SOURCE: "Story, Take Me Home; Instances of Resonance in Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins' Life Among the Piutes," in Entering the 90s: The North American Experience, edited by Thomas E. Schirer, Lake Superior State University Press, 1991, pp. 184-94.

Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims was published in Boston in 1883, "edited by Mrs. Horace Mann," as its title page announced, and "printed for the author," Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (p. 1). Editor and author had met while Sarah was working hard in the east as a controversial and increasingly popular lecturer who staged herself as Princess Sarah in fringed buckskins and beads with a golden crown on her head and at her waist a velvet wampum bag with a cupid worked on it. She had to dress up in order to draw the crowds and dollars she needed to support her cause, herself and the drunken consumptive who was the last of her husbands, Lt. Lewis H. Hopkins of Virginia. It is not a promising pair this title page offers—a Bostonian editor sure of her ways and an author who has distanced herself from her people by her marriage, by her stagey practice and by aristocratic pretensions far beyond any that Paiute society would have recognized. However, this author had a powerful story to tell and the editor who took her up, the good sense to get out of its way. Mary Mann corrected her manuscript but added nothing of her own, aside from a one page preface and a handful of short footnotes. "I wish you could see her manuscript," she wrote to a friend. "I don't think the English language ever got such a treatment before. I have to recur to her sometimes to know what a word is, as spelling is an unknown quantity to her …, but the story is heart-breaking and told with a simplicity & eloquence that cannot be described …" (Canfield, 1983, p. 203). Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins might not have been able to spell, but she came to Mary Mann fluent in at least four languages and with something worth saying in all of them. Ten years after her book was published she was dead, buried in a still-unmarked grave in Idaho, but then what name belongs there? Sarah, alone, seems so demeaning. Hopkins was a hindrance more than a helpmate to an already burdened woman. And Winnemucca, "The Giver," was her father's name, not her family's. In what follows, I will call her Sarah. In Hebrew it means "Princess," and for her public self, at least, that is what she wanted to be.

I. Resonance: Facts Felt Along the Bone

Forty years take the Northern Paiute, or the Numa as they called themselves, from first contact to near annihilation, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins lives through them all. Because of her work as an interpreter—occasionally for agents, who seldom could stomach her honesty for long, more often for the U.S. Army who came to know and value that honesty and the courage that went with it—Sarah was exactly where she needed to be to observe and to record her people's distress, and she writes of it with the accuracy and passion of a skilled investigative reporter. If it's facts you want, she gives them to you. She can list by name, rank, and office every soldier on General Howard's staff during the Bannock war though she spent scant time among them. She identifies each agent who has cheated her people and specifies exactly how he went about his greedy business. She names each Paiute who has turned against his own kind: Numana or Captain Dave who became the complaisant interpreter a succession of agents at Pyramid Lake required; her cousin Jarry, made desperate by his blindness and willing as interpreter to say and do whatever Major Reinhart, agent at Malheur, required of him; the chief Oytes who betrayed into Bannock captivity any Paiute who would not follow him into the Bannock war. She can come right to the point when she wants to without blunting it with too much detail—"The only way the cattlemen and farmers get to make money is to start an Indian war, so that the troops may come and buy their beef, cattle, horses, and grain. The settlers get fat by it" (Hopkins, 1883, p. 78). "There were no Custers among the officers in Nevada" (Hopkins, 1883, p. 178). And she can fix a complex swirling event such as the dizzy confusion of the Bannock war with the stark clarity of a single image like a photographer on the field of battle at My Lai or Bensonhurst. The Paiute were caught in an absurd trap during the Bannock war: pursued by the army because they weren't on their reservation, held captive by the Bannock and their allies because they wanted to be. Kafka could have dreamed it in its gruesome stupidity. "Poor Egan, who was not for war, was most shamefully murdered by the Umatilla Indians." Though a Paiute leader, Egan was born among the Cayuse, near neighbors of the Umatilla. "He was cut in pieces by them, and his head taken to the officers, and Dr. Fitzgerald boiled it to get the skull to keep" (Hopkins, 1883, p. 182). Poor Egan, indeed. What better emblem for the Bannock war than that savaged and sanitized skull, and Sarah's pen remembers to record it.

Yet I think we are leaving something out if we read her book only for her facts, her analyses and comments, her sharp images. There is a kind of resonance in this book that takes it beyond fact, indictment, or photograph. Let me illustrate what I mean. Sarah is describing the first time that her grandfather, Captain Truckee, talks with a party of emigrants, to offer them his friendship and his aid and to receive friendship in return.

During their stay my grandfather and some of his people called upon them, and they all shook hands, and when our white brothers were going away they gave my grandfather a white tin plate. Oh, what a time they had over that beautiful gift,—it was so bright! They say that after they left, my grandfather called for his people to come together, and he then showed them the beautiful gift which he had received from his white brothers. Everybody was so pleased; nothing like it was ever seen in our country before. My grandfather thought so-much of it that he bored holes in it and fastened it on his head, and wore it as his hat. (Hopkins, 1883, p. 8)

Old Truckee with a plate on his head may seem to pale into insignificance beside Egan's skull, for the skull makes its grizzly sense with no opportunity for mistaking it while Truckee's hat seems to make no sense at all. It is foolishness, and we laugh at it as Truckee will learn to do. But what understanding preceded this misunderstanding and let him to commit it in the first place? Surely, Truckee must have recognized something in the plate that made the bright gift meaningful, even powerful, before it became simply table ware.

On the northern edge of the Paiute country, actually in a kind of overlapping boundary zone where Klamath, Modoc and Paiute all meet, there is a distinctive run to petroglyph sites consisting of panels covered almost entirely with concentric circles. Today, the handsomest of them is located in southeastern Oregon just above the California-Nevada borders in a dry streambed known locally as Paradise Creek. At one point the walls of the creek bed open and soften a bit, and a small ledge of rock breaks through its eastern bank. About twenty feet long and twelve or fifteen high, this formation cups at its center a smooth rockface covered with a remarkable variety of concentric circles. Some are quite large relative to the rest, others are small. Some are made up of only one circle inside another, some of two or three, and some contain not another circle but a fully pecked disk. Some have been touched so recently that traces of white or red paint linger on their edges, and some have nearly vanished as natural repatination has drawn them back into the stone. Paradise Creek is a remarkable place that feels very like paradise if one is lucky enough to come upon it burning in the afternoon sun, but what does it have to do with reading Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins?

Let me be very careful about what I claim here. I cannot argue that old Truckee's people worked these circles. I cannot even date them. And most certainly I cannot say what it is that they mean though no one standing in front of them can deny their meaning and power. But I do know that these panels with nothing but concentric circles on them are unique among the petroglyphs of the region; that they seem to mark a special place, a boundary zone where Klamath, Modoc and Paiute met; and that some of them look very like a tin plate! Consider what emerges from all this tentativeness. Precisely in that narrow stretch of frontier where northern Paiute lands butt upon their strongest and strangest neighbors someone has worked, and continued working close to our century as the daubs of paint reveal, a series of petroglyph sites made up on only concentric circles. Precisely at that moment when Truckee meets the strangers he has for two or more years been trying to meet, he is given by them a bright object with concentric circles worked upon it. Even if the Paradise Creek petroglyphs were as puzzling to Truckee as they are to us, they demonstrate that a tin plate need be neither unfamiliar nor meaningless to Truckee in his own terms. Considered as a design object and in the context in which he receives it, the plate is another concentric circle offered or announced between strangers, and this short scene that seems so foolish now may have been resonant to the Paiute with Truckee's attempt to find his own meaning in the newness he has been offered.

In fact, it is just this possibility of resonance that reading Sarah as if she were only a reporter of simple fact blinds us to. Any American author could have drawn up an accounting of the crimes committed upon her people and of their claims for justice. But wrongs and claims are her subtitle, the American side of the ledger, while life among the Paiute is a different matter of resonances actively sought for and recognized by a people who were more than the passive victims of a terrible newness and strangeness. Persons important to Sarah are defined in her book not just by the wrongs they suffer, which would subordinate them to the culture that invades them, but also by the way they understand these wrongs within their own experience even as they learn to endure them. Life Among the Piutes is not a catalogue of outrages but a story of Paiute intelligences trying to take the world again and make it their own. Let me describe something of what it feels like to learn to read her book for these resonances.

II. Character: A Grandfather's Story

As a girl, before she became Sarah Winnemucca the chief's daughter or married Lieutenant Hopkins, Sarah was Thocmetony, "Shell-flower." We do not know her grandfather's Paiute name. John Frémont, the young soldier-explorer he chose to fight beside in the Bear Flag Rebellion, called him Captain Truckee: Captain, the title given to any Paiute that Americans wished to recognize or to install as a leader they could deal with; and Truckee, a Paiute word meaning copesetic, all right, hot damn. The coinage is nearly Dickensian and singularly appropriate to what we will learn of this generous old man: Thocmetony and Captain Truckee, a girl and her grandfather. The most important resonances in the book, its principle adaptive strategies, cluster in direct opposition around these two figures. They are the points of its compass rose. They define the crux of its moral dilemma.

With Captain Truckee these resonances are most direct. He knows what settlers are before he ever sees them, and he is just as certain what his response to them must be. In her first chapter Sarah describes her grandfather calling his people together to tell them a story they already know. He summons his people, and tells them this tradition:

"In the beginning of the world there were only four, two girls and two boys. Our forefather and mother were only two, and we are their children. You all know that a great while ago there was a happy family in this world. One girl and one boy were dark and the others were white. For a time they got along together without quarrelling, but soon they disagreed, and there was trouble … our father took the dark boy and girl, and the white boy and girl, and asked them, 'Why are you so cruel to each other?' They hung their heads down and would not speak … He said, 'Depart from each other, you cruel children;—go across the mighty ocean and do not seek each other's lives.'

" … And by-and-by the dark children grew into a large nation; and we believe it is the one we belong to, and that the nation that sprung from the white children will some time send some one to meet us and heal all the old trouble. Now, the white people we saw a few days ago must certainly be our white brothers, and I want to welcome them. I want to love them as I love all of you." (Hopkins, 1883, pp. 6-7)

The tradition of the quarrelling children that Truckee invokes here was extremely popular among the Paiute. At least one version, usually more, can be found in most any collection of Paiute narrative materials. These alternate versions reveal two suggestive facts about Truckee's re-telling of the tradition. First, he is extremely careful as to how much of the story he allows himself to remember. Second, again and again his people, especially his granddaughter, remind him of what he leaves out of the story by insisting upon these forgotten or ignored resonances within their own lives. In effect, Truckee hears only part of this most basic Paiute creation myth echoing in his experience of contact with whites while the rest of the Numa hear another part that is not nearly so comforting in what it implies.

The myth is too long and too varied to permit a detailed retelling of it, but even a quick account will show what Captain Truckee leaves out. I have assembled what follows from nine different tellings of the creation story collected and published from as early as 1873 to as late as 1980 (Fowler and Fowler, 1971; Kelly, 1938; Ramsey, 1977; Walker, 1980; Liljeblad, 1986). The story falls into three sections:

Attack of the Cannibals

A number of Indians are playing the hand game. They are in one camp and a single woman is in another, or they are indoors and the woman outside; either way she is emphatically not of them. She hears the cannibal coming—Nümüzoho, people pounder, is its name—and she tries to warn the others; but they are so obsessed with their gambling that they ignore her. Nümüzoho kills all of them just by looking at them, leaving only the woman and a baby who has been sleeping on the ground behind the gamblers or hidden in a basket with the woman. The cannibal leaves; she takes the baby and flees for both their lives.

What we seem to have in this first section of the myth is a congerie of a social beings, most obviously with the cannibals but also in the woman who is always outside and alone, and perhaps in the baby forgotten in the heat of the game. Only the gamblers have a camp,

a house, a society that accepts them, and for the moment they are oblivious to anyone or anything not in their game, and vulnerable as a consequence. With a fine Dantean justice the cannibal taunts their blindness and kills them with the flash of his own hungry eye: "'Shut your eyes dry' they all sat still without closing their eyes. Cannibal just looked and went away. He killed them just by looking at them …" (Kelly, 1938, p. 366). When a society closes its eyes to all but its own concerns, when the game becomes a form of blindness, then comes the time of the cannibals and, if we are lucky, of that saving remnant who may learn to see anew. This part of the story seems packed with meanings that Truckee could have used, but he will have none of them. It is the same with the second section.

Adventures on the Road

There are three adventures here. First, the woman is overtaken by the same or another cannibal and saves herself only by distracting him with a baby he then devours. Some tellers soften this unpleasantness by having Nümühozo find the baby on his own and bait a trap for the woman with its crying; in other versions she tells Nümühozo where this better food than she is has been buried. Second, after her escape the woman is given food and shelter by an older woman often identified as the grandmother of the cannibals. She conceals the fugitive from her own children and sends her on her way with instructions not to meddle with anything she finds on the road. Sometimes, the old woman is Beaver who sends the young woman to her sister Gopher for these instructions, and it is their brother Rat who must rescue her again when she ignores them. Always, their charity stands in sharp contract to the glassy eyes of the gamesters. Society is beginning to happen again; a people and a world are being made anew.

This summary may seem excessively moralizing, but isn't this a most moral progress, permitting the woman to learn just what she must know to found a new people in a difficult land? Watch out for cannibals; they usually are somewhere on the edges of things. Do unto others, etc…., or you risk becoming Nümüzoho yourself. It is not nice to meddle with Mother Nature; unless you have good reason, leave her heads and her baskets where she put them by the road. Now the woman is ready for a family of her own. Once again, it is quite remarkable how little of the tradition he invokes Truckee actually is willing or able to use. Do unto others … Surely, that's the lesson Truckee wanted to teach, but why doesn't he hear it here in this part of the story? Creation as education and growth in a woman's journey is something he chooses to ignore.

The Contentious Children

Finally, we get to the part of the story Truckee rests his understanding upon. Unfortunately, this section of the myth is the most difficult to summarize both because this is more variation here in simple details of plot than ever there was before and because the whole notion of journey is translated within this last section into a quite different dimension. All versions agree that after her adventures on the road the woman escapes the cannibals and finds her man and they marry. By means of womb or miraculous water bottle, in the fullness of time or magically day by day, this couple has four children, who fight incessantly among themselves until, in anger and despair, the father drives the children out, sending them far apart and setting out himself, sometimes with his wife, sometimes telling her she will not see him again until she dies. The children are left behind in Stillwater and in Lovelock, two towns in Nevada, or as the Pit River tribe and Paiutes, or just as warring Indians. Sometimes, one pair of them is white as Truckee claims. The mother is left sorrowing for the family she has lost, alone as she was at the beginning, but in the course of the story she has become Numü pa-a, First Mother of the Paiutes, and her husband has revealed himself as Nu-min-a, their Spirit Father who will greet them in the "Land of the Sunny South" (Fowler, 1971, p. 242) when they die.

This would seem a most cyclical notion of history, spinning order out of contention and back again, except that the final leg of this journey breaks time's round and takes the angry father and the grieving mother quite literally off any conventional map. In the most carefully localized version of the story that I have seen (Walker, pp. 165-170), the parents start out from their courting ground on Job's Peak in central Nevada; travel less than twenty miles southeast to Chalk Mountain leaving a pass and a series of springs behind them; turn due east on what is now US 50 through West Gate, Middle Gate and East Gate; and in not quite ten miles come to a large body of water where none is on the map! They walk over it as if it were land, rest for a while on a white mountain without a name but apparently somewhere in the Toiyabe or Simpson Park Range, and then the clouds open upon a beautiful green valley that could be their endless home. Like Oedipus and Colonus their journey begins in a named precinct. Thebes or the Nevadan equivalent, but ends with Nu-min-a and his wife striding off of our maps and out of our simple being. Other versions report this startling turn even more movingly than the one I have just described. For example, in Kelly (1938), who collects five different versions of the story, the father always abandons the mother to this life while he goes alone sometimes "to the other sides of the clouds" (p. 368) or to the ocean and walks over it "as if it were ice" (p. 370) or south on the people's trail, the Milky Way (p. 372). Always we start before time and end beyond it; and in between we make a most moral transit along the Paiute way.

It is amazing to see how much of this story Truckee chooses not to apply to his own circumstances. Even in the part that he tells much is lost. By making the tradition of the contentious children black and white, pun intended, Truckee offers his people a known world and clear moral imperatives with one hand while with the other he cuts them and the story loose from all that careful anchoring of their imaginations in the details of a known landscape in the Nu-mü tu-wip, the people's home. Most painfully, he drives out all of the story's mystery, substituting for it the simple facts of a geography lesson learned from Captain John Frémont.

Just look at the ocean that the Paiute mother and father walk across, the ocean that isn't there on any of our maps. For Tuckee it is simply ocean and conveniently not there so he can put it somewhere else by making it into the ocean the white pair of children must cross in their attempt to get back to their darker brothers in the Numü tu-wip. He gives the story a distinctly European twist so that he can make use of it to make sense of Europeans, and that is a desperate stratagem that rests more on his own disposition than Paiute tradition. He is after all, Captain Truckee, Captain All's Right.

What alternatives are there to his convenient misplacing of ocean? This ocean could remain just what the story makes it when it is told in place, the ghost of an ocean. After all, much of the central Nevada landscape consists of the basins and beachlines of a great inland sea that leaves its traces but is no longer there. Or ocean in the story might even be a memory of a time when water did lap these dusty shores. It seems unlikely that an oral tradition could remember so far back into the geological past, but Jarold Ramsay has pointed out that one of the most popular Paiute stories may display just such a long remembering. "The Theft of Pine Nuts" tells of Coyote stealing pine nuts for the Paiute from a people who live in the North behind an insurmountable wall of ice. Ramsey comments "The Detail of the Ice Wall is strange—if, as seems likely, Indians were in southwest Oregon at the end of the past period of heavy glaciations, could a tribal memory of the glaciers account for this detail?" (1977, p. 284).

Another suggestive fact of the Nevada landscape also may bring this doubtful ocean back where the myth says it belongs. After they have crossed the ocean that isn't there and climbed the nameless white mountain, Nu-min-a keeps on climbing into the clouds. Hickison summit lies about where this white mountain and green valley ought to be. If it is where the Paiute father steps off this world leaving his wife behind, someone has marked this holy place with an extensive series of petroglyphs. The most striking of them seems a clear reminder of all that the father abandons. There are vulva forms carved everywhere in Paiute country, all over Nevada and Northeastern California, but none are quite so monumental as the one found at Hickison Summitt. Is it a memorial to Nuirai pa? If so, it is one more indication that the landscape, the face of Numü twip, keeps prompting Truckee with more of his story than he is willing to tell.

But one does not need to take a trip to Nevada or even to the library to begin to hear those parts of the story that Truckee winces from. Sarah's book is full of such reminders, and they fall pointedly into place within the Paiute creation myth. Truckee looks only at the end of the story so that he may claim the emigrants as his lost white brothers. His people insist upon the beginning of the story and see them as Nümüzoho, the cannibal who is always there in their dreams. This identification receives fearful support from the plight of the Donner party. "Our mothers told us that the whites were killing everybody and eating them. So we were all afraid of them" (Hopkins, 1983, p. 11). "'Surely they don't eat people?' 'Yes they do eat people, because they ate each other up in the mountains last winter' (Hopkins, 1883, p. 15)." Sarah will go on to focus the full force of the Numa's rejection of Truckee's resonance into the girl she was, Thocmetony, his granddaughter and then to derive herself from their argument. Thocmetony and Truckee add up. Their sum is Princess Sarah.

However, adding Thocmetony to Truckee and deriving Princess Sarah from them … Well, had we but world enough and time. We don't Hence, this short report must tease with an instance of a resonance too often ignored, in hopes that future readers of Life Among the Piutes will try to hear more of it when they pick it up.

References

Canfield, G.W. (1983). Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press.

Fowler, D.D. & Fowler, C.S. (Eds.). (1971). Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell's Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868-1880. (Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropol ogy Number 14). Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Hopkins, S.W. (1883). Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. In (1969) M.R. Harrington, R. & A. Johnson (Eds.), Reproduction of Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Bishop Ca. Chalfant Press.

Kelly, I.T. (1938). Northern Paiute Tales. The Journal of American Folklore, 51, 363-438.

Ramsey, Jarold. (1977). Coyote Was Going There; Indian Literature of the Oregon Country, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Liljeblad, S. (1986). Oral tradition: Content and style of verbal arts. In W.C. Sturtevant (General Ed.) & W.L. D'Azevedo (Volume Ed.), Handbook of North American Indians: Vol. 11. Great Basin (pp. 641-659). Washington: Smithsonian Institution.

Walker, D.E., Jr. (1980). Myths of Idaho Indians. Moscow: The University Press of Idaho.