The Sagebrush School was a loosely connected group of writers in the 19th century American West - particularly Nevada - who used humor, satire, and wild stories layered with just enough truth to depict frontier life in and around the Nevada mining camps. It was most active from the 1860s through the 1880s, coinciding with the height of the mining booms in the Great Basin region.

Key features of the writers included in the Sagebrush School were wit and humor, often irreverent and comical, they poked fun at politics, politicians, social customs, and life in the boomtowns. They emphasized mining camp culture through regional language and the environment of the Nevada frontier. They relied on parody, exaggeration, and hyperbole, told tall tales, and created absurdist characters. They captured the dusty, arduous experiences of the mining camps and the isolation of Western settlements. The newspapers that sprouted up across Nevada with these writers at their heads, also were not afraid to confront social injustices and corruption- they balanced their mocking humor with hard hitting, whistleblowing. 

The Sagebrush School was not a formalized literary movement, but it played a crucial role in developing Western American literature. The members gave the American West its own distinct voice, storytelling style, and literary tradition. 

The name for this wily group of writers was coined by Ella Sterling Mighels, "Sagebrush school? Why not? Nothing in all our Western literature so distinctly savors the soil as the characteristic books written by the men of Nevada and that interior part of the State where the sagebrush grows."

Mighels, Ella Sterling (1893). The Story of the Files: A Review of California Writers and Literature. World's Fair Commission of California. p.102.

Sarah Winnemucca is going to be included in this collection of writers, not necessarily because she was a member of the Sagebrush School but because she she was also active at this very time. She contributed a great deal to the very same newspapers that these writers worked for and owned and was often the subject of their articles. You will find her name in issues of the Gold Hill News, the Virginia Daily Union, the Humboldt Register, the Silver State, the Nevada State Journal, the Daily Appeal, the Nevada Tribune, the Daily Territorial Enterprise, the Morning Appeal, and many more throughout Nevada and across the United States.