"Like a Roaring Lion": The Overland Trail as a Sonic Conquest

Abstract

In the opening paragraph o? Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), the Paiute leader Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins compared the coming of the whites into her homeland to lion, yes, ... a A small child when Euro-Americans first invaded her people's land near present-day Humboldt Lake in Nevada in the 1840s, Hopkins never forgot the onslaught. In her narrative and on-stage presentations to north eastern reformers during the mid-1880s, Hopkins detailed the environmental and social devastation wrought by Euro-American conquerors, including the depletion of game, homicides, sexual assaults, and other physical violence. Yet her opening observation sug gests that indigenous peoples also experienced invasion as a sonic conquest. The phrase roaring lion alludes not only to the aural volume of conquest but also to the biblical passage that describes the devil as a lion. Mary Peabody Mann, the book's edi tor and a leading Christian reformer, may even have selected the phrase herself to evoke the sinfulness of the Euro-American invasion. Although arguably none of the Euro American emigrants on the Overland Trail, commonly referred to as overlanders, who traveled through the Paiutes' land would have described their trek or America's expan sion as diabolical, many did liken their invasion to a roar. In their diaries, journals, and reminiscences, overlanders speculated about the aural impact of their wagon trains on the indigenous peoples and animals of the western wilderness; they portrayed their sounds as having the power to subdue the savage wilds and help transform the West into American territory.1