Full Description
Finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award
In 1870 a twenty-six-year-old Paiute, Sarah Winnemucca, wrote to an army officer requesting that Paiutes be given a chance to settle and farm their ancestral land in Oregon Country. The eloquence of her letter was such that it made its way into Harper's Weekly. Ten years later, as her people languished in confinement as a result of the Bannock War, she convinced Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz to grant the requests in her letter and to free the Paiutes as well. Schurz's decision unleashed a furious campaign of disinformation by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, cattlemen, and settlers, overturning Schurz's decision, sweeping truth aside, and falsely branding Paiute chief Egan as instigator of the war.
To this day histories of the Paiutes appear to be unanimous in their mistaken claim that Egan led his Paiutes into the Bannock War. Indian agents' betrayal of the people they were paid to protect saddled Paiutes with responsibility for a war that most opposed and that led to U.S. misappropriation of their land, their only source of life's necessities. With neither land nor reservation, Paiutes were driven more deeply into poverty and disease than any other Natives of that era. In Northern Paiutes of the Malheur David H. Wilson Jr. pulls back the curtain to reveal what government officials hid-exposing the full jarring injustice and, after 140 years, recounting the Paiutes' true and proud history for the first time.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Author's Note
Dramatis Personae
Preamble
Introduction
1. Paiute-White Encounters, 1826 and 1862
2. Before Whites
3. "Wholly and Completely Different"
4. Paiute Power
5. Keeping Up Appearances
6. Dark Dawn
7. A Messenger to My Heart
8. The Snake War
9. A Home on Their Native Soil
10. A Troika
11. A New Agent
12. The Bannock Uprising
13. Exodus
14. Truth Management
15. Barren Valley Imbroglio
16. Rescue
17. Steens Mountain
18. Silver Creek
19. A Great Circle
20. Crania Absentia
21. Placing the Paiutes
22. A Big Talk
23. Doing Right by the Paiutes
24. Backlash
25. Untethered from Truth
26. Gold and Cattle
27. According to Howard
28. A Yale Ho-Chunk
29. White Whim, Paiute Penury
Conclusion
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
