Fort Union, North Dakota
Natawista Culbertson was the daughter of Two Suns, the chief of the Blood (Kainah) tribe of the Blackfeet Confederacy, who worked for years as a diplomat and interpreter between settlers and Native American Tribes.
Natawista was born about 1825. When she was 15, she traveled with her father from Canada to Fort Union, a trading post on what is now the North Dakota–Montana border. While there, she married Alexander Culbertson, the chief trader for the Upper Missouri Outfit of the American Fur Company. Because of intense competition between American and British traders for the Blackfeet trade, officers often married the daughters of chiefs to cement trading relations.
Natawista worked as a diplomat, hostess, and interpreter with her husband for nearly thirty years, bridging the gap between white traders and the region’s Native inhabitants. During their years together, they had five children. In 1858, after having made a considerable fortune in the fur trade, the Culbertsons moved to a farm near Peoria, Illinois, where Natawista’s life was described as “unconventional” at times. Sometimes, in the fall, she would set up a teepee on the lawn, discard her white woman’s clothes, dress in her Indian garb, and spend several weeks there.
In 1868, the couple moved to Fort Benton, Montana, and Culbertson resumed trading. However, just a few years later, Natawista went to the Blood camps in Alberta and never returned to her husband. She died there in 1895.
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated September 2026.
Also See:
Alexander Culbertson – Fur Trader
See Sources.