With her last letter acknowledging the last money subscribed for her boarding-school in August, came a notice that the literary exercises of the school were suspended for a month, on account of her need of rest, and in order that the children might assist in harvesting the splendid crop, some of which, as it had been agreed upon beforehand, was to pay the eleven men who had labored with Natches in the winter to buy water from the water company for the year’s irrigation, and some was to pay the fifteen laborers, men and women, who were to help in the reaping, while the rest of the wheat, sold at the current market price of $30 per ton, would provide for the ensuing year’s maintenance, besides affording food and seed corn for another year’s planting.
I must confess I was rather surprised at her letter’s not containing a pæan of joy on this impending happy consummation, but only a painfully earnest expression of anxiety that I should now rest from my labors for her, and be content if she only went on in future with the day school. But I ascribed her subdued tone to the exhaustion produced by the long strain she had been under of body and mind. It was, however, explained by her next letter, when she enclosed to me a letter she had received from a mistaken friend of mine telling her that Miss Peabody had sent her all the money that had been provided for her own old age, and had been working for her to get the $100 a month, harder than she (Sarah) had ever worked in her life. I need not say that this was accompanied with a passionate entreaty that I would never send her another cent, and suspend all further care for her work. Of course I replied, instanter, that this letter was false in every point; that the provision for my old age was untouched, and that the work I was doing for her was the greatest pleasure I had ever enjoyed in my life. But before she could get my reply (for it takes six days for a letter to go from Boston to Lovelocks), another short missive came, saying that I must not write to her again till she should send word of her new whereabouts; for, “on account of our ill luck,” Natches and herself were going away to earn some money,—she to get work in some kitchen for at least her board. But not a word of explanation of the “ill luck,” which I could not divine.
I have therefore kept back this paper from the press till I should hear again. And another letter has at last come, after a fortnight of dreadful silence, acknowledging my letters that she had just found, on her return to Lovelocks after a fortnight’s service in the kitchen of a Mrs. Mary Wash, of Rye Beach, where she had earned her board, and had less than a dollar in money; and in this letter she explains the “ill luck.” Some of her inimical white neighbors had told her people, who had agreed to take pay for their work from the wheat, that Miss Peabody was sending her out $100 a month for them, and thus put them up to demanding their pay in money at once! “If we could have borrowed $200 for two months,” she says, “we could have paid them in money, and then sold the rest of the crop for $30 a ton. But it was the game to force us to sell the crop to the store-keepers for $17 a ton, which (thanks to the Spirit Father for so much) paid all our debts, but left nothing over; and I could not feed on love, so could not renew the school; and I was perfectly discouraged and worn out.” Add to this, her dear niece Delia had just died, who had been in a consumption ever since the death of the elder son of Natches, which took place when they were all so sick of pneumonia at Winnemucca just before Mr. Stanford gave them the ranch. She rejoices that “she is safe in heaven;” she hopes the “Spirit Father may soon let me die.” When she has fixed up her winter clothes she says she shall go and seek more work for her board; and adds in closing, “So, darling, do not talk any more on my behalf, but let my name die out and be forgotten; only, don’t you forget me, but write to me sometimes, and I will write to you while I live.” Of course I have replied to this wail, that while I do not wonder at her despair for the moment, I by no means accept it as the finale of our great endeavor,—that it is a natural but temporary reaction of her nerves, and I see that she is still her whole noble self in this energetic action for personal independence, which I shall make known at once to all her friends, sure that it will challenge them to help her through another year until another harvest. Meantime I believe that the entire change of work will prove a recreative rest, and her people will plainly see by it that it is not true that she had been living irrespective of them on the $100 a month, and that her enthusiastic scholars will not fail to bring their parents back to their confidence and gratitude to her.[5] I tell her that I have found at the bookbinder’s two hundred copies of her book, which I shall at once begin to sell for her again, offering to send one, postpaid, to whoever sends me $1.00, and thus make the nest egg of a new fund to enable her to renew her grand enterprise of making a Normal School (for that is what she was doing) of Indian teachers of English, for all the tribes whose languages she knows, and who will, in their turn, give their scholars, together with the civilizing English language, the industrial education that they have at the same time received, while helping in the housekeeping and on the ranch.
And with this implied appeal to the multitudes of individuals in the United States who, I am certain, are earnestly desirous to do something for our Indian brothers, but do not know exactly what to do, I send forth this pamphlet in the faith that has brought millions of dollars, unsolicited except in prayer, to George Muller’s Orphanage in Bristol, old England, and created the Consumptives’ Home and the asylum for incurable cancer patients in New England.
ELIZABETH P. PEABODY.
Jamaica Plain, Mass.
[FOOTNOTES:]
[1] For sale by T. Y. Crowell, 13 Lafayette Place, New York.
[2] In that first lecture she offended, by her story of the conduct of the Methodist agent Wilbur, a Methodist lady, who endeavored to bribe her to say no more about him, by promising her hospitality and other assistance. But Sarah was obliged to tell her she had nothing else to tell but just such actions of agents as his. This started an opposition against herself at once, that succeeded in making the Woman’s Association turn a cold shoulder to her.