6PARA .PAR@ ` ╓TEXT ` ╚Winnemucca, Sarah1844?╨1891Native American leaderBorn about 1844 at Humboldt Sink in what is now Nevada, Thoc-me-tony was a daughter of Winnemucca II, chief of the Paiute tribe. She lived during part of her childhood in the San Joaquin valley of California, where she learned both Spanish and English. After her return to Nevada she lived for a time with the white family of a stage company agent near Genoa; at that time she adopted the name Sarah. In 1860 she briefly attended a convent school in San Jose, California, until objections from the parents of white students forced her to leave. During the Paiute War of 1860 and the subsequent increasingly frequent clashes between Native Americans and whites, she suffered the loss of several family members, including a baby brother. She attempted the role of peacemaker on a few occasions and during 1868╨1871 served as an interpreter at Camp McDermitt in northeastern Nevada. In 1872 she accompanied her tribe to a new reservation, the Malheur, in southeastern Oregon. In 1875╨1876 she was an interpreter for the reservation agent, but the appointment of a new and unsympathetic agent in the latter year ended that service as well as a period of relative quiet on the reservation. On the outbreak of the Bannock War in 1878 she offered her services to the army. After several Paiute scouts had refused to enter Bannock territory to reconnoiter for the army, and on learning that her father and several other tribesmen were being held by hostile Bannocks, she volunteered for the dangerous task. Covering more than a hundred miles of trail through Idaho and Oregon, she located the Bannock camp, spirited her father and many of his companions away, and returned with valuable intelligence for General O. O. Howard. She was scout, aide, and interpreter to Howard during the resulting campaign against the Bannocks. In 1879 she lectured in San Francisco on the plight of her tribe╤many of whose members had been exiled along with belligerent Bannocks to a reservation in Washington Territory╤and on the wrongs perpetrated by dishonest civilian Indian agents. Despite slanderous responses by agents and their friends, she attracted considerable attention and was invited to Washington, D.C., where in January 1880 she spoke with President Rutherford B. Hayes and Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz. She was promised the return of her people to the Malheur reservation and a severalty allotment of land there, but for various reasons the order to that effect issued by Schurz was not carried out. After a year of teaching in a school for Native American children at Vancouver Barracks, Washington Territory, and her marriage late in 1881 to L. H. Hopkins, an army officer, Sarah Winnemucca, often known among whites as ╥the Princess,╙ made an eastern lecture tour to arouse public opinion. Aided by General Howard, Elizabeth Peabody, and others, the tour was a success, and sales of her Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims raised money for her expenses. She secured thousands of signatures on a petition calling for the promised allotment of reservation lands to individual Paiutes; Congress passed a bill to that end in 1884, but a new secretary of the interior, Henry M. Teller, refused to carry it out. From 1883 to 1886 she taught at a Paiute school near Lovelock, Nevada. In the latter year, following her husband╒s death and in ill health herself, she moved to a sister╒s home in Monida, Montana, where she died on October 16, 1891. &styl ` ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 5 !I
