A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (12 page)

With Lee's help, Sarah disguised herself by unbraiding her hair, exchanging her dress for a blanket, and painting her face. The party then made their way over the steep mountain above the Bannock encampment and saw some five hundred warriors swarming below. Sarah later admitted that the sight made her feel “a little afraid,” but she and her brother nevertheless went down to the valley and slipped into their father's lodge. “Have you come to save me yet?” exclaimed Chief Winnemucca. “My little child is in great danger. Oh, our Great Father in Spirit-land, look down on us and save us!” Sarah instructed the women in Winnemucca's band to pretend they were gathering wood for the evening and to make their escape that way. “Whisper it among yourselves,” she ordered. “Get ready tonight for there is no time to lose.” The men were told to gather as many horses as they could under cover of darkness and drive them to Juniper Lake on the other side of the mountain, where they would all meet. After they had all gone, Sarah and her father stole away later that night. Depleted from the difficult ride to the camp and from all the tension, Sarah could barely move. “It was like a dream,” she recalled. “I could not get along at all. I almost fell down at every step, my father dragging me along.”

The exhausted party barely had a moment to rest at Juniper Lake before Sarah urged them forward. The women were told to gather the food they had cooked and eat it on the ride, “for we must travel all night.” At that point Lee announced he was going back to the Bannock camp for more people and would meet up with them later. The rest of the group proceeded to Summit Springs, which they reached the next morning. Sarah hadn't slept for two days and prepared to rest, but her father encouraged her to eat first. “I did not know what hunger was all that time,” she wrote. “I had forgotten all about eating.” Just then a rider approached and alerted her that the Bannocks were in pursuit. One band of Paiutes had been overtaken while making their escape, the rider said, and Lee had presumably been killed. (He wasn't, as it turned out.) Chief Winnemucca despaired over the news. “If my son is killed, I will go back and be killed by them too,” he cried. “If we are to be killed off for what the white people have done to them, of course we cannot help ourselves.” Sarah managed to persuade her distraught father to save himself and continue the flight, while she and Lee's wife, Mattie, rode ahead to General Howard for help.

“Away we started over the hills and valleys…. No water,” she related. “We sang and prayed to our Great Father in the Spirit-land, as my people call God.” When they finally reached Howard's camp, Sarah burst into tears of relief and exhaustion. She had endured a grueling ride of 220 miles over three days, and had saved at least seventy-five of her people. “I went for the government when the officers could not get an Indian man or a white man to go for love or money,” she recalled with justifiable pride. “I, only an Indian woman, went and saved my father and his people.” General Howard sent troops to bring Winnemucca and the rest to safety, and was so impressed with Sarah's fortitude that he retained her as a guide and interpreter for the rest of the Bannock War. “I had sufficient confidence in her story [about the size and location of the Bannock forces] to change my whole plan of movement,” Howard wrote, “a change which afterward proved to be for the best.”

Despite her heroism, rumors of her disloyalty were rife. Some even said that it was she who had incited the Paiutes to join the Bannocks and that she was now Howard's prisoner. Sally Zanjani suggests that Sarah's nemesis from the Malheur Reservation, William Rinehart, was behind many of the suspicions that swirled around her. “After all,” she writes, “he had blamed her rather than his own corruption and mismanagement for the troubles at Malheur, and now he badly needed a scapegoat…. Why not again blame Sarah?” Indeed, Rinehart had received some bad press when every Indian at the reservation abandoned it and a number of them joined the Bannocks.

The innuendo wounded her deeply. In one particularly troubling incident she was accosted by a woman serving her and several officers at an inn. “Why don't you take her and tie one part of her to a horse, and the other part of her to another horse, and let them go?” the woman demanded of the officers. “I would see the horses pull her to pieces with good grace.” Though her companions tried to reassure her, Sarah was inconsolable. She couldn't eat after the scene and it was seared into her memory. “Dear reader,” she later wrote, “this is the kind of white women that are in the West. They are always ready to condemn me.”

With her knowledge of Indian customs and strategies, as well as her endurance and bravery, Sarah proved herself invaluable as she accompanied Howard's forces in pursuit of the Bannocks north through Oregon to their ultimate defeat in the last major Indian uprising in the Northwest. “She did our government great service,” Howard wrote after her death, “and if I could tell you a tenth part of all she willingly did to help the white settlers and her own people to live peacefully together I am sure you would think, as I do, that the name of Toc-me-to-ne [Sarah] should have a place beside the name of Pocahontas in the history of our country.” For Sarah, however, the victory was bittersweet. Certainly she had saved many lives, but her service to the army damaged her credibility among her own people, many of whom blamed her for the deaths of those Paiutes who had fallen in the conflict. And her standing would be eroded further still in the aftermath of the war.

She had promised those Paiutes who had not participated in the hostilities that they would be spared any punishment. “What need have you to be afraid?” she assured them. “You have not done anything…. General Howard knows all about you. None of you have fought the whites. You have all done your duty to the whites during the campaign.” But General Howard and officials in Washington had other ideas.
All
the Paiutes who had left Malheur, regardless of their involvement in the war, were to be sent far from their homeland to the Yakama Reservation beyond the Columbia River in present-day Washington State. Sarah was devastated. “If you knew what I have promised my people, you would leave nothing undone but what you would try not to have them sent away,” she pleaded. “My people will never believe me again.”

Her service during the Bannock War would have spared her the banishment to Yakama, but she chose to endure it with her people. Thus, in the depth of the winter of 1879, the exiled Paiutes made the arduous 350-mile journey north. When they finally arrived at Yakama they were left on the fringes of the reservation, “as if we were so many horses or cattle,” before they were finally housed in a makeshift shed. “Oh, how we did suffer with the cold,” Sarah recalled. “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.” The agent at Yakama, James H. Wilbur, described them as “in the most destitute condition of any Indians I have ever known in this or any other country. Some of them were literally naked.”

Like so many reservation agents, Wilbur was a religious missionary as well as a bigot. He saw Indians as savage heathens who needed to be civilized and converted, yet he grossly neglected the very people he sought to improve. He did nothing to stop the abuse of the Paiutes by the Yakama Indians who resented the intrusion onto their reservation, and the meager clothing he provided was almost laughable. Much of it was so thin that Sarah sardonically remarked that one could sift flour through the cloth. “Another Rinehart!” the Paiutes said of Wilbur. “Don't you see he is the same? He looks up into the sky and says something just like Rinehart.”

Sarah had a keen eye for Christian hypocrisy, writing disdainfully of missionary agents who praised God while profiting off the people in their care. Nevertheless, she became a Methodist while at Yakama and worked to convert other Paiutes. At one point Agent Wilbur was planning for a religious revival at the reservation, during which important people from the East were to come and observe his work with the Indians. He told Sarah to keep the Paiutes out of sight during the revival, all too aware that their threadbare presence would belie the charitable message he hoped to convey. She ignored him, and at the meeting she directed the Paiutes to sit on benches reserved for Christian Indians. “I wanted all to see how well we were treated by Christian people,” she explained.

The source of Sarah's conflict with Wilbur was his determination to prevent the Paiutes from leaving Yakama to return home. They were “woefully heart sick and grieving to death,” her brother Lee reported. “They are continually brooding over their wrongs and pining to come back to their native country. They can talk of nothing else.” Sarah hoped to raise public awareness of their plight with a series of lectures she gave in San Francisco late in 1878.

Her celebrity had increased after her exploits during the Bannock War were extensively chronicled in newspapers across the country; talks by the “Paiute Princess,” as she was often called in the press, were eagerly received. “San Francisco was treated to the most novel entertainment it has ever known…in the shape of the address by Sarah, daughter of Chief Winnemucca, delivered in Platt's Hall,” one columnist reported. “The lecture was unlike anything ever before heard in the civilized world—eloquent, pathetic, tragical at times; at others her quaint anecdotes, sarcasms and wonderful mimicry surprised the audience again and again in bursts of laughter and rounds of applause.” She dazzled people with her proud bearing and stories about Paiute history, her childhood, the Bannock War, and the evils of the reservation system—particularly one of its cruelest representatives, William Rinehart.
The San Francisco Chronicle
noted wryly that “there was little left of the redoubtable Christian agent when she finished him.”

After her successful tour of San Francisco, Sarah was invited by government officials to visit Washington, D.C. There, writes her biographer Gae Whitney Canfield, she “was to be confronted with a concerted effort to destroy her usefulness as a witness against the reservation system and the men who benefited from its bungling procedures.” Sarah met several times with Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, who hoped to shut her up by making promises that would quickly be broken. He decreed that the Paiutes at Yakama would be allowed, but not compelled, to return home, and guaranteed that one hundred tents would be provided for those Paiutes still in Nevada. But he admonished her not to speak in Washington. “I don't think it will be right for you to lecture here after the government has sent for you, and your father and brother, and paid your way here,” he said. “The government is going to do right by your people now. Don't lecture now; go home and get your people on the reservation; get them located properly; and then, if you want to come back…we will pay your way here and back again.” After meeting with Schurz, Sarah had her disappointing encounter with President Hayes. Still, she managed to charm the capital, if not the Great White Father. “Dashing Sarah,” wrote one reporter, “in intellect, grace and knowledge of the world, will compare favorably with many belles on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

While Sarah was in Washington, William Rinehart was actively conspiring to ruin her reputation. He sent a petition and affidavits to the capital, signed by the “best men in the country,” as he called them, but who were in reality his biased associates. “We have seen with amazement the charges brought against him [Rinehart] by an Indian woman calling herself Sarah Winnemucca,” the petition read. It continued: “That her influence with the Indians has always been to render them licentious, contumacious and profligate. That this woman has been several times married, but that by reason of her adulterous and drunken habits, neither squawmen nor Indians would long live with her, that in addition to her character of Harlot and drunkard, she merits and possesses that of a notorious liar and malicious schemer.” One of Rinehart's cohorts wrote that Sarah was “generally regarded by those who know her as a common prostitute and thoroughly addicted to the habits of drunkenness and gambling”; another stated that she “could be bought for a bottle of whiskey.” Had Sarah been aware of these vicious smears, no doubt she would have confronted them. As it stood, though, Rinehart's campaign silently ate at her reputation like a cancer.

Sarah returned West to a hero's welcome from the Paiutes still in Nevada, who, she wrote, “came from far and near to hear of the wonderful father we had seen, how he looked and all about him.” But the enthusiasm died when it became clear that the tents Schurz had promised would never arrive. In their eyes, Sarah had betrayed them. “What could we say?” she wrote. “We were only ashamed because we came and told them lies which the white people had told us.” Adding to her shame, she learned upon her return that the
Silver State
had reported that she had been drunk at one of the lectures she gave before departing for the nation's capital. Sarah challenged the editor of the paper to a duel with pistols or knives “just to show him how a drunken woman can shoot.” The indignant editor had her arrested, declaring, “A drunken savage, who threatens to take the life's blood of a white person, should be given to understand that there is such a thing as jail in the community.” The charges were eventually dismissed, but her troubles were far from finished.

She traveled to Yakama to bring the joyous news to her people that their exile was over, but encountered stiff resistance from Agent Wilbur when she arrived. He accused her of “putting the devil into [her] people's hands” and threatened to have her “put in irons and in prison.” He then wrote to Washington and argued that the Paiutes should remain at Yakama lest their journey homeward be “the signal of warfare” to the settlers along the way. Schurz listened and his order was rescinded.