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History & Celebrations Today – October 14

Celebrations Today – October 14

Holidays and observances

Celebrations Today – USA: October 14

National Dessert Day
Be Bald and Be Free Day
National Costume Swap Day – Second Saturday in October
National Motorcycle Ride Day* – Second Saturday in October
National Bald and Free Day
National Chocolate-Covered Insect Day
National FRUMP Day
national lowercase day
World Standards Day

Today in US History: October 14

Sarah Winnemucca

For shame! For shame! You dare to cry out Liberty, when you hold us in places against our will, driving us from place to place as if we were beasts.
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 1883.1

Paiute Indian Girl with Doll in Cradleboard, ca. 1908 [35mm slide]
Paiute Indian Girl [Bessie] with Doll in Cradleboard, circa 1908,
Winnemucca, Nevada.
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Sarah Winnemucca, whose Paiute2 Indian name was Thocmetony (Shell Flower), died at her sister’s home in Henry’s Lake, Nevada, on October 14, 1891. Winnemucca was the first Native American woman known to secure a copyright and to publish in the English language. Her book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, is an autobiographical account of her people’s experiences during their first forty years of contact with white explorers and settlers.

Born “somewhere near 1844” in western Nevada, Sarah Winnemucca was the daughter of Chief Winnemucca and Tuboitonie of the Northern Paiute people. Her grandfather, Chief Truckee, guided John C. Frémont during his 1843-45 exploration of the Great Basin and California. Friendships formed by her grandfather provided the opportunity for Sarah and her younger sister to be educated in the household of Colonel William Ormsby, first at Genoa, Nevada, and then in Carson City.

Sarah Winnemucca continued her education on her own, and soon became one of only a few Paiutes in Nevada able to read, write, and speak English. She became a translator for the U.S. Army and, later, for government agents at the Malheur Reservation in Oregon, designated a reservation for the Northern Paiutes through a series of executive orders issued by President U. S. Grant. Later she served in this same capacity at the Yakama Reservation. Winnemucca’s role as translator put her in a difficult position with both her tribe and her employers: with her tribe for conveying what too often proved to be lies and false promises, and with her employers for continually drawing attention to the plight of her people. As a woman caught in the middle, she became a controversial figure both within and beyond her immediate communities. Several failed marriages and a quick temper provided ammunition for her detractors as well.

Paiute Indian Woman with Papoose [35mm slide]
Paiute Indian Woman with Papoose.
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Paiute Indian Girls, ca. 1914
Paiute Indian Girls, circa 1914
Paradise Valley, Nevada
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Following the 1878 Bannock War, in which some members of the Northern Paiutes participated against the U.S. government, the tribe was forced to march from Malheur to the Yakama reservation in Washington Territory. There they endured great deprivation. Sarah Winnemucca began to lecture on the plight of her people, traveling across California and Nevada and speaking to white audiences. During the winter of 1879-80, she and her father, Chief Winnemucca, traveled to Washington, D.C., where they met with President Rutheford B. Hayes and gained permission from Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz for the Paiutes to return to Malheur at their own expense. This promise, however, went unfulfilled for years.

While lecturing in San Francisco, Winnemucca met and married Lewis H. Hopkins, an Indian Department employee. In 1883, the couple traveled East where Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins delivered nearly three hundred lectures on the plight of her people. In Boston, sisters Elizabeth Peabody, a leader in kindergarten education, and Mary Peabody Mann, widow of educator Horace Mann, together promoted her speaking career. The latter helped her assemble her lecture materials into a book. Winnemucca’s husband supported his wife’s efforts by gathering material for the book at the Library of Congress and joining her on lecture platforms. However, his tuberculosis treatments, combined with a gambling addiction, left her with little financial reward for her efforts. The couple separated for a time.

After returning to Nevada, Winnemucca built a school for Indian children near Lovelock, designed to promote the Paiute language and culture. Her Peabody Indian School operated briefly, until the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887 required Indian children to attend English-speaking boarding schools. Despite a bequest from Mary Peabody Mann and efforts to turn the school into a technical training center, Winnemucca’s funds were depleted by the time of her husband’s death in 1887. By now sick with tuberculosis herself, she spent the last four years of her life retired from public activity.

1. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, (printed for the author; Boston: For sale by Cupples, Upham & Co.; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York; and by the author: 1883), 243-244. (Return to text)

2. The name of Sarah Winnemucca’s tribe has had a number of different spellings over time including: Pi-Ute, Piute, Pahute, and the currently accepted Paiute. Likewise, the names Yakama and Yakima both refer to the same tribe or reservation. (Return to text)

William Penn and His Holy Experiment

Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst; and for which God will certainly most strictly reckon with us, when Time shall be no more.William Penn, Some Fruits of Solitude, 1693.

William Penn
William Penn (age 22), 1666,
Oil on canvas,
Eighteenth-century copy of a seventeenth-century portrait, possibly by Sir Peter Lely,
Historical Society of Pennsylvania
I. America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2,
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

William Penn, English religious and social reformer and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania, was born on October 14, 1644, in London. After suffering persecution in England for his adopted Quaker faith, Penn would establish freedom of worship for all inhabitants of his North American colony. Pennsylvania, while predominantly Quaker, soon became a haven for minority religious sects from across Europe, as well as the most culturally diverse of the thirteen original colonies.

Born the privileged only son of Admiral Sir William Penn, a landed gentleman, the younger William Penn was, at an early age, greatly affected by the preaching of Quaker itinerant minister Thomas Loe. At the age of eighteen, in 1662, Penn was expelled from Christ Church College, Oxford for nonconformity. Sent on a grand tour of Europe by his father, he completed his schooling in France before returning to London to study law briefly at Lincoln’s Inn. Penn soon entered into the management of his father’s affairs, which brought him into contact with the Restoration court of King Charles II. These duties also took him to Ireland, to settle family land claims there.

By the time that he returned from Ireland in 1667, and to the shock of his family, William Penn had joined the radical Religious Society of Friends. At that time, Friends—commonly called Quakers—were subjected to persecution by the government due to their unconventional religious views. Quaker beliefs, which stressed the presence of the Inward Light, or Spirit of God within each person, implied a level of personal equality that was seen as a threat to both church and civil authority. Penn soon became a spokesman among the Quakers, and was jailed four times for advancing his dissenting beliefs. His No Cross, No Crown, written in 1669 while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London for blasphemy, condemns the worldly excesses of Restoration England, urging instead the rejection of personal vanities along with Quakerism’s message of larger social reform.

Upon the death of his father in 1670, William Penn inherited title to the family estates in England and Ireland and began to frequent, as had his father, the English court. There he established friendships with King Charles II and especially with his younger brother, the Duke of York (who later became James II). Both an idealist and a pragmatist, Penn used his political influence to campaign for religious toleration and other principles of liberal government associated with the emerging Whig party of his day. He also continued to preach and publish on behalf of the Society of Friends, producing dozens of books and pamphlets during the 1670s alone. In 1672, Penn married Gulielma Springett, a fellow Quaker; they had four children who survived infancy.

The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania in America
The Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania in America,
William Penn,
London: A. Sowles, 1682.
I. America as a Religious Refuge: The Seventeenth Century, Part 2,
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

A Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania in America
A Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania in America: Begun by Wil. Penn, Proprietary & Governour Thereof Anno 1681,
Thomas Holme, surveyor; Francis Lamb, engraver,
London: Sold by Rob. Greene at the Rose & Crowne in Budg. Row and by Iohn Thornton at the Platt in the Minories,
ca. 1705.
Map Collections

Seeing limited prospects for religious toleration or political reform at home in England, Penn directed his energies toward America. Having recently helped to fund the Quaker colonization effort of West New Jersey, in 1681 Penn obtained a large grant of land from King Charles II in payment of a debt owed his father. This land grant would become Pennsylvania. On August 24 the following year, Penn further acquired the “three lower counties”, which later became Delaware.

As sole proprietor, Penn established the Province of Pennsylvania (meaning “Penn’s Woods” and named for his father) as a “holy experiment”—intended for Quakers but open to everyone. Published in 1682, Penn’s Frame of the Government of the Province of Pennsilvania in America provided that all believers in “One Almighty and Eternal God…shall in no wayes be molested or prejudiced for their Religious Perswasion or Practice in matters of Faith and Worship.” Together with Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, which granted significant rights of governance to an elected legislature, this document is an important precedent for the shaping of the U.S. Constitution decades later.

Penn also worked hard to attract settlers and sold land at the reasonable rate of £100 for 5,000 acres—partly to smooth out his own difficult personal finances. As an added incentive, purchasers of the first 500,000 acres received bonus lots of land in Penn’s planned capital city, the future Philadelphia. A Brief Account of the Province of Pennsilvania in America of 1682 was one of nine promotional tracts published by Penn to advertise the virtues of his colony. Some of these tracts were translated into Dutch and German to draw potential migrants from Northern Europe, where Penn had strong ties from his journeys as an itinerant preacher. With plenty of fertile land and guaranteed freedom of worship, Penn’s colony grew rapidly, attracting settlers of multiple religious denominations from Great Britain and Europe.

By the time that William Penn made his first visit to Pennsylvania, arriving aboard the ship Welcome in October 1682, Philadelphia (meaning “City of Brotherly Love”) was already under construction in accordance with his plan. Mindful of London’s devastating fires and epidemics, Penn instead envisioned “a green country town, which will never be burnt and always be wholesome.”  Philadelphia became the first gridded city in America, featuring parallel streets and blocks of uniform dimension stretching for a mile between two rivers. By the time of the American Revolution, Philadelphia had become the largest city in North America, serving as site of the Continental Congress, and briefly as the U.S. capital before the founding of Washington, D.C.

Map of Philadelphia Map of Philadelphia detail
A Map of Philadelphia and Parts Adjacent: With a Perspective View of the State-House and detail,
N. Scull and G. Heap; L. Hebert sculpt.,
Philadelphia, 1752.
Map Collections

Willam Penn's March
Willam Penn’s March,
Aug. Loumey,
Philadelphia: Lee & Walker, 1882.
Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1820-1860 & 1870-1885

Among his accomplishments in governance, Penn is remembered for interacting peacefully with the Lenni Lenape (or Delaware) Indians; there were no armed conflicts between Pennsylvania and native tribes until shortly before the outbreak of the French & Indian War. The iconic image of William Penn signing a treaty with the Indians, first depicted by painter Benjamin West in 1771, has entered historical imagination through borrowings in popular art and in the acclaimed folk art paintings of Quaker Edward Hicks. With the 1894 erection of William Penn’s statue on the tower of Philadelphia’s City Hall, Penn’s own image also became an enduring icon of Pennsylvania history.

Forced to return to England in 1684 to defend the terms of Pennsylvania’s charter, Penn spent less than two full years in residence in his new colony. The rise of King James II, and especially his subsequent fall from power, caused Penn to suffer further political complications—including the removal of Pennsylvania from his control for several years. Still, Penn continued his writing on behalf of Quakerism, authoring such works as Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims Relating to the Conduct of Human Life (1693), An Essay Towards the Present and Future Peace of Europe (1693), and A Brief Account of the Rise and Progress of the People Called Quakers (1694).

Following the death of his first wife, Penn married Hannah Callowhill in 1696; they had seven surviving children. Three years later, she accompanied him when he returned to Pennsylvania for his second two-year visit.

William Penn’s final years did not go well. Some of the officials who he appointed turned against him. Pennsylvania also never provided the financial relief that Penn had hoped for, and, due to the dishonesty of his principal agent Philip Ford, he even spent time in debtor’s prison. Following a paralytic stroke that left him memory-impaired for his last six years of life, William Penn died in 1718. His sons, who did not follow him into Quakerism, continued as Pennsylvania’s proprietors until the time of the American Revolution. Yet, despite his life’s late frustrations, William Penn is remembered both as an inspiration to generations of Quakers, and as a forward-thinking colonial founder who helped lay the groundwork for some of the best elements of America’s emerging cultural and political character.

Learn more about religion in early America, and Quakers and Quakerism in American history:

Today in History – October 14-External Links

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Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia