It was among her first memories: a time of utter terror. Thocmetony (thok-MEH-toh-nee) was about 3 years old. It was 1847, and she lived with her family’s band of Northern Paiute people near Pyramid Lake, in what is now Nevada. She and her cousin were with her mother and aunt as the women gathered pinyon nuts.
Word came that taibos, white men, were near. The women picked up their girls and ran. When they could no longer carry the children, they buried them up to their necks in the sand, covering their faces with sage bushes. The mothers would come back for their daughters after dark, when it was safe.
“With my heart throbbing . . . we lay there all day,” Thocmetony would later write. “It seemed that the night would never come.”
Ever since white men had arrived in the area a few years before, there had been trouble. Many Paiute people—or Numa, as they called themselves—had been killed by taibos who seemed to view them as hardly human.
Soon the newcomers would overwhelm the lands of the Numa. Like other Native groups of North America, they would be forced onto
But the girl would survive. Taking an English first name as well as her father’s, Sarah Winnemucca would go on to master the taibos’ language, work as a translator, and become the first