SOURCE: "Western American Indian Writers, 1854-1960," in A Literary History of the American West, Texas Christian University Press, 1987, pp. 1038-57.

In the following excerpt, Ruoff discusses the influence of Winnemucca's autobiography Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims.

Hostile government policies and public attitudes created a climate generally unfavorable to the development of Indian literature [in the mid-1800s]…. White audiences were far more interested in reading the accounts of explorers, settlers, and gold miners who conquered the West than they were in reading of Indian suffering brought about by this conquest. In 1883, however, the voice of the vanquished tribes of the far West was heard when the fiery Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Thocmetony; ca. 1844-91) strode across the lecture platforms of America to castigate whites for their unchristian treatment of her people, the Paiutes. With the publication of Life Among the Piutes; Their Wrongs and Claims (1883),¹ Winnemucca...