Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, The Californian, and Climates of the West

This seminar’s call intersects with my research on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s relationship to local print cultures generally and their representation of her home territory as a “region” of the United States... [ view full abstract ]

This seminar’s call intersects with my research on Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s relationship to local print cultures generally and their representation of her home territory as a “region” of the United States particularly. I am exploring how Winnemucca was shaped by and rejected many of the tropes of Nevada Territory’s sagebrush journalism, considering especially how Winnemucca’s 1883 Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims encourages readers to respond quite differently to the brutal reality of the culture shaped by the silver mines.

For this seminar, I will explore the related topic of how Winnemucca’s decision to publish her 1882 “The Pah-Utes” in The Californian (soon to merge with The Overland Monthly) can be understood as her movement toward a periodical that was actively constructing a different, yet also problematic, “West” for its readers. As Stephen J. Mexal details in his 2013 Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West, this periodical generally served imperialism by promoting a notion of liberal selfhood predicated in part on the readers’ imaginative or literal ability to travel in the supposedly tamed and formerly wild West. As far as I know, Winnemucca was the only Native American to publish in The Californian during this time, and this seminar encourages me to consider her representations of climate in this context. I will ask in particular how “The Pah-Utes” speaks to the sagebrush journalists’ representations of her home territory as a barren wasteland and The Overland Monthly’s representations of the West more generally as a place for pleasurable and profitable travel.