Princesses Behaving Badly (18 page)

When white settlers arrived in the American West in the 1840s, the Northern Paiutes were a small nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers who crisscrossed what is now Nevada, California, and Oregon. The settlers, meanwhile, were hell-bent on westward expansion and digging for all the gold in them thar hills, and native tribes were in the way.

Sarah reported that when her grandfather, a chief, first met the settlers, he welcomed them and acted as their guide. Sarah’s people kept the newcomers alive through a difficult winter and followed her grandfather’s wishes to treat them as “brothers.” Sarah’s father, Chief Winnemucca, was more circumspect and tended to keep his distance from whites. Not
surprising, given that the settlers tended to repay the natives by burning down their winter stores, indiscriminately shooting them, and polluting their drinking water. There were good white people, too, Sarah noted, those who gave the Indians clothing, who shared medicine with her when she was covered in poison oak, who recognized that the Indians should be treated with respect. But there weren’t many of that sort, and more settlers arrived every month.

Early on, Sarah may have realized something that others did not: to survive the roaring lion, you had to know how to talk to it. Fortunately for her, she had always had a great facility with languages, having learned Spanish before the age of 10, after members of her family married Spanish colonials in California. She proved just as adept at English, which she learned from a white family while she was in domestic service in Nevada (this family was also probably first to call her Sarah). By 1859 Sarah was acting as a translator for her family when she realized that white settlers wanted to deal with someone they considered an authority. So she implied to several government agents that her father was the “Big Chief” of the Northern Paiute nation, not just the head of his band of 150 followers. This little white lie allowed Chief Winnemucca to speak on behalf of his people, and Sarah to call herself a princess.

Life could be extremely dangerous for an Indian trying to find a place on the border between the “civilized” and the “savage.” One example of the danger Sarah faced appears in her book: she describes how a contingent of white soldiers, armed with a flimsy claim that her people had stolen some cattle, slaughtered an entire village, down to the last child. “It is always the whites that begin the wars, for their own selfish purposes,” she wrote.

In 1872 the Northern Paiute were “given” the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, and Sarah’s family moved there. At first, the site was overseen by Samuel Parrish, an agent who, Sarah said, treated the Indians fairly. After four years, he was replaced by the villainous William Rinehart, who stole their goods, refused to pay them for work, and cheated them at every pass. Under his feckless watch, many Indian families starved. Paiutes who were suspected of a crime were executed without a trial. Much of the land that was supposed to be set aside for them was illegally seized by white settlers,
leaving the Indians less area for hunting and food gathering. He even closed the school. Sarah’s efforts to secure sufficient food for her people and to alert the authorities about the conditions at Malheur were ignored, even though she signed her letters “Princess Winnemucca.”

In 1878, those Indians who had remained on the reservation mounted a revolt, led by the Bannock tribe. Sarah and her family sided with the U.S. government. When her father and his band were captured and held captive by the Bannocks, Sarah rode 223 miles in 48 hours to free them, leading them to the relative safety of a U.S. Army fort. Later, she worked as a translator, guide, and scout for the American forces. After the Bannock War, however, the federal government didn’t bother with distinctions of loyalty. All the Paiutes who may or may not have sided with the rebels were deemed enemies and became, overnight, prisoners of war. In January, they were forced to march 350 miles through waist-deep snow to Yakima Reservation in Washington. Nearly one in five died during the journey, many of them small children or the elderly. More would die when they reached the reservation, including Sarah’s sister. There wasn’t nearly enough food, warm clothing, or fuel for fires to keep the Indians alive.

Desperate to save her people from slow, certain death in Yakima, Sarah went east to agitate on their behalf and speak to officials in Washington, D.C. She went as a princess, a role with which she was more than familiar. In 1864 Sarah, her father, and her sister had toured as an Indian “royal family,” acting out tableaux vivants of popular native myths and stories. Wearing feathered headdresses, the family would enter the theater in a sort of royal procession, surrounded by a phalanx of braves. They’d then perform stereotypical scenes, the “Noble Savage” ideal of the Pocahontas story, mingled with some “
Savage
Savage” takes on the “Grand Scalp Dance” and “War Dance.”

That Sarah acted out roles ascribed by white culture is a complicated and uncomfortable fact of history. But one benefit of her days on the stage was that she learned how to get people’s attention. For lectures and performances, she wore what she claimed—and what audiences assumed—was
traditional native princess clothing: fantastic bedazzled and fringed ensembles, sometimes made of buckskin, other times of cloth, sporting the kind of ready-made decorations found on lampshades and curtains. To complete the look, her long black hair was loose and topped with a beaded or feathered tiara. She accessorized with beaded bangles and carried a velvet bag embroidered with a cupid. A picture of “Princess Sarah” in her “Native” costume serves as the frontispiece of her 1883 autobiography. Attendees at her lectures and public appearances could buy pictures of the princess in full regalia, with proceeds going to support her travel expenses and her tribe.

Sarah knew what she was doing. Her costume conjured a romantic image of the doomed, noble, white-friendly Indian princess, which struck a chord with those who felt a bit queasy about that whole Manifest Destiny thing. At the height of her popularity, stories of Sarah’s family and life filled newspapers and magazines. As many as 1,500 people would file in to see her, and she gave more than 400 lectures in five years. She also grabbed the attention of social reformers like Mary Peabody Mann, widow of education reformer Horace Mann, and Mary’s sister Elizabeth Peabody, who became Sarah’s patrons.

But though Sarah used her “civilized Indian Princess” persona as a gimmick, once she had people’s attention she didn’t pull any punches. Between entertaining stories and tales of Native American history, she excoriated her public for the injustices being suffered by the Paiute and other tribes. In her autobiography, she writes, “Oh, my dear good Christian people, how long are you going to stand by and see us suffer at your hands?”

Sarah repeatedly used words like
savage, civilized
, and
Christian
throughout her autobiography, cleverly playing with the meanings of each. Writing about how her people helped the white settlers, she says, “They gave them as much as they had to eat. They did not hold out their hands and say: ‘You can’t have anything to eat unless you pay me.’ No, no such word was used by us savages at that time.” And though they may believe themselves to be civilized, white people are presented as hypocrites: “You dare cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts.”

In late 1878, Sarah’s repeated efforts to be heard by the federal government
finally paid off: she was able to say her piece to President Rutherford Hayes and Carl Schurz, secretary of the interior. Not that it did a lot of good. Though she was given written promises that the Paiute would be escorted back to Malheur, such oaths were quickly broken.

The failure of the feds to make good on their commitments made Sarah’s relationship with her people all the more problematic. Though she’d spent years working on their behalf, she was sometimes seen as acting in collusion with the U.S. government, a collaborator at best and a traitor at worst. Some of her most ardent efforts failed miserably. After the Bannock War, for example, she convinced her people to gather at Fort Harney so that they could be moved back to the Malheur Reservation. But the government had lied, and instead of Malheur they were forced on a death march to Yakima Reservation. When a group of five women tried to flee, Sarah and her sister were deployed to hunt them down and bring them back. That Sarah was on the federal payroll, reportedly given a yearly pension of $600 and a house in Orgeon for her services in the Bannock War, didn’t help either.

The fact is, even though Sarah was working extremely hard for her people, she didn’t necessarily want to live like them. In 1870 she told a newspaper reporter, “I like the Indian life tolerably well.… I would rather be with my people, but not to live with them as they live. I was not raised so.… My happiest life has been spent in Santa Clara while at school and living among the whites.” Underscoring this point, she married a succession of three white men, including an agent of the very government agency that treated her people so badly. She was also a proponent of what sounds like assimilation, which angered people then just as it does now. But Sarah placed her people’s physical survival over their cultural survival, meaning that, for her, assimilation was preferable to slow starvation on a reservation.

Sarah’s image among whites was just as complicated. Her outspokenness made her a convenient target for the American press, which described her as dirty, thieving, and prone to getting into fights. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which had a vested interest in defaming her character,
branded her a “common camp follower” (i.e., a prostitute) and a “harlot,” as well as a drunkard and a gambler. When Sarah dared voice an opinion, she was thus easily dismissed. That willingness by the general public to believe the worst and laugh at the rest meant that her demands for her people were easily brushed aside. Still, Sarah didn’t stop talking.

The title “princess” can mean a lot of things—it’s all in how you use it. The fact that the Northern Paiute didn’t have a titled system of royalty didn’t stop Sarah from using the word to make her voice heard by nonnative Americans. But if the word
princess
made it easier for Sarah to be heard, it was also used to denigrate her.

Near the end of her life, Sarah said that she didn’t believe she had accomplished much. This after years of bitter disappointment, of seeing her people die from starvation and cold, of being lied to by the president of the United States, of being personally attacked in the press. In 1884 she returned to Nevada to start a school for Indian children, but it closed after only four years. Some of the funds, provided by patrons and the sales of Sarah’s book, were squandered by her gambler husband.

Sarah Winnemucca died on October 17, 1891. It is only with the clarity of hindsight that her legacy has come to be appreciated. In 2005 the state of Nevada gave a bronze statue of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins to the National Statuary Hall Collection. It depicts her as she would have appeared to the crowds who came to hear her speak: about 35 years old, clad in a fringed and beaded dress of her own creation, and carrying the cupid bag. The plaque reads:

The description is accurate but doesn’t really convey much about who she was: a complicated champion and controversial heroine who used the role she created to write a new story. She was one of the few
Native Americans in her day whose voice could be heard in the conversation about what the United States owed the country’s early inhabitants. Unfortunately, as Sarah herself wrote, “brave deeds don’t always get rewarded in this world.”

Sofka Dolgorouky

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CTOBER
23, 1907–F
EBRUARY
26, 1994
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USSIA
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NGLAND
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RENCH CONCENTRATION CAMP
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U.S.S.R.

I
n 1940, Sofka Skipwith, formerly Princess Sofka Dolgorouky, left the relative safety of England for Paris. Given the Nazis’ imperial pretentions on the Continent, it was not the best timing. Her stated intention was to stay in France only six months or so, long enough to earn money for her mother and stepfather, a pair of displaced Russian émigrés living in France. She left behind her three sons; Patrick, the youngest, was placed in care of the “milkman’s mother-in-law,”
and the two older boys were sent to live with their paternal grandparents; she also said goodbye to her husband, a Royal Air Force pilot. She could not have known that it would be four years before she would be reunited with her children. Or that she’d never see her husband again.