Lakota Sioux Nurses
Spanish-American War

Lakota Sioux Nurses
Spanish-American War

Four Lakota Sioux Catholic Sisters of the Congregation of American Sisters from Fort Pierre, South Dakota, served as contract nurses with the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Mother Bridget (Anna Pleets), Mother Joseph (Josephine Two Bears), Mother Anthony (Susan Bordeaux) and Sister Gertrude (Ellen Clark), despite no formal nursing education, were assigned to Camp Cuba Libre in Jacksonville, Florida, working in wards devoted to patients with contagious diseases. Assignments at another Florida hospital and at Camp Onward in Savannah, Georgia, followed before the nurses set sail for Cuba in December 1898. In Havana, they nursed at Camp Columbia and Military Hospital #1. Like hundreds of other contract nurses, the U.S. Army paid them $30 a month and they lived and worked in tents. These Lakota Sioux Catholic nurses were discharged in February 1899 but chose to remain in Cuba. Mother Anthony died later that year of pneumonia and was buried with military honors in Cuba. By January 1900, the remaining sisters returned to the United States.