When I wrote to Sarah for an explanation of the “drawback,” she said that the Piute parents who had been doing job-work for the people of Lovelocks in the winter, must go on their summer hunt for subsistence and winter stores, and take their children with them, and already some of her best scholars had gone; for which she was sorry, as she had hoped that when Senator Stanford should go home from Congress at midsummer, he would stop and see them, and be so pleased with what Natches had done with the land and what she had done in the school, that he would demand, from the fund in the Indian Office appropriated for Indian education, money enough to make her school a boarding-school during the summers. She said the poor parents had assembled in council in her schoolroom, and expressed their grief that they could not pay her themselves for their children’s board; and they compared this school, where the children were so happy in learning, to the Reservation schools, where they were whipped and taught nothing, but on which the Government wasted millions of dollars every year.
Now I (together with other intimate friends of Sarah) was desirous that the Government should not be solicited to help, but that her own work, seen in contrast with the work of the agency, should command its sympathetic co-operation; and I put into the “Boston Transcript” of April 21 the following article:—
THE FIRST SCHOOL TAUGHT BY AN INDIAN.
To the Editor of the Transcript: I was much obliged to you for your sympathetic introduction to the letter from those seven people in Lovelocks who wrote me about Sarah Winnemucca’s school, whose success under such hard conditions as she is in (starving on pine nuts, without bread or meat) is such a very important fact with respect to Indian education, which hitherto has been necessarily so imperfect, because conducted by instructors who did not know any Indian language. This is the first instance on record of an Indian school taught by a full-blooded Indian who grew up with both races, speaking both languages, and inspired from her infancy with the idea of civilizing her people by making English also their vernacular, and preparing the scholars in their turn to teach English to their companions and their parents, as children can best do.
Then, after inserting the above-given slips from the Western papers, I added this paragraph:—
If I can raise $100 a month this summer, the calamity of having this real school scattered may be averted. Within a week I have raised nearly a hundred for April; and if promissory notes to be paid in May, June, July, and August, can be sent me at once, I can send her a telegram to keep her scholars, for their board will be paid. Any sums from one dollar to a hundred may be sent to me at Jamaica Plain, 4 Cheshire Street, in these promissory notes, for which I shall not demand payment unless the school goes on.
Elizabeth P. Peabody.
This appeal immediately brought $400 in sums from one dollar to fifty dollars, and a promise of another $100 for August; and I sent word to her to keep her scholars. This was a great proof of the moral impression she had made of herself in the summer of 1883, for already all the organized sympathy for the Indians in the East was pre-engaged;—as, before the Piutes were heard of, all the funds to be raised by the women’s associations were pledged to their own missionary work; while General Armstrong came every year and carried off thousands of dollars for Hampton School and Carlisle, and Bishop Hare did the same for Dakota.
But I see that I am transcending the limits you prescribed for my article, and must hasten to tell of a month’s visit made to Sarah, beginning July 18, by a lady who has been for twenty years engaged practically in public and private education West and East, and who became acquainted with Sarah in the summer of 1883, and then promised her, if she recovered Malheur, that she would go out and renew with her the school that Sarah and Mrs. Charles Parish had kept, under the auspices of the only good agent among seventeen that ever were sent out to the Piutes; and it may be seen, by reading the sixth chapter of “Life among the Piutes,” that nothing is wanted to solve the Indian problem practically (at least among the Piutes) but good faith on the part of the Government agents in giving them the white man’s chances without discounting their earnings in the agents’ interest. For the last year this lady has been the teacher of methods in a normal school in Wisconsin; and she offered to go out at her own expense, if provided with free passes, and report to me concerning the school. In quite a voluminous correspondence with me she has given a history of the statu quo, comprehending an account of the state of things both inside and outside of the ranch, having found that the half had not been told her of the difficulties attending such an attempt as Sarah’s, arising from the general hostility of the frontiersmen to Indians, and their disposition to crush their attempts at self-subsistence, intensified by every degree of Indian success. She found Sarah personally also in circumstances of infinitely greater discomfort than she had imagined, and in addition to the chronic rheumatism and neuralgia from which she knew she had been suffering for two years, prostrated every other day with chills and fever, so that the first thing she set herself to doing was to cure her with quinine, which she effected. But this makes more striking her testimony to the character and quality of Sarah’s teaching, which is directed to making the children understand and speak English and then to read and write it. She found the pupils in the Second Reader, and she said every lesson was read in English and in Piute; and in Sarah’s reading to them (from the Bible for instance), there was the same use made of both languages, and the conversation upon the subject matter that accompanied it was extremely animated. Comparing the classes with those with which she was familiar in the United States schools of children of the same age, Sarah’s scholars were decidedly superior. In their writing and drawing, of which she sent me a dozen or more specimens, the superiority was marked, and made more marvellous by the fact that there was no school furniture but benches without backs, which, when they wrote, drew, or ciphered, they used as tables, sitting or kneeling on the floor, and sometimes, making the floor their table, they lay on it to write or cipher. But the children were so interested and zealous to learn that they were perfectly obedient, and when out of the specific school hours,—which were, at the time she arrived there, diminished from the four hours that had been the rule, by the pressure of the industrial work connected with the agriculture and housekeeping (for this school of Sarah’s comprehends all their life),—she found the boys digging a cellar, and the girls assisting Sarah about the cooking and the cleaning, everything being scrupulously neat both in schoolroom and tent. The ages of the children ranged between six and sixteen, and the individuality of each child was described, with those points in which they severally excelled. Within its range, in short, the education was superior, instead of inferior, to the average white education in our primary schools, being upon the method of the “New Education,” in which doing leads thinking, and gives definite meaning to every word used.
I wish I could induce your readers to look into the volume published by Carleton & Co., of New York, named “The Hidden Power,” written by Mr. Tibbles, the white husband of the Ponca Bright Eyes, every word of which, as he told me, is fact, except the proper names.
It is utterly impossible to begin to do justice to any such movement as Sarah Winnemucca’s unless the century-long action of the Indian Ring is understood. This subtle power, which dates with the organization of the Fur-traders’ companies, has come to govern this country as completely as for a time did the Slaveocracy, and still defeats everything proposed to be done; and this explains why in these last few years so little has been accomplished by Indian Rights’ associations, and the enlightened plan of Mr. Dawes and others for division of lands in severalty to Indians.