This Indian Country

by Frederick Hoxie

  Sarah Winnemucca made no secret of her three marriages or her love for recreational gambling, which was common in her tribe where games of chance were an ancient tradition. Her enemies latched on to these facts to undermine Winnemucca’s message. These negative portrayals illustrate the extent to which her contemporaries embraced the conventional view of domestic life and westward expansion. In Winnemucca’s eyes, that expansion was neither natural nor benign, but to her critics, American “civilization” was marching bravely across the continent, disrupted only by an immoral “savage” woman who was incapable of accepting the nation’s benign programs for uplift and improvement. She was not a violent rebel like Geronimo or Crazy Horse, but her resistance was no less threatening. From the perspective of the Indian Office and its defenders, the activist’s outspoken manifesto simply disqualified her from participating in discussions of the Indian’s place in the American future.

  By the end of her eastern lecture tour in the spring of 1884, Sarah Winnemucca’s personal life had become an embarrassment. Her third husband, a former army sergeant named Lewis Hopkins, whom she had married in 1881, had accompanied her to Boston and spent a considerable time there and elsewhere on her itinerary accumulating gambling debts. While she was in Washington, D.C., in April to lobby Congress and the Indian Office, Hopkins forged checks, using the names of some of his wife’s supporters, and fled. Winnemucca was not involved in any of Hopkins’s antics, but the scandal certainly confirmed the negative rumors that were already circulating regarding her virtue.46

  Unable to win the release of her tribesmen from the Yakama reserve, Sarah Winnemucca returned to Nevada in the summer of 1884 and attempted to continue her campaign on the lecture circuit. Her efforts produced few results, and the embarrassment of her husband’s desertion undermined her ability to lobby politicians and military leaders. Her failures also disappointed her supporters at home. The Virginia City newspapers reported on a lecture in the fall of 1884 that was “slimly attended,” and even though the reporter approved of her impressive presentation, he (or she?) condescendingly described the now notorious author as more of a curiosity than a serious tribal representative. “The Paiutes regard her with suspicion,” the article noted. “It is even suspected that she uses soap and a brush and a comb occasionally. To the genuine Paiutes these things are inconsistent with the traditions of the race. . . . She was regarded as a little queer by everybody.”47

  Winnemucca continued to speak in Nevada and California following her return to the West, but she had little success. She sought out audiences of sympathetic women. In San Francisco she lectured to an all-woman audience in the afternoon and a mixed audience in the evening. Winnemucca gradually shifted her appeal from an attack on the Indian Office to a more general plea for education and citizenship. She was also not above exploiting her audiences’ racial prejudices to make her point. She told her female supporters in San Francisco, for example, that Indians should have the ballot “so they can stand on par with the gentleman with wool on the top of his head. . . .”48

  Access to education had always been part of Winnemucca’s general platform, but in the wake of her less than triumphant return to Nevada, the promotion of a tribal school became her central concern. Perhaps she had come to see this as an achievable goal. Disgusted with agency corruption and missionary hypocrisy, she now considered organizing a completely independent educational program. In the past she had promised lecture audiences that she would “educate my people and make them law abiding citizens,” but because her goal had been efficient reservation administration, she had imagined accomplishing that task would be taken up by agents supported by the government. At another point she had thought of using white women as the principal instruments of reform. “You send white ladies into our midst to teach us instead of men,” she had told one audience in 1879, “they would at least give us half [an effort] instead of none.”49 Now she concluded that Indians would do the work themselves.

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  IN THE SUMMER OF 1885 Sarah Winnemucca moved to her brother’s small homestead on the outskirts of Lovelock, Nevada, and announced that she would open a school for local Paiute children. She proposed to teach her students to speak English and other basic skills but to introduce them to their lessons by using Paiute as the language of the classroom. Her school would not require children to leave their families or to wear military uniforms, as was common in the government’s boarding schools. Moreover, she planned to include their parents in the enterprise by asking students to take their lessons in arithmetic and other useful skills home with them so that they could pass their knowledge on to their families. By the fall this small version of the Paiute “homeland” the activist had imagined in her lectures and petitions had become a reality.50

  In the end even Sarah Winnemucca’s most tangible success, a well-attended bilingual school operating outside the authority of the Indian Office, provided yet another example of how public intolerance and government rigidity marginalized and eventually defeated her. The ever-loyal Peabody sisters solicited funds for the school from friends in Boston and Washington, but few were interested in a project that had no relationship to the nation’s missionary societies and no prospect of securing government funding.

  In 1886 Elizabeth Peabody published a pamphlet that enthusiastically reported on the school’s work and stressed its community roots. She wrote, “[I]t is a spontaneous movement, made by the Indian himself, from himself, in full consciousness of free agency, for the education that is to civilize him.”51 But such sentiments did not appeal to reformers committed to the conversion agenda of the major Christian denominations or to the government’s authoritarian programs of domestic reform and moral uplift. From their perspective, Winnemucca’s little enterprise seemed both inadequate and self-serving. Given the doubts already circulating about Winnemucca’s personal life, some believed the school was simply a ruse to extract money from innocent easterners. The Indian Rights Association fanned these suspicions when it investigated the school in 1886. While praising the Peabody sisters’ dedication, the IRA report dismissed them as “good, but strangely-infatuated ladies” who could not accept Winnemucca’s “unreliable and bad character.”52 Despite praise from visitors and even the skeptical Nevada press, support for the school dwindled, and its doors closed after three years of operation.

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  IT IS NOT difficult to imagine the reasons that non-Indians would be reluctant to embrace Winnemucca’s indictment of American expansion; the failure of other Native activists to come to her defense is more puzzling. A historian cannot draw any insights from negative evidence, so there is little that can be said about the Paiute tribe’s silence in the wake of the public attacks on her virtue and honesty. Sarah Winnemucca’s brother supported the school she founded on his Lovelock farm, but few other Paiutes came to her defense. It is also true that her cause elicited no noticeable support from other tribes in the region or from the few prominent tribal leaders who, by the time of her memoir’s publication, had become familiar to the American public. Among these were the Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and the Nez Perce chief Joseph, all men who lectured in the East in the 1870s, all silent. This silence also extended to the rising generation of educated Indian leaders.

  Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), a star pupil at the Presbyterian mission school for the Santee Sioux in the Dakota Territory, was a freshman at Dartmouth College the year Life Among the Piutes was published. Chief Joseph and Red Cloud had already pleaded their tribes’ cases before eastern audiences, and Standing Bear, the Ponca chief who in 1879 had mounted a successful legal challenge to a government order confining him to his reservation, had recently completed a lecture tour of eastern cities.53 None of these men ever mentioned Sarah Winnemucca in their speeches or their writings. In addition, each fall, beginning in the year Life Among the Piutes was published, the leaders of missionary and Indian rights groups would gather at a Catskill Mountain res
ort owned by a Quaker activist, Albert K. Smiley, to report on the progress of their efforts and to set future goals. Calling themselves the Friends of the Indian, the reformers met at Smiley’s Mohonk Mountain House and soon became a powerful lobbying force that pressed for allotment, boarding schools, and citizenship. Beginning in 1889, the group also began inviting carefully selected educated Indians, such as Eastman, to address their meetings. They never invited Sarah Winnemucca to attend, and none of the invited Native speakers ever mentioned her name.54

  Chastised by critics in both the East and West and ignored by the few Indians who managed to command some part of the American public’s attention in the 1880s, Winnemucca fell from public view. She did not fit the government’s narrative of Indian uplift or, apparently, the expectations of tribal leaders who preferred politically savvy—and male—spokespeople. But Sarah Winnemucca’s contributions to Native activism, and to resistance against American expansion, are not impossible to discover. Her unique viewpoint was clearly evident in her assault on the smug assumptions of nineteenth-century American expansionism and in her rejection of the policies the American government had adopted to reform the domestic life of the tribes. Her uncompromising female voice and unapologetic public persona stand apart from the approach of practical Indian leaders like William Potter Ross or modern reformers like Charles Eastman. She refused to participate in either the language of political negotiation or the missionary-influenced agenda of cultural uplift. Her willingness to address the violence so endemic in westward expansion and her eagerness to defend the virtues of traditional Indian homes and families set her apart from all other Native activists of her time. Her outspokenness, and her marginalization, marked her as a new voice in the effort to ensure an autonomous Native presence within the boundaries of the American nation.

  The persistence of Winnemucca’s outlook is plain when one considers the American Indian intellectuals who came to prominence after her death in 1891. While none of these figures publicly praised the Paiute activist or her memoir, each of them expressed a version of her comprehensive critique. These individuals composed essays and memoirs that resembled the more strident approach of Life Among the Piutes. Winnemucca’s successors were a diverse lot, but indictments of American expansion and colonial rule appear with growing frequency, if subtly, in their work.55

  We cannot know what these activists understood about her career and the rapidity with which the reform community abandoned her, but we can observe that they followed what we might call the Winnemucca Rules. They shared her view of American expansion, but they did not discuss sexual violence, they did not attack missionaries, and they did not directly challenge a progressive view of America’s destiny or the patriotic allegiances of their white audiences. Instead, they chose indirection.

  Francis La Flesche was a model boarding school student like Charles Eastman. He went to work at the Smithsonian Institution in the 1880s and later published an outwardly entertaining childhood autobiography. His 1900 book was filled with tales of boarding school high jinks, but the author took several opportunities to insert his own commentary into the stories. When discussing the common practice of assigning students English translations of their given tribal names upon enrollment, for example, La Flesche wrote that “no native American can ever cease to regret that the utterances of his father have been constantly belittled when put into English, that their thoughts have frequently been travestied and their native dignity obscured.”56

  At another point, La Flesche described an impromptu quiz conducted by a visiting school inspector. “Who discovered America?” the bearded white man asked. “George Washington!” a star student replied. The irony and pathos in the scene were clear, but La Flesche made no direct comment, letting his joke do the work for him. His readers were left with the image of a Native student, forced to live apart from his own family, choosing one of the white man’s pantheon of interchangeable heroes to satisfy his inquisitor. Winnemucca would never have been so subtle, but she certainly would have appreciated La Flesche’s point.

  Charles Eastman adopted a similarly humorous pose in a memoir published in 1916 following his years as a reservation physician and an organizer for the YMCA. The Santee author described a visit to a YMCA chapter on one reservation where he gave a public lecture urging local Indians to participate in the organization’s Christian self-help programs. Eastman described an elderly man who responded to his speech: “After a long silence [the man] said: I have come to the conclusion that this Jesus was an Indian.”57 Like La Flesche and Winnemucca, Eastman was clearly aware of the destructive impact of American rule on traditional domestic life. Indians were not backward heathens, the old man had suggested, but were naturally inclined to Christian virtue. One of his Native kinsmen must have been the Messiah. Eastman made this point with his story; he did not need to turn dramatically to his audience, as Winnemucca had in her performances.

  It is fascinating to consider whether any of these individuals read Life Among the Piutes or heard descriptions of Winnemucca’s brief campaign to challenge the Indian Office and its ideology of progress. Eastman lived in Boston, the home of the activist’s white sponsors, from 1887 to 1890 and was a frequent speaker at reform gatherings in the city. Perhaps he met Elizabeth Peabody or was given a copy of the controversial book. In the 1880s and 1890s, Francis La Flesche shared a house in Washington, D.C., with the reformer and anthropologist Alice Fletcher, who considered the young Omaha her adopted son. Formerly active in Boston’s circle of abolitionists and women’s rights activists, Fletcher became interested in Indian affairs at just the time when Sarah Winnemucca was lecturing and lobbying government officials. It is likely she heard the Paiute activist speak or owned a copy of her book.58

  ANOTHER VOICE

  Tracing the relationship among nineteenth-century American Indian thinkers and political leaders is a speculative and inexact enterprise. William Potter Ross testified in a congressional hearing room where a reference to Indians “who happened to be in the city” appeared by chance. Who were they? How did Ross’s ideas about treaty rights and tribal unity circulate to other tribes and parts of the continent? Similarly, Sarah Winnemucca spoke to hundreds of eager gatherings and published a dramatic memoir, but no Indians spoke directly back to her, despite her fame and the passion of her words. At the same time, the themes she enunciated recur regularly (although in muted form) in the lectures and essays of the generation of Native authors who came immediately after her. How can we confirm the link?

  Ely Parker, the Seneca brigadier general who became President Grant’s commissioner of Indian affairs, provides yet another possible connection between Winnemucca and other Native writers who indicted American expansion for its violence and cruelty. In September 1865, as a military officer, Parker had accompanied the commissioner of Indian affairs when he summoned Cherokee leaders to Fort Smith, Arkansas. There he watched as the victorious federal officials first dictated terms to tribal leaders and then retreated before the cogent arguments and steely intransigence of the Cherokee leadership. Later Parker served on the commission that investigated the massacre at Sand Creek, Colorado. It was to Parker, now the head of the Indian Office, that Sarah Winnemucca had written in the summer of 1870, urging him to prevent white ranchers and prospectors from committing “acts of violence” against her community. “I know more about the feeling and prejudices of these Indians than any other person,” she had told the commissioner; “therefore I hope this petition will be received with favor.”59

  Ely Parker resigned from the Indian Office in 1871 amid unproved accusations of financial mismanagement made against him by William Welsh, an influential Philadelphia businessman and Christian reformer. (William Welsh was the uncle of Herbert Welsh, the founder of the Indian Rights Association.) After he left his post, Parker returned to New York and tried his hand at business. Unsuccessful, he became a clerk in the New York City Police Department, for which he worked until his deat
h in 1895. Sometime in the late 1880s, probably while Sarah Winnemucca was struggling to keep her bilingual school open in Lovelock, Nevada, Parker revealed in a letter to a friend how disillusioned he had become with the culture and institutions of the United States. “I have little or no faith in the American Christian civilization methods of treating the Indians of this country,” he told Harriet Maxwell Converse (whom he addressed with the Seneca name Gayaneshaoh).60 “Black deception, damnable frauds and persistent oppression have been its characteristics, and its religion today is that the only good Indian is a dead one.” Parker condemned the increasingly authoritarian nature of federal policy, revealed in an expanding system of military-style boarding schools, and the rising popularity of proposals to impose allotment on tribes in every corner of the country. “All other methods of dispossessing the Indians of every vested and hereditary right having failed,” he wrote, “compulsion must now be resorted to, a certain death to the poor Indians.”

  Parker’s solution to this assault on Indian rights was “secular and industrial schools in abundance” and the recognition of Native claims to land. “There is land enough on this portion of God’s footstool called America for the Indian and the white man to live upon side by side,” he observed. Like Winnemucca, he didn’t argue for the preservation of vast reservations or the negotiation of elaborate new treaties, but he was adamant that Native people deserved protected homelands in the United States, places where they could live without outside interference. “The Indian,” the former army engineer declared, “wishes to be let alone in his wigwam.”

  Parker saved his harshest words for the reformers and missionaries who claimed to have Native interests foremost in their thoughts. He observed that reformers were urging the adoption of legislation that would divide tribal lands into individual allotments. Groups like the Indian Rights Association were claiming that Indians everywhere were eager to abandon their tradition of communal ownership. Parker disagreed: “The Indians, as a body, are deadly opposed to the scheme for they see in it too plainly the certain and speedy dissolution of their tribal and national organizations. It is very evident to my mind that all schemes to apparently serve the Indians are only plausible pleas put out to hoodwink the civilized world that everything possible has been done to save this race from annihilation and to wipe out the stain on the American name for its treatment of the aboriginal population.” After unburdening himself, the former commissioner apologized to Converse for his “thesis on Indian rights and wrongs, an almost inexhaustible theme.” He added, “I drop it since no good can result to continue it.” The rest of his letter was devoted to Seneca folklore.