Further reading: John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1985).
—Anne Malcolm
Winnemucca, Sarah (1844?-1891) Indian rights activist, interpreter, lecturer
Native American spokeswoman and educator, Sarah Winnemucca was born near Humboldt Lake in western Nevada. She was the daughter of a Paiute chief and was sometimes called a princess. Her maternal grandfather, who was also a chief, arranged for her and her sister Elma to spend more than a year with an English-speaking family, where they learned to read, write, and to sing in English. Their grandfather next had them go to a rancher friend, who enrolled them at the Academy of Notre Dame, a prestigious Catholic boarding school in San Jose, California. Three weeks later, after the parents of their classmates objected to their being at the school, they were sent back to Nevada. There Winnemucca did housework for white families in Virginia City and purchased books to continue her education. In 1866 she began living with her brother Natchez on the Pyramid Lake Reservation, and since she knew five languages, including three Native American ones, army officers from Fort McDermitt frequently asked her to translate and mediate for them. In the 1870s Winnemucca had three marriages of short duration.
In 1875, while living in Oregon with her father at Fort Harney on the Malheur Reservations, she concluded that the army treated Native Americans better than the Office of Indian Aeeairs (Indian Bureau) did. An exception was the new agent for Malheur, Samuel B. Parrish. He worked out a successful agricultural incentive program for his charges and hired Winnemucca as an interpreter and later as a teacher’s aide. Unfortunately, he was replaced by William Rinehart, who immediately changed Parrish’s policies. When Winnemucca lodged complaints against Rinehart, he fired her and in letters to the Office of Indian Affairs called her a prostitute and a drunkard.
Also disgusted by Rinehart’s actions, some Paiute left the reservation to join the Bannock in their war against whites in 1878. Yet other Paiute, including Winnemucca’s father, were coerced by the Bannock to join them. Concerned over growing Bannock strength, the army asked for Winnemucca’s help. Acting as a scout, she followed Bannock trails for more than 100 miles “through the roughest part of Idaho” into eastern Oregon. There she found her father and his followers, inside the hostile Indian camp, and persuaded several hundred of them to go with her to Fort Lyon. Her actions impressed General Oliver O. Howard, who saw that she received a $500 reward and hired her as his guide and interpreter.
When the war’s end left Winnemucca without a job, she started lecturing in San Francisco and Nevada, calling for Agent Rinehart’s resignation and telling of the horrors of reservation life. Dressed in her native dress, almost as if for the stage, and speaking without notes, Winnemucca became an eloquent spokeswoman for the Paiute and other Native Americans. In 1880 she, her father, and her brother were part of a delegation called to Washington, D. C., to discuss the problems of their people. In addition to talking to Interior Secretary Carl ScHURZ in Washington, Winnemucca spoke with President Ruthereord B. Hayes and First Lady Lucy Hayes and some of her guests, including Mary Peabody Mann, the widow of the educator Horace Mann. Lucy Hayes was sympathetic and impressed with Winnemucca, and Mary Mann determined to aid her and her cause. Although Schurz gave Winnemucca a letter detailing his promise to allow the Paiute to return to their reservation at Yakima, where adult males were each to receive 160 acres, Indian agents, fearful of provoking white settlers and accustomed to making their own decisions, because of their distance from Washington, did not carry out Schurz’s orders.
Back west, Winnemucca accepted General Howard’s invitation to teach Native American children at the Vancouver Barracks in Washington State. There she received President and Mrs. Hayes, on their 1880 trip to the West Coast. Impressed by her school and by her eloquent pleas for her people, Lucy Hayes cried as Winnemucca spoke.
Determined to get more than promises, Winnemucca, in 1883, started an eastern lecture tour to plead for Indian rights. She gave nearly 300 lectures in Boston, New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D. C., and other cities. She circulated a petition that was signed by nearly 5,000 people, requesting that Native Americans be given lands in severalty and the rights of citizenship. She was sponsored by Mann, who wrote her into her will, and by Mann’s sister Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, pioneer in kindergarten education. Winnemucca’s new husband, Lewis H. Hopkins, an Indian Bureau employee, accompanied her. He usually introduced Winnemucca, sat with her on the speaker’s platform, and researched at the Boston Athenaeum and the Library of Congress to get background material for the autobiography Mann had urged her to write.
At her lectures Winnemucca, wearing a gold crown and an intricately beaded buckskin dress, spoke from her heart for almost an hour. Peabody, who often sat on the platform with Winnemucca and had heard her lecture 50 times, never grew tired because each lecture was different. Among those who came to hear Winnemucca speak were Edwin Booth, the greatest actor of his era, and Henry Ward Beecher, thought by many to be the greatest preacher. Also there were Helen Hunt Jackson and Senator Henry L. Dawes, both of whom Winnemucca inspired to work for Indian rights, Jackson through effective writing and Dawes through legislation.
Besides speaking to better the treatment of her people, Winnemucca was speaking to gain funds for a school she had planned with Peabody. It would be bilingual with Native American teachers and would not tear students away from their homes and culture. Unfortunately, Winnemuc-ca’s husband Hopkins had both tuberculosis and a gambling habit, which used up money she was saving for her school as she paid his debts.
Winnemucca’s book, Life among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), which Mann prepared for the press, went through many editions. Winnemucca called her school for Paiute children the Peabody School. It was located near Lovelock, Nevada, on the ranch Leland Stanford, the California railroad builder, had given her brother Natchez. By summer 1885, it had 26 pupils, and it operated successfully for nearly four years. Paradoxically, it had to become an industrial school after the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, which turned out very different from the bill Winnemucca had inspired. Unlike Winnemucca’s school, which was bilingual so that Paiute children would not forget their own language, Dawes Act schools allowed students neither to live with their families nor to speak their Native American languages.
When she died of tuberculosis at her sister’s home in Monida, Montana, on October 16, 1891, Winnemucca was called “the most famous Indian woman of the Pacific Coast.” Her name, General Howard declared, “should have a place beside the name of Pocahontas in the history of our country.”
Further reading: Gae Whitney Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983).
—Olive Hoogenboom
Wizard of Oz See currency issue.
World History
