70th Issue: Edward Rose and Sarah Winnemucca
Edward Rose was an explorer and fur trapper who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the United States. His origins are unknown, but he was mixed-race, and brown skinned with black hair. He lived among the Crow Indians when he was a kid, and learned their language and customs. He mostly lived around Louisville Kentucky. He worked as a deckhand on a boat and went to New Orleans, and was known for getting into fights as a teen. He had scars, and so he became known as Nez Coupe (Cut Nose).
Edward got a job as an interpreter in 1807, working on an expedition to Wyoming under the command of Manuel Lisa, an explorer. He scouted the area, built relationships with the local Native American communities, and set up camp for the winter at a local Crow village. He traded the goods that Manuel Lisa had given him for favors with the Crow people, and the next summer, when Manuel caught up with him, he was pissed off about it. They started physically fighting, and Edward was definitely the stronger one. It took ten or fifteen men to subdue him as Manuel fled. Edward stayed at the Crow village and did not go back to Manuel Lisa or his people.
When Edward was at the village, the Crow people were involved in a battle against the Hidatsa people. Edward fought bravely and killed five people and was now known as The Five Scalps. His esteem went up with the Crow people. For the next few years, Edward split his time among the mountain men and the Crow people, working as an explorer and trapper, in North Dakota, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.
Edward then moved on to an Omaha village where he married the chief’s daughter. He’d made some money with his work and had two children, also getting into alcohol and starting fights when he was drunk. This didn’t go over well either with the Omaha or the native people he was living with. Edward ended up getting arrested and sent back to St. Louis. He moved to New Orleans when he was released, and stayed back with the Crow again for ten years.
In 1823, Edward worked again as an interpreter on an expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, the expedition was abandoned when the men ran into trouble with the local Arikara Indian tribe, and several were killed. He next traveled as an interpreter and guide again northwest into the Wind River Valley, where Edward negotiated horse trading and passage through Crow lands. Unfortunately that winter, in 1823, the Arikara Indians from before found Edward and his fellow explorers and killed them while they were crossing the Yellowstone River.
I apologize because for some reason I can't get pictures to embed in this newsletter, but you can see some images of the next person I'm going to talk about, Sarah Winnemucca, here.
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins was a Northern Paiute activist. She was born in 1844 in Nevada, the daughter of Chief Winnemucca and granddaughter of Chief Truckee. Her grandfather had worked as a guide for white settlers in the area, and fought in the Mexican-American war, making white friends and starting his family’s tradition of getting along well with the settlers.
When Sarah was six years old, her family moved her to Stockton, California, and her parents worked in the cattle industry. When Sarah was thirteen, her grandfather got her and her sister to live and work in the house of William Ormsby, a civic leader and hotel owner in Nevada. They learned English and more about the ways of the white European Americans. She and her family all spoke English, and she could read and write English as well. Sarah enrolled into Catholic school in San Jose when she was sixteen.
A few years later, two white men kidnapped and abused two Paiute girls. Paiute men went and killed those white men, and then the settlers and miners came after the Paiute again. The Paiute were fierce fighters, and the settlers and miners were inexperienced. The two groups did reach a truce, but just a few years later the Nevada Volunteer cavalry raided and attacked Paiute bands for no reason. Twenty-nine people were killed, including Sarah’s mother and other extended family members. Other Paiute moved to a military camp and then to a portion of land in Eastern Oregon called the Malheur Reservation. When Sarah was 27 years old, in 1871, she worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs as an interpreter.
The Bannock War took place a little later, in 1878 when those in charge of the Malheur Reservation failed to pay workers, alienated tribal leaders, and allowed white settlers to illegally take over most of the land. The Paiute and Bannock people left, moving away, and then the white people who lived where they wanted to move to started fighting. The war was mostly between the Bannock and the white settlers and military, but the Paiute may have participated as well. Sarah said that she and some other Paiute families were held hostage by the Bannocks.
Casualties during the war were pretty few, and Sarah said that the Bannocks and the Army soldiers liked each other and didn’t really shoot to kill. Sarah worked as a translator for the army at this time, and had several letters of recommendation from them. Sarah published a memoir and history of her people called Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims in 1884. It is the first known autobiography written by a Native American woman. Once it was published, Sarah toured New England to speak about the book, and then founded a private school for Native American children in Nevada.
The Paiute were interned in a camp after the Bannock War, and Sarah was very upset at the harsh conditions. Sarah became an advocate for the rights of her people, travelling across the country to tell white people about the issues her people were facing. After the Bannock War, Paiute were interned in a concentration camp in Washington state, and Sarah went to Washington DC to lobby Congress for their release. She also worked as a messenger, interpreter and guide for US forces, and as a teacher for imprisoned Native Americans.
As Sarah continued to give lectures, she was known as the “Paiute Princess”. She met Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann who was married to Horace Mann, the famous educator. They helped promote and boost her speaking career. The school for Native American children that she started ended up being closed when the government decided to start making Indian Boarding Schools (which is a whole different story) to assimilate Native American children, and Sarah was struggling financially towards the end of her life. Her sister, Elma, had married and had children, and Sarah moved in with her after two marriages of her own falling apart. She died of tuberculosis a few years later.
Though in 2005, Nevada contributed a statue of Sarah Winnemucca to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the US Capitol, her legacy has been a little more controversial. Though she tried to improve the conditions of her people, she also assisted the US military when they were fighting against the Paiute. Sarah also advocated for assimilation, so she was a little bit complicated.
Thank you for reading and I am always open to suggestions for new things to research and share!