All I Know About Winnemucca

Everybody knows the Johnny Cash song about Winnemucca, but I rode into town looking for gas, hot off Interstate 80. I'd just filled up and was drinking bottled water with Rose at an outdoor table overlooking the campers and cars clogging around the pumps. Young miss big swinging hips sways on past, and puts something in through the open window of her old crappy car, then sits down at our table with a bottle of iced tea. Nice cleavage. Sweaty. Rose gets up and walks away. "Is it gonna rain?" I ask. There were clouds, there were. And she proceeds to tell me how she hopes not, because she's moving to Carson City, and she's lived all her life in Winnemucca. And she's not gonna drive in Carson City, (she'll make her boyfriend do it), because of the traffic. The Boyfriend has family there, but "we're not gonna live together," oh no. And her daddy has a lot of junk cars on the property, and that embarrasses her, and she's gonna get a new job but probably still somewhere in Nevada. And she's never been to the ocean, but last week her and her boyfriend went to Lake Tahoe, the first time she's ever been to the beach, but she didn't have a bathing suit, and didn't go in the water. And a lot of the local folks think she has a Tennessee accent (she didn't), and on her class trip, she went to Washington, D.C., and the tour guide mispronounced the name of her town. And it makes her proud that Johnny Cash mentions Winnemucca in a song. And she's getting her GED and is going to be a nurse. And the swells of her cleavage heaved moist in the desert heat. Winnemucca.

The town was named for Chief Winnemucca of the local Northern Paiute tribe. Winnemucca, translated, means "the giver." The chief's daughter, Sarah Winnemucca, was an advocate for education and fair treatment of the Paiute and Shoshone tribes in the area. Their family all learned to speak English, and Sarah worked as an interpreter, scout and messenger for the United States Army during the Bannock War of 1878. In 1883, Sarah Winnemucca published the first autobiography written by a Native American woman,

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