EPILOGUE

Oatman’s Literary Half-Life

To be American is to be unfinished. And although that state is powerful and creative, it carries with it nightmares all its own. | PHILIP J. DELORIA, Playing Indian

Olive’s legacy, like her Mohave ethnicity, would be more notional than genealogical. She had slipped into another skin and passed as a Mohave, then she peeled away her Indian self and resumed her whiteness, leaving no genetic trace in either realm.¹ Still, a fertile afterlife awaited her: she would be reborn, again and again — in newspaper articles, short stories, and novels — well into the twenty-first century.

In the decades after Oatman’s death, a series of yarn-spinners worked themselves into her legend, claiming to have saved her, or at least to have known her. The most bizarre example involved a wealthy Mohave in Arizona named John Oatman, who said he was Olive’s grandson. His story hit the papers when his wife sued him for divorce in 1922, alleging that he ate “dog dinners,” frightened her by painting himself with phosphorous and doing ghost dances, and carried on with an albino Yavapai. He had reportedly lost an eye in an explosion in a gold mine, along with part of his scalp and lower jaw. He thus wore a wig and dentures, and he had taken to removing his glass eye and “scalping” himself to scare the children of the tribe. By comparison, his countercharges were hopelessly bland: he said his wife wore mud in her hair and cooked boring meals.²

On slow news days, newspaper editors pulled the Oatman drama out of storage and ran it as a novelty item, often in the Southwest, sometimes in multiple parts. The first such story appeared in the Syracuse Herald in 1913 with a tenuous tie-in to the Oatmans’ relatives in the area; as recently as 2007 an Oatman article ran in the San Pedro Valley News Sun — for no reason at all. By 1909 the Stratton book was back in print and has been published continually ever since, targeting popular audiences and, in recent decades, scholarly, romance, and young readers.³ Since the 1970s, feminist academics have revisited the story in their explorations of women-in-captivity literature and examinations of the female body in nineteenth-century writing.

But when it was fictionalized, as it was within fifteen years after the Stratton book was published, the Oatman experience acquired rich new subtexts, revealing as much about the historical mindset of its appropriators as the dramatic plight of the captive. In 1872 the Baja California native Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton used Oatman as the basis for Lola Medina, the heroine of her satirical novel, Who Would Have Thought It?⁴ Ruiz de Burton, a Mexican of European descent, was a newspaper correspondent living in San Francisco when the Oatman ransom story broke in 1856. Like Olive, Lola is a white Indian captive traded from the Apaches to the Mohaves and recovered near the Gila and the Colorado rivers by a man who takes her — and the riches her mother left her before she died — to live in New England with his family.

Lola, too, carries the physical imprint of her tribe back to “civilization.” Because the Mohaves have dyed her skin to make her blend in, her foster mother, Jemima Norval, assumes the girl is black and tells her to sleep with the servants. “Drop her hand Mattie!” Jemima exclaims when she sees her daughter examining the girl’s white palm. “You don’t know what disease she might have!” Referencing a spate of sex scandals involving ministers in the 1860s and 1870s and culminating in the indictment of Henry Ward Beecher, the novel even features a smooth-talking, Strattonesque clergyman who has an eye on Lola’s inheritance — and her virginity.⁵ The novel ingeniously knits together themes of class, race, religion, and gender, with a final flourish: written during feminism’s first wave (and published the year the first woman, Victoria Woodhull, ran for president), it satirizes the sentimental novel. Dr. Norval, Lola’s rescuer, tells his wife that Lola “is only ten years old, but her history is already more romantic than that of half of the heroines of your trashy novels.”⁶

Set during the Civil War, Who Would Have Thought It? ridicules the racist double standard of abolitionist Northerners, exposes the gold rush venality that made a mockery of Puritan values (Lola’s new family happily accepts her fortune but not her ethnicity), and dramatizes the racial dualism — white against not — that flourished after the Mexican-American War. When one abolitionist character is told that California “natives” are of Spanish descent, and should not be confused with “wild” Indians, she responds, “To me they are all alike — Indians, Mexicans, or Californians — they are all horrid. But …as soon as we take their lands from them they will never be heard of anymore, and then the Americans, with God’s help, will have all the land that was righteously acquired through a just war.”⁷ Like Royal Stratton, she sees no disconnect between her abolitionist views and her intolerance of Southwesterners.

Lola’s captivity and blurred ethnicity, like Oatman’s, is the result of American expansionism, specifically in Mexico, where each was captured. And for each girl, whiteness is its own reward: only after Lola’s European ancestry is revealed can she reclaim her Anglo status and, by book’s end, marry her foster brother, a colonel in the Union army. But unlike Oatman’s ethnicity, permanently tainted because of both her tattoo and her veiled sexual history, Lola’s is merely indeterminate, mirroring the muddled status of Southwestern Mexicans who became U.S. citizens after the war.

When the Oatman story was adapted for the popular Western television series Death Valley Days during the cold war–civil rights era of the mid-1960s, it was no longer a parable of shifting borders and confused identity, but rather one of segregation, aired the year after the 1964 Civil Rights Act was passed. With the frontier tamed, whatever threat Western “natives” may have posed to whites had expired, and the broader perils of race mixing had replaced it. Spooning a hefty dollop of geopolitical self-satisfaction onto a thin slice of Western lore, the 1965 script oozes machismo and white superiority. The plot is a prefeminist exercise in family values, where the social order hinges on racial separatism, which the Mohaves threaten to disturb. Since this Oatman encore features a sexually pristine and culturally redeemable heroine (here, Olive’s only meaningful relationship is with her Mohave father), her tattoo — the central symbol of her cultural violation — disappears from the narrative.

Titled “The Lawless Have Laws,” the adaptation was part of the Death Valley Days series hosted, appropriately enough, by Ronald Reagan, who also played Martin Burke, the colonel who first received Olive at Fort Yuma, reimagined here as her rescuer. In the introduction, Reagan selects and leafs through a book (the script specifies that it is Stratton’s), and addresses the viewer: “There’s a town on the Arizona side of the Colorado River, near Lake Mead, called Oatman. Quite possibly you never heard of it. But back in the 1850s, Oatman was a name that sent a chill of horror across the still-wild West.” Calling it “one of the strangest dramas in western history,” Reagan summarizes the massacre with general accuracy, but the show itself culminates in a purely fictional rescue operation.⁸ And though the white characters go by their real names (Lorenzo’s is inexplicably spelled “Loranzo”), the Mohave characters are fabricated.

The episode opens with Burke and Loranzo riding into Death Valley to save Olive, played by Shary Marshall, a TV actress who had appeared on Gunsmoke, The Fugitive, and The Untouchables. Loranzo plays an angry and buffoonish sissy to Burke’s “desert toughened” commander, who diminishes him at every turn. (“I find it real hard to shed tears for you, son, considering what your sister’s put up with,” Burke scoffs when Loranzo complains about the desert heat.⁹) When the two men meet an elder named Nakoda in Mohave country, Burke tries to negotiate for the blue-eyed captive, but the old man refuses to acknowledge her existence. “What’s the problem, Chief?” Burke taunts him. “If you’re telling the truth, and she’s not here, you’ve got nothing to lose. … If she is, [then] it’s a choice between letting her go, and having your people hunted and killed like the Apaches.”¹⁰

In an ensuing scuffle, the Mohaves take the upper hand, tying the two white men to posts while Olive and Nakoda tenderly confirm their bond: having no wife or child, Nakoda had bought Olive as a slave five years earlier and raised her as his daughter, but since he isn’t her biological father, he wants to let her go. “You’ve given me a father’s love,” she says. “Until I knew you, I thought all Indians were lawless savages. … You’ve taught me that isn’t true. You live by a law you’d break, for me.”¹¹

The exchange offers the show’s only real moment of cultural slippage: in playing her love for the Mohave father she knows against her loyalty to the white brother she doesn’t, Olive acknowledges that tribal kinship could trump blood ties. But the prospect vanishes when a rogue warrior named Chibichah vows to kill the captive men, buy Olive, and take her away. She agrees to marry him in order to spare Loranzo and Burke, in short, opting to become an involuntary Mohave (who will be violated) to save her blood brother. As the “sadistic” Chibichah swings her up onto his horse, Nakoda trains a gun on him, exposes Olive’s ploy, then frees her. “Tell your people,” he tells Burke, “there is law for the Indians, too. … Give love. … Love is given.”¹² In an Irataba-like flourish, he also instructs his own people not to fight the whites before Burke and Loranzo walk the freed captive “home.”

Though “The Lawless Have Laws” grants the Mohaves a modicum of integrity through Nakoda, its segregationist subtext undermines its surface tolerance. Unlike Ruiz de Burton’s Indians and Mexicans of the nineteenth century, the racial Others in this context are permitted their difference and even their dignity by whites — as long as they keep to themselves. The episode touches on and dispenses with the postsegregationist anxiety that was mined with more nuance and ambivalence in John Ford’s film The Searchers, released in 1956 and set in the Southwest in roughly the same period. The Searchers also follows a captive-rescue plotline, but admits the inevitability of race mixing, two years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, as Barbara Mortimer explains in Hollywood’s Frontier Captives. In Ford’s hands, the white captive (played by Natalie Wood) resists return. An assortment of adoptive relationships are characterized as more enduring than blood ties, and the male lead (John Wayne) is portrayed as a relic of a bygone era who vacillates between a desire to retrieve his white Comanche niece and his impulse to kill her for having crossed over.¹³ Where The Searchers probes the tensions of evolving race relations, “The Lawless Have Laws” stubbornly denies them.

When Oatman was reborn in the postfeminist 1980s, Elmore Leonard seized on the one glaring but perpetually sublimated theme of her ordeal — her sexuality, and for the first time, she was unabashedly eroticized. In his 1982 short story, “The Tonto Woman,” Leonard pulls her out of the background, where she had hovered in previous adaptations, gives her a strong — sometimes angry — voice, and makes her desirable because of her tattoo. (Olive’s tattooed face even appears on the cover of his 1998 collection, The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories.) Leonard modified the details of her history by marrying her off before her abduction, giving her twelve (not five) years with the Indians (first with the Mohaves, then the Apaches) and making her husband a cold, rich rancher who forces her, on her return, to live alone in the desert instead of on his ranch with him. (“Unclean from living among the red niggers,” explains a local cattleman.) Held captive by a white man who won’t discuss her, much less touch her, Sarah Isham’s story begins here, when a Mexican horse thief named Ruben Vega watches her bathe, “bare to her gray skirt, her upper body pale white, glistening wet in the afternoon sunlight.”¹⁴

In this Oatman iteration, Sarah’s tattoo is a sexual magnet as well as a cultural touchstone whose meaning she subverts in the interest of her own self-definition: she asks the Mohaves to tattoo not just her chin, but also her cheeks. “I told them if you’re going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble,” she tells Vega, who immediately falls under her spell. A fellow outsider, he affirms her sexual power and individuality by touching the tattoos, and says, “You’re in there, aren’t you? Behind these little bars. They don’t seem like much. Not enough to hold you.”

Vega takes her into town and holds her hand in a restaurant, telling her he could look at her and touch her and love her for the rest of his life. “You’re the loveliest woman I ever met. And the strongest.” But his goal is to free her, not to take her. “Are you ready?” he asks. “I think the man coming is your husband.”

When Sarah’s husband approaches, itching for a fight, Vega invites him to sit down, adding wryly, “I’ll introduce you to your wife.” The couple wrangles over their stunted marriage, which Sarah threatens to abandon when he offers to move her into the house. Vega excuses himself to prepare for a trip south, telling her, “You’ll do alright, whatever you decide. Just keep in mind there’s no one else in the world like you.”¹⁵ Unlike the white men — historical and fictional — who rescue Oatman from Indian captivity and attempt to restore her to her former social station, Vega redeems Sarah’s self-worth, leaving her to choose where her freedom will take her.

Fifteen years after Leonard refracted Oatman through the prism of male desire, she reappeared as a romantic heroine in Elizabeth Grayson’s So Wide the Sky (1997), expressing her own yearnings in a compelling Western romance novel chock full of period detail, if bloated by bodice-ripper rhetoric. In an author’s note, Grayson explains that her protagonist, Cassie Morgan, was directly inspired by Oatman, whose photo she had seen in Time-Life’s Old West series. A Kiowa captive for nine years, Cassie is returned to the whites with a tattoo on her cheek — a circle with radiating lines — and marries her childhood sweetheart, now a cold and bigoted cavalry captain turned off by her free spirit and strong will, not to mention her skin art. By contrast, a handsome half-Indian scout named Hunter Jalbert identifies with her Otherness and wins her heart. Like Vega in “The Tonto Woman,” Hunter declares his love by touching the tattoo: “‘This makes you special. … It makes you beautiful. It makes you mine,’” he says, first caressing and then kissing the mark. Cassie, Grayson writes, “had finally found someone who saw her for herself.”¹⁶

By linking their heroines with minority lovers, both Leonard and Grayson acknowledge the racial implications of Oatman’s tattoo. Their white savage is an ethnic Other, thus — it takes one to know one — only a brown-skinned man (and even better, a hybrid such as Hunter) can really understand her and vice versa. When Hunter suggests that whites and Indians can find a way to live in harmony, Cassie startles him by asking, “Have the white and Indian parts inside you found a way to make their peace?”¹⁷ Though Cassie is validated by a man, as Oatman is in virtually every reworking of her story, she finally speaks for herself, something Stratton (for the most part) and Fairchild denied Olive. Leonard grants Sarah a more three-dimensional personality through a few deft and funny conversational exchanges, but Grayson lets Cassie luxuriate in cultural acceptance and sexual fulfillment, allowing her a relationship of equals in what amounts to a sentimental novel retrofitted for the ’90s.

So Wide the Sky stands on a historical continuum of books and stories about marked women who, beginning with Hester Prynne, redefine the symbols of their transgression. “Outlawed from society,” wrote Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter, Hester refused to discard the “A” that branded her as an adulterer because its meaning had changed. Like Olive’s and Cassie’s marks, “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.” Even the contemptuous townspeople ultimately accept the scarlet letter’s new symbolism: “They said it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.”¹⁸

Wendy Lawton’s Ransom’s Mark (2003), one of four children’s books published about Oatman in the past decade, also features a heroine who revises the meaning of her mark, this time as “a sign of God’s love and deliverance.” Lawton treats the Mohaves respectfully, portraying them as Oatman’s saviors (because they bought her from the hostile Yavapais), then theorizes the tattoo as a down payment on her Christian soul. The tattoo, she writes, “has become the ransom’s mark — the remembrance of the price that had been paid for her by the Mohave and their promise of protection.” But she also liked to think of it as “the remembrance of the ransom price Christ had paid for her with His own life and His promise of protection.”¹⁹ With a good squint, Lawton seems to say, you can see a cross in the hash marks on Oatman’s chin. The Mohaves didn’t save her — God did. In foregrounding the salvational aspect of the story, Lawton returns the captivity tale to its infancy, reprising its Puritan premise. As Vaughan and Clark explain in Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676–1724, “Captivity was God’s punishment, redemption was His mercy.”²⁰

Refigured variously as a disfranchised Mexican (Ruiz de Burton), a rehabilitated white Indian (Death Valley Days), a sexual creature shedding her chrysalis of repression (Leonard), an Indian lover (Grayson), and a saved soul (Lawton), Oatman has shape-shifted through three centuries, morphed by the cultural fantasies and geopolitical preoccupations of her interpreters. In literature as in life, she is always a lone woman trafficked among men and delivered back to the Anglos, though her redemption, significantly, no longer turns on her reabsorption into exclusively white romantic relationships. Topeka and Aespaneo are typically dismissed from the narratives, whose appeal seems to lie in the spectacle of Olive’s return to society and the conundrum of her emotional isolation within it, orphaned and maladjusted.

Indeed, unlike the best-known female captives, Oatman was not a mother struggling to protect or reunite her family (like Rowlandson, Dustan, and Wakefield) nor did she become a mother during her captivity (like Jemison and Parker). Try as her contemporaries did to confer maternal status on her through the suggestion that she left Mohave children behind, in the end she was a loner whose story embroidered the classic male American themes of frontier adventure and individual survival. And though Ruiz de Burton gave her a father to return to in Who Would Have Thought It? her twentieth-century incarnations center on her status as a white woman who is not only culturally but also emotionally unmoored. In these versions, she is a fascinating case study in feminine self-reliance.

Still, the limits of her reinvention reveal a remarkable ethnocultural blind spot. In every Oatman reprisal, even the historically sensitive ones, American Indians are interchangeable: Kiowas, Apaches, or Mohaves, their sole purpose is to reflect her whiteness as she negotiates her way back into Anglo life. Thus, the Mohave nation — mighty as it was — fades without distinction into a hazy vision of generic Indians, and the one story that has not been written becomes as telling as those that have: who will return Oatman to her tribe? When will her Mohave persona be fleshed out and validated, and how would her life have unfolded if she had reclaimed her adopted family?

As a national symbol, Oatman remains similarly unfinished. She evokes the multiethnic American future as powerfully as she recalls its territorial past. In Playing Indian, an analysis of white Americans who have dressed as Indians throughout history, Philip Deloria observes that our national identity was born of a cultural cleavage — British versus American — at a time when the only authentic Americans were Indians. They were both the “us” we first encountered and the “them” we overcame. “There was, quite simply, no way to conceive an American identity without Indians,” writes Deloria. “At the same time, there was no way to make a complete identity while they remained.”²¹ The arrival of Africans and mainland Europeans further complicated the project of national self-definition. In 1892 Ellis Island opened its doors to the greatest influx of immigrants in American history; more than 40 percent of Americans can trace their heritage through it.²² We are “the Nation of many nations,” Whitman wrote in “Song of Myself,” a poem in which the physical self incarnates national selves, much as Oatman did.²³ And yet Oatman was an American without a country: her family left the United States to establish a new “nation” under Brewster, she spent her adolescence with a tribe with its own fully formed national identity, and long after she was “repatriated,” she remained marked as an outsider.

Today, with the myth of the Western frontier long exhausted, America’s current preoccupation with brown-skinned terrorists abroad has supplanted our historical fear of red-skinned terrorists within. In an effort to fortify ourselves, we have shored up our borders, tightened immigration policy, and embraced political isolationism even as we struggle to contain a rising tide of diversity. Yet our own ethnic boundaries are often blurred beyond recognition. When our first biracial president, Barack Obama, declared his candidacy he was considered either too black or too white, depending on who was looking. About 40 percent of the so-called millennial generation, born in the United States after 1981, are black, Latino, Asian, or racially mixed.²⁴ The country has seen a growing influx of adopted Asian babies, and Latinos have replaced blacks as the largest minority in America, with 10 percent of Mexico’s population now living in the United States. In short, our whiteness is fading.

Gazing out from the pages of history, Oatman is a poster girl for our inherently split and perpetually multiplying national identity. If her legend once illustrated the dangers of frontier Americans colliding with the ethnic unknown, it is now a parable about what mixed-race America has ineluctably become. She is a white woman of color, a foreigner in her own country, a beautiful freak whose blue tattoo denotes the shaky fault lines between civilization and savagery. Cassie Morgan’s query is a fitting epigraph for her unsettled — and unsettling — portrait: “Have the white and Indian parts inside you found a way to make their peace?”