DURING THE FLOW OF MIGRATION westward to the Pacific coast, some of the Indian tribes escaped conflict with the settlers through the skillful efforts of their leaders. Such were the Paiutes, the Utes, and the Shoshones, whose leaders were Chief Winnemucca and his granddaughter Sarah Winnemucca, Ouray the Arrow, and Washakie.
Old Chief Winnemucca was the outstanding chieftain among the Paiute bands that made their homes around Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Peaceable and friendly, the Paiutes—both men and women—wore colorfully decorated clothing. They lived in wickiups, small rounded huts of tule rushes fastened over frameworks of poles, with the ground for a floor and a fire in the center. For food they ate meat, and cakes made from the flour of piñon nuts and other seeds. When John C. Frémont journeyed through this section of the country in 1845, he and Winnemucca became good friends. The chief agreed to accompany the exploring party as a guide across the mountains to California.
Winnemucca liked the whites’ country along the coast, and when he returned to Pyramid Lake and found that he had become a grandfather, he resolved to have the girl educated in the California schools. And so before he died in 1859. the old chief arranged for his granddaughter, Tocmetone, to attend a mission school at San Jose. This was the beginning of her career as a peacemaker between the Paiutes and the whites.
As soon as she learned to speak and write English, Tocmetone changed her name to Sarah Winnemucca, a name which was to become more famed than that of her grandfather.
During the 1860s there were frequent clashes between the Nevada tribes and the new settlers. Apparently the younger Winnemucca lacked the qualities of leadership that his father had possessed. He was a chief in name only, and was having difficulty restraining his angry warriors from going on the warpath when Sarah Winnemucca returned from California filled with a desire to help her father’s people adjust to their changing environment.
As she was able to speak both English and Paiute, Sarah became an interpreter. By winning the friendship of Nevada’s governor. James W. Nye, she also won many concessions for her people. But inevitably, the pressure from the miners, the settlers, and the overland stage companies forced the authorities to transfer the Paiutes north to the state of Oregon where they were quartered on Malheur reservation.
Sarah Winnemucca meanwhile had married a Lieutenant Bartlett, who had been stationed at Fort McDermit, Nevada. When Bartlett was dismissed from the service and departed for the East, Sarah followed her father’s band of Paiutes to Malheur and became a schoolteacher there.
For several years she worked earnestly to improve the condition of the Indians, but the corruption of the agency officials finally led her to plan a visit to Washington where she hoped to present her case before the highest authorities. She had traveled as far as Camp Lyon. Idaho, when she received news that the Paiutes had suddenly left Malheur reservation to join the Bannocks.
The Bannock Indians, led by Buffalo Horn, had in 1878 departed their reservation and returned to the Camas Prairie of southern Idaho, where they were holding war dances and collecting stolen horses and weapons to drive out the settlers. Seeking allies among the tribes in nearby reservations, Buffalo Horn had found willing listeners among the Paiutes at Malheur. In spite of the younger Winnemucca’s protests, the braves of his band went to join the Bannocks, forcing their unwilling chief to go with them.
Realizing that her people were doomed to destruction as soon as General O. O. Howard could gather his armies. Sarah Winnemucca hurried to Silver City, where she found Captain Reuben F. Bernard in charge of Howard’s first attacking force. She persuaded Captain Bernard to hold off his fight with the Bannocks until she had made an attempt to bring the Paiutes out of Buffalo Horn’s camp. “The people of Winnemucca do not wish to fight the soldiers.” she declared.
Under cover of darkness, she approached the Bannock encampment, and by chance met one of her brothers. Lee Winnemucca. He agreed with Sarah that the Paiutes should withdraw from their alliance with the bellicose Bannocks. He suggested that she exchange her usual neat dress for a squaw’s blanket, and together they crept into the camp, found their father, and led most of the Paiute warriors away before the Bannocks knew what was happening.
“Princess” Sarah Winnemucca remained with General Howard’s staff for the remainder of the Bannock campaign, serving as a scout and interpreter. Afterward she and her father traveled in the East where she lectured and wrote articles and a book about her people. She was married for the second time in 1882, to a Lieutenant Hopkins. When he became ill of tuberculosis, she took him back to Nevada where she bought a tract of land near Lovelock and opened a school for Indian children.
When Hopkins died in 1886, Sarah Winnemucca abandoned her school and her career, and finished out her life penuriously near the village of Monida, Montana.
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Ouray the Arrow was the chief of the Uncompahgre Utes of Colorado, a chief by virtue of inheritance rather than by prowess in battle. Ouray preferred talking to fighting. He liked to talk so well that he learned both English and Spanish, and would sit for hours conversing with any traveler who might stop to listen. After Ouray joined the Methodist Church he discontinued using profanity along with hard liquor and tobacco, but even under these self-imposed handicaps to loquacity he was known far and wide as an accomplished conversationalist.
Ouray’s dislike for battle may have arisen as the result of an encounter with the Sioux about 1860. In this fight he lost his only son. Thereafter he was a man of peace.
In 1862 he settled down on Los Piños agency, earning what was then a comfortable salary of five hundred dollars per year as an official government interpreter. The Utes meanwhile were scattering all over Colorado, and were being blamed for most of the Indian trouble in the Rocky Mountain region.
To bring these wandering bands together, the government officials recognized Ouray as chief of all the Utes, drew up a treaty at Conejos on October 7, 1863, and assigned land and hunting ground boundaries to the tribe. The garrulous chief thus suddenly became a man of power and affluence. The Utes lost most of their deer-hunting grounds, but some of the more enterprising turned to raising goats instead of hunting deer.
The Utes had long been friends of Kit Carson, and when the old scout came to Colorado after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, he and Ouray became inseparable companions. The massacre of Black Kettle’s Cheyennes in 1868 had created a dangerous situation in the gold country, and Carson’s unofficial assignment was to act as a peacemaker and molder of treaties.
Ouray, who looked upon Carson as something of a god, was of considerable assistance to the scout in helping to quiet the rebellious Indians. In turn, when Ouray wanted to suppress an uprising led by a subchief, Kaniatse, Carson volunteered to assist in the action. Afterward they went to Washington together on a treaty junket, a journey which must have been a continual round of tale spinning, as Kit Carson was as magnificent a talker as Ouray.
The chief’s prestige among his people was lowered in 1872, however, when an attempt was made by the government to recover a large portion of the land given to the Utes in the treaty of 1863. Resisting at first, Ouray suddenly changed his mind and signed away the territory. As soon as the Utes discovered that Ouray had received a thousand dollars per year for life and a fine farm and a house in exchange for giving away their hunting grounds, they accused him of betraying his deer-hunting brothers.
An indirect result of this disillusionment was the Ute War of 1879. When hostilities flared up on the White River reservation, Ouray commanded the warriors to come in and surrender their arms. Instead of obeying, the angry Utes attacked a troop of cavalry and killed Major Thomas Thornburgh and a number of his command. They then swarmed upon the buildings of the agency to massacre agent Nathan C. Meeker and his men and to carry off Mrs. Meeker and her daughter.
The fury of the Utes had been aroused by the policies of Meeker, an eccentric experimentalist who had come out to Colorado some years earlier to found a cooperative community at Greeley. He developed a set of theories on how to “civilize” the Indians, and had found an opportunity to test his ideas in 1878 when he was appointed agent at the White River reservation. “I propose to cut every Indian to bare starvation point if he will not work,” announced Meeker enthusiastically. The Utes, who had been feeding and clothing themseles on the products of their hunting trips, did not find it easy to obey the strong-willed Meeker, who ordered them to move into log cabins and plow the fields and raise crops. When Meeker started playing off two chiefs, Jack and Douglas, one against the other, he was setting his own death trap.
It was Douglas who led the massacre. Meeker was shot down in his living room, dragged into the courtyard, and staked to the ground with an iron tent pole.
Ouray, the peacemaker, was powerless to stop the war (though Mrs. Meeker and her daughter were later released through the intercession of Ouray). The Utes were driven back to the stronghold of the Roan Mountains of Utah. It was here in a desolate wasteland that the deer hunters finally were locked upon a reservation named for their chief.
But Ouray did not go there to join his people. He who preferred talking to fighting stayed on his comfortable Colorado farm with his wife, Chipeta, until he died like a white man in 1880.
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Since the days of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Shoshones had always been proud of their friendship with the whites. Sacajawea, the legendary Shoshone woman, had accompanied the explorers westward from Fort Mandan on the Missouri to her people’s country beyond the Rockies.
In the same winter of 1804-05 that Sacajawea joined Lewis and Clark, there was born among the eastern Shoshones of Montana a boy called Shoots Straight. When he was old enough to kill his first buffalo, Shoots Straight made from the skin of that animal’s pate a rattle filled with stones which he kept as a charm. And from that time his people called him Washakie, “the Rattler.”
As a young man, Washakie was a great warrior, leading the braves of his band in many battles against the Blackfeet and the Crows. By 1840 he was well known among the trappers, and the Hudson’s Bay Company employed him seasonally as a guide in the Green River country of Wyoming. He was tall and handsome, a man of dignity.
During the peak of overland emigration following the opening of the Oregon Trail, Washakie ordered his followers to become friends with the whites. There are numerous accounts of amicable meetings between the travelers and the Shoshones, who went out of their way to help the wagon trains safely across fords. Though the migrants’ straying livestock often ruined the Indians’ root and herding grounds, animals captured by any of Washakie’s band were always dutifully returned to the rightful owners.
But by the spring of 1862, the Bannocks who lived in the same area were beginning to raid the smaller emigrant trains. Seeing the plunder that the Bannocks were obtaining with such ease, some of the Shoshones joined in the attacks. Washakie warned them, “You are all fools. You are blind and cannot see. You have no ears, for you do not hear. You are fools, for you do not understand. We can make a bow and arrows, but the white man’s mind is strong and light.”
Taking his loyal followers to Fort Bridger, Washakie waited until General Patrick E. Connor had defeated the marauding Bannocks and Shoshones at Bear River. When the contrite survivors of this affair came in to Washakie’s camp, the chief met them with cold dignity. He asked one of them: “Who are you?” The beaten Indian replied: “I am a Shoshone.” Washakie shook his head and declared: “You have been whipped. Shoshones are never whipped. You are no Shoshone.” The penitents, however, were taken back into the fold, Washakie believing that they had learned their lesson.
Not long afterward the Shoshones were given a reservation near Fort Bridger, and after the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, Washakie agreed to take in the fleeing Arapahoes and Cheyennes. His Green River country was becoming a peaceful refuge.
But the whites’ trails and telegraph lines and finally the hated railroads were swiftly ruining the once lush hunting grounds. Fearful of what his people might do if pressed too far, Washakie went to agent Luther Mann at Fort Bridger and asked for a new reservation, off the routes of the western travelers. His reputation for peace and loyalty won for the Shoshones one of the most beautiful sections in Wyoming, the Wind River valley.
In 1868, the treaty was completed. When informed of its approval, the chief declared: “I am laughing because I am happy, because my heart is good. Now I see my friends are around me, and it is pleasant to meet and shake hands with them. You have heard what I want. The Wind River country is the one for me. I want for my home the valley of the Wind River and lands on its tributaries as far east as the Popoagie, and want the privilege of going over the mountains to hunt where I please.”
Before the move was made, however, the chief chanced to overhear some of his younger braves arguing about his prowess as a warrior. Some of them said he was too old to remain as the chief of the mighty Shoshones. “He is too old to win victories in battle. He is an old woman who will not even scalp his victims. War blood no longer flows in his veins.”
This talk angered Washakie, but he said nothing to the young braves. He quietly disappeared for two moons, reappearing suddenly at the campfire one evening with seven scalps in his possession. He may have talked of peace with the white men, but the Blackfeet and the Crows were still his mortal enemies. “Let him who can do a greater feat than this claim the chieftainship,” he said, lifting the scalps above the heads of the young braves. “Let him who would take my place count as many scalps,” His abilities as a warrior were never questioned again.
After he became the undisputed ruler of the great Wind River reservation, Washakie’s policy was to treat all Indians who warred against the whites as his enemies. The U. S. Army showed its appreciation by changing the name of the fort on the reservation from Fort Frederick H. Brown to Fort Washakie.
Although Wind River and Fort Washakie were far off the main trails, many travelers made the long journey by stagecoach from Rawlins to visit the Shoshones’ beautiful country. The Shoshones would stage dances for visitors and soldiers.
In the late spring of 1876, when General George Crook was preparing for the battle of the Rosebud, Washakie sent eighty-six of his best scouts to assist the bluecoats. Three weeks later he arrived himself, leading two hundred warriors. When he arrived at Crook’s headquarters, he was wearing a giant headdress of eagle feathers sweeping far along the ground behind his pony’s tail. The government, he said, had been generous to him. He would now show that the Shoshones never forgot a kindness given.
As the years went by he became a nationally known figure, a patriarch among the Indians of the West. He never allowed horse thieves or vagabonds to find refuge among his tribe. He became a devout Episcopalian, and tried to set what he thought was a correct moral example for his people.
When Washakie died in 1900, the adjutant-general of the U.S. Army ordered that he be given a military funeral, the first ever given to an Indian. The procession is said to have been the largest in the history of Wyoming, a mile and a half long, the mounted Indian police, the agency employees, the soldiers and officers of the U.S. Army, and all the Shoshones and Arapahoes of the reservation following behind the flag-draped casket.
In the granite of his monument were chiseled these words: “Always Loyal to the Government and to His White Brothers.”