Cattle and Sovereignty in the Work of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

Abstract:Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins used cattle as her catalyst to describe the depredations brought about by US cattle ranchers and corrupt reservation land agents as part of US expansion. A catalyst is an item or person that precipitates action, and cattle in the West during the second half of the nineteenth century did just that. Winnemucca, like other nineteenth-century authors, offered rhetorical practices to show that peoples regarded as subjected and assimilated were in truth employing existing discursive methods to further their own causes. Winnemucca describes her experience of US settlement of the West as an example of how one Indigenous community had to dramatically alter because of the encroachment of Americans and their cattle. These struggles permeate her most famous work, her memoir, Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). In addition, some of her most passionate rhetoric appears in her newspaper articles, published in Newspaper Warrior, as well as in her 1884 congressional testimony, in archives at the University of Nevada, Reno. Winnemucca would come to describe the settlers’ actions against her people in terms of cattle in two key ways: cattle became competition for resources, and cattle became comparative figures, as the Paiutes themselves came to be treated as merely another form of stock. I argue that Winnemucca used cattle deliberately in her memoir, essays, and testimony to gain sympathy from white audiences and US government officials in order to help her people, the Paiutes, during the cattle boom of the 1880s.