Sarah Winnemucca's Practical Solution of the Indian Problem A Letter to Dr. Lyman Abbot of the "Christian Union" — Context and Discussion

nd songs of labor, that she interpreted in Piute; and as soon as the children could speak and understand some English she began to teach them to read and write it, also to draw and even to cipher, sending us through the post-office specimens of their work and of their sewing. And in February we were surprised with the following letter, which came soon after one from herself, in which she described the unexpected visit, and said that Captain Cook made a speech to the children (which she interpreted to them in Piute), telling them that when he was a boy he had not such advantages of education as they were enjoying. This letter I immediately sent to the editor of the “Boston Transcript,” who published it with his own indorsement as follows:--

Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody has had her heart cheered--not that it has ever faltered in that generous trust of which only noble natures are capable--with the following unexpected testimony to the faithfulness of the Piute “Princess” Winnemucca to the cause of uplifting her people. Other friends of the Indian have turned against her, but Miss Peabody has persevered in supporting this most remarkable woman through every kind of cruel and scandalous assault upon her character by those interested in having the poor, dispossessed remnants of the peaceful Piutes left naked to their enemies. This is surely trustworthy testimony:--

LOVELOCKS, Feb. 25, 1886.

MISS PEABODY,--A few of the principal residents of Lovelocks, having heard so frequently of the Piute school and the aspirations of the Princess, concluded, after very little cogitation, to verify in person the truth of these prodigious reports. As a few of the party were unable to attend during the week, the children were kindly retained on Saturday for our enjoyment.

The site of the school building is about two miles from the town; and so unpretentious is it in appearance that a stroller would look upon it as a quiet rural home instead of the labor field of your worthy beneficiary. When we neared the school shouts of merry laughter rang upon our ears, and little dark and sunburnt faces smiled a dim approval of our visitation. After a brief conversation with the Princess, we seated ourselves comfortably, evidently feeling that

“Come what come may, Time and the hour runs through the roughest day.”

Speaking in her native tongue, the Princess requested the children to name all the visible objects, repeat the days of the week and months of the year, and calculate to thousands, which they did in a most exemplary manner. Then she asked them to give a manifestation of their knowledge upon the blackboard, each in turn printing his name and spelling aloud. It is needless to say, Miss Peabody, that we were spellbound at the disclosure. Nothing but the most assiduous labor could have accomplished this work. But most amazingly did I rudely stare (and most of our party were guilty of the same sin) when these seemingly ragged and untutored beings began singing _gospel hymns_ with precise melody, accurate time, and distinct pronunciation. The blending of their voices in unison was grand, and an exceedingly sweet treat. We look upon it as a marvellous progression; and so gratified were we that we concluded to send this testimonial containing the names of those present, in order that you may know of the good work the Princess is trying to consummate. Considering that only six weeks have been consumed in effecting this much [it is six weeks since the house was completed; the school out of doors had existed longer.--E. P. P.], we feel that any further assistance would be well deserved and profitably expended by Sarah. One of our party, Captain Cook by name, addressed the children upon the usefulness of knowledge and its power in the world. When the Princess had made proper interpretation of this speech, their bright eyes seemed to say in response, “We are, though still in the bud, the flowers of the coming dawn which perfume the golden mosses of the oak.”

I remain very respectfully,

MRS. JENNIE E. HARRINGTON, MRS. H. C. EMMONS, T. H. WORKMAN, GEO. W. LECOMPTON, EMILY E. CUTTING, CAPTAIN FRANK COOK.

Sarah wrote also that she had asked these people to write and tell me of their approbation, because it was I that had given the schoolhouse. But in doing this, and also by subsequently naming her school the “Peabody Institute,” which is painted on the outside, there has grown up a false impression, as if _I_ were the originator and prevailing influence of the school. This is diametrically opposite to the fact; for the very point I would make most prominent is that the whole thing is an Indian idea and an Indian plan; and the reason that she feels me to be her mainstay is that I do not bother her with my suggestions, but wait to see what it is her impulse to do, because I see that she knows, as I cannot, how the Indian mind is to be approached and set at work for that self-development which is the only real education. I owe to her a conviction, which has grown upon me continually for three years, that the only vital education for the Indian as for every child is Froebel’s method of keeping an equipoise of doing and thinking.

Soon after receiving the above letter I had several newspapers sent me from Nevada, Utah, and California, from which I will extract specimen paragraphs. One from a Lovelocks correspondent of the “Silver State” says:--

“The Princess Sarah is making her school for young Piutes a success. The attendance is large, and little Indians may be seen on our streets every morning with their lunches, wending their way to school, a mile and a half off. She keeps excellent order, and conducts the school as systematically as any experienced ‘schoolma’am.’”

There is a very certain proof that neither Sarah nor her brother suggested this article, in the seven words we put in italics in another paragraph of it; for Piutes have never been known to handle “tomahawk or scalping-knife,”--never took a scalp, though they have been scalped themselves by whites, of which Sarah told several pathetic instances in her lectures when she was here.

“Chief Natches has _put aside the tomahawk and scalping-knife_, and taken hold of the plough and grubbing-hoe. He has cleared about forty acres of the one hundred and sixty given him by Governor Stanford. He will sow thirty acres of wheat, and put the rest in barley and vegetables. He has a dozen or more Indians working with him upon a dam belonging to his white neighbors, who pay him by allowing him water for his ranch, this season.”

“Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins has erected a schoolhouse for her people, and has about twenty-five pupils, all little Piutes. They learn rapidly; and though the school has been housed only about six weeks, some of them can read and write already. The school is free to all Piute children in this county, _provided their parents make arrangements to board them_. This is the only drawback to the school, that Princess Sallie has not means to feed the children, and she could not have built the schoolhouse had it not been for the assistance given her by philanthropic people in the East.”

Another quotes from the “Daily Alta California” the first notice it made, as early as March (referred to on page 4):--

“Out in Nevada is proceeding an experiment that deserves the respectful sympathy of the world. Princess Sarah, daughter of Winnemucca, late chief of the Piutes, has opened a school for the Indian children, and the young of her tribe are flocking to it for instruction. In this effort to reclaim her primitive people this Indian woman rises to a nobility that puts her in line with the best of the superior [?] race.”

When I wrote to Sarah for an explanation of the “drawback,” she said that the Piute parents who had been doing job-work for the people of Lovelocks in the winter, must go on their summer hunt for subsistence and winter stores, and take their children with them, and already some of her best scholars had gone; for which she was sorry, as she had hoped that when Senator Stanford should go home from Congress at midsummer, he would stop and see them, and be so pleased with what Natches had done with the land and what she had done in the school, that he would demand, from the fund in the Indian Office appropriated for Indian education, money enough to make her school a boarding-school during the summers. She said the poor parents had assembled in council in her schoolroom, and expressed their grief that they could not pay her themselves for their children’s board; and they compared this school, where the children were so happy in learning, to the Reservation schools, where they were _whipped_ and taught nothing, but on which the Government wasted millions of dollars every year.

Now I (together with other intimate friends of Sarah) was desirous that the Government should not be solicited to help, but that her own work, seen in contrast with the work of the agency, should command its sympathetic co-operation; and I put into the “Boston Transcript” of April 21 the following article:--

THE FIRST SCHOOL TAUGHT BY AN INDIAN.

_To the Editor of the Transcript_: I was much obliged to you for your sympathetic introduction to the letter from those seven people in Lovelocks who wrote me about Sarah Winnemucca’s school, whose success under such hard conditions as she is in (starving on pine nuts, without bread or meat) is such a very important fact with respect to Indian education, which hitherto has been necessarily so imperfect, because conducted by instructors who did not know any Indian language. This is the first instance on record of an Indian school taught by a full-blooded Indian who grew up with both races, speaking both languages, and inspired from her infancy with the idea of civilizing her people by making English also their vernacular, and preparing the scholars in their turn to teach English to their companions and their parents, as children can best do.

Then, after inserting the above-given slips from the Western papers, I added this paragraph:--

If I can raise $100 a month this summer, the calamity of having this _real_ school scattered may be averted. Within a week I have raised nearly a hundred for April; and if promissory notes to be paid in May, June, July, and August, can be sent me _at once_, I can send her a telegram to _keep her scholars, for their board will be paid_. Any sums from one dollar to a hundred may be sent to me at Jamaica Plain, 4 Cheshire Street, in these promissory notes, for which I shall not demand payment unless the school goes on.

ELIZABETH P. PEABODY.

This appeal immediately brought $400 in sums from one dollar to fifty dollars, and a promise of another $100 for August; and I sent word to her to keep her scholars. This was a great proof of the moral impression she had made of herself in the summer of 1883, for already all the organized sympathy for the Indians in the East was pre-engaged;--as, before the Piutes were heard of, all the funds to be raised by the women’s associations were pledged to their own missionary work; while General Armstrong came every year and carried off thousands of dollars for Hampton School and Carlisle, and Bishop Hare did the same for Dakota.

But I see that I am transcending the limits you prescribed for my article, and must hasten to tell of a month’s visit made to Sarah, beginning July 18, by a lady who has been for twenty years engaged practically in public and private education West and East, and who became acquainted with Sarah in the summer of 1883, and then promised her, if she recovered Malheur, that she would go out and renew with her the school that Sarah and Mrs. Charles Parish had kept, under the auspices of the only good agent among seventeen that ever were sent out to the Piutes; and it may be seen, by reading the sixth chapter of “Life among the Piutes,” that nothing is wanted to solve the Indian problem practically (at least among the Piutes) but good faith on the part of the Government agents in giving them the white man’s chances without discounting their earnings in the agents’ interest. For the last year this lady has been the teacher of methods in a normal school in Wisconsin; and she offered to go out at her own expense, if provided with free passes, and report to me concerning the school. In quite a voluminous correspondence with me she has given a history of the _statu quo_, comprehending an account of the state of things both inside and outside of the ranch, having found that the half had not been told her of the difficulties attending such an attempt as Sarah’s, arising from the general hostility of the frontiersmen to Indians, and their disposition to crush their attempts at self-subsistence, intensified by every degree of Indian success. She found Sarah personally also in circumstances of infinitely greater discomfort than she had imagined, and in addition to the chronic rheumatism and neuralgia from which she knew she had been suffering for two years, prostrated every other day with chills and fever, so that the first thing she set herself to doing was to cure her with quinine, which she effected. But this makes more striking her testimony to the character and quality of Sarah’s teaching, which is directed to making the children understand and speak English and then to read and write it. She found the pupils in the Second Reader, and she said every lesson was read in English and in Piute; and in Sarah’s reading to them (from the Bible for instance), there was the same use made of both languages, and the conversation upon the subject matter that accompanied it was extremely animated. Comparing the classes with those with which she was familiar in the United States schools of children of the same age, Sarah’s scholars were decidedly superior. In their writing and drawing, of which she sent me a dozen or more specimens, the superiority was marked, and made more marvellous by the fact that there was no school furniture but benches without backs, which, when they wrote, drew, or ciphered, they used as tables, sitting or kneeling on the floor, and sometimes, making the floor their table, they lay on it to write or cipher. But the children were so interested and zealous to learn that they were perfectly obedient, and when out of the specific school hours,--which were, at the time she arrived there, diminished from the four hours that had been the rule, by the pressure of the industrial work connected with the agriculture and housekeeping (for this school of Sarah’s comprehends all their life),--she found the boys digging a cellar, and the girls assisting Sarah about the cooking and the cleaning, everything being scrupulously neat both in schoolroom and tent. The ages of the children ranged between six and sixteen, and the individuality of each child was described, with those points in which they severally excelled. Within its range, in short, the education was superior, instead of inferior, to the average white education in our primary schools, being upon the method of the “New Education,” in which doing leads thinking, and gives definite meaning to every word used.

I wish I could induce your readers to look into the volume published by Carleton & Co., of New York, named “The Hidden Power,” written by Mr. Tibbles, the white husband of the Ponca Bright Eyes, every word of which, as he told me, is fact, except the proper names.

It is utterly impossible to begin to do justice to any such movement as Sarah Winnemucca’s unless the century-long action of the Indian Ring is understood. This subtle power, which dates with the organization of the Fur-traders’ companies, has come to govern this country as completely as for a time did the Slaveocracy, and still defeats everything proposed to be done; and this explains why in these last few years so little has been accomplished by Indian Rights’ associations, and the enlightened plan of Mr. Dawes and others for division of lands in severalty to Indians.

Here ends the article I prepared for the “Christian Union,” but which, proving too long for a newspaper, you have advised me to print in a pamphlet; and I conclude to make it an appeal to the UNOFFICIAL people of the United States, instead of to the Government, as I first thought of doing.

For, notwithstanding the good intentions of the new administration, I see it is effectually hindered (_how_, it does not itself realize) from doing justice to the Indian, as its first act with respect to the Crow Creek tribe promised would be its policy.

I mentioned that the satisfactory testimony respecting the character of Sarah Winnemucca’s school, with which I closed the above report of it, was extracted from “voluminous letters,” overflowing with details of the innumerable difficulties Sarah had to contend with, of which some idea may be obtained from the following extract of a letter which my correspondent addressed at the same date to an Indianapolis newspaper:--

“Natches wanted land of his own; and for a wonder, he got it. Senator Stanford gave him one hundred and sixty acres. Where cattle range, land must be fenced. Lumber is very high, as it comes from a distance. Miss Peabody sent him $200 to fence it. Water comes next. Nevada is a desert without irrigation. By agreeing to pay them out of his crop, Natches furnished thirteen men (Indians and himself) one month, to work on the dam and ditches, to pay for his water, but gets no paper to show how long. Eastern people help him to a wagon, plough, spade, hoe, and axe. He already has horses, and he gets in sixty-eight acres of nice wheat. As the wheat grows and tempts the cattle, the water-power people tell him he must leave the gate open so they can get to their ditches, some of which they put on his land without permission. The white men on each side of him have gates, and keep them shut, although their land is used only for grazing. I go to town, find they have no right to say anything about it, and the gate is put up, and the old uncle who has camped by it to keep out the cows and save the wheat can do something else. The wheat gets ripe; he can hire a machine to cut it at $1.75 per acre, cash. He has no cash; he must hire Indian women at $5 per acre, and pay in wheat.

“The next time I go to town, I am told that the water company has decided not to let Natches have any more water, because ‘Indians are so lazy, they don’t want them around,’ and, for illustration, point to that old man who sat all day by the hole in Natches fence. I tried to explain; but it is not permitted to explain things here.

“At all the railway stations along the road, one sees Indians sitting on the shady side of the house or walking along the track, sometimes begging. I talked with one of them of the loafing and card-playing that is so common. She admitted and regretted it, and added: ‘Let me disguise you as an Indian, and go to the reservation where all these Indians have been trained. Stay a few weeks as an Indian, and learn to enjoy work as we have to do it, and see if you think our young men can see any good in it, or have any motive for doing it. You know children,--see what you think the same training would do for a white child.’”

It is plain that jealousy and opposition were excited to madness by the very success of Sarah’s unexampled enterprise, which has also aroused the attention of Agent Gibson, whose intrigues form the subjects of other letters.

The week before she arrived, an official from Washington, who was an intimate friend of Gibson, had appeared, and told Sarah that unless Natches would surrender his independent possession of the land, and she the direction of her school, to the authorized agent of Pyramid Lake, no aid would be given to the boarding-school from the reserved fund for Indian Education. Sarah, however, had indignantly refused to accept any aid on such destructive conditions.