A Treasury of Foolishly Forgotten Americans (13 page)

Sarah departed Yakama brokenhearted, but promised the Paiutes held there that she would work for them “while there was life in my body.” General Howard offered her a position at Fort Vancouver in Washington, where she continued to agitate for her people and urged them to engage in what amounted to a strike. “Sarah Winnemucca finds frequent means to communicate with them,” Wilbur reported, “urging them to take no steps and accept of nothing that can be contrived into a prospect of accepting this reservation as their home.” While at Fort Vancouver, Sarah met again with President Hayes, who was visiting with his wife, Lucy. “I spoke to him as I done in Washington to the Secretary,” she related, “and I said to him, ‘You are a husband and father, and you know how you would suffer to be separated from your wife and children by force, as my people still are, husbands from wives, parents from children, notwithstanding Secretary Schurz's order.' Mrs. Hayes cried all the time I was talking, and he said, ‘I will see about it.' But nothing was ever done that I heard of.”

It would take Wilbur's resignation from Yakama for the Paiutes suffering there to finally gain their freedom. He was replaced in 1882 by the more humane Robert H. Milroy, who understood how miserable the Indians were at the reservation and how they would never consider it home. He looked the other way as they gradually escaped in small groups, and by the end of 1884, they were all gone.

In December 1881 Sarah married the last of her loser husbands,
³
a former soldier named Lewis H. Hopkins. Why she was so consistently attracted to white men remains a mystery. Sally Zanjani speculates that she was drawn to the exotic, as were the men she married. “Moreover,” she writes, “for Sarah, who always cared deeply about her acceptance by whites and felt her repeated rejections so keenly, a white husband may have provided another item for her credentials, along with Methodism and her claim to a convent education.”
⁴
There was also the fact that had she married within her race, she would have had to settle for the obscure domesticity of an Indian wife. “I would rather be with my people,” she once told a reporter, “but not to live with them as they live.” Whatever her reasons for marrying Hopkins, he would cause her no end of trouble.

The couple traveled to Boston in the spring of 1883. There Sarah came under the patronage of two elderly sisters, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mary Mann, widow of the famed educator Horace Mann. The sisters encouraged Sarah to write about her experiences and helped prepare for publication
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims
, the first book written by a Native American woman (and one of the earliest written by any Indian west of the Mississippi). “It is of the first importance to hear what only an Indian and an Indian woman can tell,” Mann wrote. Through Peabody, who became her devoted friend, Sarah was introduced to many persons of influence, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier. She also launched a wildly successful lecture tour of the East, speaking more than three hundred times in various cities. “She never repeated or contradicted herself once,” Peabody wrote, “though it was obvious that except in the choice of some particular subject to be made her theme, she took no previous thought as to what she should say, but trusted that the right words would be given her by the ‘Spirit Father,' whose special messenger she believed herself to be, and impressed her audiences to believe that she was.”

The tour culminated in Washington, D.C., where Sarah met President Chester Arthur and Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller, both of whom proved no more helpful than their predecessors had been. “Their eyes aren't opened yet,” she said at the time. She was also invited to testify before the House Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, where she eloquently pleaded for a permanent home for the Paiutes: “We have no reservation, no home, and now I ask you for my people to restore us and put us I do not care where as long as it is our own home, in the home where we were born, and that is all.”

Casting a considerable pall over the otherwise successful tour was Sarah's husband Lewis Hopkins, who, before deserting her, disgraced her with his reckless gambling and by forging checks in the names of her supporters. She was forced to repay the money with funds raised for the Paiutes, leaving many with the impression that she was nothing but a huckster out to profit from her people's misery. “Poor dear Winnemucca,” one New England supporter wrote to Elizabeth Peabody, “my heart aches for her, I fear that her husband's conduct will injure her
cause
. I hope that she…may find a quiet home under the protection of her brother out of the reach of her dishonest husband. I hope he will receive the imprisonment that his crime deserves that will make it impossible for him to follow her…. I fear her enemies will take advantage of his misconduct to prove that she is equally base & false.”

Yet in spite of her husband's dishonesty, Sarah had accomplished much in the East. “Hers had been a remarkable journey,” writes Zanjani, “walking out of the Stone Age where she was born into the parlors of the intellectual elite and the halls of Congress. In bringing the sufferings of a small and obscure Indian tribe to the attention of thousands, she had surely contributed to that sharp turn in American public opinion toward justice for Indians.” Now all she wanted was to go home and teach.

Education for Indians at the time was based on a policy of eradication of the native culture and conversion to Christianity. “The Indian is
DEAD
in you,” a commencement speaker at the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania said, expressing a general philosophy. “Let all that is Indian within you die!…You cannot become truly American citizens, industrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the
INDIAN
within you is
DEAD
.” Sarah believed differently, and in 1885 she opened her own Native school on her brother's ranch outside the town of Lovelock, Nevada. She named it the Peabody Institute in honor of her friend Elizabeth, who devoted herself to raising funds for the school—a rather daunting task given the battering Sarah's reputation had taken courtesy of her husband, as well as William Rinehart's lingering campaign against her. Despite the difficulties, Sarah's humane and loving approach to education made the school a success. Louisa Marzen, a leading citizen of Lovelock, praised it after a visit in 1886. “When we neared the school shouts of merry laughter rang in our ears,” she wrote to Elizabeth Peabody, “and little dark and sunburnt faces smiled a din of approval of our visitation.” Marzen then went on to describe the accomplishments of Sarah's students:

As it was so often the case in Sarah Winnemucca's life, success was fleeting. Her school struggled from a lack of financial support by the government, which demanded assimilation in Indian education, and from her benefactors in the East, many of whom either distrusted her or had simply drifted to other causes. Furthermore, she lost her standing among her own people in favor of another Paiute named Wokova, who preached of the mystical Ghost Dance, which he claimed would bring the Indian dead back to life and restore the world to the native people. Many Paiutes withdrew their children from Sarah's school because of Wokova's prophecy that when the dead warriors returned, they would exterminate not only the whites but also those Indians who could speak or write English. Another blow was the sudden reappearance of Sarah's estranged husband, Lewis Hopkins. Before succumbing to tuberculosis in 1887, he stole the money earned from a bountiful harvest on her brother's ranch that might have saved the school. It wound up closing sometime in 1889.

Completely disillusioned, Sarah retreated to Henry's Lake, just south of the Idaho-Montana border near Yellowstone Park. There she died on October 17, 1891, at age forty-seven. The cause of her death remains a mystery,
⁵
and the precise location of her unmarked grave is unknown. “Let my name die out and be forgotten,” she once said in despair, perhaps realizing that history has a tendency to do just that.

The rat-hunting terriers stood at the ready on the night of September 3, 1872, eagerly waiting for the walls of the District of Columbia's Northern Liberties Market to come crumbling down. Despite vigorous protests by the people who made their living there, the decrepit and unsanitary old building at what is now Mount Vernon Square had been ordered demolished by Alexander “Boss” Shepherd, head of the city's Board of Public Works. No shopkeepers were going to stand in the way of progress. The Boss made certain of that. While his hastily assembled demolition crews set to work with their ropes and sledgehammers—releasing a horde of displaced rodents to the frenzied terriers—Shepherd was at his estate in the nation's capital entertaining the judge who might have otherwise issued an injunction against the work at hand. When the dust settled the next day, a sprawling eyesore was gone for good. But in the rubble were the corpses of a young boy, there to catch rats with his dog, and a butcher who had failed to clear out in time.

The human toll on this occasion was an aberration, but the incident was nevertheless typical of Shepherd's relentless—and sometimes ruthless—campaign to transform Washington, D.C., from muddy morass to grand metropolis. Just two months after the deaths at Northern Liberties Market, an unrepentant Shepherd orchestrated what was perhaps the most audacious move of his career. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had tracks running smack in the middle of improvement projects on Pennsylvania Avenue. Shepherd wanted them removed, but the railroad balked. Undaunted, he sent a crew of men to tear up the tracks under cover of night, and regrade the avenue to his specifications. “I did that without authority of law,” Shepherd later recalled, “but it was the right thing to do, and the nuisance would not otherwise have been removed.” John Garrett, B&O's president, was reportedly so impressed by Shepherd's nerve that he offered him a job as his vice president.

Boss Shepherd certainly knew how to get things done. During his tenure as head of public works and then as governor of the short-lived Territory of Columbia in 1873–74, the willful and imposing man almost unilaterally transformed the face of the nation's capital. With a wave of his hand, hills were leveled and gullies filled. Miles upon mile of sewers, sidewalks, and roads were laid. Street lamps were erected, new water mains and gas lines installed. City parks were created, and more than sixty thousand trees planted. The fetid Washington Canal, running along what is now Constitution Avenue, was mercifully filled, removing one of the city's most visible blights. Washington was on its way. “People who remember it as it was in the old days…can hardly believe that it has been transformed into the new and elegant city of today,” one observor reported in 1875. “There is a constant demand for houses at increased rentage, while rents in other cities have fallen. New buildings are rising everywhere…. There is no question that the city of Washington is at the beginning of a long period of growth and prosperity, which in a few years will make it one of the most important, as it will be one of the most beautiful, cities in the Union.”

 

Before Boss Shepherd came along, Washington was widely derided as one of the ugliest urban blights in the nation—“as melancholy and miserable a town as the mind of man can conceive,” the English author Anthony Trollope wrote in 1860. Indeed, little had changed since another Englishman, Charles Dickens, slammed the city two decades before: “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances, but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions…Spacious avenues that begin in nothing and lead nowhere; streets, miles long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete; and ornaments of great thoroughfares, which only lack great thoroughfares to ornament—are its leading features.”

The Civil War had doubled Washington's population, but the city itself remained an unsightly backwater, with muddy streets, open sewers, and disease-ridden slums. William Tindall, a local official, later recalled that there were “in every part of the city…hog pens…many cow sheds…chicken, geese and cows roamed at large…Scavenger service offended both sense and sentiment, the most noisome kind of offal and refuse were dumped daily on the surface of the common.”

One of the worst areas was around what is now Washington's monumental core. “Here crime, filth and poverty seem to vie in a career of degradation and death,” one police report read. “Whole families are crowded into mere apologies for shanties, which are without light and ventilation.”

Major Nathaniel Michler of the Army Corps of Engineers headed an office in charge of the city's public buildings and grounds after the war, and issued a report that criticized some of the more offensive aspects of the nation's capital—including the ones that Boss Shepherd would soon tackle. The Northern Liberties Market, for example, was “unsightly…an intolerable nuisance…on market days the most offensive matter accumulates in the adjoining streets, greatly detrimental to the health of the residents…vegetable matter…offal from the stall of the butcher…filth created by animals…causing a most disagreeable stench…engendering sickness.” As for the streets that Shepherd would have paved, Michler wrote: “There is scarcely a street or avenue in the city over which one can drive with ease and comfort…. [Parts of Pennsylvania Avenue] become almost impassible, either from the effects of weather, or being cut up by the immense amount of travel over them.”

Washington was in such sorry shape that there was talk, as after the burning of the city by the British in 1814, of moving the nation's capital. St. Louis, in fact, even held a convention in 1869 to vie for the honor. And proposals for a major Centennial celebration in the capital were greeted with howls of derision. Senator William M. Steward of Nevada called Washington “the ugliest city in the whole country,” and declared, “The idea of inviting the world to see this town, with its want of railroads and its muddy streets, seems to me altogether out of the question.”

Clearly it would take a man of enormous strength and will to make the city, as President Grant said before Congress, “worthy of the nation.”

 

The boy who would be Boss was born January 31, 1835, in the city's Southwest quadrant, which was then cut off from the rest of Washington by that foul-smelling canal Shepherd would later have filled. Only thirteen when he was forced to drop out of school to help support his mother and six siblings after the death of his father, young Alexander worked a series of jobs, ranging from store boy to carpenter's apprentice, before landing a place at the city's leading plumbing and gas-fitting firm at age seventeen. He quickly rose from head bookkeeper to partner to owner. After a brief stint with a local militia during the Civil War, Shepherd married and then purchased a 300-acre estate at what is now Northwest Washington's Shepherd Park neighborhood. He also got very rich in real estate, building, by some estimates, 1,500 homes in about ten years. This gained him entree into the clubs and saloons of the Washington elite. President Ulysses S. Grant became a pal, local politics a passion.

In 1871 Congress created a territorial form of government for the District of Columbia—a blend of local and federal participation, with the most powerful positions subject to presidential appointment. Shepherd was hoping his friend Grant would make him governor. Instead, he was appointed to the newly created Board of Public Works, which he quickly made his personal kingdom. This coup of sorts was abetted by the fact that Governor Henry D. Cooke, who also served as nominal president of the Board of Public Works, was otherwise preoccupied by the banking business, taking little interest in the territory he was appointed to run. “Why is Governor Cooke like a sheep?” went a popular joke at the time. “Because he is led around by A. Shepherd.”

Using his new office to the best advantage, Shepherd immediately commenced massive improvement projects. The pace was frantic, and money was no object. Hundreds of workers, many of them friends and supporters, were added to the city payrolls. Huge tax increases were ordered, to howls of protest. Construction chaos often ruled. While streets were being leveled and graded, for example, some houses were left sitting high above the road, while others sank well beneath it, a situation that is still apparent on some streets around the city today.

The board received plenty of complaints. Banker William Corcoran, one of Washington's richest and most powerful men (and benefactor of the art museum that today bears his name), was enraged when his home was damaged during the laying of sewer lines. In another case, a woman fell into a giant street hole on F Street NW. “I…was in an instant precipitated into the deep mud and water to my waist,” she wrote in her complaint to Shepherd, “and the more I attempted to extricate myself, the deeper I got into the mire…. When I returned to the house I found all my clothing except my hat quite ruined.”

Others were angered by Shepherd's high-handed, occasionally subversive methods of doing business. One newspaper even compared him to New York's infamous swindler, William “Boss” Tweed. Cronyism and corruption were rampant. It did not go unnoticed, for example, that the destruction of the Northern Liberties Market could only benefit Shepherd's own Central Market a short distance away. In addition, many complained that most of the great improvements were focused on the increasingly fashionable Northwest section, where Shepherd and his associates had substantial holdings.

Shepherd dismissed his critics, especially Washington's old-line property owners and unreconstructed Democrats, as political opportunists hoping to undermine President Grant and the Republicans through him. What he could not ignore, though, was Congress. His unchecked spending had not gone unnoticed, and he would have to answer for it on Capitol Hill.

A series of congressional investigations revealed the enormous sums that had been spent. Shepherd, who had been promoted to territorial governor in 1873, acknowledged that he had exceeded the city's debt limit, but had done nothing illegal. Congress, though outraged over all the money spent, took no action against him. One member of the investigating committee, Senator William Allison of Iowa, noted that while the territorial government was rife with mismanagement, he was “sorry that Shepherd was temporarily sacrificed as he had done so much for the city. He can afford to wait, however, as no stain is cast on his honor or integrity by the investigation or report.” The District, on the other hand, lost whatever measure of independence it had gained when Congress abolished the territorial democracy in 1874. Home rule would not return for another century.

Despite Senator Allison's reassuring words, Shepherd's reputation in Washington had been sorely battered, and the specter of misused funds hung about him for years. He declared bankruptcy two years after leaving office. “I had failed,” he later recalled, “and a man who is down cannot easily command the support of his friends. I concluded that I would endeavor to strike out anew.”

In 1880 the fallen Boss and his family moved to Mexico, where he owned a failing silver mine. His legacy in Washington remained, however, garnering almost universal praise.
Harper's New Monthly Magazine
was particularly effusive in 1875, noting how the streets were “covered with the most noiseless and perfect pavements in the world, and embowered in the greenest borders of grass-plots, enclosed with panels of post and chain or graceful palings, and planted with trees…. At all points of junction new squares and circles appeared, their verdure relieved with flashing fountains, or bits of statuary, or effects in sodded terraces, all ready for the sculptor.”

The city itself gave belated tribute to the man who had changed its fortunes when Shepherd was given a grand homecoming in 1887. Among the festivities were a parade up Pennsylvania Avenue and a reception for six thousand at the Willard Hotel. The
Evening Star
heralded him as “the man who redeemed and beautified Washington and came out of office a poor man.” “It was a question of national pride,” Shepherd said at the time, “but there were some old fogies here at the time who couldn't, or wouldn't, see it.”

After Shepherd's death in 1902, further tributes came, capped by the unveiling of his statue on Pennsylvania Avenue. But as his fortunes fluctuated in life, so they did in death. After standing grandly in front of the District Building for seven decades, Shepherd's statue was removed in 1979 to make way for the refurbishment of the avenue. For years it was stored far away from the heart of Washington, in an obscure location near the city's sewage treatment facility. Finally, in 2005 the Boss was rightly restored to his place of honor in the capital he had helped make among the most magnificent in the world, and indeed “worthy of the nation.”