A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (11 page)

As the climate in Georgia became increasingly hostile to blacks, some proposed leaving the state and resettling in Arkansas. Campbell vigorously resisted. “I propose to sink or swim, live or die, right here, and not ask any man if I can stay here,” he declared. “Let our wives and children know they have husbands and fathers [and] that we are able and willing to defend them in this state. I am opposed to any plans of emigration. I repeat, sink or swim, live or perish, Georgia is to be our home.”

Campbell probably never fathomed just how inhospitable his home would become. He hoped to live in a color-blind society where all men were treated equal, but his idealism gradually gave way to cold realism as he came to understand that few whites in Georgia would ever share his vision. If they couldn't be coaxed toward fairness, he concluded, they would have to be forced. He used his office as justice of the peace to that end, and never hesitated to arrest anyone who mistreated his people. “He makes up his mind and pursues his course, whether right or wrong,” said Judge William M. Sessions after Campbell was attacked for being overzealous in his position. “He professes to look, and his acts show that he does look, very closely to [blacks'] rights as citizens.” To many whites, that made him a “lawless nigger,” as the
Savannah Morning News
called him. His decisions as justice of the peace would be one way they would use to bring him down.

Another weapon was an act passed by the state Senate that established an unelected board of commissioners to control McIntosh County. “Not only did the law provide for an all-white county government with the authority to create and control patronage positions,” writes Russell Duncan, “but it also threatened to destroy Campbell's position. He saw five years of black progress imperiled.” Naturally he opposed the law, calling it “the most iniquitous, unjust, and diabolical thing ever attempted on citizens of a free country,” and he encouraged blacks in the county to resist it—violently, if necessary. The Redeemers pounced, charging Campbell with inciting the populace.

“His influence is a blight on the community,” wrote William Robert Gignilliant, the man who had taken Campbell's seat when he was ousted from the Senate in 1868. “If he could be arraigned before the Senate and dismissed for malpractice as a Justice of the Peace, his expulsion from that body would necessarily follow. As he lives only by his office he would then be obliged to quit the County or starve.”

A Senate investigation found Campbell “guilty of using disrespectful and slanderous language towards the Senate…guilty of trying to excite an insurrectionary spirit among the people of his district by advising them to resist a public law of the State with the bayonet,” guilty of being “a general disturber of the peace and order…[and] guilty of malpractice in the office of Justice of the Peace.” Despite the conclusions, no action was taken against Campbell—Duncan theorizes that it was out of fear of retaliation from Washington and the restoration of military control in the state. But the Redeemers were far from finished.

Campbell lost his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1872 after the votes in two key precincts were tossed out because of “irregularities.” Election fraud similarly undid his bid for the House two years later. Meanwhile, he was bombarded with bogus charges arising from his activities as justice of the peace. In 1872, for example, he was arrested for marrying a mixed-race couple four years earlier. “Last Tuesday Senator Campbell was arrested and incarcerated in jail,” Henry McNeal Turner wrote in a letter to the
Savannah Journal
that charged there was a statewide conspiracy to jail black leaders. “The senator is handcuffed as though he was a murderous desperado and hurried off to Atlanta. And what is all this for? Why manacle, shackle, and gyve this senator with such unusual ferocity? Is it because he married that couple four years ago? No! It is because they mean to get him out of the senate and defeat his re-election.”

The judge who heard the case called it a “broad farce,” and Campbell was released after trial. But there was no such judicial restraint when a staunch Democrat and Confederate veteran named Henry B. Tompkins was appointed to preside over the superior court of McIntosh County in January 1875. That same month Campbell was indicted for the false imprisonment of Isaac Rafe, whom he had arrested in 1873 for breaking into the homes of two blacks. Campbell had fined Rafe $100 and ordered him to keep the peace for six months, but Rafe refused to pay the required court costs or bond and was ordered to jail. According to Campbell, he ran away and never spent a minute behind bars.

Under pressure from Judge Tompkins, the jury in the case returned a guilty verdict, but recommended mercy. Tompkins wouldn't hear of it. He stripped Campbell of his office as justice of the peace and sentenced him to one year of hard labor. When Campbell's attorneys appealed for a bond, Tompkins snapped that he “would not take a bond for the sum of a million dollars.” He also repeatedly put off the hearing on a motion for a new trial until Campbell was finally hauled away to a labor camp. Though Tompkins was eventually forced to release him on a $2,000 bond, the Redeemers were delighted with his tactics. “Everybody at the capitol is jubilant over the initial exploits of your new Judge in the administration of criminal law in the negro bestridden County of McIntosh,” wrote a correspondent to the
Savannah Advertiser
. “He has rid the County of…the Senior Campbell.”

While Campbell was free on bail in the Rafe case, the ever-zealous Tompkins had him arrested for another case dating back to 1871. Campbell had jailed one John Fisher for contempt and was later found guilty of falsely imprisoning him. The Georgia Supreme Court had reversed the case, but now Tompkins saw fit to revive it. A grand jury—hardly comprised of his peers—indicted Campbell, after which Tompkins ordered a $3,000 bond. When he was unable to pay, the sheriff's men tried to take him to jail. But outside the courthouse hundreds of armed blacks had gathered and demanded Campbell's release. When the city marshal went out to the crowd and tried to disperse it, an exchange of gunfire ensued. As a result Campbell was kept at the courthouse overnight, and by the next evening was taken away by steamer. “Goodbye Mas Jesus,” the crowd cried mournfully, “goodbye.”

Judge Tompkins's persecution of Campbell and other blacks was reported to President Grant, along with requests for his intercession. An investigation followed, and Tompkins was found unworthy of holding judicial office. Assistant U.S. Attorney George S. Thomas, who conducted the investigation, wrote to Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont after discussing Tompkins with several local judges: “Judge Russell very frankly told me that he was a Democrat and opposed to Campbell politically, but that candor compelled him to state that he (Campbell) was being shamefully persecuted by Judge Tompkins and others for the purpose of ridding McIntosh County of his presence and influence…and that he was satisfied that Judge Tompkins's prejudices against Mr. Campbell on account of his race and color were such to disqualify him from giving Mr. Campbell justice, and that he looked upon Judge Tompkins's conduct toward Mr. Campbell as a disgrace to the judicial position he occupied.”

The conclusions did little to help Campbell. While George Thomas was trying to get the Fisher case moved to federal court to ensure a fair trial, the Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal on the Rafe case because of a technicality. It was returned to Judge Tompkins, which doomed Campbell. After waiting in jail for nearly nine months pending the Fisher trial, he was now ordered to serve his sentence for the Rafe case by working on a plantation as part of Georgia's convict-lease law. He later described his first day of bondage:

After a year of labor, Campbell was released from Smith's plantation at age sixty-four. “We think it very doubtful if the old man ever comes back to Darien [the seat of government in McIntosh County] to live anymore,” gloated the editor of the
Timber Gazette
. He was right. Assured that he would be jailed again if he remained in Georgia, Campbell moved to Washington, D.C., where he continued the struggle for justice and equality, but to little effect. Radical Reconstruction was dead in the South, and so, it seemed, were Tunis Campbell's dreams.

The Great White Father in Washington seemed indifferent to the Northern Paiute woman who had traveled across the continent to plead for her obscure and suffering tribe. “Did you get all you want for your people?” President Rutherford B. Hayes asked somewhat dismissively. “Yes, sir,” Sarah Winnemucca tentatively replied, “as far as I know.” With that, the brief interview ended and the powerful man in whom Sarah had placed so much hope swept out of the room. Though she had been given a written guarantee from Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz that the sorry lot of the Northern Paiutes would be improved, so many whites had broken their promises before. Only the near-mythic president of the United States could truly help her people, Sarah believed, and she found that he didn't care. Dejected, she returned to her homeland in the western Nevada desert and saw soon enough that Secretary Schurz was yet another in a long list of whites who wouldn't keep their word.

One hundred and twenty-five years after Sarah Winnemucca's disappointing journey to Washington in 1880, she was given a place of honor among other great Americans in the U.S. Capitol. Though not as recognizable as some of the carved figures enshrined there, it was a fitting tribute to a dynamic woman who defied the limitations placed upon her sex to lead a most extraordinary life. She was the first Native American woman to write a book, and one of the few to have had national influence. A compelling speaker with a sharp tongue and ready wit, she lectured in countless halls and was invited to testify before Congress.

Hers was a life of contrasts—a brave heroine with a weakness for bad men; an advocate for peace with a violent temper when it came to her own honor; a firm believer in the superiority of the native culture criticized by her own people for assimilating too far into the white world. But Sarah's overriding legacy was her tireless, often frustrated efforts on behalf of the Northern Paiutes
¹
and other native tribes in the face of relentless white encroachment onto their lands and sometimes barbaric abuse of their people. “They came like a lion,” she wrote, “yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since.”

When Sarah was a young girl, with the given name of Thocmetony (meaning “shell flower”),
²
these encroachers were called “white owls” because of their bearded faces and pale eyes. The white invasion of the Paiute homeland in northwestern Nevada had barely begun when she was born around 1844. Even then, however, the white owls were striking terror. They were known to shoot Indians on sight, and were believed to be cannibals after reports that a group of white travelers had resorted to eating one another while stranded in the Sierra mountains. It was this fear that informed one of Sarah's earliest memories. A party of white men was heard to be approaching her camp, but she and a cousin were too frightened to run. Their panicked mothers, saddled with other children on their backs, had no choice but to bury the little girls before fleeing themselves. Only their faces were exposed and hidden under sagebrush to protect them from the desert sun. “With my heart throbbing and not daring to breathe, we lay there all day,” Sarah later recalled. “It seemed that the night would never come.”

Despite the Paiutes's fear of whites, Sarah's revered grandfather Truckee encouraged friendship with them. Indeed, he demanded it, for he believed the future of his people lay in the white world. The tribal leader had served as a guide for expeditions into California and was awed by the technological wonders he witnessed there. He also fought with General John Fremont's army in the 1846 Bear Flag Rebellion to wrest control of California from the Mexicans, and one of his most prized possessions was a letter he received from Fremont requesting that all who read it treat him well. Truckee called the letter his “rag friend,” and described its amazing powers to his people: “This can talk to all our white brothers, and our white sisters, and their children…. The paper can travel like the wind, and it can go and talk with their fathers and brothers and sisters, and come back to tell what they are doing, and whether they are well or sick.” Although Truckee's abiding faith in the goodness of his “white brothers” was sorely tested, particularly when a group of them killed his son, it never wavered. His granddaughter, on the other hand, would always be ambivalent.

She had seen the wonders of the white world when Truckee took her to California as a young girl and when she was later sent to live with a white family, where she learned English. But she had also seen its innumerable cruelties. The gradual influx of white settlers into her homeland became a flood after gold was discovered in the region. The native people, scorned by the newcomers as subhuman, were pushed from the land they had occupied for thousands of years and deprived of the meager resources the desert provided. An early Indian agent noted that “the encroachments of the Emigrant have driven away the game upon which [the Paiutes] depend for subsistence. They cannot hunt upon the territories of other tribes, except at the risk of their lives. They must therefore steal or starve.”

Rampant disease and starvation among the displaced people were punctuated by periodic cycles of violence. While the Indians sometimes killed settlers, far more often they were the victims. White fear and greed inspired genocidal tendencies. The
Humboldt Register
declared that killing Indians on sight was the “only sane” policy to control them, and the
Gold Hill News
advocated a “final solution of the great Indian problem: by exterminating the whole race, or driving them forever beyond our frontier.” The violence touched Sarah personally on a number of occasions, perhaps most notably in 1865 when her mother and baby brother were slaughtered in what became known as the Mud Lake Massacre.

“The soldiers rode up to the encampment and fired into it, and killed almost all the people that were there,” she wrote. “Oh, it is a fearful thing to tell, but it must be told. Yes, it must be told by me. It was all old men, women and children that were killed…. After the soldiers had killed all but some of the little children and babies still tied up in their baskets, the soldiers took them also, and set the camp on fire and threw them into the flames to see them burn alive.”

Soon after the Mud Lake Massacre, Sarah moved to a reservation that had been established in the area surrounding Nevada's Pyramid Lake. There she shared the extreme deprivations of her people and found the cause that would consume her for the rest of her life. “She would not withdraw as some did,” writes Sarah's biographer Sally Zanjani, “nor would she accept in silent misery what she had no power to change. Before her spirit finally broke, she would rage with all the eloquence at her command in print and in lectures against the reservation system, and she would carry her appeals to men of power.”

The corrupt agents appointed to the Pyramid Lake Reservation were the frequent targets of her sometimes caustic tongue. She denounced them for the meager food and clothing they provided, for profiting from their positions, and for their Christian hypocrisy. After one agent made a great show of presenting a ton of flour to the Shoshone Indians for the benefit of their agent, his superior, Sarah confronted him. “I said, ‘You come up here to show off before this man. Go and bring some flour to my people on the Humboldt River, who are starving, the people over whom you are agent. For shame that you who talk three times a day to the Great Father in Spirit-land should act so to my people.' This man called himself a Christian, too.”

After about a year at the Pyramid Lake Reservation, during which time her uncle was murdered by a group of whites who coveted his land, Sarah moved north to Camp McDermit on the Oregon border to serve as an interpreter. There she wrote her first letter pleading for the cause of the Paiutes. It was sent to Major Henry Douglas, superintendent of Indian Affairs for Nevada, who forwarded it to the commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C. The letter brought Sarah national recognition when it was excerpted in
Harper's Weekly
as part of a profile on her, and later in Helen Hunt Jackson's popular book,
A Century of Dishonor.
The agents at Pyramid Lake were once again the subjects of her scorn. “If we had stayed there, it would only be to starve,” she wrote. “If this is the kind of civilization awaiting us on 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 an existence in our native manner.”

Sarah apparently enjoyed life at Camp McDermit, where the Paiutes were well provided for and where she basked in all the attention accorded her. “She was fully aware of her charms and lost no opportunity to display them,” wrote Fanny Corbusier, the wife of an army surgeon at the post. “With a flourish which I have never seen duplicated in any show, she would gallop across the parade ground—supple, but erect in perfect balance—her quirt hand lifted in a queenly salute. Between the barracks and across the parade ground again, and she would be gone amid the lusty cheers of the men. Or, on occasion she would dismount just long enough to receive their plaudits—be remounted by some gallant soldier, and be off.”

The soldiers at Camp McDermit proved to be good company for Sarah. She drank, gambled, and caroused with the men, and ended up eloping with one of them. Lieutenant Edward Bartlett became the first in a succession of ne'er-do-well white husbands whom she found irresistible. “His example would ruin the best company in the service,” Bartlett's commanding officer observed of him. He was a handsome rogue with a drinking problem who narrowly avoided a court martial on charges of defrauding the government. Sarah was smitten. She defied her father, Winnemucca, chief of the Paiutes, to marry Bartlett, but within a month she returned to her family. It seems her new husband had deserted her after the novelty of an Indian wife had worn off.

A Paiute woman who dared question Sarah's virtue after the demise of her ill-fated marriage perhaps did so without realizing the consequences of casting such aspersions on her character. In full fury, Sarah attacked the woman, beat her mercilessly, then triumphantly bounced on top of her. With each bounce she issued a sharp slap across the face. “There,” she exclaimed, “talk so about me to white folks, will you!” Sarah's wrath, when aroused, did not discriminate between the sexes, either. Two weeks after the brawl with the unfortunate Paiute woman, she clashed with a hotel waiter in what a
Humboldt Register
headline called
A BLOODY COMBAT
. The waiter ended up with a black eye, but Sarah fared worse, slipping into a coma from which it took her several days to emerge. Later, when a man named Julius Argasse tried to rape her, she slashed him across the face with a penknife. Usually such an assault on a white man, no matter how well justified, would result in serious punishment. Fortunately, Sarah had a good lawyer who produced an impressive list of character witnesses, and the charges were dropped.

In 1875 Sarah went to work as an interpreter at the Malheur Reservation in southeastern Oregon. The agent there, Samuel B. Parrish, was one of the few ever to earn her approbation. He treated the Indians with kindness, encouraging them to work the land and to keep the rewards of their labor. “The reservation is yours,” Parrish told them. “The government has given it all to you and your children.” While the Indians enthusiastically dug irrigation ditches and planted crops, Sarah served as an assistant to Parrish's sister-in-law when she opened a school at Malheur in the spring of 1876. “Oh, how happy we were!” she wrote. “We had three hundred and five boys, twenty-three young men, sixty-nine girls, and nineteen young women. They learned very fast, and we were glad to come to school. Oh, I cannot tell or express how happy we were.”

The idyll at Malheur was not destined to last, however. To the Indians' great dismay, Parrish lost his position and was replaced by William V. Rinehart, a tyrannical figure who despised his charges. He advised them that everything they produced at the reservation belonged to the government and that they would be paid a small fee for their labor. After expenses for their care were deducted, this came to nearly nothing. When the Indians appealed to him with the promises that had been made to them, Rinehart was unmoved. “Nothing here is yours,” he snapped. “It is all the government's. If Parrish told you so, he told you lies.” Rinehart's gross abuses prompted Sarah to petition against him to various authorities. This resulted not only in the loss of her job at Malheur, but in Rinehart's enduring enmity as well. He would hound her for years to come.

 

The Northern Paiutes weren't the only tribe in the region to suffer from the influx of white settlers. The Bannocks, who shared a common language with the Paiutes but who were far more aggressive, long bristled under the many injustices heaped upon them. By 1878 they were ready for war. Several bands of Paiutes joined the Bannocks and their allies when hostilities commenced, a turn of events that distressed Sarah. Like other members of her family, she believed a war against the whites could not be won and would only spell doom for her people. Therefore, she determined to work with the army to help stop it. “Sarah never doubted her course of action,” writes Sally Zanjani. “She would follow the path on which Truckee had propelled her since she was a small child. She believed that acting for the army to bring an early peace was the best way to serve the Paiutes.” Her courage throughout the crisis was remarkable.

With the approval of General Oliver O. Howard, Sarah pursued a daring plan: She would find the Bannock camp and persuade the Paiutes there to come over to the army in exchange for protection and rations. The mission was fraught with danger, but she was undaunted. “There is nothing that will stop me,” she declared. Some officers on Howard's staff weren't so sure. “I have little idea that she will succeed,” wrote Major Edwin C. Mason. Nearing the Bannock camp, Sarah and her two companions met her brother Lee, who advised them that Winnemucca and his band had been captured by the Bannocks and were being held prisoners. “They have treated our father most shamefully,” Lee told her. “They have taken from us what guns we had, and our blankets, and our horses. They have done this because they outnumber us.” Lee warned his sister of the great danger she faced and pleaded with her not to enter the camp, to no avail. “I must save my father and his people if I lose my life in trying to do it, and my father's too,” she said. “That is all right, I have come for you all. Now let us go.”