Sarah Winnemucca, 'Shell Flower' 1844-1891

"I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country.  They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming."

Having spent part of her adolescence in the household of William Ormsby, a hotelier and civic leader in Carson City who wanted a companion for his daughter, Sarah acquired a good command of English and other languages and was at ease moving between cultures.

She worked as an interpreter and teacher on the Malheur Reservation and later as a translator on the Yakama Reservation after the Bannock War.

It was here that she began a series of public lectures to publicize the punitive conditions of her Paiute people on the reservation.  She is known as the first Native American woman to write her autobiography:  Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883)

The town of Winnemucca, Nevada is named after her.

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