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Sarah Winnemuca, oil-tinted photograph
The Granger Collection, New York City (1844?-1891), Native American leader
Born about 1844 at Humboldt Sink in what is now Nevada, Thoc-me-tony was a daughter of Winnemucca II, chief of the Paiute tribe. She lived during part of her childhood in the San Joaquin valley of California, where she learned both Spanish and English. After her return to Nevada she lived for a time with a white family and adopted the name Sarah. In 1860 she briefly attended a convent school in San Jose, California, until objections from the parents of white students forced her to leave. During the Paiute War of 1860 and the subsequent increasingly frequent clashes between Native Americans and whites, she suffered the loss of several family members. She attempted the role of peacemaker on a few occasions and from 1868 to 1871 served as an interpreter at Camp McDermitt in northeastern Nevada. In 1872 she accompanied her tribe to a new reservation, the Malheur, in southeastern Oregon.
Winnemucca for a time was an interpreter for the reservation agent, but the appointment of a new and unsympathetic agent in 1876 ended her service as well as a period of relative quiet on the reservation. On the outbreak of the Bannock War in 1878, she learned that her father and others had been taken hostage and offered to help the army scout the Bannock territory. Covering more than a hundred miles of trail through Idaho and Oregon, Winnemucca located the Bannock camp, spirited her father and many of his companions away, and returned with valuable intelligence for General O.O. Howard. She was scout, aide, and interpreter to Howard during the resulting campaign against the Bannocks.
In 1879 she lectured in San Francisco on the plight of her tribe--many of whose members had been exiled along with belligerent Bannocks to a reservation in Washington Territory--and on the wrongs perpetrated by dishonest civilian Indian agents. Despite slanderous responses by agents and their friends, Winnemucca attracted the attention of President Rutherford B. Hayes. She was promised the return of her people to the Malheur reservation and a severalty allotment of land there, but the order issued to that effect was never executed.
After a year of teaching in a school for Native American children at Vancouver Barracks, Washington Territory, and her marriage late in 1881 to L.H. Hopkins, an army officer, Winnemucca, often known among whites as "the Princess," went on an eastern lecture tour to arouse public opinion. Aided by General Howard, Elizabeth Peabody, and others, the tour was a success, and sales of her Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims raised money for Winnemucca's expenses. She secured thousands of signatures on a petition calling for the promised allotment of reservation lands to individual Paiutes. Congress passed a bill to that end in 1884, but once again promises came to nothing. From 1883 to 1886 Winnemucca taught at a Paiute school near Lovelock, Nevada. In 1886 her husband died, and ill herself, Winnemucca moved to a sister's home in Monida, Montana, where she died on October 16, 1891.
Sarah Winnemucca's Fight for Indian Rights
"I hate everything that belongs to the white dogs...Oh, I hate them so badly." Sarah Winnemucca had good reason. She wrote that white men had tried to take her sister and "abuse her" in front of her mother and herself. She watched her people, the Paiutes, suffer through a forced evacuation far from their homelands, despite their peaceful declarations, and severe neglect by the white men who were supposed to be protecting them on the new reservation. Unable to be silent, she began lobbying for the Indian agent's removal, brandishing proof of embezzlement of the food, materials, and money provided on behalf of her tribe by the federal government. The agent retaliated by producing a number of men who swore she was a common drunken whore who they bedded regularly.
Sarah was not deterred, traveling to Washington, D. C., to gain an audience with President Garfield Hayes, returning home with written orders for the release of her tribe from the reservation so they could return home. Despite her efforts, the agent refused to release them; they spent many more years suffering from cold and starvation before Sarah was able to force a resolution to the situation.
Sarah's first recollection of the white man was not favorable. It left her with nightmares which woke her in the night, screaming, "Oh, mother, the owls,...", a reference to her father's description of the white man's "big, white eyes staring from their hairy faces..."
Her grandfather told of a dream in which he foresaw the destruction of the Paiute people. Even though he had tried to be friendly, "they do not seem to think we are like them." In the dream, he saw, "my men shot down by the white people...and I saw the blood streaming from the mouths of my men that lay all around me."
Other Indian women were suffering too. Lucy Young never again saw her sister, who was kidnapped by a white man. Lucy was also kidnapped and used sexually, "I hear people tell 'bout what Inyan do early days to white man. Nobody ever tell what white man do to Inyan."
One Oklahoma Indian woman recalled running into the bushes with her sister to escape from the first white man she ever saw. "At that time, the older people told the younger that some time there would be no Indians, that eventually they would merge into the white race."
Sally McKillip, also from Oklahoma, was terrified of white people because of the terrible things that happened to the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. Sarah, who was well educated, devoted her life to lecturing and writing books in her efforts to liberate her people from the "dog face" enemy.
The daughter of a tribal chieftain, Sarah was well known for her bravery among Indians and whites alike. Once, when her father had been captured by the enemy, no men would undertake his rescue. She mounted a horse, traveled under cover of night, and entered the camp alone. Like fathers everywhere, he scolded her for the dangerous risks she had ignored in her successful effort to free him.
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