For shame! For shame! You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts.

Sarah Winnemucca
Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, p. 243-244.
1883.

Sarah Winnemucca,
circa 1883-1890.
with permission of the
Nevada Historical Society

Sarah Winnemucca, whose Paiute* Indian name was Thocmetony or Shell Flower, died at her sister's home in Henry's Lake, Nevada on October 14, 1891. Winnemucca was the first Native American woman known to secure a copyright and to publish in the English language. Her book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, is an autobiographical account of her people during their first forty years of contact with explorers and settlers.

Born "somewhere near 1844" in the Humbolt River and Pyramid Lakes area of western Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca was the daughter of Chief Winnemucca (Po-i-to) of the Northern Paiute people. Her grandfather, Chief Truckee (possibly Tru-ki-zo in Paiute) guided John C. Frémont during his 1843-45 survey and mapmaking expedition across the Great Basin to California. The friendships which Chief Truckee formed with the Frémont party provided an opportunity for his granddaughter to be educated in the household of William Ormsby of Carson City. Sarah Winnemucca soon became one of only two Paiutes in Nevada able to read, write and speak English. At the behest of her grandfather she became a translator for the U.S. Army and, later, for government Agents at Malheur Reservation, designated a reservation for the northern Paiute by a series of Executive Orders issued by President U. S. Grant. Later she served in this same capacity at the Yakima Reservation.

Paiute Indian Woman with Papoose,
Paradise Valley, Nevada

Paiute Indian Girl [Bessie] with Doll in Cradleboard,
circa 1908,
Winnemucca, Nevada

Paiute Indian Girls [Lou and Eva Abel],
circa 1914
Paradise Valley, Nevada
Buckaroos in Paradise, 1945-1982
These historical photographs were copied from the collection of Fritz Buckingham in Paradise Valley, Nevada, by staff of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, 1978-1982.

As translator Sarah Winnemucca was often in the position of conveying to her tribe the words of military men and Indian Agents. This role put her in a difficult position both with her tribe and her employers: with her tribe for conveying what frequently proved to be lies and false promises, and with the employers for being a thorn in their side by drawing their attention to the plight of her people. A woman caught in the middle, she thus became a controversial figure both within and outside of the Native American community.

Following the 1878 Bannock War, in which members of her tribe participated, her people were forced to march to the Yakima reservation (in Washington Territory) where they endured great deprivation. Sarah Winnemucca began to lecture on the plight of her people across California and Nevada. During the winter of 1879 and 1880, she and her father, Chief Winnemucca, visited Washington and gained permission from Secretary of the Interior, Carl Schurz, for the Paiutes to return to Malheur at their own expense. However, this promise went unfulfilled for years.

Knowing the temper of the people through whom they must pass, still smarting from the barbarities
of the war two years previous, and that the Piutes, utterly destitute of everything, must subsist themselves on their route by pillage, I refused permission for them to depart . . . and soon after, on being more correctly informed of the state of affairs, the Hon. Secretary revoked his permission though no determination as to their permanent location was arrived at. This was a great disappointment
to the Piutes and the greatest caution and care was necessary in dealing with them.

Report of Yakama Agent, James H. Wilbur
Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the Year 1881,
p. 174 and 175.
American Indians of the Pacific Northwest

While lecturing in San Francisco, Winnemucca met and married Lewis H. Hopkins, an Indian Department employee. In 1883, they traveled East where Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins delivered nearly three hundred lectures. In Boston, the sisters Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann, wife of the educator Horace Mann, began to promote her speaking career. The latter helped her to prepare her lecture materials into a book which was published in 1883. Winnemucca's husband supported his wife's efforts by gathering material for the book at the Library of Congress. However, her husband's tuberculosis and gambling addiction left Hopkins with little financial reward for all her efforts.

After returning to Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins built a school for Indian children which was to promote the Indian lifestyle and language. The school operated briefly, until the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 required Indian children to attend English-speaking boarding schools. Despite a bequest from Mary Peabody Mann and efforts to turn the school into a technical training center, Winnemucca's funds were depleted by the time of her husband's death in 1887, and she spent the last four years of her life retired from public activity.

• Search on the term Paiute in American Indians of the Pacific Northwest to read a wide variety of reports written by Indian Agents and published by the Office of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Read, for example, the 1881 Report of Yakama Agent James Wilbur which mentions the Winnemucca's visit to Washington. The 1884 Report of Yakama Agent by R. H. Milroy contains a description of the Ghost Dance (page 173) which originated among the Paiute people of the Great Basin.
• Map Collections (1500-Present) contains cartographic treasures of the Library of Congress. Search on the term Nevada to see maps from the mid-1800s, including an 1855 map of the area from the Humboldt Mountains to the Mud Lakes made by the topographers Capt. E. G. Beckwith and F. W. Egloffstein under the direction of Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War.

  
  Moccasins with Beadwork,
  Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, McDermitt, Nevada
  Thomas Vennum, Jr., photographer,
  August 1978.
  Buckaroos in Paradise, 1945-1982

  The McDermitt reservation is home to one group of Northern Paiute.

• See the Special Presentation Indian Land Cessions in the United States in A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 1774-1875 to read Treaties, Acts of Congress, and Executive Orders concerning Indian lands. Described are tracts of ceded or reserved land, the date of any treaty, law or executive order, the name of the tribe or tribes affected, with other historical data and references. Browse this information by Tribe, by State or Territory, and by Date from 1784 to 1894.
• Northern Paiutes have worked alongside Nevada cattle-ranchers since the early days. Read the Today in History feature on the fall round up and trail drive for the Ninety-Six Ranch. Also search on the term Paiutes in Buckaroos in Paradise, 1945-1982 to see and hear about Paiute people and culture in the twentieth century. See, for example, a woman Holding Pieces of Cradle Board and a horseshoe Pitch by [a] Paiute Indian Contestant Who Won the Tournament. Listen to comments from Tex Northrup, a Northern Paiute buckaroo, regarding Indians at Haying Season, and from Les Stewart, a white cattle rancher, about Indians on the 96 Ranch Today.
• Search on the terms Mary Peabody Mann or Horace Mann in The Nineteenth Century in Print to read more by this famous pair. Read, for example, Moral Culture of Infancy by Mary Mann, and Slavery: Letters and Speeches by Horace Mann.
• Omaha Indian Music features traditional Omaha tribal music from the 1890s and 1980s. The collection includes forty-four wax cylinder recordings collected between 1895 and 1897. The Omaha are a Plains people of northeastern Nebraska.

* Note: The name of Sarah Winnemucca's tribe has had a number of different spellings over the course of time. These include: Pi-Ute, Piute, Pahute, and the currently accepted Paiute.

Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst; and for which God will certainly most strictly reckon with us, when Time shall be no more.

William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693.

William Penn (age 22), 1666,
Oil on canvas Eighteenth-century copy of a seventeenth-century portrait, possibly by Sir Peter Lely, Historical Society of Pennsylvania
The Quakers
I. America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

William Penn, English reformer and founder of Pennsylvania, was born on October 14, 1644, in London, England. Persecuted in England for his Quaker faith, Penn established freedom of worship in Pennsylvania. The colony became a haven for minority religious sects from Germany, Holland, Scandinavia, and Great Britain.

Born the privileged son of a landed gentleman, young William Penn was greatly affected by the preaching of Quaker itinerant minister Thomas Loe. Expelled from Oxford in 1662 for refusing to conform to the Anglican Church, Penn joined the Religous Society of Friends five years later. At that time, Friends, commonly called "Quakers," were subject to official persecution.

Penn was jailed four times for stating his beliefs in public and in print. No Cross, No Crown (1669), written while imprisoned in the Tower of London, condemns Restoration England's excesses and extols the benefits of Puritan asceticism and Quaker social reform.

Upon the death of his father in 1670, William Penn inherited title to the family estates in England and Ireland and began to frequent, as his father had, the court of King Charles II. Both an idealist and a pragmatist, Penn used his political influence to campaign for religious freedom and other principles of liberal government associated with the Whig party of his day.

Mary Dyer Led to Execution on Boston Common,
1 June 1660,
Color engraving, Copyprint Nineteenth Century, Courtesy of The Granger Collection, New York Execution of Quakers
I. America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2
From the Exhibition,
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

Although the Puritans sought freedom of religious practice in the New World, their leaders put to death or expelled from Massachusetts Bay Colony a number of Quakers.

With limited prospects for religious tolerance and political reform in England, Penn directed his energies toward America. He had visited the North American colonies with Quaker leader George Fox in 1677. In 1681, he obtained a large grant of land from King Charles II in payment of a debt owed his deceased father and established the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Drafted in 1682, William Penn's "Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania in America" provided that believers in "One Almighty and eternal God . . . shall in no wayes be molested or prejudiced for their Religious Perswasion or Practice." With plenty of fertile land and a charter guaranteeing absolute freedom of worship, the colony grew rapidly attracting settlers from Great Britain as well as Germany and Holland, where Penn had journeyed as an itinerant preacher in the 1670s.

Arch Street Friends Meeting House (1804),
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,
circa 1890-1910.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-920

When Penn made his first visit to the colony in 1682, the city of Philadelphia was already under construction in accordance with his plan. On August 24 of that same year, he acquired the "three lower counties" that eventually became Delaware.

In addition to his commitment to religious freedom, Penn is remembered for interacting peacefully with the Lenni Lenape Indians and for his 1697 draft of the Plan of Union. This document, thought to be the first plan for a union of the American colonies, is considered a forerunner of the U.S. Constitution. In 1699, Penn returned to Pennsylvania for a two-year stay. After his return to England, his personal affairs deteriorated and led to return of the province to the Crown. William Penn died in 1718.

Learn more about the contributions of Quakers to the development of the United States:

• Visit the exhibition Religion and the Founding of the American Republic for more detailed treatment on the Quakers' role in creating our nation.
• Read "Mrs. George R. Bean." This American Life Histories interview includes an account of a Quaker settlement in Texas.
• Listen to a sound recording of "Madam, I Have Come A-Courting." This old Quaker song is available through the collection California Gold: Folk Music from the Thirties.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Quaker to read more about famous Friends including philanthropist Johns Hopkins, abolitionist Lucretia Coffin Mott, and suffragist Alice Paul.