Sarah Winnemucca, Part 2

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is part two of our episode on Sarah Winnemucca.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Last time we talked.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
About her early life and her Northern Piute band's first
encounters with white people. Where we had left off, a
lot of her people had been moved to Malor Reservation
and their situation there got a lot worse after Major WV.
Reinhart became Indian agent. There is a gap of a

(00:43):
year or so in her account at this point, and
we're starting where her account picks up again. In eighteen
seventy seven or eighteen seventy eight, while Sarah Winnemucca was
living and working at a ranch owned by people named
either Cooley or Corley, several Northern Paiutes traveled to see
her to ask for help. Conditions had continued to deteriorate

(01:06):
at Malor Reservation and that was where they were living.
People were starving and they did not have enough basic supplies,
including clothing. They thought that Sarah might be able to
go with them to Camp Harney to ask for help
or maybe even go to Washington, d C. To advocate
on their behalf. But Sarah really did not have any

(01:28):
money at that point to take a trip all the
way to Washington, since she had already been expelled from
that same reservation for reporting Reinehart to Camp Harney. She
also thought she might just make things worse if she
tried to go there and talk to them, or that
Reinehart might have her arrested or sent away as soon
as he learned that she was there. So this party left,

(01:52):
but groups of people kept coming to see her. They
came back several times over the following months, and eventually
somebody told that a lot of her people had been
driven off of the reservation. A group of Payutes and
Bannocks had started camping alongside a river, and they were
trying to survive there just on whatever fish they could catch.

(02:15):
Sarah suggested things that they might try to do to
advocate for themselves, including getting help from the reservation's new interpreter,
but they said that this interpreter just did whatever Reinhart wanted.
So eventually Sarah agreed to return to Malu because of
the risk of being sent away again. She started meeting

(02:35):
with people immediately after arriving, including a payute leader named
Egan and a man she identified as Bannock Jack. They
dictated their accounts to her, which she wrote down, and
she started preparing to go to Washington. Egan managed almost
thirty dollars to help pay for the journey, and she
had about twenty dollars that she had been paid to

(02:56):
take someone with her when she traveled to Malure. We
planned to raise more money by selling her wagon and
her horses.

Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
Egan had managed to collect this money by asking everyone
to contribute anything that they had available to contribute. Sarah
did not make it to Washington, d C. At this point,
though not long after setting out, she learned that ongoing
conflict between the Bannock tribe and the United States had
escalated into war. This had originated at Fort Hall in

(03:29):
southern Idaho, where people were facing a lot of the
same issues as at Meller, including a lack of food
and basic resources, and progressive loss of ancestral lands and
traditional ways of living. A lot of the people at
Fort Hall had been moved there from very far away
were totally unfamiliar with the area. The introduction of pigs

(03:49):
into this part of North America had also been a
major issue as they dug up and ate the canvas
route that was a staple food source. Had begun in
May of eighteen seventy eight with a Bannock force led
by Chief Buffalo Horn, who also had Pyute allies. Fort
Hall was roughly three hundred miles away from Malur, and

(04:11):
while Sarah's brother Natchez and father Winnemucca had tried to
maintain peace in the region, the conflict had been spreading. Egan,
who we mentioned a moment ago, led a force that
joined the Bannocks, as did Payute spiritual leader Eutes. The
peacemaking efforts of Natchez and Winnemucca meant that there were

(04:32):
already people who considered Sarah's entire family to be enemies
and traders, and people thought this about Sarah herself, especially
after she offered her services to Captain Reuben Bernard of
the US Army. In her mind, what led her to
do this was that the best thing for everyone that
would have the least loss of life would be if

(04:54):
this war came to a speedy end. So, among other things,
she offered to try to convince Piutes in the area
who had not joined the Banck side to work as
scouts or as messengers and to help negotiate a truce.
She tried to convince two Piute men to act as
messengers and to travel to Camp Harney or to Mallur

(05:16):
and see if authorities there had any news about where
the Banck force was located. These men refused and also
told her that they had heard her brother Natchez, had
been killed. So on June thirteenth, eighteen seventy eight, Sarah
went to Captain Bernard and told him that she would
go and find out where they were herself, along with
a couple of men who had agreed to go with her.

(05:39):
She would bring back her father and any other Piutes
who weren't joining the Bannock's side.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Although he didn't think she was likely to succeed, Bernard
got approval for this plan from General Oliver o'howard, and
he gave Sarah a letter with instructions for her to
be provided with horses and help if she needed it.
It really was not clear whether Sarah was going to
find her father and his people encamped somewhere, or if

(06:05):
they had been taken captive but soon after setting off,
she and the men who were with her, who she
identified as John and George, found a trail that they
thought might belong to a Bannock party or possibly to
her father's people. They followed this trail, they found places
where people had clearly made camp and spotted a burned

(06:27):
down ranch along the way. Eventually, as they approached Juniper
Lake in southeastern Oregon, they saw two men who looked
like they were running from something. One of them turned
out to be her brother Lee, who told her that
he and her father and others had all been taken
prisoner by the Bannocks and were being held about six

(06:48):
miles away. Lee also told her that their brother Natchez,
had not been killed. He had been sentenced to death
for aiding the white people, but he had escaped. Sarah
sneaked in to this encampment and found her father. She
told him to have the women and children start gathering
firewood for the night so they had a reason to
get away from the camp. After it got dark, she

(07:11):
led her father, her brother Lee, and three cousins out
of the camp. Lee worked his way ahead of them
to get some horses, and he sent his wife Mattie
back with one for Sarah. In Sarah's words, by that
point quote it was like a dream. I could not
get along at all. I almost fell down at every step,

(07:31):
my father dragging me along.

Speaker 2 (07:33):
After they all rendezvous at Juniper Lake, they made their
way back to Captain Bernard, some of them on horseback
and some of them on foot, and sometimes being pursued
by the Bannocks. They found food and water wherever they could.
Toward the end of the journey, Sarah and Maddie rode
ahead to get word to the army that they had
people with them and that they were being pursued. Troops

(07:56):
were sent to escort everyone else back. In Sarah's words, quote,
this was the hardest work I ever did for the
government in all my life. The whole round trip from
ten o'clock June thirteenth up to June fifteenth, arriving back
at five point thirty pm, having been in the saddle
night and day distance about two hundred and twenty three miles. Yes,

(08:19):
I went for the government. When the officers could not
get an Indian man or a white man to go
for lover money, I only an Indian woman went and
saved my father and his people. After this, Sarah and
Mattie started working as scouts, guides, and interpreters for General Howard.
This meant that they were working against the Bannocks, but

(08:40):
also against bands of their own people that had joined
the Bannocks side. Buffalo Horn had been killed on June eighth,
but battles between the US Army and the Bannocks and
Northern Paiutes and other indigenous allies continued until mid September
of eighteen seventy eight. Egan was murdered toward the end
of the war along with some of his family, reportedly

(09:03):
by a chief from another tribe who hoped to both
collect the bounty and avoid punishment for having joined this uprising.
Outas and his force ultimately surrendered. After the war, the
Northern Piute bands who had not participated were sent to
Camp Harney, Oregon, and told that from there they would

(09:24):
be sent back to Malure. Sarah encouraged them to go,
but in her words quote some of my people said,
we know there is something wrong.

Speaker 1 (09:32):
We don't like to go. But the officers told them
there was nothing to fear. They would be sent to
the Malor agency. My people asked me over and over again,
I told them I did not know any more than
they did. Therefore I could not say. At last, I said,
what need have you to be afraid? You have not
done anything. All the officers know that you have acted

(09:56):
for the whites. General Howard knows all about you. No
one of you have fought the whites. You have all
done your duty to the whites during the campaign. Her
brother Natchez also told them the.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
Same thing, but instead of being sent back to Malur,
these Northern Payute bands were sent to the Yakima Reservation
across the Columbia River, roughly three hundred and fifty miles north.
Sarah felt personally betrayed when she heard about this order.
She was also afraid of what her people would think

(10:28):
of her and whether they would ever trust her again.
The commanding officer told her to keep the information to herself,
but she later confided in Mattie, and Mattie told her
a quote, Sister, we cannot help it if the white
people won't keep their word. These Piute bands were forced
to make this trip in winter, and they were given
only about a week to prepare. Although she and Mattie

(10:51):
collected as many furs and blankets as they could, they
didn't have enough clothing to protect themselves from the elements.
Mattie was also making the journey while badly injured after
being thrown from a horse while trying to find a
group of women who had escaped during the night. After
describing Mattie's injury in her book, Sarah wrote, quote, Oh,

(11:12):
for shame, you who are educated by a Christian government
in the art of war, the practice of whose profession
makes you natural enemies of the savages, so called by you, Yes, you,
you who call yourselves the great civilization, You who have
knelt upon Plymouth Rock, covenanting with God to make this
land the home of the free and the brave. Ah,

(11:34):
Then you rise from your bended knees, and seizing the
welcoming hands of those who are the owners of this land,
which you are not. Your carbines rise upon the bleak shore,
and your so called civilization sweeps inland from the ocean wave. But, oh,
my God, leaving this pathway marked by crimson lines of
blood and strewed by the bones of two races, the

(11:55):
interior and the invader. And I am crying out to
you for justice, yes, pleading for the far off plains
of the West, for the dusky mourner, for whose tears
of love are pleading, for her husband, or for their
children who are sent far away from them. Your Christian
minister will hold my people against their will, not because

(12:16):
he loves them, no, far from it, but because it
puts money in his pockets. We will talk about what
happened when they got to Yakima. After a sponsor break,
the Northern Piute bands who had been sent to Camp Harney,

(12:39):
arrived at Yakima in February of eighteen seventy nine. A
number of people died of exposure or illness along the way,
including two babies who were born during the journey. People
continued to die after arriving at the reservation, both from
the ordeal they had just been through and because of

(12:59):
the conditions they were in at the reservation. They were
essentially put in a concentration camp.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
There.

Speaker 2 (13:06):
In Sarah's words quote, they had a kind of shed
made to put us in. You know what kind of
shed you make for your stock in winter time? It
was of that kind. All how we did suffer with cold.
There was no wood, and the snow was waist deep,
and many died off just as cattle or horses do
after traveling so long in the cold. Maddie was one

(13:28):
of the people who died that spring, and within two
years of their arrival, only four hundred and forty of
the five hundred and ten people who had made the journey.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Were still living. Those who survived faced increasing tension and
hostility from members of the Yakama Nation, who understandably didn't
want to lose part of their limited reservation land.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Sarah sent her brother to San Francisco and then to Washington,
d c. To try to convince the government to give
the Payutes a reservation somewhere that was actually within their
ancestral homeland. She also started teaching and working as an interpreter.
Although she found that she was paid a lot less
working for an Indian agent on a reservation than she

(14:10):
had been working for the military, her pay just wasn't
enough to cover her board while she was working. She
wrote to Carl Schurz, who was Secretary of the Interior,
for help, but didn't get a response, so she started
publicly lecturing again, both to try to get support for
her people to be able to return home and.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
To try to support herself. She started a month long
lecture tour at Platt's Hall in San Francisco in November
of eighteen seventy nine. Her lectures incorporated Northern Piute oral
tradition with rhetoric that would be approachable for white audiences,
including incorporating humor and satire to make her point about

(14:51):
the plight of her people without making white audience members
feel attacked. She pointedly criticized Reinhardt, who at this point
was trying to get the Pyute bands that hadn't been
caught up in the fallout from the Bannock War to
move back to malure. For many of her public appearances,
Sarah Winnemucca were a costume that was inspired by Indigenous

(15:13):
styles of clothing. As has been the case with some
of the other Indigenous women that we have talked about
on the show who tried to advocate for their people
with white audiences, This wasn't what she would have worn
in her day to day life among the Northern Piutes.
It incorporated elements from other nations and peoples, but they
were all things that a white audience would recognize as

(15:37):
Indigenous clothing. This combined with the idea that being Winnemucca's
daughter made her the equivalent of Payute royalty, so the
San Francisco Chronicle, for example, called her the Princess Sarah.
Sometimes her brother or cousins or other family members also
appeared on stage with her in kind of a performance.

(15:57):
Sarah also continually wrote letters to government and military officials
and to newspapers. She sent a petition to Secretary Sures
asking for permission for her people to return to Maler
with the reservation placed under the control of Samuel B.
Parish or someone else who would be sympathetic to them.

Speaker 2 (16:17):
She also started working on a plan to visit Washington
to try to meet with President Rutherford B. Hayes and
the Secretary of the Interior. For a time, the federal
government had really discouraged indigenous nations from sending delegations to
the capital, but in the late nineteenth century, the government
started to see it as an opportunity to sort of

(16:38):
impress indigenous leaders, basically implying that trying to wage war
against a nation with such a capital would be a
useless exercise. Carlisle Indian Industrial School was also established in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania in eighteen seventy nine, so a lot of indigenous
leaders who visited the school from farther away. They also

(17:00):
wanted to take the opportunity to visit Washington, about one
hundred miles away from Carlisle. These visits to Washington were
very tightly controlled on the part of the US government,
with indigenous delegations usually being housed at the same hotel,
kept away from reporters, and escorted everywhere they went. The

(17:21):
Winnemuccas did get to Washington, d c. And they briefly
met with the President. They also had two meetings with
the Secretary of the Interior. Sarah did not wear her
stage costume for these audiences. She wore the kind of
clothing that would have been expected for a respectable white
woman of the era. At the first meeting, Shurs mostly

(17:42):
asked her for details about the Bannock War, but at
the second meeting, after hearing her make her case, Shrs
told Sarah that the Northern Paiutes who had been sent
to Yakima would be given permission to return to Malor
Reservation and that they would be given land allotments. He
later all also promised that they would be able to
pick up canvas tents when they reached Lovelock.

Speaker 1 (18:04):
Nevada.

Speaker 2 (18:06):
The Winnamaccas arrived back in Nevada on February second of
eighteen eighty and they learned that Reinhart had basically been
running a smear campaign against Sarah Winnemucca in the newspapers
while they were gone. Then they faced another setback when
they arrived at Lovelock and they tried to pick up
those tents.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
They were told that they.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Would not be given any tents and that the only
supplies they could get would be at Melur. Then once
they got to Yakima, the Indian agent there told her
he had not gotten any kind of letter from Sures
about allowing the Northern Pikes to go back to Malure.
The letter that Sarah had with her was not enough

(18:46):
to satisfy him, and he also tried to bribe her
to keep its contents a secret. Shures never followed through
on the tents or on the relocation back to Malur,
and Mehler Reservation was ultimately disestablished.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
In eighteen eighty one. Sarah briefly met with Rutherford B.
Hayes again when he was visiting Fort Vancouver, and she
again tried to get approval for her people to leave
Yakima Reservation. He seemed sympathetic to her, but he also
didn't take any action, so Sarah encouraged her people to
start what was essentially a campaign of direct action. They

(19:24):
refused to farm, or build houses or do anything that
was expected of them at Yakima as an act of protest.
This naturally made their living situation a lot harder, and
it led to Sarah being expelled from the reservation. But
after this some families were given permission to leave. When

(19:45):
Robert H.

Speaker 2 (19:46):
Milroy became Indian agent at the Yakima Reservation in eighteen
eighty two, he seems to have realized that the Northern
Pietes would never consider that to be their home. He
started working with the people who wanted to leave, placed
them at reservations where other Piutes were living, and he
also didn't really try to stop people who just left

(20:07):
on their own. Over the course of about four years,
all of the remaining Northern Piutes left Yakima Reservation, but
at that point that was only about half of those
who had arrived there in eighteen seventy nine. On December fifth,
eighteen eighty one, Sarah married Lewis H. Hopkins in San Francisco.

(20:29):
On October twenty first of the following year, her father, Winnemucca,
died after a long illness, and the year after that
she traveled to Boston. It's likely that people that she
had met during her eighteen seventy nine lecture tour in
San Francisco had encouraged her to make this trip. Boston
was known as a home for suffragists and reformers and

(20:51):
other people who might have sympathy for her. After the
end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery,
some abolitionists turned their attention to his indigenous people's rights.
It's not entirely clear whether she might have been specifically
directed to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her sister, Mary Peabody Man,

(21:11):
which I imagine, like some of the other Peabodies in
this area might have said it Peabody uh. But those
are the two Boston women who became a big part
of Sarah's life and work from this point. Elizabeth Palmer
Peabody was an educator and part of the Transcendentalist movement,
and is known for starting the first English language kindergarten

(21:31):
in the United States. She came up in our episode
on Milton Bradley. Mary Peabody Man was a teacher and
a reformer, and the widow of educator Horace Mann, who
is not the same Horace Man who was friends with
Horace Walpole. With the help of Mary Peabody Man, Sarah
Winnemucca wrote and published Life among the Piutes, Their Wrongs

(21:54):
and Claims, which we've been reading from in these episodes.
This is believed to be the first to autobiography written
by a Native American woman, although some scholars frame it
more as a work of auto ethnography. It's not a
book about Sarah Winnemucka's life in isolation. It's interwoven with
the story of the Northern Piute during her lifetime. This

(22:17):
reflects the Northern Piute worldview. It wouldn't have been.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Appropriate for her to tell the story of herself alone,
but beyond that, their oral traditions and their way of
living were all very communal, with families making decisions collaboratively
based on consensus and a strong sense of how everyone
in the community was interrelated. This is also one of
the reasons she is sometimes seen as a controversial figure,

(22:42):
since there were times when she did things and made
decisions on her own without that consensus. The book begins
with Sarah's birth and the coming of white people to
their land, and it ends with Secretary Schurz's unfulfilled pledges
to allow her people to return to.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Mary peabody Man wrote the preface to this book and
added some explanatory footnotes, and she also assembled a lot
of letters and testimonials about Sarah to include at the end.
She wrote in the preface quote, finding that in extemporaneous speech,
she could only speak at one time of a few points,
she determined to write out the most important part of

(23:24):
what she wished to say, and fighting with her literary deficiencies,
she loses some of the fervid eloquence which her extraordinary
colloquial command of the English language enables her to utter.
But I am confident that no one would desire that
her own original words should be altered. The relationship between

(23:45):
Mary and Sarah seems to have been collaborative and mutually beneficial.
Sarah was known for being engaging and well spoken on stage,
but elements of written language were more of a struggle
for her. So Mary helped her with her written English
and with thoughts on how the book would be most
effective for white readers. Sarah also expanded Mary's experience in worldview,

(24:09):
which influenced Mary's work on her novel Juanita, A Romance
of real life in Cuba, fifty years ago. That book
came out four years later. That novel and advocating for
the Northern Piutes were Mary's two biggest projects in the
last years of her life. In addition to helping Sarah
get this book published, the sisters helped her promote it.

(24:31):
This included Elizabeth Peaboddy writing letters to her connections in
the Transcendentalist movement, including people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, and
Sarah promoted it herself as she continued lecturing around the Northeast,
doing more than three hundred lectures between the spring of
eighteen eighty three in the summer of eighteen eighty four.

(24:52):
It's not entirely clear where her husband was at this
point and how much he supported all of this public
work work.

Speaker 1 (25:01):
We'll talk more after a sponsor break.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
In eighteen eighty four, Sarah Winnemucca was back in Washington,
d C. She presented a petition to Congress proposing that
the Northern Pyutes be restored to the Mellor Reservation, including
those who had been sent to the Yakima Reservation after
the Bannock War. She also spoke before the Senate Subcommittee
on Indian Affairs on April twenty second of that year.

(25:35):
She described a lot of what we've talked about so far,
including her tribe's experiences with Reinhart as Indian agent and
the fact that most of the Payute bands she was
connected to had been forced to move to Yakima even
though they had not participated in the Bannock War. The
land that was part of Mellor had mostly been taken

(25:56):
over by white settlers, so she also suggested that a
whole might be made for them at Fort McDermott, where
many of them had lived previously, in which the Army
was expected to abandon.

Speaker 1 (26:09):
Ultimately, on July sixth, eighteen eighty four, the Senate passed
a bill that allowed the Piutes to return to Pyramid
Lake Reservation, but much of that land was being inhabited
by squatters and nothing was really done to try to
deal with that. And after this, Sarah also couldn't get
hired as an interpreter or as a teacher. The reasons

(26:31):
why are mostly speculative, whether it had something to do
with Rheinhardt's smear campaign against her, all her speaking and
her advocacy, or the fact that she'd been expelled from
multiple reservations for actions she had taken to try to
help and protect her people. It's also possible that the
authorities making these hiring decisions understood that, after everything that

(26:53):
had happened so far and her public persona as an
Indian princess, a lot of people among her tribe just
didn't trust her anymore. Sarah was also dealing with a
personal crisis. Her husband, Lewis, had contracted tuberculosis, and he
had also run up a bunch of gambling debts and
then tried to pay them off with forged checks. Sarah

(27:16):
felt like she had no choice other than to use
money from her book sales and lecture tours, along with
money that the Peabody sisters had raised for the Paiutes,
to pay those debts off.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Some of the white reformers she had been working with
really saw her as the victim in all of this,
but others started to suspect that she was some kind
of a grifter. In eighteen eighty five, Sarah went to
live with her brother, Natchez, and she started working on
a plan to start her own school. The United States
had started building a system of boarding schools to separate

(27:50):
Indigenous children from their families and cultures. We have talked
about these schools in several previous episodes, including our two
parter on the Fort Shaw Indians School girls basketball team
and our three parter on jim Thorpe. These schools purported
to teach Indigenous children what they would need to know
to survive in a white world, but they were one

(28:11):
component of an ongoing genocide on reservation. Day schools also
fulfilled the same purpose as the boarding schools, but without
sending the children away from their families. Yeah, there's been
a multi year investigation into these schools in recent years,
and just a couple of days ago as of when
we are recording this, President Joe Biden formally apologized for

(28:34):
this boarding school system. Sarah's school was not part of this,
and it was different. Rather than forcing students to speak
only in English and punishing them for speaking their own
language or observing their own cultural practices the way the
boarding schools did, Sarah's approach was bilingual. Her students would

(28:55):
speak to her in their native language, and then she
would translate that into English and her words quote, I
attribute the success of my school not to my being
a scholar and a good teacher, but because I am
my own interpreter and my heart is in my work.
This school was also meant to preserve, not eliminate, Northern

(29:15):
Paiute traditions and cultural practices among the students. She called
it the Peabody School for Indian Children. Although I did
read in one source that Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her
sister lay they didn't really want it to be named
after them, it did not say specifically why they were
not comfortable with that.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
Sarah couldn't get money to build a schoolhouse on land
on her brother's ranch, so she started with a brushhelter
with benches for the students to sit on, or they
would sit on the ground and use the benches as desks.
She hoped her students would teach their parents English and
how to read and write, and maybe go on to
become teachers themselves, following this same model of preserving their

(29:57):
language and culture. The boarding schools and on reservation day
schools weren't compulsory yet When she started this school, although
they would become compulsory later, and Sarah got a lot
of interest from families who did not want to send
their children to one of these government schools. In the
spring of eighteen eighty seven, she got hundreds of applications

(30:20):
that was far more than she could possibly accommodate. But
while she was getting lots of interest and potential students,
she had a lot of trouble getting funding. She was
basically doing the opposite of what the government wanted in
government funded schools. Most missionary societies that had some kind
of an interest in education for indigenous students were also

(30:43):
funding schools that were focused on Christianization and assimilation. Although
Sarah had become a Methodist at some point, this was
not the focus of her school at all.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
She was also really critical of a lot of missionaries
and a lot of missionary efforts, describing them as being
focused on proselytizing and converting people rather than seeing to
their basic needs and education.

Speaker 1 (31:08):
Her school faced some other challenges as well. Sarah had
developed neuralgia, and she had some kind of recurring illness
that may have been malaria, which had been a big
problem on the Yakima reservation. At one point, a government
official arrived to try to take her students to a
boarding school, and she refused to let them. Both the

(31:30):
school and her brother's ranch also faced a financial crisis
when her husband took their harvest to San Francisco and
offered Natchez only fifty dollars when he returned. That was
far less than the crop was worth, and the crop
had been meant for both their income and their food.
It seems like after this, Sarah kept the school going,

(31:52):
at least in part through gambling.

Speaker 2 (31:55):
Lewis Hopkins died of malaria on October eighteenth, eighteen eighty seven,
at the age of thirty eight. That year, Congress passed
the Dawes Act. The Dawes Act authorized the breakup of
reservation land which had been designated for tribes collectively, so
that it could be individually allotted to tribal members instead.

(32:18):
Sarah had written to Senator Henry L. Dawes with a
number of suggested changes to this bill. One of them
was that she argued that chiefs of each tribe should
be the ones to decide how to allot the land,
since they would know the most about who would benefit
from that. They would definitely know more than somebody like

(32:38):
the Secretary of the Interior. These suggested changes were not
incorporated into the bill. Though Sarah thought the Dawes Act
would help her people, and Senator Dawes was one of
the people that she thought had been honest and fair
with her. But the DAWs Act was catastrophic. Between eighteen
eighty seven and nineteen thirty four, roughly sixty percent of

(33:00):
land that had belonged to Indigenous nations and people had
passed out of Indigenous communities, nearly all of it going
to white people. And of course that was the reservation
land that Indigenous nations had been left with after centuries
of subtler colonialism, conquest, and genocide. The late eighteen eighties

(33:20):
was also when the spiritual movement known as the Ghost
Dance was evolving among indigenous peoples in parts of North America.
This is an entirely separate topic. We cannot possibly do
justice to it in a couple of sentences in this episode.
There's an episode in the archive, but it's from prior
hosts and it's only twelve minutes long. This was a

(33:42):
movement that involved religion and spirituality, and as its name
suggests there was ritual dancing involved. One of the prophecies
associated with this involved the idea of like the end
of the white person. It had a lot of influences
of both indigenous culture and religion, and also the other

(34:02):
nineteenth century spiritual and religious movements that were going on.
They all came together. Sarah and her brother Natchez were
not directly involved in the Ghost Dance movement, but they
did know about it. It arose in Northern Pyete Bands
in Nevada, and it spread to other tribes and nations,
including the Lakota, for various reasons, including that idea of

(34:24):
an almost end of the world, ending of the white
person focus on some of the prophecy around this. The
United States found this movement to be a threat. It
was not the kind of threat the United States imagined
it to be, but the government thought it was a threat,
and they deployed troops in response, and this ultimately led
to the massacre at Wounded Knee on December twenty eighth

(34:45):
of eighteen ninety, in which US troops killed more than
two hundred and fifty Lakota. Sarah was afraid something similar
might happen to her people, since she could read English.
She knew how the ghost dance movement and the massacre
were being covered in white newspapers, and it was highly sensationalized.

(35:05):
She also personally knew Colonel James W. Forsyth from the
Bannock War. He was in command of the seventh Cavalry
at Wounded Knee, So she tried to warn people of
the possible danger, and the response to her efforts was mixed.
She faced hostility from white newspapers for daring to suggest
that there was a possible threat. Some piut bands started

(35:28):
keeping watch for army soldiers, but others thought that Sarah
was just once again accommodating white society rather than standing
with her own people. Less than a year after the
Wounded Knee massacre, on August sixteenth, eighteen ninety one, Sarah
Winemaka died at her sister Elma's house at the age
of forty seven. A lot of sources give her cause

(35:53):
of death as tuberculosis contracted from her late husband, but
most accounts of the last of her life don't suggest
that she was seriously ill, as she would have been
if she were dying of tuberculosis at that time. Biographer
Sally Zanjani cites the work of Patricia Stewart and her

(36:14):
exploration of whether Sarah may have been poisoned, either accidentally
or intentionally. The coroner, Joe Sherwood, gave Sarah's cause of
death as too much choke cherry wine. That is also
what he listed for Elma's late husband after he also
died suddenly in eighteen ninety nine. Now, Sherwood did not

(36:38):
have any medical training. He had no formal training to
be a coroner. He was just kind of the guy
who said he was the coroner. And it's possible that
he just put too much choke cherry wine on people's
death certificates when there was no obvious cause as to
the cause of death, or it is possible that there

(37:00):
was something in the wine.

Speaker 1 (37:02):
Sarah Winnemucca was still well known at the time of
her death. The New York Times ran an obituary for
her on October twenty seventh, eighteen ninety one, calling her
the Piute Princess and describing her as a remarkable woman.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
A historical marker for Sarah Winnemucca was placed at McDermott
Indian Reservation in nineteen seventy one. Fort McDermott was designated
as an Indian agency after the military stopped its operations
there in eighteen ninety nine, and it formally became a
reservation in nineteen thirty six. That was something that Sarah

(37:38):
Winnemuca had been advocating for, but that formal designation didn't
happen until after her death. Today this is the home
of the Fort McDermott Pyute and Shoshone tribe. There are
other Northern Pyute tribes and bands still today, and other
reservations for the Northern Piute in addition to Fort McDermott,
and of course also not everyone one who is Northern

(38:01):
Paiute lives at a reservation. In nineteen ninety three, Sarah
Winnemucca was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.
In two thousand and five, the state of Nevada gave
a statue of her to the National Statuary Hall collection
at the Capitol Building in Washington, d C. Which accepts
two statues from each state. There was some controversy about this,

(38:24):
as there are still people who consider her to be
an assimilationist or even a trader. Members of her family
were involved in the statue's creation to make sure it
looked like they thought.

Speaker 1 (38:35):
She would have wanted. It was designed by Benjamin Victor,
inspired by a photograph of her. She's wearing what would
have been her stage dress with fringe that looks like
it's blowing in the wind, and she is holding a
book in one hand and a shell flower in the other.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
And that is Sarahwinnamucca, who I admire in a lot
of ways. And I think there are some ways for
she was ahead of her time and others that are
more complicated, which I'm sure we'll talk some more about
on Friday. I also have some listener mail. This is
from Karina, and I was a little alarmed by the

(39:12):
subject line because the subject line says, I think you
might be stalking me, and I was like, oh no,
what have I done that? There's nothing to be alarmed.
Karina wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy. As an avid listener
of the show for many years, a history lover, thank
you for all you do and teaching me about historical
events and figures from across the world that without you

(39:33):
I would remain ignorant of despite the fact that I
live in the UK. However, sometimes I find the topics
you pick about UK history so accurately mirror my life
and experiences that I have to ask, are you actually
stalking me? I am, of course joking. Your recent two
parter on the iconic Horace Walpole prompted me to write
in though, as in some ways he has a big

(39:55):
influence on my life, I'm very familiar with his beloved
Gothic villa, Strawberry Hillhouse. Yes, I actually went to Saint
Mary's University, which is adjacent to the house. They are
literally neighbors, and spent three years living and studying there.
It is just as splendid and quirky as you imagine.
In fact, some of our lectures and meetings were held
in a suite within Strawberry Hill House, which if you

(40:16):
looked closely, featured elements from the Castle of Otranto, including
a miniature helmet incorporated into the fireplace. We of course
studied the Castle of a Toronto as part of our
Gothic literature course, and it was truly something special to
be reading a novel in the same place it was
written centuries before, and to study Gothic literature at the
very birthplace of the genre. The house has had a

(40:39):
renovation in recent years and is still open to visitors
just as it was in Walpole's time. It is only
around thirty five minutes on the train from central London.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
The station is even.

Speaker 2 (40:48):
Called Strawberry Hill and is totally worth a visit if
you are ever in the UK. I'm afraid I don't
have any pictures to share for the pet tax. Karina
goes on to talk about living in a place surrounded
by deer, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, horses and farm animals. Below
is a picture of the autumnal view from our patio door.

(41:09):
I also have an adorable toddler who keeps me busy
and enjoys listening to your podcast with me on lung
car rides. She sometimes falls asleep while listening, but don't
take it personally anyway. Thanks for all you do. You
both help keep history alive. Lots of love, Karina. I
love all of this about having your college classes dreamy,

(41:30):
Strawberry Hillhouse dreamy. And I love this view off of
the back patio of the house looking out at a woodland.
This looks like it happened maybe in the late fall,
early winter. A lot of the trees don't have their
foliage anymore. And I will also say if you want

(41:51):
to send pictures of deer, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, horses, and
farm animals, that is also great.

Speaker 1 (42:00):
I took a little trip to.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
The Delaware River Valley area of New York a couple
months ago, and boy did I take so many pictures of.

Speaker 1 (42:09):
Deer because they were everywhere.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
So thank you so much for this email. If you'd
like to send us a note about this or any
other podcast, or at History podcast at iHeartRadio dot com,
and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio
app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts.

(42:34):
Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

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.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 2