G.I. Joe Meets Geranimo

Mike Gauldin, former head of PR for Gov. Bill Clinton and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, has started his own company.

Gauldin makes 12-inch Indian dolls, or “action figures,” adorned with historically accurate clothing for individual tribes. The firm, founded in 1999, is called Dog Soldiers.

The dolls range in price from $40 for the mass marketed variety to $500 for the custom made dolls with buffalo-hide clothing and glass beads.

Gauldin said it was his love of G.I. Joe dolls and his experience at the U.S. Department of the Interior that got him into this line of work.

He lived in Fayetteville 20 years ago and worked at The Springdale News and the University of Arkansas. He was communications director for Babbitt from 1995 until last January. Gauldin was Clinton’s press secretary from 1987 to 1992 and was director of public and consumer affairs in the U.S. Department of Energy from 1993 to 1994.

Now, his day job is working as chief of communications for the Office of Surface Mining in Washington, D.C. Gauldin makes the dolls and clothes at night.

Gauldin said he started buying G.I. Joes a few years ago and was unhappy to find that their “guns were not historically correct.”

“I’d be drilling out the barrels and making little unit patches” for the doll uniforms, he said.

Gauldin said he has found Indian dolls from U.S. toy stores to be “stereotypes,” usually wearing a hodgepodge of costumes from different tribes.

“Working with the Department of the Interior with Indians and Indian affairs, it appealed to me to do accurate Indians,” he said.

Gauldin has mass produced a Cheyenne Warrior. Two more mass produced dolls are due out so far this year: a Chiricahua Apache War Leader in May and a 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldier in August. Gauldin doesn’t do only Indian dolls. Buffalo Soldiers were African-Americans who fought in the Civil War.

Gauldin’s Web site is http://www.homestead.com/dogsoldiers/main.html.