8

“There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away”

“I plainly saw that grief, or want of food, or both, were slowly and inch by inch, enfeebling and wasting away Mary Ann.” | OLIVE OATMAN

The Mohaves were famously ferocious warriors, but their conflicts were often instigated by war leaders who steamrolled the pacifist majority of the tribe in their push to battle. They went to war for a variety of reasons: to exact revenge, to take prisoners, to protect their territory, but most often to enhance their nationalistic and spiritual identities, which were intertwined. Because they were secure in their homeland, thousands strong, with their material needs met, they rarely raided or fought for economic reasons. More interested in trophy scalps and captives than plunder, they approached war like a national sport.

Mohave warriors or kwanamis (brave men), like doctors, scalpers, shamans, and spies, were born, not trained; they drew their power from mythological dreams that began in childhood, telling them how to both fight and protect themselves in battle. Unlike tribal headmen, whose status was hereditary — and seemingly inferior to that of warriors — kwanamis who reported such dreams were tested and cultivated from the age of four or five and trained for warfare between eight and ten. If they showed fortitude and stoicism, they were given a black stripe across their faces and a pair of feathers for their hair and sent to battle in their late teens. Young kwanamis were “keyed up” like racehorses, as one Mohave put it, champing at the bit and obsessed with killing, even though war parties only went out once or twice a year.¹

The Mohaves were friendly with the Yavapais and the Quechans; enemies of the Pimas, the Maricopas, and the Cocopas; and merely tolerant of the Chemehuevis, who in the 1830s had moved into the valley below them on the western side of the river — an area the Mohaves yielded to them because they believed departed spirits lived there, making it dangerous. In the spring of 1854, when the Quechans invited the Mohaves on a retaliatory expedition against the Cocopas, the Mohaves’ attitude toward war took a new turn. Irataba, the young kwanami who had accompanied Whipple out of the valley a few months earlier, was becoming a pacifist. He knew the army at Fort Yuma was watching them, like the Quechans, and that if they continued their intertribal warfare, soldiers would be sent to their valley to punish them. War with a foe bearing rifles and riding horses was something to reconsider.

Irataba initially resisted the Quechan invitation, saying that although he’d always encouraged his people to fight, he was “quitting.” He told his people, “There are four or five of you who are brave and always like fighting; but there is no use in that. … Follow what the whites tell you.” This was the first of many hugely consequential conciliatory gestures Irataba made toward the white man for the sake of survival. For the moment, however, he relented, privileging his loyalty to his friend, the Quechan leader Pascual (a Spanish rendering of Paskwa-ole), over his fear of white intervention. “I do not wish to fight; it is bad,” he told Pascual, a famous warrior whose scarred body was a monument to his military legacy. “But you wanted me and sent for me.”²

The Mohave women roundly opposed the attack. “Those of them who had husbands and brothers enlisted in the expedition,” wrote Olive, “tried every expedient in their power to dissuade them from it. They accused them of folly and a mere lust of war, and prayed them not thus to expose their own lives and the lives of their dependent ones.” They had heard that the Cocopas had allied with surrounding tribes, and they feared defeat. “But go they would,” Olive reflected, “and on the day of their departure there was a convocation of nearly the whole tribe, and it was a time of wild, savage excitement and deep mourning.”³

True to tradition, the women danced around scalps collected in previous battles and wept as the warriors departed. About sixty soldiers left the valley carrying gourd canteens strung with willow fiber, wooden bows nearly as tall as the men themselves, and long wooden clubs carved from mesquite and painted black and red — good for smashing the skulls of enemies felled by arrows. They wore only breechcloths and sandals, their bodies painted red, black, and white, their faces masked in black, their long hair, bound and wrapped, doused in red. They took with them the few well-fed, highly prized horses they owned, trained specifically for battle.

Weeks later they returned, triumphant, having killed three Cocopas and taken two sisters prisoner. The Mohaves had lost no men. Though Olive never wrote about it, she and Mary Ann must have been fascinated to see how these captive sisters were treated when they were adopted for eventual marriage into the tribe through rituals the Oatmans never — at least by Olive’s account — experienced. The entire tribe came together to sing in the morning, eat at noon, and in the afternoon dance shoulder-to-shoulder in a revolving circle, after which the prisoners were brought out and walked to the river. A kohota rubbed them with soaproot and arrowweed to purify the captives and protect the Mohaves from any illness they carried, led them to the water, and jumped in with them, followed by the rest of the tribe. “Perhaps these young women will bear children” the kohota announced. “These children will grow up half Mohave and half Cocopa, and because they belong to both tribes, there may be no more fighting.”⁴ One sister was given as a wife to an old man and subsequently had two children; the other was not married, and a few years later, when relations between the Mohaves and the Cocopas settled, she was returned.

By now, Olive and Mary Ann were clearly accustomed to Mohave social life; the Mohaves’ typical victory party involved both scalp-dancing and, like the harvest celebration, elder-approved socializing and sex. At the celebratory feast, the men sang, and women, painted like warriors, addressed the trophy scalps, which were tied to poles, insulting them and narrating the battles in which the enemies had lost their lives — and their scalps. They also teased and shamed any healthy young men who had stayed home during the battle. The kohota gave a speech, encouraging the young people to find partners and multiply. These celebrations often inspired new marriages, tying the ritual of war to the regeneration of the tribe.

The Oatmans soon learned that dreaming was not just the inspiration for war, but served as the mythic foundation of Mohave consciousness. Dreams began in the womb and were caused by the spirit wandering around, having real experiences, while the body was inert. They were not induced by fasting or hallucinogens but rather came spontaneously, in two forms: those that conferred special powers or identity — bravery, leadership, musical talent, running ability, or homosexuality, for example — and everyday dreams. Some people got their dreams from Matavilya, the primary spirit, who was born of the union of earth and sky, or his brother Mastamho, who succeeded him, and created the river and the mountains along it.

Good luck and common knowledge came in dreams, and because information was said to be dreamed, not learned, elderly Mohaves could no longer distinguish between dreamed and tangible experiences. Important dreams were told or sung ceremonially and were open to interpretation, for the purpose of helping listeners individually and for clarifying the future. The ethnographer William J. Wallace theorized that some shared Mohave dream content was induced through suggestion: the imagery and myths that were constantly emphasized during the daytime naturally crept into the Mohaves’ night dreams.⁵ Conversely, special powers were sometimes attributed retroactively to dreams: a boy who proved to have warrior potential was suspected of having dreamed of it when he was younger. Faked dreams were uncommon because people feared that failed powers would expose the deceit.

Since Olive and Mary Ann’s arrival, dreams had served the Mohaves well: the tribe had been on a roll, from the bountiful harvests of 1851–53 to the productive exchange with Whipple in early 1854, and later the same year, the triumph of war with the Cocopas. Now, things were about to change — for the girls and for the Mohaves. The harvest of 1855 was bad — fatally so. After a spring drought prevented the banks of the river from overflowing, the crops came up late and the yield was paltry. Aespaneo had given the girls seeds and a thirty-foot-square garden plot, where in previous years they had planted wheat, corn, and melon. “It brought to our minds the extended grain fields that waved about our cottage in Illinois,” wrote Olive, along with “the May mornings, when we had gone forth to the plow-fields and followed barefooted in the new-turned furrow.” Their labor of love had now turned to tough, necessary work, but the garden had failed. Mesquite mush, ground in a stone pestle, was becoming the tribe’s only food, and even that was giving out. By the fall, food was being rationed, and eleven-year-old Mary Ann was faltering. “I plainly saw that grief, or want of food, or both, were slowly and inch by inch, enfeebling and wasting [her] away,” wrote Olive.⁶

The Mohaves decided to travel in search of a mesquitelike bush that grew to thirty feet and yielded tasty berries with an orange flavor.⁷ Mary Ann started out with Olive on the three-day journey, but was too weak to continue and turned back. The party found the trees and spent two days filling their baskets, but lost their way on their return to their temporary camp one day and wandered around looking for it through the night. People were becoming sick from eating the berries; three died. Their bodies were cremated, their baskets of berries collected, and the party “went howling through the woods in the most dismal manner,” according to Olive. When they found their camp the next day, they realized they’d been near it all along. They gathered their belongings and returned to the village.

Back in the valley, Olive found Mary Ann in worse shape than when she had left her. The berries helped, but only temporarily. She spent days searching for blackbird eggs that would give her sister protein; roots took too long to collect and would mean leaving her alone overnight. Soon the girls, along with the rest of the tribe, were going whole days without food, except when Topeka and Aespaneo scraped something up for them. “Had it not been for the wife and daughter of the chief, we could have obtained nothing,” wrote Olive. “They seemed really to feel for us, and I have no doubt would have done more if in their power.”

People — mostly children — were dying. The wailing of mourning rituals filled the night, followed by cremation ceremonies, which for adults included torching the house of the dead along with his or her belongings. Soon Mary Ann was talking about death: she imagined rejoining her parents and sang hymns the family had sung together. “Don’t grieve for me,” she told her sister. “I have been a care to you all the while. I don’t like to leave you all alone, but God is with you.”⁸

She asked Olive to sing her favorite hymn with her, which began, “There is a happy land, far, far away,” and told her sister she was willing to die.⁹ But what Olive described merely as Mary Ann’s weakness during this period must have been much more ghastly: people dying of starvation experience hair loss, bloating, and hypothermia, appear aged and withered, and become frantic for food before succumbing to listlessness and depression. Olive said her own cravings were already uncontrollable and observed that others in the tribe had become “reckless and quarrelsome” in their desperation. In her advanced state of malnutrition, Mary Ann could not have, as Olive put it, “s[u]nk away without much pain, and all the time happy.”

As Mary Ann slid toward oblivion over the next two days, Aespaneo realized the child was beyond saving. The Mohave mourning ritual occurred before and during, as well as after death, and Aespaneo began her lament for the child. She looked into Mary Ann’s face, said Olive, “and wept from the heart and aloud. I never saw a parent seem to feel more keenly over a dying child. She sobbed, she moaned, she howled. And thus bending over and weeping she stood the whole night.” Mary Ann died the next day, with Aespaneo and Olive at her side.

Olive wailed like a Mohave over her sister as Aespaneo and Topeka comforted her. When Espaniole prepared to cremate Mary Ann’s body, following Mohave custom, instead of burying it as Olive wanted, Olive wandered off to cry privately. Aespaneo later came to her to say that she had argued Olive’s case with her husband, who had granted her wish. He gave her two blankets in which to wrap the body and sent two men to dig a grave wherever she wanted it. Olive chose the plot where she and Mary Ann had gardened together. “In this,” she said, “they dug a grave about five feet deep, and into it they gently lowered the remains of my last, my only sister, and closed her last resting-place with the sand.”

Olive was overcome not just with the heartbreak of losing Mary Ann but also with a more concrete problem: she, too, was starving. She had a burning sensation in her stomach, and she was so weak she could barely walk. “When the excitement of that hour passed, with it seemed to pass my energy and ambition. … I found but little strength from the scant rations dealt out to me. I was rapidly drooping, and becoming more and more anxious to shut my eyes to all about me, and sink to a sweet, untroubled sleep beneath that green carpeted valley. This was the only time in which, without any reserve, I really longed to die.”

Aespaneo saved her life. Having dug up a stash of cornmeal she had buried, intending to parcel it out until spring, she ground and cooked a gruel and presented it to Olive in a hollow stone. When she had eaten it, Aespaneo brought her more. “I felt a new life and strength given me by this morsel,” wrote Olive. “She had the discretion to deny the unnatural cravings that had been kindled by the small quantity she brought first, and dealt a little at a time, until within three days I gained a vigor and cheerfulness I had not felt for weeks.” Aespaneo nurtured the girl secretly, because, as Olive put it, “some of her own kin were in a starving condition.”¹⁰ She may have realized that she had waited too long to save Mary Ann and was now scrambling to help Olive, or she had recognized from the start that Mary Ann, the younger and more delicate sister, could not be saved.

From there, Olive was able to regain her strength and find her own food. She continued tilling her garden, which Aespaneo watched for her when she went out gathering roots; her Mohave mother also found her a granary in which to store her harvest and made Espaniole promise that it would be protected. Mary Ann’s death had left Olive without family, but it had also brought the goodness of her Mohave family into bold relief. Her last tie to the white world now severed, she was a Mohave.

“I saw but little reason to expect anything else than the spending of my years among them,” wrote Olive, “and I had no anxiety that they should be many. … There were some few for whom I began to feel a degree of attachment.” She came to love the valley, and now “time seemed to take a more rapid flight; I hardly could wake up to the reality of so long a captivity among savages, and really imagined myself happy for short periods.”¹¹