CAMBRIDGE:
JOHN WILSON AND SON.
University Press.
1886.

To Dr. Lyman Abbot, Editor of the Christian Union:—

Because you so cordially announced Sarah Winnemucca’s “New Departure,” a year or more ago, as the Christian Union’s solution of the Indian problem, I send you this Report that I am now desirous to make to the public, unofficial and official, of her progress. The distinguishing characteristic of this New Departure is that, instead of being, as usual, a passive reception of civilizing influences proffered by white men who look down upon the Indian as a spiritual, moral, and intellectual inferior, it is a spontaneous movement, made by the Indian himself, from himself, in full consciousness of free agency, for the education that is to civilize him.

Sarah Winnemucca’s idea is an inheritance from that remarkable chief of the Piutes, Captain Truckee, who in 1848, for the first time, discovered that there were white men in the world! In the first chapter of her “Life among the Piutes”[1] Sarah tells of his meeting with General (then Captain) Fremont in the mountains of Nevada, who accepted his proffered guidance on the unaccustomed way, and with whom he and a dozen of his braves went down to California, where the wonders of civilization burst upon him, firing his imagination, before his self-respect had been wounded and his heart discouraged, as is the usual Indian experience, with an unquenchable ardor to share these glories.

He and his braves were able to do Fremont service in the affair of Mariposa and the immediately following conquest of California, for which they were decorated, and so respectfully and kindly treated by Fremont that the old chief’s heart was completely won; and he clung to his “white brothers,” as he pathetically called them, to the end of his life, although immediately on his return to Nevada he was told of those terrible emigrations that had rushed across it “like a roaring lion,” as Sarah phrases it, striking terror into the souls of the women and even of the brave men, who could not understand the wanton and unprovoked cruelty with which these white savages shot all Indians down as soon as they were seen, as if they were wild beasts. But he persisted in calling them exceptions to the end of his life.

The artless autobiography of the first chapters of Sarah’s book gives the key to her career as reconciling mediator for the mutual understanding of the two races. She was educated for it by her grandfather. That she has actually become this, is shown by an article from the “Daily Alta California,” of July 24, which I have just received; and I beg that you will insert every word of it here:—

“We have referred already to the school for Indian children established in Nevada by the Piute woman, Princess Sarah Winnemucca. Her efforts have seemed to us to deserve encouragement. Travellers through Nevada who have seen the squalid crowds of Indian children at the stations taking eagerly scraps of food offered them at the car windows, may think that the regeneration of those people is impossible. To change this opinion it is only necessary to consider the case of Sarah Winnemucca, who, when her childhood was long past, first had opportunities for education, and improved them so well that her attainments command the respect of all white people who know her. What education has done for her it may do for a majority of the children of that tribe in which she was born a Princess, a Chief’s daughter. She is very active for her people, and loses no opportunity to urge them forward in the path to civilization. Recently she sent a message to those Indians living in Inyo County, in this State, urging them to send their children to school. A copy of this letter was sent to the School Trustees of Inyo, and we invite the attention of our readers to it. She says:—

“‘Brothers and Sisters: Hearing that you are about to start a school to educate your children, I want to say a word about it. You all know me; many of you are my aunts or cousins. We are of one race,—your blood is my blood,—so I speak to you for your good. I can speak five tongues,—three Indian tongues, English, and Spanish. I can read and write, and am a school teacher. Now, I do not say this to boast, but simply to show you what can be done. When I was a little girl there were no Indian schools; I learned under great difficulty. Your children can learn much more than I know, and much easier; and it is your duty to see that they go to school. There is no excuse for ignorance. Schools are being built here and there, and you can have as many as you need; all they ask you to do is to send your children. You are not asked to give money or horses,—only to send your children to school. The teacher will do the rest. He or she will fit your little ones for the battle of life, so that they can attend to their own affairs instead of having to call in a white man. A few years ago you owned this great country; to-day the white man owns it all, and you own nothing. Do you know what did it? Education. You see the miles and miles of railroad, the locomotive, the Mint in Carson, where they make money. Education has done it all. Now, what it has done for one man it will do for another. You have brains same as the Whites, your children have brains, and it will be your fault if they grow up as you have. I entreat you to take hold of this school, and give your support by sending your children, old and young, to it; and when they grow up to manhood and womanhood they will bless you.’

“It is hard to find in all the literature of pedagogics a stronger appeal to a primitive or any other people to avail themselves of the benefits of education. Exceptionally good in its language and logical in its presentation of reasons, it constitutes not only advice to her own tribe, but it is the finest of all the genuine proofs of the capacity of the Indian intellect. We cannot help feeling that such a woman deserves help, and that her work should command support far beyond the lines of her own State. If each of the tribes could furnish only one such woman, of equal culture, sincerity, and energy, their joint influence upon the future of our Indians would be greater than all the armies that can be put in the field. The Federal Government should consider her and her work. She has defended her people against the rascally treatment of its agents, but with a rare discretion has never, therefore, inflamed them against the whites. She has constantly pointed to civilization as desirable above all things, and has taught them that return to their old ways is forever impossible.

“We believe that the Indian Department should found an Indian school in Nevada and put Sarah at the head of it. The cost would be small compared with the value of the experiment, and surely it would command the sympathy of all right-minded people. She has ample culture, and she knows the Indian character thoroughly, while it is easy to believe that her example will be of great value in encouraging her pupils. When Indians have a white teacher there must naturally seem a great gulf between them. The pupils must often despair of ever approximating the learning which they believe came as naturally to the white man as the color of his skin. But when an Indian teacher like Sarah can say to them, ‘I learned this, I am an Indian, and you are as good as I am; what I learned is as possible and as easy to you,’ there must be in it a superior encouragement. We do not know whether there is on this coast any organization that is charged with the interests of these humble people. We believe Mrs. John Bidwell has done something in her vicinity toward advancing them, and she may be known to the East for her good work. If there be an organization it should bring this matter to the attention of the Government, to the end that this Indian woman may have facilities equal to her energy and to her noble spirit. It won’t hurt the whites any to give their gentle and philanthropic sentiments free play in a matter that is full of interest and of genuine Christianity.”

Without stopping to tell of the circumstances of her life, inward and outward, that have brought her to the point of her present undertaking,—though to do so would give new meaning and interest to it,—I hasten to say that a year and a half ago, when it seemed as if the conditions she craved were to be despaired of, Senator Leland Stanford, who came into relation with the Piutes in 1863 and personally knew their exceptional character, spontaneously deeded to Sarah’s brother, Chief Natches, one hundred and sixty acres of land near Lovelocks; and a few of the friends of Sarah at the East, to whom she had fully communicated her idea and what she wished to do, advanced from their own private resources barely sufficient capital to enable Natches to get his land surveyed and in part fenced and planted, and Sarah to open her school for his children, and those of some other Piutes wandering in the neighborhood seeking chance jobs of work. She began instructing them in the English language, which she had grown up speaking in her equal intercourse with both races.

Our idea in giving this aid, without which the land would have been no boon, was to give Sarah the chance to begin her experiment independent of the agency at Pyramid Lake, which, like the large majority of Indian agencies, prevents civilization by insulting and repressing that creative self-respect and conscious freedom to act, from which alone any vital human improvement can spring. We wanted that there should be no pretext of favors received, for the agent, who naturally enough is her personal enemy, to interfere or meddle while she, with a few of her people, began a self-supporting, self-directed life on the ground of their inherited domestic moralities, which, in the case of the Piutes at least, are very pure, as she had demonstrated to us in her lectures and by her own remarkable personality, thus making a healthy wild stock of natural religion on which to graft a Christian civilization worthy of the name, which might rebuke and correct that which certainly disgraces it now on our frontiers. But all that we did for her still left her with broken health and numberless hardships to contend with, which would have crushed any less heroic spirit.

She began her school in a brush arbor, teaching gospel hymns and 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:—

A PRINCESS’S SCHOOL.

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,

Louisa Marzen.

Signed by each—

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.”

Another says:—

“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.