[Rarebooks] fa: SARAH WINNEMUCCA - Life Among the Piutes 1883 - SIGNED

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, March 17. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://tinyurl.com/pe9veeh

Thanks again,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins: Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims. Edited by Mrs. Horace Mann, and Printed for the Author. Boston: For Sale by Cupples, Upham & Co., 1883. FIRST EDITION. Original publisher's cloth; 8vo; 268 pp.

SIGNED by Sarah Winnemucca on the front flyleaf. With the penciled owner's signatures of C. W. Rasey, probably Charles W. Rasey (born 1856), an early Western Union telegrapher and Colorado railroad man, later county recorder in Santa Barbara, California, who may very well have had personal contact with the author. He has written in pencil under Winnemucca's signature: "Her autograph. CWR." Binding well rubbed and worn, text block somewhat shaken but secure, light damp-stain to the upper corners of the first three leaves; mild toning to the contents; offsetting to the flyleaf from an 1891 newspaper article on the front paste-down reporting Winnemucca's death and giving a brief account of her life.

Sarah Winnemucca (ca. 1844-1891) was born Tocmetone, the daughter of Chief Winnemucca of the Northern Paiute. Her grandfather had acted as a guide to Gen. John C. Frémont during his 1843-45 mapmaking expedition. Sarah herself became an active liaison between the Paiutes and white society, as well as an impassioned spokeswoman for her people and Native Americans in general. She was the first Native American woman to secure a copyright and this, her autobiography, is considered one of the most important Nevada books of the nineteenth century. In it she describes the rampant corruption in the Indian Agencies and provides valuable, if not always reliable, accounts of the Bannock War (in which she acted as a scout and interpreter for the U.S. Army), the Reservation on Pyramid and Muddy Lakes, the Malheur Agency, the Yakima Affair, the First Meetings of Paiutes and Whites (in which she argues that it was fear of white emigrants' barbaric behavior that stopped her people from helping the ill-fated Donner party in the winter of 1846), etc.