Sarah Winnemucca

A tireless advocate for the Paiute Indians and the granddaughter of Truckee, who guided John Charles Fr mont across the Great Basin to California, Winnemucca (1844-1891) was the author of Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883) the first book ""by an Indian woman, the first by an Indian west of the Rockies, and one of the earliest by an Indian west of the Mississippi."" Having grown up amid the wars, massacres, removals and betrayals that devastated the Paiute despite Fremont's assurances, Winnemucca struggled ""to find a place for herself and her people in the world [white men] had snatched away."" Founded on Zanjani's (A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West) painstaking examination of civil documents, private papers and newspapers, this meticulous account details such pivotal events as Winnemucca's interpreting services for the American army, her quarrels with usually corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs agents, her impassioned lectures, her unsuccessful trip to Washington to plead that the Paiute be allowed to return to Oregon, and her journey to Boston, where under the auspices of Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Mann she wrote her book and met Boston's intellectual and social elite. Unfortunately, the prose is flat when it isn't Winnemucca's, and the story is hemmed in by nervous caveats ""if,"" ""maybe,"" ""probably."" Even new details lack vitality in this account, which will primarily interest scholars. Photographs not seen by PW. (Apr. 20)