Introduction

Thocmetony came into my life in 1990 while I was working construction in the Owen’s Valley of California.  Twice that year, strangers looked intently at me and told me that I should write a story about Sarah Winnemucca.  It wasn’t until I started actively researching that I learned Sarah’s childhood name was Thocmetony or Shell Flower in the name of her people, the Kuyui Dokado. I am not sure what motivated those strangers to assign me the task of discovery, but I travel the path they set me on even today.

It was not until a year or two later when I started really researching the lives of the Northern Paiutes of Nevada, that I realized my own family’s connection to the story.  Sarah struggled for years fighting for the rights of her displaced people in the second half of the nineteenth century.  During her communications with the officials of the United States government, she was often passed from office to office or her case would be passed on from one set of politicians to another as Presidents changed seats.  One of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs that she dealt with, and who refused to help aid her people in their return to Pyramid Lake, was Hiram Price.  After reading copies of correspondence between Sarah Winnemucca and Commissioner Price, I finally realized that he was my Nana Ruby’s Uncle Hiram.

When I arrived at California State University, Monterey Bay, I knew that I wanted to use Sarah’s story as my Senior project.  I had previously shelved my work on the piece because of concerns about being true to Sarah’s voice.  One of the first classes I attended in the world of the University was Frances Payne Adler’s Women’s Writing Workshop.  As I started to find my own voice, Sarah once again started to whisper to me.  She reminded me that voices are often quiet during times of oppression and the duties of a spokesperson are often thrust on an unwitting soul by circumstance alone.  Voices often unheard in today’s culture include those of young girls, girls who need Hera’s. 

I once again picked up my work on the story, this time focusing on Sarah’s childhood at the time of the Westward Expansion.  The initial contact between the settlers and the residents of the Great Basin was not positive.  The young Thocmetony’s own Grandfather, told stories of the Peoples white brothers who had been taken to a far land and would some day return to complete the family.  However the Immigrants had other concepts in their minds as they traveled to the lands of Alta California. 

In the book; Life Among the Piutes; Their Wrongs and Claims, written by Sarah in 1883, she tells of a terrifying experience of her youth in where her mother had buried a two year old Thocmetony up to her neck in order to hide her from marauding white immigrants.  It was common in her childhood for their winter food stores to be destroyed in order to force her people off their own lands.  The massacre of family members while on a fishing trip left the young Thocmetony in terror of the whites.

Add to this the horrible stories that had come out of the Sierra Nevada’s of the white’s cannibalism committed by the Donner party, coupled with the tales that had been told to generations of young Paiute children of the Cannibal Owl.  The combination was enough to make any young girl frightened of these odd looking hairy strangers.   But Thocmetony overcame her fears and eventually grew to become a spokesperson for the rights of Native people. 

At the end of each chapter, I have added a focused lesson plan for the use of teachers of western history in grades four through eight.  The lesson plans follow the themes of the chapters, Westward expansion, the Geography and the ecology of the area, Images of the Kuyui Dokado, gathering and storing of food and finally on Sarah Winnemucca herself.

Web page addresses change with time.  The pages were checked at the publication of this document.  However, if you are having trouble accessing any of these links, try using a good search engine such as www.google.com and enter the page title in the search box.