(1844?-91)
Northern Paiute activist and educator
Born about 1844 near the Sink of the Humboldt River in what is now western Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca (later Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins) played an active role in the transition of the Northern Paiute from the independence of pre-contact life to full containment on reservations. Part of her childhood and much of her early married life was spent among the white settlers and soldiers who had moved into her people's country, giving her the opportunity to observe non-Indian systems of education and government. Later she lectured extensively in the East and Far West on reservation conditions, inequities in federal Indian policy, and corruption by government agents. She established and operated for two years her own school for Northern Paiute children near Lovelock, Nevada—an early attempt at self-determination in Indian education. And she wrote a book about her life and circumstances (Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims), being one of the first, if not the first, Native American woman to do so.
Sarah Winnemucca was the daughter of Old Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute headman from a district north of Pyramid Lake in western Nevada. Her mother's name and affiliation are not recorded, other than that she was the daughter of Captain Truckee, another early Northern Paiute headman apparently from near Lovelock, Nevada. Truckee served as a guide for various emigrant parties traversing the Sierra Nevada, fought in California for John C. Frémont in his Mexican campaigns in the 1840s, and generally befriended white settlers throughout northern Nevada and parts of California. In the early 1850s Truckee took Sarah and her mother and sister to California for several months, where she had her first intensive experiences with white settlers while living on the ranch where Truckee worked. She would recall later in her book being impressed by all of the material things that she saw, but being terrified of the whites themselves. Truckee, Old Winnemucca, and Sarah continued to feel that some type of accommodation to white ways was in the best interest of their people, although it is clear at least in Sarah's case that she felt that Indian people should direct the accommodation.
Following her initial experiences in California, Sarah learned to speak and ultimately to read the English language through her associations with whites in western Nevada. Largely self-taught, she acted periodically as interpreter for the military at Fort McDermitt in Nevada and at Camp Harney in Oregon between 1866 and 1875. It was at Fort McDermitt that she met her first husband, Lieutenant Edward C. Bartlett, whom she married in 1871. After a few years the marriage dissolved, and Sarah settled with some of her people on the Malheur Reservation in Oregon. From 1875 to 1878 she acted as interpreter there and also as teacher's aide. During the Bannock War of 1878, which involved some of the people of Malheur, including her father, she again worked for the military. With the cessation of hostilities she went to Yakima Reservation in Washington where some of the Paiute prisoners from the war were interned. When their expected release and the restoration of lands to them at Malheur were not forthcoming, Sarah went on a lecture tour in the West to publicize their plight. With her father and her brother Natches she went to Washington, D.C., in 1880 to plead for their release and for the restoration of Malheur with the Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz. When that attempt failed she again went on the lecture circuit, and in 1883 expanded her efforts to the East Coast.
Between April 1883 and August 1884 Sarah gave nearly three hundred lectures from Boston and New York to Baltimore and Washington, D.C. She spoke in the homes of many prominent Indian advocates of the day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her sister Mary Mann, the wife of Horace Mann. Her speeches, along with the work of this group, supported the passage of the General Allotment, or Dawes, Act in 1887. It was also during this period that Sarah wrote her book, which was edited by Mary Mann and published in Boston in 1883.
Although she was defeated in getting the lands at Malheur restored or the prisoners at Yakima released, Sarah's contacts in the East ultimately led her to found her own school in Lovelock, Nevada, on a parcel of her brother Natches's land. Backed by Elizabeth Peabody, a pioneer in kindergarten education, Sarah successfully operated the school for two years (1886-87). However, attempts by Peabody to have the school federally funded came to nothing. Discouraged and despondent over the breakup of her marriage—to Lewis H. Hopkins, an ex-military man—Sarah went to Idaho to be with her sister Elma. She died in Henry's Lake, Idaho, in 1891, at the approximate age of forty-seven.
Sarah Winnemucca was a remarkable woman whose life and works had a direct impact on the course of nineteenth-century Indian affairs. Although her accommodationist positions, and particularly her association with the military, did not make her universally popular among her own people, she nonetheless was dedicated to their welfare. She was an activist who felt strongly that her people could and should run their own lives without the interference of federal authorities. She tried under several circumstances to show that her ideas could work, but the reality of conditions in the nineteenth-century West ultimately limited her achievements.
Gae W. Canfield, Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983); Catherine S. Fowler, American Indian Intellectuals "Sarah Winnemucca, Northern Paiute, ca. 1844-1891," ed. Margot Liberty (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Company, 1978); Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883).
Catherine S. Fowler
University of Nevada, Reno
