The disruption of the Paiutes’ traditional hunting and gathering accelerated with the arrival of new groups of American prospectors and the subsequent appearance of new mining towns like Virginia City, founded in 1859. Areas of white settlement expanded, producing numerous disputes. Because the Paiutes did not farm, the extent of their territory was not obvious to the new settlers. Frequently prospectors traveled through an area and expressed outrage when local bands claimed it as their own. Tensions like these came to a head in 1860, when a series of murders and kidnappings prompted a settler assault on a Paiute band living on a reservation near Pyramid Lake. That assault was repulsed by the Indians, but the government responded to the incident by dispatching a detachment of 750 regulars to Nevada from the Presidio at San Francisco and subsequently establishing a permanent military post in what was now the Nevada Territory.3
Winnemucca’s grandfather Truckee died soon after the Pyramid Lake War of 1860. His death, coupled with the establishment of American military authority in the area and the continued growth of white settlement, ushered in a new era in which the Paiutes were assigned to reservations and his granddaughter began to be called upon as an intermediary between government authorities and tribal leaders. The tribe had no single leader, but by the 1870s Winnemucca’s father was frequently representing the group in dealings with outsiders. Thanks to his relative wealth, his relationship to his father-in-law, Truckee, and his English-speaking daughter, government officials believed they could communicate with the Paiutes by meeting with Winnemucca. The “chief” became better known among whites in 1864, when he took advantage of his prominence and began speaking before white audiences in lecture halls in both Nevada and California. At these events, which gradually evolved into performances of Indian customs and dancing, the chief would renew his plea for friendship, condemn frontier violence, and solicit money for his followers.4 Such peaceful interludes were rare, however, as tensions with local whites continued and violence broke out at regular intervals.5
Sarah Winnemucca spent most of the 1860s living with her brother at Virginia City and at the nearby Pyramid Lake Reservation, but in 1868, amid continuing conflict with white settlers, the two agreed to move north and relocate with their father and other kinsmen at Camp McDermitt, a post that lay across the invisible territorial boundary with Oregon, but that was very much within the Paiutes’ Great Basin homeland. It was at Camp McDermitt that Winnemucca first became a paid interpreter for the Indian Office and a prominent local figure who traveled easily among the American settlements, was married (briefly) to a white army officer, and assisted government agents and newspaper editors by providing them with information and advice. She was an effective aide to the local agent, persuading reluctant bands to relocate to the preserve and working closely with military commanders to protect the Indians’ property and maintain the integrity of the reservation’s boundaries. She even traveled to San Francisco to plead with military commanders for more generous supplies. She relished her prominent role, often appearing in local parades, riding sidesaddle and dressed in black. As one officer’s wife later recalled, she rode “in perfect balance, her quirt hand lifted in a queenly salute.”6
Winnemucca lived at Camp McDermitt until 1873, when she moved south to a village along the Central Pacific Railroad named for her father. Two years later she became an interpreter at a reservation that had recently been established along Oregon’s Malheur River as a refuge for the region’s Paiute-speaking Indians.7 It was because of confrontations on the Malheur reserve that the young Paiute first emerged onto the national scene. In 1876 a popular agent was replaced by William Rinehart, a local merchant who insisted, upon taking office, that tribal leaders work under his direction rather than develop their own farms as they had been doing under his predecessor. When the chiefs protested—and Winnemucca forwarded their complaints to Washington—the agent accused his interpreter of disloyalty and fired her. Her dismissal incensed Winnmucca. In letters to local army commanders and the Indian Office, she accused Rinehart of colluding with local cattlemen and ignoring the well-being of the tribe.8
Two years after she left the Malheur agency, Winnemucca witnessed the outbreak of yet another border war between starving Indian bands and grasping settlers. In the course of this conflict, known as the Bannock War, she won praise from local commanders for her services as a messenger and interpreter. In the wake of these events, however, Winnemucca was shocked to learn that Indians such as her own peaceful group of Paiutes were to be moved arbitrarily to new agencies and assigned yet another political appointee as agent. Winnemucca’s band was sent hundreds of miles north to the Yakama Reservation in the Washington Territory, where she was appointed agency interpreter. In 1879, sensing the start of yet another cycle of confinement and conflict, she resigned her post and traveled first to San Francisco and then on to Washington, D.C., to speak out on behalf of both the Paiutes and other neglected reservation Indians.9
For the next four years Sarah Winnemucca devoted herself to social activism. She lobbied army officers and government officials, lectured before women’s organizations and reform groups, and developed her alliance with humanitarian reformers and women’s rights activists. As she extended her network of supporters, she moved toward the center of a broader political arena; she also developed bold and wide-ranging critiques of both American expansion and the nation’s rapidly proliferating reservation and “civilization” programs.
SARAH WINNEMUCCA’S MESSAGE
In 1883 Sarah Winnemucca published Life Among the Piutes. (Winnemucca did not use the modern spelling of the name of her tribe.) It was the culmination of her public efforts on behalf of Indian rights. It was also the very first book published in the United States by a Native American woman.
“I was a very small child when the first white man came into our country,” Winnemucca wrote on page 1. “They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since. . . .” The accusatory power of that opening line must have shocked her readers. Abandoning legalistic discussions of tribal rights, and setting aside any pretense that her story might offer a profile of native lifeways, Winnemucca’s memoir focused on the theme of violence and betrayal. She described her grandfather’s first attempt to welcome General Frémont to his homeland and noted how disappointed the old man had been in the American’s frosty response. “I can imagine his feelings,” she wrote, “for I have drunk deeply from the same cup.” 10
Winnemucca’s manifesto was aimed at a wide audience. It was published with the assistance of two prominent woman reformers, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her sister Mary Peabody Mann, the widow of the educator Horace Mann. It was written during the activist’s extended lecture tour in the East, probably while she was the sisters’ houseguest at their home in Boston. The speed with which the book was produced suggests that it contained many of the stories Winnemucca had been presenting in public presentations over the previous two or three years. Some critics later charged that Life Among the Piutes was really the work of the Peabody sisters, but that is unlikely. Elizabeth Peabody had long experience with publishing and was a steady advocate of bringing women’s voices before the public. She and Mary Mann likely inspired Sarah to publish her story, but neither sister had the knowledge or the inclination to write the manifesto herself. Mary Mann freely discussed correcting and editing the Paiute author’s prose but insisted that she did little more than assist the young woman in her battle against what her friend called “her literary deficiencies.” 11
Beginning with her comparison of the Americans to a “roaring lion,” Winnemucca employed vivid language to argue that the nation’s conquest of the West, so celebrated by politicians and social theorists of the day, was brutal and violent. In addition to her bitter memory of General Frémont’s disrespectful treatment of her grandfather, she recalled white travelers routinely burning the Paiutes’ supplies of food, a tactic that prompted her kinsmen to flee to the mountains
whenever wagon trains approached their territory. Commenting a few pages later on some of her first memories of whites, she added: “They are not people; they have no thought, no mind, no love. They are beasts. . . .” 12 Winnemucca never witnessed a major Indian rebellion or organized campaign to stop white settlement. Instead, she wrote, Nevada’s history was characterized by unprovoked acts of violence and revenge. For her, this pattern of unrelenting hostility revealed the true nature of American expansion.
Winnemucca also charged that sexual violence was a fundamental aspect of expansion. Her speeches and writings were peppered with descriptions of rape and threats of rape. She recalled early in her memoir, for example, that while traveling as a child with her grandfather in California in the 1850s, she, her sister, and her mother were left in the care of one of Truckee’s white patrons. She recalled: “The men whom my grandpa called his brothers would come into our camp and ask my mother to give our sister to them. They would come in at night and we would all scream and cry; but that would not stop them.” Given the history of violence in the California goldfields (in which thousands of Native people were murdered by miners and settlers), her family could not resist. She wrote, “My uncles and brothers would not dare to say a word for fear they would be shot down.” 13
Winnemucca argued that Americans commonly exerted their authority over Indian women and men by violence. She explicitly rejected the common belief that Indian “backwardness” was simply doomed to give way to something better: American “progress.” She reported, for example, that the Pyramid Lake War, which she witnessed in 1860, began when two white brothers kidnapped and raped a pair of young Paiute girls. “When my people saw their condition,” she reported, “they at once killed both brothers and set fire to the house.” Three days after the rape and the tribe’s revenge, Winnemucca noted, the news was spread in typical frontier fashion: “The bloodthirsty savages had murdered two innocent, hard-working, industrious, kind-hearted settlers.” 14 Similarly, the Bannock War, which began shortly after she had left Oregon’s Malheur agency, was provoked when two white men attacked a girl who was gathering roots and “used her shamefully.” The girl’s relatives instantly retaliated. The rapists, a Bannock leader told Winnemucca, “are the cause of all our trouble. . . .” 15
The new American regime, celebrated as an instrument of progress by officials in the Indian Office and in Congress, brought other hardships. Winnemucca described how as whites entered the delicate, arid environment of western Nevada, their horses and cattle destroyed many of the naturally occurring food sources that had long been staples of the Paiutes’ subsistence cycle. In addition, she argued, ranching and mining enterprises fouled local streams and blocked the tribe’s access to upland hunting grounds. Weakened by disruptions of their food supply, the Paiutes became increasingly susceptible to disease. Winnemucca described a cholera outbreak that occurred during her childhood. On her return from a trip to California she recalled being told “some very bad news . . . almost all the tribe had died off, and if one of a family got sick it was a sure thing that the whole family would die.” 16
The Paiute activist’s list of expansion’s damaging side effects included the suffering inflicted by the Christian bureaucrats dispatched to “uplift” her tribe. The reservations established in the Paiute homeland were staffed during Winnemucca’s adult years by men and women appointed largely under President Ulysses Grant’s Peace Policy, a program under which major Christian denominations nominated candidates for government posts. Winnemucca ridiculed this policy for introducing a wave of administrators who were publicly pious but who were personally corrupt or incompetent. She viewed these appointees with scorn, telling one Nevada agent that because the Paiutes were starving at their agency, he should be ashamed “that you talk three times a day to the Great Father in Spirit land.” 17 At the Yakama Reservation, headed by the Methodist James Wilbur, Winnemucca derided the agent’s converted Christian Indians by declaring that when they welcomed Winnemucca’s group, they did not do so “because they loved us, or because they were Christians. No, they were like all civilized people; they came . . . because they were to be paid for it.” 18
Winnemucca’s critique of American expansion in Life Among the Piutes was deeper and more threatening than the sum of its separate parts. By characterizing the U.S. onslaught as beastly, violent, and immoral, she attacked the idea that the extension of national power into the Great Basin was natural and benign. Americans entered the region by force and imposed their authority by terror. Christian benevolence simply provided a convenient cover for the enforcement of their rule. The Paiute would have been impatient with the legal parsing of William Potter Ross; she left no room in her narrative for the possibility of a humane government policy or for some legal reform that might correct the situation. According to her version of events, the suffering she witnessed was not rooted in political shortsightedness or administrative ignorance; it was the work of the “roaring lion” of violence, disease, and hypocrisy.
When she emerged onto the national stage in the 1880s, Winnemucca routinely contrasted the cruelty and immorality of American expansion with the humanity of the Paiute people and their traditions. In Life Among the Piutes she spelled out the civilized qualities of Native culture by pairing the activist’s horrific account of the American “roaring lion” with poetic descriptions of traditional Northern Paiute life. Tellingly, Winnemucca titled her chapter on tribal life “Domestic and Social Moralities,” another implicit criticism of the “morality” of the violent and irreligious invaders. Winnemucca described the affection that united all Paiute families. With the biblical injunction clearly in mind she noted: “We don’t need to be taught to love our fathers and mothers. We love them without being told to.” She emphasized the tribe’s devotion to chastity, education, modesty, hard work, and traditional gender roles. She noted that a father who does not provide adequately for his children “is considered an outcast.” She even described the Paiute governance system as superior to the celebrated U.S. Constitution. “We have a republic as well as you,” Winnemucca noted, where “anybody can speak who has anything to say, women and all.”19
Winnemucca’s description celebrated Native values and rejected the moral claims of U.S. nationalism. Not surprisingly, she did not advocate a program of integration that would bring Indians into the American mainstream. Instead, she envisioned an autonomous community of Indian people who could live in some secure portion of their original homeland, apart from the disruptions caused by national expansion.
In Life Among the Piutes, the reservation at Malheur where she had lived in the 1870s was the model for Winnemucca’s ideal Native community. Located in an isolated part of eastern Oregon, within the radius of the traditional Paiute landscape, she recalled that the reservation had been both governed and protected by the agent Sam Parrish, an idealistic pioneer who told the Paiutes: “I want you . . . to ask all your people to come here to make homes for themselves. Send out your men everywhere, and have them come to this place. This is the best place for you all, and as soon as we get started, I will write to your father in Washington, to send us a mill to grind our grain. We will raise a little something this summer. We can plant some potatoes and turnips and watermelons.”20 The tribe responded promptly to this invitation. Winnemucca reported that “we got along happily afterwards. . . . We were all good friends, and our agent liked my people, and my people loved him.” The only condition insisted upon by tribal leaders was that the agent should keep white people away. “We do not want to have white people near us,” the leaders insisted. “We know what they are and what they would do to our women and our daughters.”21
According to Sarah Winnemucca, the central element of this ideal reservation community was not its white agent or its emulation of “civilized” white behavior but its distance from American expansion. This distance protected aspects of tribal domestic life. In her view, the most effective counter to the conquest of her Nev
ada homeland would be the rehabilitation of traditional domestic life, not military action, religious revival, or a program of federal reform. She gave her version of that life a tribal name: Paiute. What in her childhood had been a label attached to a series of related hunting bands speaking the same language had become, in her version of events, the name of a coherent tribal community whose values and traditions could represent both a refuge from and an alternative to the American onslaught.
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THE MOST POWERFUL PASSAGES of Life Among the Piutes and the most compelling feature of Winnemucca’s lectures occurred when the activist turned directly to her audience and shifted her role from a witness of past events to a prosecutor acting in the present. Her judgment was fierce and unmistakable: she argued that it was her audience’s society, not hers, that deserved the label “savage.” One such moment occurred in the middle of Winnemucca’s description of her tribe’s confinement on the Yakama Reservation. Her kinsmen were forced to march north to the eastern Washington Territory despite the fact that they had refused to take up arms against the United States in the recent Bannock War. Stepping back from her firsthand account of events on the frontier, Winnemucca suddenly declared, “You who are educated by a Christian government in the art of war . . . you who call yourselves the great civilization; you who have knelt upon Plymouth Rock . . . your so-called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave . . . I am crying out to you for justice. . . .”22
The effect of this tactic must have been even more jarring in a lecture hall when Winnemucca would shift in her Indian princess costume from meek self-pity to a voice that challenged her listeners to reimagine American expansion from the perspective of the private lives of Indian women like her. As a witness who could make the violence of conquest personal and testify to the cruel costs imposed upon Native families by continuous expansion, Winnemucca challenged her audience to reconsider the narratives of progress that justified the government’s actions. Despite her genteel manner and her respectable white allies, she attacked the heart of America’s ambition on the continent, the claim that the growth of the United States marked the natural evolution of human history from backwardness to modernity.
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