BOOKPATHS

Nevada, U.S.

Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Carson City, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1994; first published in 1883)

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844-1891) provides a first person account of the injustices suffered by the Paiute Indians, from their first meeting with white men through their removal from their ancestral lands in Nevada to other locations in the western United States.  Her haunting narrative is Winnemucca’s “powerful legacy to both white and Paiute cultures.”

I was born somewhere near 1844, but am not sure of the precise time.  I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country.  They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since, and I have never forgotten their first coming.  My people were scattered at that time over nearly all the territory now known as Nevada.  My grandfather was chief of the entire Piute nation, and was camped near Humboldt Lake, with a small portion of his tribe, when a party traveling eastward from California was seen coming. – from Life Among the Piutes, by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

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Online Edition

Nevada Historical Marker 143 – Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

Bookpath: France and Nevada, USA

Bookpath: Sweet Promised Land, by Robert Laxalt (Reno : University of Nevada Press, reprint edition 1988)

Robert Laxalt writes lovingly of his immigrant father, Dominique Laxalt, who came to the United States from the French Pyrenees Basque country in the early 20th century. Laxalt tells of his father’s life as a sheepherder in Nevada; his dream of visiting his homeland; his eventual return forty-seven years later; and his realization that his true home is in the United States, in the American west.

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“My father was a sheepherder, and his home was the hills. So it began when he was a boy in the misted Pyrenees of France, and so it was to be for most of his lifetime in the lonely Sierra of Nevada. And seeing him in a moment’s pause on some high ridge, with the wind tearing at his wild thickness of iron-gray hair and flattening his clothes to his lean frame, you could understand why this was what he was meant to be.” – from Sweet Promised Land, by Robert Laxalt

“And suddenly before me, I saw the West rising up at dawn with an awesome vastness of deserts and mighty mountain ranges. I saw a band of sheep wending their way down a lonely mountain ravine of sagebrush and pine, and I smelled their dust and heard their muted bleating and the lovely tinkle of their bells. I saw a man in crude garb with a walking stick following after with his dog, and once he paused to mark the way of the land. Then I saw a cragged face that that land had filled with hope and torn with pain, had changed from young to old, and in the end had claimed….” – from Sweet Promised Land, by Robert Laxalt