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.
