 29
“We started out on a fine morning and there was a lot of feed for the cattle. I drove three yoke of cattle hitched to two wagons for Jule, and he drove four yoke hitched to two wagons. When we got near the spot where Orin Junction is now located we were attacked by Indians in the day time. They rode to the hills at some distance from us and shot at us but were too far away to harm us. This seemed to be a small party and they soon left us. Again, when near the present site of Casper we were attacked, so corralled our wagons and remained in this position all night. In the morning no trace of Indians could be seen and we resumed our journey. Near Split Rock on the Sweetwater we were suddenly surrounded by a large war party and it looked as though our time had come. We hastily corralled our wagons and got ready for the fight of our lives, so it seemed. The Indians were all around us and within two hundred yards. There was shouting and yelling by the Indians with arrows flying and now and then a bullet hitting our wagons.”
It was a rare, yet classic Hollywood image of the Old West. A Native American war party attacking a wagon train. The wagons arranged in a circle with both sides exchanging fire. Only this time, it was much different, thanks to Woman Dress. Noble went on with his story.
“We thought it was all over, that it would be our last fight, when all at once Mrs. Lamoureaux, a Sioux woman whose name was Woman Dress, began shouting at the top of her voice. She climbed down out of the wagon in which she and her two children were riding. She had a strong voice and she had recognized our assailants’ voices as Sioux. She stepped boldly out in sight and this is what she said, ‘I am Woman Dress, sister of your chief, Gall. Beware lest you harm me and my two children here. Go away or you will rue it.’ They told her to step out where they could see her. She did and the attack was over. The whole party owed their lives to this brave Indian woman.”
Though not yet four-years old, young Lizzie remembered the incident clearly.
“I wanted to peek out of the wagon to see the battle but my mother gave me a good spanking to keep me down in the box,” Lizzie said.
Woman Dress was eight months pregnant when she drove off her fellow Hunkpapa tribal members. On April 24th, 1868, the party arrived at Willow Creek on South Pass. The next day Lizzie gave birth to her third child, a star-crossed boy named William. They first named him Willow since he was born in a willow thicket, but he was called Willie and later known equally as William or Bill Lamoureaux. Local Arapaho tribal members often called him Smiling Fox.
Traveling with the Lamoureaux family was the family of Jules’ late business partner, Charles Lajeunesse. Charlie ran a trading post at Devil’s Gate from 1852 to 1856. He was killed at the Battle of Platte River Bridge by High Backed Wolf of the Northern Cheyenne. Charlie’s wife was an Eastern Shoshone.
Charlie’s sons, Mich, Noel, and Ed, and his pregnant daughter, Louisa Boyd, traveled with them. Her husband, William Henry Harrison Boyd, had worked for Charlie before becoming his partner and marrying Louisa in 1864. Their three-year-old daughter, Charlie’s granddaughter, was with them.
Mich and Noel fought at the Battle of Platte River Bridge a few dozen miles east near Casper in 1865. Mich is credited with killing High Backed Wolf at the battle.
Louisa and other Shoshone women celebrated the death of High Backed Wolf with a victory dance while wearing his bloodstained scalp.
Another Lakota woman rode in the train. Julia Bissonette Ecoffey was half-Sioux as well. Her husband, Frank Ecoffey, drove a wagon in the train. Julia’s father, Joseph Bissonette, was a trader, government interpreter, and partner of Charles Lajeunesse and William Boyd on Deer Creek near present-day Glenrock around 1864.
Bissonette was an experienced trader, dating back to 1842. He worked as an interpreter for John C. Fremont on his trek to California. By 1865, he was running a store at Platte Bridge.
The Cheyenne and the Hunkpapa were allies, which makes Lizzie’s heroic act even more notable.
After failing as a gold miner, Jules moved his family down the mountain to Lander in 1870, where he ran a butcher shop and took up ranching.
The couple eventually had 17 children.
Frank Ecoffey was the U.S. Army beef contractor for Camp Stambaugh and Fort Brown (later Fort Washakie).
Jules Lamoureaux was the second mayor of Lander. Lizzie was involved with the growing town, doing charity work and caring for her children and her growing number of grandchildren.
Woman Dress died in 1908. Lander businesses closed in her honor.
Their oldest child, Lizzie, was a very popular young woman in Lander, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful women in Wyoming. She was popular even though it was well known that her maternal uncle, Gall, had been instrumental in the defeat of Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn.
She married Ed Farlow, a local rancher and popular cowboy. On February 2, 1886, they had a son, Albert Jerome, but he was better known as Stub.
In 1896, when Stub was just 10 years old, his uncle William and a friend were involved in one of the most sensational killings in early Fremont County.
Jim Washakie was shot on a butte near present-day Pavillion. People who heard the shot took the badly wounded Washakie to Napoleon Bonaparte Kinnear’s ranch, located between the tiny modern hamlets of Kinnear and Morton.
The killers had taken off with Washakie’s wife, Sadie. It wasn’t clear whether she was forced or was willing to leave with them.
O’Dell told Kinnear that if Washakie followed them, he would “Smoke him up.”
Frank O’Dell and William Lamoureaux were identified as the killers. John Hereford was with them but not involved in the shooting. The 30-year-old William had fallen in with O’Dell, and only trouble followed.
They shot Washakie, a grandson of Chief Washakie, from about 200 yards away, hitting him in the back and the thigh. The bullet exited his upper chest. He remained at the Kinnear ranch under the care of the Wind River Agency’s physician, Dr. Frank Welty.
He died there.
Lamoureaux and O’Dell were captured at Greybull by Native police three weeks later.
Weekly Boomerang – July 23, 1896
GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER
Lamoureaux and O’Dell Were Convicted at Cheyenne Today.
FOUR YEARS IN THE PEN.
“This Is the Term Each Man Receives with a Fine of $5 for the Killing of the Indian Jim Washakie, on the Shoshone Reservation.”
Special to The Boomerang.
“Cheyenne, July 18. The jury in the case against Lamoureaux and O’Dell, in the United States Federal Court, for the killing of Jim Washakie, in the northeastern part of the state, rendered a verdict this morning finding the defendants guilty of manslaughter.
Lamoureaux and O’Dell were each sentenced this afternoon at 3 o’clock by Judge Riner to four years in the penitentiary and a fine of $5 each.
It will be remembered that it was claimed that Lamoureaux and O’Dell were charged with the abduction of Sadie Washakie, the wife of Jim Washakie, an Indian on the Shoshone Reservation, but the defendants claimed that Sadie accompanied them voluntarily to escape the cruel treatment of Washakie. When her husband pursued and came upon the party there was an exchange of shots and Jim Washakie was mortally wounded.
The defense claimed that Lamoureaux only fired his gun into the air, and that Washakie would not have died if he had received proper medical treatment, and that after his wounds had been bandaged by a surgeon, a medicine man of the tribe came in, tore them off, and applied his mouth to the wound.
The killing occurred on the night of March 7.
The judgment was a historic one for Native Americans in Wyoming. For the first time, a white man was convicted of killing a Native American and sentenced to prison.
The Indian Guide – October 1, 1896
“The conviction, last June in the United States Court at Cheyenne, of two half-breeds and one white man for the killing of Jim Washakie is the first case in which a white man has been punished in this state for the killing of an Indian. The verdict was manslaughter, the maximum penalty for which is ten years’ imprisonment. The prisoners were sentenced to three and four years in the penitentiary.”
A conviction for murder often carried much harsher penalties, including hanging, but the unusual circumstances persuaded Judge Riner to impose relatively light sentences.
In 1913, the Lamoureaux family gained statewide fame when Stub rode the bronc Steamboat at Cheyenne Frontier Days.
The famous photograph of Stub on Steamboat has graced Wyoming license plates for decades.
Because of Woman Dress, the story of the Little Bighorn did not end on the battlefield in Montana. It continued through her family in Lander, through the tragedy of Jim Washakie, and ultimately to Stub Farlow’s famous ride on Steamboat that still appears on Wyoming license plates today.