Women of the Frontier

by Brandon Marie Miller

  Cynthia Ann’s repeated attempts to escape and her refusal to change led to new living arrangements. She began making the rounds of Parker relatives, moving farther and farther east—away from the plains, away from her sons, and away from any hope of escaping back to her Comanche life.

  People came to see her, the famous rescued captive. Cynthia Ann spoke Spanish or Comanche, mixing the two languages as she talked. She tried to bribe one man who spoke the Indian language, promising that she would give him horses, guns, even wives—whatever he wanted—if he would take her back to the Comanche. “My heart is crying all the time for my two sons,” she told the man, begging him to take her with him.32

  At her brother Silas’s house, her misery and escape attempts continued, especially as Silas’s wife punished Prairie Flower for calling her mother by her Comanche name. She slashed her arms and breasts in mourning and used a butcher knife to chop off her long hair. Around this time, a Fort Worth photographer took the famous picture of Cynthia Ann nursing Prairie Flower.

  When Cynthia Ann finally came to her sister Orlena’s home, she seemed to at last find some peace and began adjusting to her new life. She learned the housewifery skills of a white woman—weaving, spinning, and sewing. She also tanned hides, a skill she’d mastered as a Comanche. She and Prairie Flower began speaking English.

  But Cynthia Ann still hid from gawkers and spent hours crying. She never abandoned some of her Comanche ways, especially the mourning rituals of cutting and keening. One neighbor told of how she still cried for her boys, and another wrote, “I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed. And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which [showed] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from that then the Indians did by taking her at first.”33

  In 1864, Cynthia Ann suffered another shattering blow when Prairie Flower died of influenza and pneumonia. Little is known of Cynthia Ann’s life in the six years that followed. She died in 1870 of influenza, her death perhaps hastened by her starving herself. She never knew that her handsome son Quanah became one of the great Native American warrior chiefs, who never forgot the mother snatched from his life when he was just a twelve-year-old boy.

  Quanah Parker. Library of Congress

  Sarah Winnemucca

  Life Among the Paiutes

  Named Thocmetony (Shell Flower) at birth, Sarah Winnemucca was born in the year 1844, welcomed into a band of Paiute that roamed the deserts of northern Nevada. “I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country,” Sarah recalled. “They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.”34 Sarah’s grandfather, Chief Truckee, welcomed the white men as brothers, but for Sarah, the coming of the settlers changed forever how she and her people lived.

  Over the next several years, emigrant bands of white settlers and gold-diggers streaming through Paiute land committed crimes against Sarah’s people. In one instance, white men burned the band’s winter supplies; another time, a group fired on a Paiute fishing party near the Humboldt River, killing one of Sarah’s uncles and setting off a ritual of mourning through the village.

  The never-ceasing pressure for Paiute lands from white settlers eventually forced Sarah’s people onto reservations, first at Pyramid Lake in Nevada, which was followed by treks to far-off reservations in Oregon and finally Yakima, Washington. Over the years, as the government drove the Paiute from one place to another, Sarah lost nearly half her family. She devoted her life, while straddling two worlds, to defending the rights of her Paiute people and to forging an understanding between Indians and the US government.

  Years later, Sarah wrote about her youth and the lessons she learned as a child. “Be kind to all, both poor and rich, and feed all that come to your wigwam,” she wrote, “and your name can be spoken of by every one far and near. In this way you will make many friends for yourself. Be kind both to bad and good, for you don’t know your own heart. This is the way my people teach their children. It was handed down from father to son for many generations. I have never in my life saw our children rude as I have seen white children and grown people in the streets.”

  Sarah Winnemucca. Nevada Historical Society

  As a young teen, in 1859, Sarah learned English while living in the household of William Ormsby near Genoa, Nevada. She possessed a gift for languages and spoke several Indian dialects as well as English and some Spanish. During the early 1860s, Sarah lived with her parents and siblings at the Pyramid Lake reservation, on traditional Paiute lands. The government promised the Indians clothes, food, and farm tools, in exchange for the Paiute remaining on the reservation and replacing their old ways of hunting and fishing with farming.

  But after the first year, a series of agents issued nothing to the Indians. The tribe dug a ditch for a new mill, but the government-issued money, which was meant to build a gristmill and sawmill, never built a thing for the Indians. White people squatted on the Paiute reservation and set their cattle to graze on the land. Worse, soldiers came and accused the hungry Paiute of stealing cattle from white settlers. The soldiers found a camp of Indians and “killed almost all the people that were there. Oh, it is a fearful thing to tell,” Sarah wrote, “but it must be told…. I had one baby brother killed there…. Yet my people kept peaceful.”

  Sarah’s father suffered greatly at the death of his baby son, going off alone into the hills. Not long after, Sarah’s mother and sister died. Incidents of betrayal, misunderstanding, and retaliation between Indians and whites haunted the Paiute. Both sides often turned to Sarah to translate and interpret between the soldiers and agents and her people. On at least one occasion, her efforts won food for the tribe.

  But Indian agents repeatedly cheated the Paiute, selling goods meant for the tribe to enrich themselves and giving well-paying jobs to relatives while their Indian charges starved. Sarah reported one issue of goods to weary people who’d traveled three days to reach the agency. A family group of 23 people received four blankets, three fish hooks and lines, and two kettles. “It was the saddest affair I ever saw,” she wrote. If the Paiute raised five sacks of grain, she wrote, “they give one sack for the Big Father [the president] in Washington; if they have only three sacks, they still have to send one. Every fourth load of hay goes to the Big Father at Washington, yet he does not give my people the seed.” Instead, the Paiute had to pay for the seed themselves.

  Conditions became so bad that Paiute leaders asked Sarah to travel to San Francisco and meet with the region’s commanding military officer. General McDowell reported the Paiute’s crooked agent, but the man was not removed. Sarah made more trips to the military commanders over the years, seeking justice for her people, but after receiving promises from the generals, she usually never heard another word from them. She blamed unscrupulous agents for allowing the murder of her people and the loss of their reservation lands. “And yet we, who are called blood-seeking savages, are keeping our promises to the government,” she wrote. “Oh, my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands?”

  In the 1870s, the government moved the Paiute to the Malheur Reservation in Oregon. There Sarah worked with the wife of the tribe’s fair-minded Indian agent, Samuel Parrish, to open a school. But her joy in the school proved short lived. A new agent replaced Parrish in 1876. He gathered the tribe and had Sarah translate his mission: he’d come to “make you all good people.” He told the Paiute they lived on government land. “If you do well and are willing to work for government, government will give you work,” Sarah later recalled his words. But the Paiute knew this land had been promised to them. The land was theirs, and what they did on it was theirs.

  The new agent quickly set the tone for future dealings. “When I tell you to do anything,” Sarah translated, “I don’t want any of you to dictate to me, but to go and
do it.” The Paiute worked for a week, but when they went to get their pay, the agent charged them for any supplies they’d used and refused to pay them in cash. The government, of course, had meant the supplies for Paiute use, without charge. Continued unfair and cruel treatment led some Paiutes to abandon the reservation and join the neighboring Bannock tribe in a war against the government.

  In 1878, the army hired Sarah to work as an interpreter, messenger, and scout. They wanted her to persuade the Bannocks to give up. When Sarah reached the Bannock camp, she discovered some Paiutes, including several family members, whom she later claimed were being held captive. She told them that the army approached and they must flee. She left with the Paiute, and they hid in the hills from the Bannocks while Sarah galloped ahead to get help from the soldiers, riding 200 miles over two sleepless days and nights.

  Sarah continued in the army’s service for the rest of the Bannock War. The insurrection ended when General Oliver Otis Howard captured about 1,000 Bannocks and killed 140 men, women, and children at Charles’s Ford, Wyoming, in September 1878.

  But Sarah’s efforts won no concessions for her tribe. The government punished all Paiutes, not only the ones who’d joined the Bannock, with removal to a new reservation at Yakima in Washington Territory. The nightmare journey, in the icy depths of winter, killed many members of the already half-starved tribe. They arrived at the new agency on the last day of December 1878, mourning the loss of children who had frozen to death in the deep snows. The agent issued them goods—”Oh, such a heart-sickening issue!” lamented Sarah—a few shawls and a few yards of cloth so poor for sewing clothes that “you white people would sift flour through” it.

  Many Paiute died that winter. Sarah’s sister lingered, suffering with illness, and died in the spring. Though Sarah kept working for the government as an interpreter, her disgust at the treatment of her people led to a greater step—she would speak for the Paiutes on a larger stage.

  In January 1880, Sarah began her work as an activist for her people, pleading their cause before the secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz, in Washington, DC. The secretary made her many promises he never kept, and some Paiutes blamed Sarah for the government’s lies. Some believed she took money from the agents or sold them out to the soldiers, causing the move to Yakima. At one point, when Yakima agent “Father” James Wilbur threatened to throw her in jail for rabble rousing, Sarah wished he would, “for that would have made my people see that I had not sold them.”

  In 1882, she married Lewis Hopkins, an Indian Department employee. A year later, they traveled east, and Sarah began a tireless round of lectures—more than 300 presentations—on behalf of the Paiute, sponsored in part by Mrs. Horace Mann, wife of the celebrated reformer. Then, in 1883, Sarah penned and published her autobiography, the first book by a Native American woman, called Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Sarah not only wrote of the wrongs done to her people by a corrupt government system of agents but also told the story of growing up in her native culture, showing Indian life from an Indian perspective, a personal account that had not been written before.

  When Hopkins died in 1887, Sarah devoted herself to opening a school for Indian children in Nevada. She fought for her students to remain near their parents instead of being taken away to boarding schools where much of their Indian heritage and language would be obliterated. Sarah believed in taking certain skills of white culture, like writing, and adopting them for her people’s use.

  Sarah kept her school open for four years, but her dream withered from lack of funding. She moved to live with her younger sister, Elma, in Montana, where she died on October 17, 1891. Sarah Winnemucca is remembered today as a compassionate woman who sought understanding between two nations and cultures, and fought for the heritage of her people.

  Susette La Flesche

  “An Indian Is a Person”

  “How often I have fallen asleep when a child,” wrote Susette La Flesche, “with my arms tight around my grandmother’s neck, while she told me a story…. When thinking of those old days—so happy and free, when we slept night after night in a tent on the wide trackless prairie, with nothing but the skies above us and the earth beneath; with nothing to make us afraid; not even knowing that we were not civilized, or were ordered to be by the government; not even knowing that there were such beings as white men; happy in our freedom and our love for each other—I often wonder if there is anything in your civilization which will make good to us what we have lost.”35

  Susette La Flesche. Nebraska State Historical Society

  Her blood mingled white and Indian ancestry. Susette La Flesche, bearing both the name of French ancestors and her Indian name, Inshtatheumba, or Bright Eyes, straddled both worlds as she advocated for the rights of her Native American people.

  In 1854, the year of Susette’s birth, her father Joseph, also called Iron Eyes, signed a treaty with the United States. The government promised their tribe, the Omaha, would keep 300,000 acres of their traditional lands in eastern Nebraska for their reservation. Government Indian agents would run the reservation, hand out money, and provide food and clothes. Joseph believed the only way for the Omaha to survive the surging waves of white settlers was to adopt the farming lifestyle of the whites. The Indian practice of communal sharing would have to give way to the self-interest of the individual.

  As a child, Susette learned about Christianity and how to write, read, and speak English at the reservation’s mission school. A former mission teacher won Susette a spot at a private school for young ladies in New Jersey. She graduated in June 1875 and returned to the reservation. For three years, Susette tried to secure a position teaching but was thwarted by dealings with Indian agents and government red tape. Eventually she won a job as an assistant teacher.

  The years had been difficult for the Omaha and other Indian tribes. The invasion of white settlers carried soldiers in its wake, followed by railroads and by hunters who killed buffalo for the skins and tongues, leaving the meat to rot. The animal central to the lives of the Plains Indians edged ever closer to the brink of extinction. Corrupt agents pocketed tribal funds and paid the tribes in shoddy goods. Hunger and suffering haunted once proud Indian nations.

  But even worse for the northern tribes was the threat of removal south to Indian Territory, an arid, harsh land in present-day Oklahoma. In 1877, this happened to the Omaha’s close friends, the Ponca. Joseph’s mother was a Ponca, and his brother, White Swan, grew up with that tribe. Armed with her education, her ability to translate, and her skill with a pen, Susette became deeply involved in the Ponca’s plight.

  Like the Omaha, in the 1850s the peaceful Ponca turned over thousands of acres to the United States. They welcomed a mission church to their reservation, worked their fields, and built log houses. But the government rewarded the Ponca’s cooperation by doling out only a fraction of the supplies and money promised them.

  Then, in 1868, the government mistakenly handed over the Ponca’s “permanent” homeland to another tribe—the Sioux. In May 1877, soldiers drove 700 Ponca, “as one would drive a herd of ponies,” south to Indian Territory. Susette and Joseph met the Ponca en route—and the sight broke Susette’s heart. For those few days, she heard the Ponca cries for their dead and cries for their old home. The visit haunted her.

  Nearly 150 Ponca died of disease and hunger during the first year in Oklahoma. Later, Susette traveled to Indian Territory to report firsthand on the Ponca’s stark living conditions. And all the time she worried, If this could happen to the Ponca, and so many other tribes, why not the Omaha?

  Susette plied her pen in letters to the president, the secretary of the interior, and the Indian commissioner. She wrote for herself and translated the words of others. “Because I am an Indian can you order me to the Indian Territory, New Mexico, or any place you please, and I be powerless to appeal to any law for protection?” she asked the commissioner.36 But of course, the government could do as it wished.

  The
n, in January 1879, Ponca chief Standing Bear and about 30 others fled the reservation and headed north toward their homelands in Nebraska. Standing Bear’s dying son had begged to be taken back to the land of their fathers. After a grueling 10-week winter journey that left them sick and nearly starved, Standing Bear’s refugees arrived at the Omaha reservation. Joseph believed that, once the Ponca settled on Omaha lands, everything would work out. But soon soldiers under the command of General George Crook arrived to arrest the runaway Ponca and take them to the fort at Omaha.

  Susette and the Omahas waited for word about Standing Bear and his people. They expected to hear they’d been shipped back to Indian Territory. But instead, word came that the Ponca had a champion, a journalist named Thomas H. Tibbles, who’d interviewed Standing Bear and telegraphed his story to papers around the country. Tibbles also enlisted the aid of lawyers John Webster and A. J. Poppleton to bring against General Crook a writ of habeas corpus, which required that a prisoner be brought before a court to decide the legality of his imprisonment.

  Tibbles wrote to the physician at the Omaha reservation, asking for all information about the Ponca incident. The doctor had Susette write her chronicle of events instead. “This statement,” she finished, “shows how much they trusted in the justice of the white people, believing that the wrong done to them had been done by only a few, and without authority. I do hope some action will be taken in the matter soon.”37