- Chief Winnemucca
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Chief Winnemucca
Winnemucca, (ca. 1820–1882)(also called Wobitsawahkah,[1] Bad Face,[1] Winnemucca the Younger,[1] Mubetawaka,[1] and Poito[1]), was born a Shoshoni around 1820 in what would later become the Oregon Territory.[1] He married a Kuyuidika woman, the daughter of Old Winnemucca, and thus was a Paiute himself by tribal rules.[1][2] His father-in-law honored him by giving him his own name[citation needed]. Winnemucca or Wuna Mucca[1] has been translated as The Giver of Spiritual Gifts[citation needed]. This name is part-English and part-Paiute[citation needed]. Winnemucca the Younger became war chief of the Kuyuidika (bird eaters), a Northern Paiute band.[1]
Contents
Political life
Winnemucca the Younger became war chief of the Kuyuidika.[1] Unlike his father-in-law, he was distrustful of white settlers.[1]
His role in Northern Paiute politics is difficult to determine and somewhat controversial. He is primarily known through the writings of his daughter, Sarah Winnemucca. She downplayed his Shoshoni roots and connections to distinguish her father and her people as peaceful and to protect them from the prejudice many settlers held against the more warlike "Snake Indians".[2] Sarah exaggerated his influence over the Paiute people, stating that he was the absolute chief of all the Paiute tribes. Due in large part to her role as a translator, this viewpoint was shared by contemporary Oregonians[2] Modern historians and ethnologists view him more as a "first among equals", with considerable influence over the bands in the Pyramid Lake region.[citation needed]
He was a leading proponent of the Pyramid Lake War of 1860. However, when the Paviotso Confederacy was first forming at the Ochoco Council of 1851, the Paiute people had been more inclined to listen to his father-in-law, (Old) Chief One Moccasin, and keep the peace, than to follow Bad Face's counsel to join the other Shoshone and Northern Ute warriors in the war effort.[3] Later, Bad Face did lead several Paiute units into active fighting, where they would be misidentified as Snake warriors.[1]
At 3:00 am on March 17, 1865, while Sarah Winnemucca and her grandfather, Old Winnemucca were in Dayton, Nevada, Captain Almond Weh's Nevada Volunteer cavalrymen raided their family camp on the shore of Lake Winnemucca.[4] Twenty nine of the 30 old men, women and children in the camp were killed, including two of Old Winnemucca's wives.[4] (Winnemucca the Younger) Bad Face's wife and another daughter were shot, sustaining wounds that eventually killed both of them.[4] They threw Bad Face's baby son, basket cradle and all, into a blazing fire.[2] In 1868 Bad Face surrendered.[1] After that war his influence decreased considerably and he appears to have had little control over the events at the Malheur Reservation in the lead up to the Bannock War of 1878.
During the winter of 1872-1873, over his daughter's objections, Bad Face refused to go and farm for a living on the Malheur Reservation, where she was staying at the time, saying he might starve there.[2] His hideout was at the base of Steens Mountain, near the Reuben and Dolly Kiger Ranch in what is now Harney County, Oregon.[2] By 1873, settlers and the government in Oregon had come to worry that the Paiute people under Bad Face might be organizing to join with the more war-inclined Shoshone people under Chochoco (Has No Horse), and that they might either collaborate or unite with their old enemies, the Modoc people, under John Schonchin and Modicus, in what became the Modoc War.[2]
On April 11, 1873, the Modoc War ended.[2] By 1874, "Winnemucca, the Chief of the Paiutes", eight braves, Sarah, and another of his daughters would grace the stage of the Metropolitan Theater with a series of skits on Indian life, which they performed for five years.[2][4] As of April 1875, Bad Face was visiting and leaving the Malheur Reservation as he pleased, while that agency was under the comparatively decent Indian agent Samuel Parrish.[2] Parrish had built irrigation canals and a school for the reservation.[2] He had also broadened the limits of the reservation to secure better farmland for the reservation Shoshoni, without any permission to do so, including Pony Blanket's cultivated land and the Shoshoni's traditional hot springs bath.[2] This caused conflict with powerful local settlers who also wanted that land, including ranchers Henry Miller and Pete French, and so a successful campaign to oust Parrish from the agency ensued.[2]
In early April 1875, Bad Face, Sarah Winnemucca, and Pony Blanket attempted unsuccessfully to persuade officers at Fort Harney to help reinstate Parrish, but William V. Rinehart and some of the other wealthy anonymous campaigners fought back, falsely accusing officers at Fort Harney, Fort McDermitt, and Fort Bidwell of supplying food to Shoshoni who refused to stay on the Malheur Reservation empowering them to stay away.[2] Rinehart was the sworn enemy of both the Shoshoni and Paiute, preferring absolute authority and extermination of indigenous people, where possible.[2] Parrish was ultimately replaced by Rinehart, who arrived at the Malheur Reservatin on June 28, 1876, just three days after Custer's fall at Little Bighorn.[2] He began defrauding, starving, and abusing both reservation and non-reservation native people immediately.[2]
Less than a year later, in mid April 1877, Rinehart came to realize that, among other things, Bad Face was Paiute only at his daughter Sarah's insistence.[2]
Following successful political pressure from northeastern Oregon settlers upon the Congress, to overturn President Ulysses S. Grant's pact to let the Nez Perce stay in Wallowa, on June 13, 1877 Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph went on the warpath.[2] He killed four white men, after refusing to move some 500 of his people off of their high mountain meadow in the Wallowa Valley to the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho, which was to have included Camas Prairie, but due to a "clerical" error, did not.[2] The Paiutes, who had been leaving the Malheur Reservation to escape both Rinehart and starvation, returned en masse, knowing they would at least be safer at the reservation during wartime.[2] Meanwhile Bad Face and some of his warriors journeyed to Boise City, where they dined as guests of honor with Governor Mason Brayman and assured him that Bad Face, Chochoco (Has No Horse), and their people had only peaceful intent.[2] Still, neither would go onto the Malheur Reservation as Rinehart insisted and conditions continued to worsen. Two Shoshoni Snake dog soldiers came to the Malheur Reservation in March 1878 and threatened war as soon as there was grass.[2] Idaho Governor Brayman wrote to US Senator W. J. McConnell on their behalf, agreeing that the Shoshoni Banattee Snakes at Fort Hall Reservation had "ample justification" for the methods they pursued, given the ongoing loss of their natural food supply, Camas root, to the settlers hogs.[2]
On June 16, 1878, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported that Laughing Hawk (Tambiago), imprisoned at the Idaho Territorial Penitentiary, had informed officials there that Buffalo Horn (Kotsotiala) was to meet with Bad Face and Has No Horse in the "Juniper Mountains".[2] That point was ignored by those officials.[2] On May 27, 1878, after holding a council of war, a second Shoshoni uprising was launched in eastern Oregon with the killing of James Dempsey, a white gun dealer who lived in Harney Valley with a Shoshoni wife. He had purchased arms in October 1877 from the Mormons at Salt Lake City and then sold the weapons to the Bannock/Bannatte Robber Snakes, after having for over a year prior urged them to go to war.[2] He then informed Idaho Governor Brayman that war was eminent.[2] The uprising turned into the second Shoshoni War, which the Americans would title the Bannock War.[2] On June 5, Sarah Winnemucca met with Pony Blanket (Egan), Left Hand, Dancer, and Three Coyotes at the Malheur Indian Agency and learned that the Snake Indians were being starved out of the Malheur reservation, that they could not buy clothes, and that Paiute horses were being shot.[2] Three Coyotes reported the rape of an Indian girl and the confiscation of weapons and horses at the Fort Hall Reservation.[2] They gathered money to send Sarah to Washington to tell President Rutherford B. Hayes of these problems.[2] She left on June 9, 1878 and on that day Captain Reuben Bernard caught up with Black Buffalo and Old Bull near the Oregon-Idaho border, in the process of pulling down telegraph lines to shut off the war zone communications, and he seriously wounded both men.[2] Before the last of the lines were pulled down, General Irvin McDowell got a message through to Bad Face and his son Natchez, asking them to come and help keep the peace with the hostile Snakes at the Malheur Reservation, which both men said they would do. In fact they planned to join the Snakes at war. On June 10, 1878, Congress declared war on the Western Shoshoni Nation.
Bad Face died of poisoning in 1882.[1] The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Winnemucca died in October 1882 at Coppersmith Station, Nevada[citation needed]. It further reported that his death was attributed to his being bewitched by his young wife, who was then stoned to death along with their three-year-old child[citation needed].
Legacy
Winnemucca Indian Colony of Nevada, Winnemucca Lake, Winnemucca Mountain, and the city of Winnemucca, Nevada are named after Winnemucca[citation needed]. His eldest son Natchez and nephew[citation needed] Numaga were known to whites as Little Winnemucca[citation needed] and Young Winnemucca[citation needed], respectively.
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Ontko, Gale. Thunder Over the Ochoco, Volume I: The Gathering Storm. Bend, OR: Maverick Publications, Inc., 1997.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag Ontko, Gale. Thunder Over the Ochoco, Volume IV: Rain of Tears. Bend, OR: Maverick Publications, Inc., 1998.
- ^ Ontko, Gale. Thunder Over the Ochoco, Volume II: Distant Thunder. Bend, OR: Maverick Publications, Inc., Fourth Printing, August 1997.
- ^ a b c d Stewart, Omer C.(1983). Canfield: Sarah Winnemucca of the Northern Paiutes. Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 5(2). Retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1vx9q7p0
See also
Categories:- Native American leaders
- People from Nevada
- 1882 deaths
- Paiute people
- Shoshoni people
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