Sarah Winnemucca, Part 1

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Today we are going to talk about Sarah Winnemucca, who
was Northern Paiute and was born not long before her
band had their first contact with people of European descent.
That happened in the middle of the nineteenth century, which
means that she lived through a lot, and a lot
of what she lived through was violent and horrifying. She

(00:39):
spent a lot of her adult life trying to advocate
for the Northern Piute. Although her legacy in that regard
has some complexities, there's enough that happened and enough complexities
that this blossomed into a two part episode. Sarah Winnemaka's
name in the Northern Paiute language was Tony Tonige and

(01:00):
that means shellflower, and she published her book under the
name Sarah Winnemaca Hopkins, which was her married name at
the time. The name Winnamacca means giver, and in addition
to her use of it as a surname, it was
also used by multiple men in her family, including her grandfather, father,
and brother. So to try to avoid confusion, we are

(01:24):
going to refer to her mostly as Sarah, to her
father as Winnemacca, and to her grandfather and brother as
other names that they were also known by, and those
are Trucky for her grandfather and Natchez for her brother.
Both of those are probably nicknames that were given to
them by white people. Trucky probably came from a Northern

(01:47):
Payte word meaning alright, was something that they heard him
say a lot, and the Natchez came from the northern
Payete word for boy, because that was how his father
would refer to him in front of white people and
be like, Okay, you can talk to my boy about that.
They are also though names that Sarah used for them

(02:07):
in her book and other writings. The term Piute is
used to describe multiple distinct Numic speaking peoples from the
Great Basin region of western North America. That's the watersheds
surrounded by mountains and plateaus that includes most of what
is now Nevada, as well as adjacent parts of Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, California,

(02:29):
and northwestern Mexico. The name Piute comes from Spanish, possibly
from the same origins as the word Ute, which is
used for another Numic speaking people of this region and
is also the origin of the name Utah. The Northern
and Southern Piute are two distinct peoples, and multiple Northern
and Southern Pyute bands still exist today. Although Piute isn't

(02:53):
the name these bands and tribes chose for themselves, it
is one that many of them use. The Northern Piute
referred to themselves as Nimah, meaning the People. Their ancestral
homeland includes what's now eastern California, western Nevada, and southeastern Oregon.
Sarah Winnemucca was born near Humboldt Lake in what's now

(03:16):
Nevada around eighteen forty four, although she wasn't sure exactly when.
At that time, Mexico claimed most of the territory where
her people lived. In her book Life among the Piutes,
Their Wrongs and Claims, she describes the Northern Piute as
scattered all over what is now known as Nevada before

(03:37):
she was born. Much of the beginning of the book
is about the Northern Piute's first encounters with white people,
which started when she was still a baby. These were
not the first white people ever to arrive in the
Great Basin that had happened at least twenty years before,
but they were the first ones her grandfather, known as
Tracy mentioned earlier as Trucky or Old Winnemucca, personally saw.

(04:01):
In her words quote, my grandfather was chief of the
entire Piute nation and was camped near Humboldt Lake with
a small portion of his tribe when a party traveling
eastward from California was seen coming. When the news was
brought to my grandfather, he asked what they looked like.
When told that they had hair on their faces and
were white, he jumped up and clasped his hands together

(04:25):
and cried aloud. My white brothers, My long looked for
white brothers, have come at last. This description of her
grandfather as the chief of the entire Piute nation doesn't
really capture the full story. The Northern Piute were made
up of bands of families, with each band having a headman.

(04:45):
The headman made some decisions along with a council of elders,
but often the consensus of the entire band was involved.
Different people also served as leaders for different specific functions,
like being the leader of a h hunting party, or
in the time of war. Sometimes, if there was a
reason for multiple bands to come together, someone might act

(05:07):
as the primary mediator and counselor among them, but that
responsibility lasted only as long as it needed to. It
was not a permanent situation. White newcomers to the area,
on the other hand, expected there to be some kind
of centralized leadership governing an entire tribe, so they assumed
Trucky was chief or king of all the Northern Piutes.

(05:31):
That fed into white people seeing Trucky and his whole
family as authority figures, which then affected their relationship with
the rest of their tribe. So we don't fully know
Sarah Winnemucka's thought process behind describing her grandfather in this
way like he was important, she gave him a different
degree of importance than really he would have had among

(05:54):
the Northern Piute, And there were definitely people who thought
it was really self serving and self for grandizing. But
this book, along with all of Sarah Winnemucca's other writing
and speeches, was created with the goal of getting white
people's support to help her tribe. Describing herself and her
family in this way suggested to her audience that she

(06:16):
deserved their respect and their admiration, or at the very least,
their interest, and it suggested that she had the kind
of status that would allow her to speak on her
people's behalf.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
To return to what Tracy read just a moment ago,
Trucky saw the newcomers not only as brothers, but brothers
whose arrival he had been eagerly anticipating. Sarah described him
telling a story about their people's origins involving two boys
and two girls, one of each dark and the other white.

(06:49):
In the context of this story, Trucky thought the arrival
of white people to what's now Nevada was going to
heal an ancient wound between the descendants of these two pairs.
Trucky met and made friends with people like Captain John Fremont,
who was on an expedition to map the Great Basin region.
Trucky and eleven other Payute men went with him into

(07:12):
Mexican Territory to support a group of Americans in a
rebellion against Mexican authorities, which came to be known as
the Bear Flag Revolt. He returned to Pyute Territory after
the Mexican American War with stories of how beautiful California was,
and he also carried a letter of introduction from Fremont,

(07:33):
which he used to basically open doors for himself and
his people when he encountered white authority figures. Later on
in her book, Sarah described this as a talking paper
and Trucky called it his rag friend. Not long after
rejoining his band, Trucky returned to California with about thirty families.

(07:54):
While he was gone, words started to spread among the
Northern Pyute and other tribes about grit groups of white
people who were coming through and killing anyone who got
in their way. Indigenous people started fleeing into the mountains
to try to stay safe. At one point, Trucky's band
heard that there were white people coming, and Sarah described

(08:16):
trying to run away with her mother and her aunt,
along with her baby sister and a cousin. But Sarah
and her cousin just couldn't keep up. Sarah really was
too terrified to even move, so her mother and aunt
decided to bury the girls up to their necks and
cover their faces with sagebrush to hide them and protect
them from the sun. And Sarah's words quote, oh can

(08:40):
anyone imagine my feelings, buried alive, thinking every minute that
I was to be unburied and eaten up by the
people that my grandfather loved so much. Eventually, they thought
the danger had passed, and Sarah's mother and aunt came
back to retrieve her and her cousin. But then they
learned that white people had found and burned their winter supplies. Quote.

(09:03):
My father took some of his men during the night
to try and save some of it, but they could not.
It had burnt down before they got there. These were
the last white men that came along that fall. My
people talked fearfully that winter about those they called our
white brothers. My people said they had something like awful
thunder and lightning, and with that they killed everything that

(09:26):
came in their way. In Sarah's account, her father, Winnemucca,
was filling the role of chief in Trucky's absence, and
he started to have prophetic dreams about white people coming
and killing them all. A lot of people were afraid
not just of being killed, but also, as I alluded
to earlier, of being eaten. That possibly came from stories

(09:49):
of the Donner Party, which had become stranded in the
Sierra Nevada in October of eighteen forty six. Eventually, Winnemaca
recommended that their band moved the mountains where they would
usually go in the spring and summer to gather pine nuts,
and they would wait there until Trucky returned. When Trucky
got back, he continued to insist that the white people

(10:11):
were their brothers, even after a group of white men
killed several of their tribe while they were fishing. Eventually,
Trucky decided to return to California, this time taking most
of his family with him. Sarah was probably about seven
at that point. This was a time when a lot
more white people were coming to and through the area,

(10:34):
thanks in part to the California Gold Rush. By her
own account, Sarah was absolutely terrified of all the white
people they encountered along the way. In addition to the
traumatic experiences she'd already had, She thought their wide eyes
and facial hair made them look like owls. Her feelings
on this only started to change a little after she

(10:56):
got very sick and was nursed back to health by
a white woman. At first, Sarah thought that her illness
came from eating a sugary bread that some white people
had given to her, but it turned out that she
had gotten into some poison oak. This was something that
did not grow where she was from, but it's native
to the part of California that they were traveling through.

(11:16):
She was really miserable and her eyes were swollen shut.
Sarah never really trusted white people in the way that
her grandfather did, but after this experience, she did start
to become more comfortable around them. At this point, there
is a six year gap in Sarah's account. Then, in
eighteen fifty seven, she and her sister went to work

(11:39):
for Major William Ormsby, who was an agent of the
Carson Valley Stage Company in Genoa in what is now Nevada.
She doesn't say which sister this was, but it was
probably her younger sister, Elma. Sarah would have been about
thirteen and her sister a couple of years younger. They
were hired to be companions for William's daughter, Lizzy, and

(12:01):
they probably also did some domestic work. They may have
been allowed to sit in with Lizzie on her lessons,
which would mean that this was when Sarah learned to
read and write. This also may have been when she
started going by the name Sarah rather than Tony Taniga,
although it's not really clear when that happened.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
In her book, Sarah describes this as a community in
which white and Indigenous people loved one another without any
violence or theft. Sarah considered Ormsby and his family to
be friends, especially after her parents joined the rest of
the family at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, which is northeast of
what's now Reno. The Bureau of Indian Affairs had set

(12:43):
aside land for a reservation for the Northern Piute at
Pyramid Lake. This happened a few years after the reservation
system was first established under the Indian Appropriations Act of
eighteen fifty one, although the reservation wasn't formally surveyed or
like formally established until much later than this.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
But that piece she described did not last, and we
will get to that after we pause for a sponsor break.
While Sarah Winnemucca and her sister were living with Major
William Ormsby, two white men from Genoa were robbed and

(13:27):
murdered while they were on their way to California to
buy supplies for the winter. The culprits stuck arrows into
the victim's wounds to try to make it look like
indigenous people had done it. Because Major Ormsby had a
trusting relationship with Trucky's Northern Paiute band, he summoned several
of them, including Sarah's brother and her cousin, to identify

(13:51):
the arrows. Sarah's account describes her cousin as war chief
and her brother as peace chief. During this time, her
cousin said the arrows were a type that was used
by the Washows, which is a tribe whose homelands are
in the region around Lake Tahoe. The Washo leader, who
spoke on their behalf, said that these were the Washo's arrows,

(14:12):
but that no one from his tribe could have killed
the two men because he knew where they all were
and no one was unaccounted for. But after this, three
Washo men were taken prisoner and then were shot by
white men as they tried to flee. Two of them
died of their injuries. Later on, after Sarah and her

(14:32):
sister had returned to their family, they learned that the
actual white perpetrators had been caught and hanged.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
This whole situation led to conflict between Sarah's band and
the Washos. As the Washos tried to get some compensation
for the Piute's involvement in those two men's deaths. Sarah's
brother Natchez, said that they hadn't had anything to do
with the white people's actions, but he did eventually give
the washos All horse. In June of eighteen fifty nine,

(15:03):
a rich deposit of silver was discovered near Virginia City, Nevada,
which came to be known as the Comstock Load. This
led to a huge influx of white people into and
through Northern Pyute territory and increasing tensions and violence. Newcomers
also started clearing the native pinion trees to use them

(15:24):
for lumber and fuel. The nuts from these trees were
a staple food for the Northern Pyute and other indigenous
people of the region. White farmers also brought in pigs,
which ate root vegetables that the Northern Pyute and other
indigenous peoples depended on. The Winter of eighteen fifty nine
to eighteen sixty was brutal for the indigenous peoples of

(15:46):
the region, both because of the weather and because of
the loss of those critical food sources. Then, in May
of eighteen sixty two, Piute people were attacked by white
men at Williams Station, which was one of the Nevada
stops for the Pony Express. The Piutes rallied a force
to retaliate, which led Major Ormsby to muster a force

(16:09):
of his own in response. This was later known as
the Pyramid Lake War, and on May twelfth of eighteen sixty,
the Piutes defeated Ormsby's force, and Ormsby himself was killed.
Additional Federal forces were sent into the area, but the
Piute bands were able to hide in the desert canyons

(16:29):
and other places they were familiar with that the white
soldiers didn't really know how to reach. The Pyramid Lake
War temporarily forced the Pony Express to suspend service between
Carson City and Salt Lake City. In October of eighteen sixty,
Sarah's grandfather, Truckee, got sick and died, possibly as the
result of a tarantula bite. At his request, his funeral

(16:53):
and burial rights combined both Pyute and White Christian practices.
One of his final wish was also for Sarah and
her sister Elma to be sent to a convent school
in San Jose, California. They went briefly, but after a
few weeks, they were sent home because white parents complained
about their children being in school with two Indigenous girls.

(17:17):
It's possible that around this time Sarah got married to
a white man known as Snyder, who was the person
Truckie had entrusted with escorting her and her sister to
the convent school. Sarah would have been about sixteen, which
was considered to be a marriageable age. She does mention
Snyder in her book and in other writings, but she

(17:37):
really does not say anything to suggest that she was
married to him, although there are some other contemporary accounts
that did. In September of eighteen sixty four, when she
was about twenty, Sarah went with her father and brother
to Virginia City, Nevada, to try to raise money. Her
father spoke about their plight in the Northern Pyute language,

(17:59):
and she transfer for him. They managed to raise about
twenty five dollars, and this is when people started to
call her things like Princess Sarah. At various points after this,
she her father, and her brother did speaking engagements and
public performances to try to raise enough money for their
band to survive. In eighteen sixty six, a different Northern

(18:23):
Paiute band was accused of stealing cattle. In response, Captain
Almond Wells arrived and surrounded a group from Sarah's band
who were fishing at Mud Lake, which is also called
Winnemucca Lake. According to Wells, the people who were fishing
shot at him and he returned fire. But according to

(18:43):
Sarah's account, her father had taken all the young men hunting,
so the only people at Mud Lake at that time
were elderly people, women and babies. Wells's men killed twenty
nine Payutes and the only person to escape was Sarah's
sister Mary, who fled on horseback. Her mother and a
baby were killed. The account of this massacre in life

(19:06):
among the Piutes is flatly horrifying, and Sarah describes it
as almost killing her father win Amaca when he learned
about it, and while her sister Mary escaped the attack,
she died later on that winter in eighteen sixty eight,
Sarah received a written message from Lieutenant Aaron Jerome of
the eighth Cavalry, ordering her and her brother.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
Natchez to meet with him to discuss the deaths of
two soldiers and reports of Piutes stealing horses. In Sarah's account,
This started after Indian agent Hugh Nugent had illegally sold
gunpowder to a Piute man who had then been killed
for possessing that gunpowder. Natchez was away when she got

(19:49):
the message, so the other Piutes wanted her to write
back rather than just sending a verbal message. She didn't
have anything to write with, so she improvised with a
sharpened s and fish blood for ink. After Natchez returned,
both of them went to meet with Captain Jerome. They
told him about what had happened with Nugent and the gunpowder.

(20:11):
They reassured him that they were not involved in stealing
any horses. Not long after that, Jerome came to them again,
this time asking where Winnemucca was. Sarah explained that her
father had not been back to Pyramid Lake since the
massacre at Mud Lake had killed so many of his family.
Jerome asked them to bring Winnemaca to Camp McDermott, which

(20:34):
was near the border between Nevada and Oregon, and there
he said the army would offer him protection and supply
him with provisions. This led to Sarah and her brother Natchez,
going to Camp McDermott and eventually convincing Winnemaca to go
as well, along with about five hundred Northern Paiutes. Sarah
was hired as an official government interpreter for the camp,

(20:57):
and she was paid sixty five dollars a month. Her
brother also worked for the army as a scout, and
sometimes she worked with him. Jerome does seem to have
been sympathetic to the Paietes after their experiences with Nugent,
and he's one of the white authority figures that Sarah
generally trusted and believe treated her people fairly. It does

(21:19):
seem like they had more food and other resources at
McDermott than they had at Pyramid Lake, but this was
also a strategic move that was connected to a more
overarching US policy, as the federal government tried to force
all indigenous people to live on reservations. Warfare was ongoing
between the United States and a number of indigenous nations,

(21:42):
including the Bannock tribe, which has a lot of cultural, historical,
and linguistic connections to the Northern Paiute. In the wake
of these wars, people from multiple tribes and nations were
all being brought to Camp McDermott until they could be
placed on a reservation somewhere else. Some of the chiefs
and headmen who had already been brought to camp mc

(22:02):
Dermott didn't want to make decisions without Winnemucca there, so
while these efforts applied to all of the Northern Paiut,
Jerome was also looking for Winnemucca's band specifically. Sarah was
skilled and respected as an interpreter. During her lifetime, she
became fluent in at least five languages, including Northern Paiut, Shoshone, English,

(22:25):
and Spanish, but white people also criticized various aspects of
her behavior. At McDermott. She socialized with the soldiers, and
sometimes this included drinking and gambling. She also carried a
knife to protect herself, something that she had been doing
for years, starting after white men had tried to abduct

(22:46):
her older sister. At some point, she had heated disputes
with other people, and sometimes these disputes escalated into physical brawling.
As she became more and more publicly known, newspapers covered
these kinds of things with a tone of almost gleeful scandal,
and there were some incidents in which she was clearly

(23:07):
the victim and things were skewed against her like At
one point years later, a man tried to break into
her home and she defended herself with her knife, and
she was the one who faced charges rather than the
man who tried to break in. Those charges were ultimately dismissed,
so white society would have considered all of this unacceptable

(23:30):
behavior if a white woman was the person doing it,
but since it was an Indigenous woman, this was seen
with even more suspicion and scrutiny, and it fed into
like damaging stereotypes of what white people thought Indigenous women
were like. All of this scrutiny and sometimes insulting news
coverage increased with Sarah's growing prominence among white people, which

(23:54):
we will get into more after a sponsor break. On
April fourth, seventeen eighty, Sarah Winnemucca wrote a letter to
Major Henry Douglas, Superintendent of Indian Fairs for Nevada. The

(24:16):
commander at Camp McDermott had asked her to do this,
essentially to bring Douglas up to speed on the Northern Piete.
Douglas was impressed with this letter enough that he forwarded
it to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington. The
letter was also reprinted in a number of newspapers, including
in Harper's Weekly, and that prompted other newspapers to print

(24:38):
responses that really attacked Sarah's morals and character. In this letter,
Sarah again described her father Winnemucca, as the head chief
of the whole tribe. She described their time at the
Pyramid Lake Reservation, which she calls Trucky River. She wrote, quote,
if we had stayed there, it would be only to starve.

(25:00):
I think that if they had received what they were
entitled to from the agents, they would never have left them.
So far as their knowledge of agriculture extends, they are
quite ignorant, as they have never had the opportunity of learning.
But I think if proper pains were taken that they
would willingly make the effort to maintain themselves by their
own labor, providing they could be made to believe that

(25:22):
the products were their own for their own use and comfort.
It is needless for me to enter into details as
to how we were treated on the reservation while we
were there. It is enough to say that we were
confined to the reserve and had to live on what
fish we might be able to catch in the river.
If this is the kind of civilization awaiting us on

(25:43):
the reserves, God grant that we may never be compelled
to go on one, as it is much preferable to
live in the mountains and drag out in existence in
our native manner. So far as living is concerned, the
Indians at all military posts get enough to eat and
considerable cast off clothing. She went on to ask some

(26:03):
really pointed questions about this whole arrangement. Quote, but how
long is this to continue? What is the object of
the government in regard to Indians? Is it enough that
we are at peace? Remove all the Indians from the
military posts and place them on reservations such as the
Trucke and Walker River reservations as they were conducted, and

(26:25):
it will require a greater military force stationed round to
keep them within the limits than it now does to
keep them in subjection. On the other hand, if the
Indians have any guarantee that they can secure a permanent
home on their own native soil, and that our white
neighbors can be kept from encroaching our rights after having

(26:47):
a reasonable share of ground allotted to us as our
own and giving us the required advantages of learning. I
warrant that the savage, as he has called today will
be a thrifty in law, law abiding member of the
community fifteen or twenty years. Hence that last sentence sounds
as though she's calling for the Northern Piute to assimilate

(27:09):
with white culture, but there were limits to how much
of that she thought should happen. She considered the English
language reading and writing, and European style farming methods to
be tools that the Northern Piute could use to improve
their own lives and to live in peace with all
the non indigenous newcomers who clearly were not going anywhere.

(27:31):
But she also advocated for her people to maintain their
own culture and their traditional ways of living, not to
abandon them to live as white people did. No, and
she says thrifty in law abiding member of the community.
She's not saying we're going to give up all of
our own ways. In eighteen seventy two, Sarah got married

(27:51):
to Lieutenant Edward C. Bartlett. This marriage was actually illegal
under Nevada's anti missagination laws, so they eloped to Salt
Lake City in Utah Territory. Then they were married there
by a Justice of the peace. This marriage didn't last long, though,
and Sarah later accused Edward of drinking excessively and stealing

(28:11):
and pawning her jewelry, Although the relationship itself seems to
have ended long before that. They were officially divorced a
few years later. In eighteen seventy four, Indian agent Calvin
Bateman had Sarah's brother, Natchez, arrested, and the army sent
him to Alcatraz. Natchez and a lot of other people

(28:34):
had become deeply frustrated over the distribution of winter blankets.
The federal government was trying to get Indigenous people to
move onto reservation land by distributing supplies to them only
at reservations. Natchez had heard that winter blankets were being
distributed at Walker River Reservation, so he went there, but

(28:54):
the Indian agent there said they actually needed to go
to Pyramid Lake. Meanwhile, bait Men, who was the agent
at Pyramid Lake, said he had nothing to distribute to them,
and he sent them all back to Walker River. Natas
had also heard a rumor that all of the Northern
Paiut were going to be rounded up and sent to
Fort Hall Reservation in what's now Idaho, or to Indian

(29:18):
Territory in what's now Kansas. Fort Hall was about five
hundred miles away, and Indian Territory was about three times
that far. The idea of being forced to move so
far from their homeland to a place with a totally
different landscape and geography was just It was an ongoing
fear at this point for the Northern Paiut. Natas took

(29:41):
that rumor to a newspaper called the Humboldt Register, and
then after all this, Bateman accused him of intentionally sowing unrest.
Bateman had also sought the support of various Indigenous and
non Indigenous people who were critical of the Winnemucca family
for various reasons, as he made this case that Natchez
was causing trouble. Natchez was held for eleven days and

(30:05):
released after General John Schofield determined that Bateman's allegations were unfounded.
While Natchez had critics that Bateman had called on, he
also had supporters who had contacted Schofield and other authorities
on his behalf. Bateman faced some criticism over his actions,
both from Schofield and from newspapers. All of this was

(30:28):
happening under President Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy, in which
Indian agents, many of whom had been military officers or
other officials, were being replaced with Christian missionaries and others
who had some kind of religious background. Bateman was one
of the agents who had been appointed because of his
religious affiliations, so a lot of this criticism questioned his

(30:51):
religious character.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
As all of this was happening, the federal government was
also continuing its efforts to move Indigenous people onto res
According to a census that Natchez carried out after he
was released from Alcatraz, there were nearly twenty five hundred
Payutes and only two hundred and fifty three were living
on reservation. So the government really wanted to do something

(31:15):
about all those other people. In eighteen seventy two, the
federal government established the Malar Reservation on land in what's
now southern Oregon and northern Nevada. It was designated for
the quote roving and straggling bands in eastern and southeastern
Oregon which can be induced to settle there. That sort

(31:37):
of blanket statement was meant to include both Northern Paiute
and Bannock peoples.

Speaker 1 (31:43):
Sarah Winnemucca was hired as an interpreter at Malur Reservation
in eighteen seventy five, working with Indian agent Samuel B. Parish,
and this was someone else that Sarah came to respect
and thought treated her people with fairness and empathy. Although
her descriptions of their conversations in her book do sound
fairly paternalistic. Something she'd noted in her letter to Major

(32:08):
Henry Douglas was that the Northern Piute did not know
how to farm. They had been a migratory people that hunted, fished,
and harvested things like pine nuts and root vegetables. Parish
taught them farming and harvesting methods that would work on
the reservation's land, and he paid them for the work
they did. After about a year, Sarah also started working

(32:29):
as a teaching assistant at the reservation school, which was
run by Parrish's wife, But in June of eighteen seventy six,
Parish was replaced by Major W. V. Reinhardt.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
A number of sources, including Life among the Piutes, say
that this was because of Grant's peace policy and its
focus on having Christian missions and charitable societies oversee the reservations,
but Parish was raised by missionaries, and while I could
not find a ton of des detail about Reinhardt's biography,
I really didn't find any references to him being affiliated

(33:05):
with any kind of Christian or charitable organization. He had
served in the US Army during the Civil War, he
had run a store and worked as a postmaster. It's
possible that Parish was really replaced because of complaints about
him by members of the local white community who didn't
like what he was doing. Among other things, he had

(33:27):
strongly advocated for the reservation's residents during a dispute over
the border of the eastern part of the reservation.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
There had already been people who resisted being forced to
live on the reservation, but problems really escalated after Reinhardt
took over. He claimed that everything on the reservation belonged
to the government, including people's crops. He collected the harvest
and paid people partially in rations, which meant that people

(33:56):
often had less food after being paid than they would
have if they had just been allowed to keep what
they grew. According to Sarah Winnemuck's account, he also paid
them in goods from the reservation storehouse, but the price
of those goods was a lot higher than people would
have paid elsewhere. If they had actual wages, they could
spend as they wanted. Some of the Northern Payute chiefs

(34:19):
living at Malheur also accused Reinhart of selling liquor to
the people living there. Reinhart also dealt with people through
threats and intimidation, and sometimes physical violence, including beating a
child that he said had laughed at him. Headman and
spiritual leaders who had resisted Parrish's management of the reservation

(34:39):
were even more vocal about Rehinehart. Yeah, everyone was having
a difficult time, but existing resistance what was going on escalated.
Sarah Winnemaka criticized Binhart really openly, and this included traveling
to Camp Harney to report what was happening to the
military authorities there. She wrote out a whole report that

(35:01):
was signed by all the head men who were living
at the reservation. In response, Reinhardt fired her as interpreter,
banished her from the reservation, and accused her of being
a drunken gambler and a sex worker. He vilified her
in pretty much every avenue that was available to him,
including his public statements, letters, he wrote to the Office

(35:24):
of Indian Affairs and newspaper reports. Reinhardt also maintained that
he was doing his job as it was expected of him.
About seven hundred people were living at the reservation, and
he claimed that the government wasn't providing the resources that
would be needed to make themselves sufficient. It is true
that government funds to the reservation declined while he was there. Also,

(35:48):
when white ranchers started encroaching onto the reservation land and
their cattle trampled the crops, he couldn't get federal authorities
to do much to stop it. But his treatment of
the people living there was corol enough that a lot
of people thought he was intentionally trying to drive them
away from the reservation. According to Sarah Winnemucca, after being

(36:09):
presented with all their grievances, he did tell them that
if they didn't like what the government wanted them to
do on the reservation, they should quote go and live
with the soldiers.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
As all of this was happening, after the divorce from
her previous marriage was formalized, Sarah married a man named
Joseph Satwaller. They also were divorced not long afterward, But
there's really not much additional detail known about this relationship,
Like there's a record that they got married, but almost
nothing else about him has survived. There is a bit

(36:43):
of a gap in Sarah's account after this marriage. So
this is where we're going to pause and we will
pick right up next time. I have some listener mail.

Speaker 1 (36:53):
Hooray. This listener mail is from Mariam after we had
a discussion about places to get jobs for people interested
in history or maybe getting history degrees. And this applies
more to the US than the UK, which is where
the original letter writer was from, but it's still interesting
and cool information. So Miriam wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy. First,

(37:16):
I'd really like to thank you for the hours I've
gotten to spend listening to you too, as I've driven
all over the US recently. At the end of the
Horace Walpole Part one episode, you discussed job advice for
those looking for jobs in historian type careers. I happen
to have a piece of advice for folks who love
history and love discussing it with people, one that I

(37:37):
spent twenty years doing. Try applying to work as a
ranger with agencies like the National Park Service. The NPS
has many different flavors of rangers, and the majority of
park visitors get to interact with interpretive rangers who work
with visitors to help them form emotional and intellectual connections
to the resources of the NPS units, which in normal

(38:00):
people speak means we're the rangers who get to do
the ranger hikes, walks, talks, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
We're the ones who get to meet in the visitor centers,
who can try to answer the questions you have, and
who get to swear in all the junior rangers. It's
a great way to experience amazing parts of America's history,
dive into deep depths, and share that knowledge with people
who want to be there and want to learn. State
park systems and concessionaires to the National Parks often hire

(38:31):
those who have a background in history as well. It's
a great option that isn't always discussed as a career
in most history majors. As a pet tax, I've attached
a couple of picks of the two cats who own
the household. There's trouble, our older grand them and Sigfried Akaciggy. Yes,
we are a classical music household, so the cats are

(38:52):
named for opera characters. Siggy is the most orange of
orange tabbys, with the possession of the shared brain cell
only rarely, but we love him regardless. Trouble loves to
lie and wait in the bathroom for one of us
to lift her to the sink for fresh from the
fawcet water. Thanks again for the many hours of company
and learning, Miriam. Uh, we sure do have a picture

(39:15):
of a kiddie cat sitting on the toilet looking like, hey,
when can I have the fawcet water and an orange
cat asleep in a very adorable pose.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
I like the Ciggy's place on the timeshare list for
the brain cell. Maybe like that paperwork hasn't gone through. Yeah,
it sounds like for anybody that doesn't note that is
a common joke among orange cat owners that there's one
brain cell they all share and they have to pass
it around. They have to pass it around. Yeah, thank

(39:48):
you so much for this email, Miriam.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
I had not even thought of, you know, working as
a National park ranger as an option for history minded people,
but it totally makes sense, especially since some of the
national parks have a big focus on history in terms
of their interpretive elements. I imagine a lot of national
parks as a place to go outside and hike and explore,

(40:11):
but that's not all there is to do there. Well,
and we have done shows at parks yeah, and talk
to the rangers who are extraordinarily knowledgeable about the history
of the area.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
So I feel foolish that it never occurred to me either. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:26):
Yeah, they're also specifically national historic parks in the United States,
So anyway, things I had never thought of as a
career option in that way. I did think of being
a park ranger when I was in college, and I
worked at a state park for my summer job during college,
but like I was thinking about the being outside and

(40:47):
hiking and clearing trails and the least favorite part of
that job, which is the cleaning of the public restrooms.
So uh, anyway, thank you so much, Miriam for this
email and the cat pictures. If you would like to
send us a note about this or any other podcast
or at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com, and you

(41:09):
can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or
anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts, from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,

(41:29):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Good Game with Sarah Spain

Dateline NBC

Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sarah Winnemucca, Part 1