[5] It may seem strange that her own people could be so influenced by the settlers even for a time. It shows their demoralization. It was one of Sarah’s acutest trials to find, when she went out to Nevada, in August, 1884, how the last seven years of homelessness depriving her people of all opportunity for family councils and the hereditary domestic discipline, had told on their morals. She found them divided into small squads scratching for mere bread under captains elected for their _smartness in getting along_, instead of their goodness, as when the fatherly chief appointed them; and that they had partially lost their old confidence in her as their faithful “Mother,” though she could not blame them for it, as she said she had been made the mouthpiece of so many lying promises. The same want of confidence had transpired temporarily in 1880, when the Indian Office failed to send the canvas for the hundred tents to Lovelocks that it spontaneously promised her father when they were in Washington in 1879; and the Secretary of the Interior also failed to follow up the written order he gave her to show her people and Agent Wilbur of Yakima. But that had proved a transient spasm of doubt, and she had come East on her mission in 1883, at their entreaty. She had begun to feel, however, since commencing her school, that it would prove a rallying-point of union, and with the exception of the interpreter and the other virtual slaves of the agent on the Reservation, that they would be brought into unity with her, notwithstanding the unceasing intrigues of Gibson against her, and which were undoubtedly excited by the fact that her school was attracting even the Piutes on the Reservation, who wanted to send to her their children. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Sarah Winnemucca's Practical Solution of the Indian Problem, by Sarah Winnemucca and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody