SOURCE: "The Preliterate Traditions at Work: White Bull, Two Leggings, and Sarah Winnemucca," in American Indian Autobiography, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 48-71.

In the following excerpt, Brumble contends that Winnemucca was not aware of contemporary literary models in her writing of Life among the Piutes, but rather adapted Paiute oral conventions to the persuasion of white audiences.

Sarah Winnemucca was born probably in 1844.¹¹ …

By the time she reached adulthood … Winnemucca had experienced a wide range of what late-nineteenth-century America had to offer. As a young child she had lived with a stone-age, hunter-gatherer people; by the time she was twenty she had made her stage debut, acting in Indian tableaux vivants and interpreting for her father in his attempts to explain the Paiutes to the good burghers of Virginia City. By twenty-four she was a figure of some influence in the Great Basin, serving as the Army's...