Attacking Sarah Winnemucca and her efforts for peace

'Quintus Hopper of Nevada' series: Northern Paiute princess Sarah Winnemucca was a tireless advocate for her people - her life was as challenging as it was epic.

Quintus Hopper of Nevada, published in January 2022, is a historical novel that follows the epic and peculiar life of a frontier newspaper typesetter. As part of my research I made extensive use of newspaper archives and, in this series, I’ll share some of my often surprising findings. Here are history, commentaries and contemporary newspaper articles as they relate to my latest novel. Sarah Winnemucca tirelessly fought for her Northern Paiute people - and newspapers often ruthlessly attacked her for it.

The following article about Sarah Winnemucca leads to a fight that doesn’t end well for those on the other side of Quintus Hopper’s wrath. Sarah Winnemucca had worked, tirelessly so, as a bridge between her people and the white man’s authorities. She worked as an interpreter, as a guide, as an intermediary – with no other aim than to bring about peace, to end the fights and the starvation, and to find a way forward for her people in a white man’s world. She worked with the military, she lobbied in Washington, she would go on to lecture far and wide to educate white people about the plight of the Indian – and she was the first Indian woman to write and publish an autobiography, ‘Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.’ It is a valuable read, particularly when you put it in context with the portrayal of history from a white man’s perspective.

It was at her time at Camp McDermit (named after Charles McDermit, Captain Wells’ commanding officer, who died in an ambush during the Snake War) that Sarah worked as interpreter. Major Henry Douglas, Indian Superintendent for Nevada, asked the commander at Camp McDermit for information about the situation with the Indians. That commander asked Sarah to write the reply. In her letter, she wrote: ‘If this is the kind of civilization awaiting us on the reserves, God grant that we may never be compelled to go to one, as it is much preferable to live in the mountains and drag out an existence in our native manner.’ Douglas was apparently so impressed with the letter that he talked about it and shared it – a month later, Harper’s Weekly wrote an article about Sarah and published her letter.

Below article, first published in the Boise City News and then reprinted in other papers such as the Daily Alta California, doesn’t just deride her, it also makes clear that they think it highly unlikely that someone like Sarah Winnemucca, an Indian woman, could have written such a letter. It may indeed be true that she had help in drafting that letter, but there can be no doubt that the statements were her own and they were so to the point, that the only thing the regional papers could do, was to attack her person. 

July 3, 1870

Daily Alta California, San Francisco

MISS SARAH WINNEMUCCA.

From the Boise City (Idaho) News

Harper’s Weekly contains a highly poetical allusion to Sarah Winnemucca, the interesting daughter of Mr. Winnemucca, Chief of the Piutes, whose gallant exploits in stealing horses and cutting the tongues out of defenseless emigrants will long be remembered by the people of Nevada and Southern Idaho with feelings of just pride and admiration. Now this noble aborigine daughter, Sarah – no less – is to come in for a share of the honors which have been lavished so unsparingly in days gone by upon her illustrious sire, the old gentleman Winnemucca. Miss Sarah, says Harper’s Weekly, “has written (?) a very sagacious letter to Indian Commissioner Parker, in which she has eloquently portrayed the wrongs of her race.” What internal noodles some of those Eastern people are. If we are not very much mistaken we had the pleasure of seeing, some years ago, Miss Sarah at Camp McDermit Nevada. She and a few other interesting relics of the “noble red man” were being fatted at the fort during that winter for the spring campaign against Idaho emigrants. The emigration having stopped for the season, “there were no other worlds to conquer,” so Sarah and her tribe were about to fare badly, as the supply of dried scalps, grasshoppers and lice had been exhausted. Their condition excited the sympathy of Uncle Sam's boys at the fort so that they were taken in and cared for until spring, when they resumed their favorite pastime of stealing and murdering. But it is our recollections of Miss Sarah we propose to recite. Sarah was at that time about sweet 16 or 20 – it would be difficult to judge of her exact age from her appearance, owing to a careless habit she had acquired of never washing her beautifully chiseled features. But as we had been taught to judge the age of a cow by the wrinkles on her horns, or the age of a tree by the belts of growth on its trunk, so we made a slather at Miss Sarah’s age by the number of scales of greasy dirt which naturally accumulated on the ridge of her comely countenance during the lapse of years. She was about four or five feet high – how is that for “Lo?” – and not quite as broad as she was narrow. Her raven tresses, which had been permitted to coy with the sportive breeze, unbound, unwashed, and uncombed, from her earliest childhood, stood out in elegant and awry confusion from her classically shaped cabese, which contributed to her contour an air of romantic splendor. Her style of dress, though primitive, closely assimilated that worn by her more fashionable sisters in Paris and other big towns. It was the fashion of the day; slightly exaggerated, consisting of an elegant scarf, about a foot wide, cut from an ancient horse blanket, which was gracefully girded round her delicate waist, - the circumference of which; owing to the scarcity of clover and fresh crickets at that season, had materially diminished, – over which hung a beautiful set of skeleton hoops. These completed the toggery of this sweet and simple daughter of nature. Her feet were encased in moccasins, and showed evident indications of hard service and long walks over the rocky hills and sage-brush plains, the mud of her native heath, crisp and dry, clinging tenaciously to her toes. And we are glad to be able to announce that this divinity was treated during her brief sojourn among the white savages with the respect due her exalted rank and birthright – as the only daughter and heiress of that noble old Chief, Winnemucca. If Miss Sarah has improved her time as well since we saw her as she evidently had previous to that date, we have no hesitancy in pronouncing her at this day a highly, cultivated and refined young lady, well qualified to write a “sagacious letter to Commissioner Parker,” or to make a valuable contributor to Harper’s Weekly.