Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, Edited by Mrs. Horace Mann.
First Major Book On Native American Life By A Woman
Emerging Voices Title
Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca. Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrong and Claims, Edited by Mrs. Horace Mann. Boston: Dupples, Upham, & Co.; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883.
12mo; very light foxing on inner margins of text; gold cloth boards (there was also an issue in green cloth) with black blind-stamped design on front board and spine; boards a bit rubbed and faded, front board dented at edge; a very good copy of a very early book written by a Native American woman; relatively uncommon, and scarce signed, especially signed with Native American name.
First Edition of the author’s only book, inscribed by author as Sarah Winnemucca on front free endpaper. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (ca. 1844-1891), writer, lecturer, and educator, was the daughter of Chief Winnemucca, an antelope shaman and leader, and granddaughter of Chief Truckee, the Paiute chief who guided John C. Fremont’s expedition across the Great Basin to California. Born in western Nevada with the name Thocmetony or Tos-Me-To-Ne (Shell Flower), she was renamed Sarah and sent to a convent school in California. Already fluent in three Indian languages, Sarah learned English and Spanish while in school and became a prized interpreter and army liason in Nevada and Oregon. In 1878 she served as General Oliver O. Howard’s guide and interpreter during the Bannock War and actually fought in the war, taking her fallen uncle’s place in battle.
Following the Bannock War, the Paiutes were displaced from their native land and sent to the Yakima Reservation in Washington. This event pushed Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins to begin lecturing for Indian rights and campaigning for reform on reservations. In 1883 she moved to the East Coast, and in Boston she met Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Peabody’s sister, Mary Mann. Mary Mann, the wife of Horace Mann, would eventually edit Winnemucca’s autobiographical work, Life Among The Piutes.
Life Among The Piutes is the only book ever published by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. It is a significant work because it is one of the earliest works published by a Native American woman writer and is the first 19th-century book about Native Americans written by a Native American woman. Hopkins documents the first forty years of Paiute contact with white explorers and emigrants, providing both a history of her tribe and an account of her life. She recounts her experiences during the Bannock War and includes a plea to Congress to restore land and rights to the Paiutes. The book concluded with an appendix of correspondence and articles concerning Hopkins and her reform work.
Life Among The Piutes was an extension of Hopkins’ quest for a redress of the wrongs against her tribe. Although she was unsuccessful in her fight and many people in white and Paiute society criticized her unconventional approach, she was an important lobbyist for reform. As the first Native American woman to secure a copyright for a book and the first to publish a book in English, she proved herself as a pioneering Native American woman.
Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature, by Buck, pp. 642, 850-851.
Emerging Voices, Grolier Club, pp. 75-76.
Native American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, pp. 115-116.
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