Sarah Winnemucca was born as Thocmetony, or “Shell Flower,” at the Humboldt Sink in present-day Nevada. Daughter of the Paiute chief, she learned to speak English, Spanish, and several American Indian dialects. As a young woman she served as a companion to the daughter of Major William Ormsby and his family in Genoa, Nevada. During this period she took the name Sarah. In 1860 the Paiute were moved into a reservation at Pyramid Lake. Five years later a clash with U.S. army soldiers resulted in the massacre of many Paiute people, including Sarah’s brother, and the destruction of their settlement. Without other resources, Winnemucca secured employment in 1868 as an interpreter at Camp McDermitt in Nevada. In 1872 a new reservation for the Paiute was established in Oregon, and Winnemucca served as interpreter there. In the early 1880s, she began giving public lectures about the injustices being committed against American Indians, particularly the government’s failure to give the Paiute exclusive land ownership rights as it had promised. In 1883 she wrote Life Among the Piutes [Paiutes]. Later, she successfully influenced Congress to pass a bill giving land ownership to the Paiute, but the secretary of the interior never carried out its terms. In the 1880s she taught in a school for Paiute children. She died in Montana in 1891.
