In 1883 Sarah Winnemucca sat writing at a rapid pace in the Boston home of her friend and supporter, the New England reformer Elizabeth Peabody. The book in progress would not be Sarah's first publication. A letter she wrote in 1870 to inform the Nevada Superintendent of Indian Affairs about the condition of her tribe, the Paiutes, in northwestern Nevada, was subsequently reprinted in several newspapers, in Harper's magazine, and in A Century of Dishonor, Helen Hunt Jackson's 1881 polemic.