The Blue Tattoo

1. Parker, Arizona–area Mohaves spell the name with an h, while in the Needles area a j is preferred. The choice of Mohave for this book is arbi-trary.

2. Stratton, Captivity, 205.

3. Oren Arnold, “The Wild West’s Favorite Indian Story,” Galveston Daily News, May 21, 1943.

4. Llewellyn Barrackman, interview with the author, Needles CA, February 26, 2005.

5. Corle, Desert Country, 122.

6. Charles F. Morgan, “Omaha Veteran Traveled with the Pathfinder in 1845,” Sunday World Herald, magazine sec., January, 12, 1913.

7. Morton J. A. McDonald, “This Man There When Marshall Found Gold / Adventurous Is Career of W. H. Jonson / Rescues Olive Oatman from Cruel Apaches,” Oakland Tribune, April 28, 1918.

8. Devereux, “Psychology of Feminine Genital Bleeding,” 237.

9. Even accounting for Mohave intermarriage with whites or into other tribes, today only 2,600 people claim Mohave ancestry. Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

10. Sides, Blood and Thunder, 248; Hine and Faragher, American West, 199–200; McWilliams, Southern California, 43; Hurtado, Indian Survival, 135.

11. Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 172.

1. At the time, Fort Yuma was called Camp Calhoun. In March of 1851 the name was changed to Camp Yuma or Fort Yuma.

2. Maloney, “Some Olive Oatman Documents,” 109.

3. Stratton, Captivity, 74.

4. Stratton, Captivity, 79.

5. In 1846 Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke had upgraded it to lead five hundred Mormon volunteers (the Mormon Battalion) from Albuquerque to San Diego during the Mexican War. Faulk, Destiny Road, 7.

6. S. Hughes, “Murder at Oatman’s Flat,” 3.

7. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 21.

8. Stratton, Captivity, 87.

9. Olive’s account of the distance and duration of the trip varied from 100 to 250 miles, over one to four days. In The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival (78–86), Brian McGinty makes a convincing case for a sixty-mile journey, based on the distance between the site of the attacks and the location of the Western Yavapais.

1. Stratton, Captivity, 118.

2. Stratton, Captivity, 116–17.

3. Stratton, Captivity, 124–25.

4. Stratton, Captivity, 127.

5. Sides, Blood and Thunder, 243, 247.

6. Stratton, Captivity, 129; O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 13.

7. Stratton, Captivity, 133–34.

8. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 32.

1. Vogel, “James Colin Brewster,” 125; Denton, Faith and Betrayal, 27.

2. “Notice,” Times and Seasons (Nauvoo IL), December 1, 1842, 32.

3. Denton, Faith and Betrayal, 29.

4. Olive Branch, January 1849, 103–4.

5. Book of Mormon, 456, 21, 154, 253, 154, 333, 403.

6. Olive Branch, September 1849, 37; Olive Branch, August 1848, 25; Olive Branch, March 1850, 130.

7. Olive Branch, March 1849, 137–38.

8. Olive Branch, January 1850, 111–12, 138.

9. Olive Branch, September 1849, 108, 66.

10. Olive Branch, March 1850, 131–32.

11. Denton, Faith and Betrayal, 26.

12. Remini, Joseph Smith, 178; Corle, Desert Country, 151.

13. Sperry, “Pioneer Journal,” 139–40.

14. Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, 192.

15. Olive Branch, November 1850, 61.

16. McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 39–40; Olive Branch, October 1850, 151.

17. McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 41; Vogel, “James Colin Brewster,” 132.

18. Olive Branch, July 30, 1850, 37.

19. Faulk, Destiny Road, 82.

20. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 1–2.

21. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 2.

22. Martin, Yuma Crossing, 127.

23. Faulk, Destiny Road, 70; Wagner, “Road to California.”

24. Wyllis, Arizona, 129–33; Faulk, Destiny Road, 77.

25. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 3.

26. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 2–3.

27. Russell, Land of Enchantment, 14, 25; Denton, Faith and Betrayal, 97.

28. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 4–5.

29. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 3.

30. McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 45.

31. Olive Branch, April 1851, 141.

32. Greene, Kansas Region, 58–60.

33. Olive Branch, October 1850, 38.

34. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 3–4.

35. Dary, Oregon Trail, 218.

36. Pettid, “The Oatman Story,” 19–20. The Reverend Edward J. Pettid wrote a book about the Oatman massacre in the 1960s, but it was never published and most of his research notes have since been lost. His article “The Oat-man Story” appeared in Arizona Highways in November 1968. Pettid fab-ricated details for purposes of scene-setting where he lacked information, but his use of original sources (I have cross-referenced his with mine) is otherwise reliable. I have also quoted from his original interviews with people who knew Oatman and her family in Sherman, Texas, and used details from his quotes from her scrapbook, whose existence various rela-tives have confirmed but which, too, is now lost.

37. Stratton, Captivity, 46–7.

38. Olive Branch, March 1851, 149.

39. Greene, Kansas Region, 60.

40. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 5.

41. Olive Branch, September 1851, 17.

42. Olive Branch, May 1851, 151.

43. “The Brewster Branch of the Mormons,” Republican Compiler (Gettysburg PA), April 19, 1852. Brewster ultimately made it to California — but lost his religion in the Golden State. Joseph Smith’s 1900 History of the Church noted, “The last we heard of James C. Brewster he was lecturing in Cali-fornia [on] spiritualism” (78). By 1856 Brewster had returned to Illinois, where he worked as a farm laborer and as a schoolteacher. He fought and was partially disabled in the Civil War, then he lived in Minnesota and Lou-isiana but had no further association with the Mormons. He died in 1909, at sixty-one, at the National Home for Disabled and Volunteer Sol-diers, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Vitale, “Whatever Happened to James Colin Brewster,” 11–14.

44. Faulk, Destiny Road, 199. Today, Interstates 10 and 8 follow the trail from El Paso to San Diego.

45. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 6; Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 3–4.

46. Olive Branch, September 1851, 17.

47. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 6.

48. Olive Branch, September 1851, 18.

49. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 8.

50. Gohres, “San Diego History,” 1; Trafzer and Hyer, Exterminate Them! 62; Richards, California Gold Rush, 57.

51. Stratton, Captivity, 62; O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 8.

1. The term was so broad as to be almost generic. In his 1874 book The Na-tive Races of the Pacific States, historian Hubert Howe Bancroft included as Apaches tribes of New Mexico, northwestern Texas, northern Mexico, and Arizona — fourteen tribes, from the Yavapais to the Navajos (591). Cul-tural similarities between the Yavapais and the Apaches, their neighbors to the east, also probably contributed to the confusion between the tribes: they were both hunter-gatherers who inhabited similar landscapes. Only some Apaches had Yavapai blood. Kroeber and Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s First Account,” 314n10; Kroeber and Fontana, Massacre on the Gila, 28.

2. Braatz, Surviving Conquest, 63; McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 81–83; Tim-othy Braatz, e-mail correspondence with the author, July 15, 2006; Gif-ford, “Northeastern and Western Yavapai,” 247–48.

3. Tuttle, “River Colorado,” 5; Martin, Yuma Crossing, 158.

4. “Five Years Among the Indians: Story of Olive Oatman,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), June 24, 1856; O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 15; Strat-ton, Captivity, 138.

5. Stratton, Captivity, 135.

6. Stratton, Captivity, 136, 139.

7. Howe, What God Hath Wrought, 809.

8. Stratton, Captivity, 142–43.

9. Stratton, Captivity, 143–44.

10. Stratton, Captivity, 150, 153; O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 15.

11. The Mohaves have never used the term chief. They prefer captain, head-man, or leader. As psychoanalyst George Devereux explained, “The Mo-have chief was, primarily, a servant of the tribe with little personal powers and many cares and duties.” The leaders could exercise power temporarily, and their leadership was limited to a particular area such as war, celebra-tion, or medicine. The tribe had no centralized government until the late nineteenth century. Devereux, “Mohave Chieftainship,” 33.

12. Stratton, Captivity, 156–59.

1. Stratton, Captivity, 91.

2. Stratton, Captivity, 103.

3. Stratton, Captivity, 106.

4. Stratton, Captivity, 109.

5. Wilder, “Oatman Massacre Recalled,” 10.

6. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 11.

7. Wilder, “Oatman Massacre Recalled,” 11.

8. Stratton, Captivity, 11.

9. Woodward, Journal, 114.

10. Woodward, Journal, 55.

11. Heintzelman, Transcription, 26.

12. Heintzelman, Transcription, 12, 15, 21.

13. Heintzelman, “Post Return.”

14. Heintzelman, Transcription, 17.

15. Heintzelman, “Post Return.”

16. Quoted in Vogel, “James Colin Brewster,” 129.

17. Heintzelman, Transcription, 79.

18. Love, Hell’s Outpost, 19.

19. Woodward, Journal, 53–54; Browne, Adventures in the Apache Coun-try, 57.

20. Heintzelman, Transcription, 21.

21. Daily Alta California, July 24, 1851.

22. Heintzelman, Transcription, 17.

23. Stratton, Captivity, 111; S. Hughes, “Murder at Oatman’s Flat,” 7.

1. Stratton, Captivity, 163.

2. Espaniole was technically a subchief under five more dominant leaders.

3. The names Olive used in Captivity of the Oatman Girls were probably Ol-ive’s — or Royal Stratton’s — Spanish transliterations of Mohave names. Es-paniole was also called “Espaniola” (Stratton, Captivity, 175) and “Aespan-iola” (235).

4. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 2.

5. Stratton, Captivity, 168.

6. Stewart, “Aboriginal Territory,” 257. Though they are scarcely documented, some Mohaves had been associated with missions, possibly in the Yuma area. When explorer John Charles Fremont met six Mohaves in 1844, a Mohave who spoke fluent Spanish told him he had been a “mission Indian” before the mission system collapsed as a consequence of Mexico’s independence from Spain. Gudde, “Mohave and Mojave,” 171.

7. De Humbolt, Political Essay, 206–7; Hafen and Hafen, Old Spanish Trail, 74; Sherer, Bitterness Road, 6; Corle, Desert Country, 113; Shea, History of the Catholic Church, 342. Ironically, over half a century later, the military succeeded where the church had failed. Fort Yuma was built on the site of the old mission, specifically for the purpose of subduing local Indians.

8. Hine and Faragher, American West, 158; Sherer, Bitterness Road, 5.

9. Quoted in Sherer, Bitterness Road, 14.

10. Stewart, “Mohave Warfare,” 57; Kroeber and Fontana, Massacre on the Gila, 132. On February 1, 1852, Sweeny noted in his diary, “We burned a number of villages, destroyed their planting grounds and did all the mischief that we could. We ran short of provisions before we got back, and had to kill some of our mules and live on the meat for two days. I liked it very well.” Sweeny, “Military Occupation,” 20.

11. A. Kroeber, Handbook, 745, 747, 752; Kroeber and Kroeber, Reminiscence, 7n6; Pamela Munro, interview with the author, February 15, 2005; A. Kroe-ber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 2.

12. Hine and Faragher, American West, 217; McWilliams, Southern Califor-nia, 43.

13. United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, Report of an Ex-pedition, 18–19.

14. Palmer, “Observations,” 63.

15. Carlson, “Martial Experiences,” 493; A. Kroeber, Handbook, 733; U.S. Con-gress, Message from the President, 589.

16. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 244.

17. Stratton, Captivity, 172–73, 180.

18. Stratton, Captivity, 204.

19. Devereux, “Mohave Culture and Personality,” 96–97; Devereux, “Psychol-ogy of Feminine Genital Bleeding,” 238; Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007; A. Kroeber, Handbook, 747–49.

20. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 1; Pamela Munro, interview with the author, February 15, 2005.

21. Michael Tsosie says the name, also spelled “Owch,” meant “water in the sky” and could designate anything associated with precipitation, includ-ing rain, clouds, thunder, and lightning. Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

22. Gibbs, “Observations of the Indians”; Mowry, “Notes of the Indians,” 10; Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

23. Betty Barrackman, interview with the author, Needles CA, February 26, 2005. The name was subsequently mistranslated as “rot womb,” probably because Oatman or others who recorded her story were embarrassed to say “vagina,” says Pamela Munro, a linguist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Pamela Munro, interview with the author, February 15, 2005.

24. Pamela Munro, interview with the author, February 15, 2005; Tuttle, “River Colorado,” 59. According to Devereux’s Kinseyesque “The Psychology of Genital Feminine Bleeding: An Analysis of Mohave Indian Puberty and Menstrual Rites,” the Mohaves loved fellatio (254) and loathed men-strual blood, particularly its smell (239). Men who had sex with menstru-ating women were considered lewd, though some men did it as a practi-cal joke, after which they displayed their bloody penises before washing in the river (239, 246).

25. Sherer, Clan System.

26. Stratton, Captivity, 175–77.

27. Stratton, Captivity, 219.

28. Taylor and Wallace, “Mojave Tattooing,” 5. This belief was shared by other Native American tribes, including the Sioux (Gilbert, Tattoo History). Many California and Arizona Indian tribes practiced tattooing. For most women in these regions, tattooing was restricted to the chin.

29. In Captivity of the Oatman Girls, they were called “ki-e-chook” (183), but the Mohaves have no such word; Stratton may have fabricated it.

30. By the early twentieth century, when the average Mohave weighed much more after adapting to the white diet, the standard changed, and a long face became the ideal. Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

31. Whether or not Olive underwent a puberty ritual, and what it involved, is difficult to guess since she had probably reached puberty before she was adopted by the Mohaves, and puberty rites were individualized and partly determined by dreams (Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007). Devereux described a four-day ceremony that included fre-quent visits by the girl’s mother and grandmother, who told her how a woman should behave; buried her in hot sand to help her body develop properly for childbirth and give her shapely calves and arms and make her a good worker; massaged her; and advised against using body paint — believed to cause liver spots during menses, pregnancy, and childbirth. Devereux, “Psychology of Feminine Genital Bleeding,” 241–42.

1. Stratton, Captivity, 181.

2. Quoted in Gordon, Through Indian Country, 10–11.

3. Gordon, Through Indian Country, 187.

4. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 232, 245; A. Kroeber, Handbook, 749.

5. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 245.

6. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 235–36.

7. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 236–37

8. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 247–48.

9. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 250–51, 257.

10. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 245.

11. Sherer, Bitterness Road, 18.

12. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 255.

13. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 263.

14. Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

15. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 237.

16. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 262–63.

17. Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 246–47.

18. Irataba’s name was derived from the Mohave word for “bird,” yara, mod-ified by teva (wings), “spread out or loosened, as in flight” (Sherer, “Great Chieftains,” 30n11). He was variously called Yara tav, Yara teva, Yarate:va, Arateva, Aratêve Yaratev, Eecheyara tav, and Irateba. The name “Aretev” is listed as the short form of Irataba’s full name, Ichayer Aratev (Freed Bird), in Munro, Brown, and Crawford, Mojave Dictionary, 40.

19. Quoted in Whipple, Pathfinder in the Southwest, 252n4.

20. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 249.

1. Stewart, “Mohave Warfare,” 260–61. The sisters and daughters of kwana-mis sometimes followed them to war, both to cheer them on and to help them finish a battle (267).

2. Kroeber and Kroeber, Reminiscence, 8–9.

3. Stratton, Captivity, 217–18.

4. A. Kroeber, Handbook, 746–47.

5. Wallace, “Dream in Mohave Life,” 253.

6. Stratton, Captivity, 186–88.

7. Olive called it the Taneta tree (Stratton, Captivity, 188).

8. Stratton, Captivity, 188–93.

9. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 17.

10. Stratton, Captivity, 191–99.

11. Stratton, Captivity, 231.

1. Asa Abbott to John LeConte, September 12, 1851, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

2. John LeConte to Asa Abbott, October 15, 1851, Abbott Family private col-lection, Morrison IL.

3. “City Intelligence,” Daily Alta California, March 3, 1851.

4. Lorenzo Oatman to Asa Abbott, May 19, 1854, Abbott Family private col-lection, Morrison IL.

5. Lorenzo Oatman to Asa and Sarah Abbott, May 19, 1854, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

6. Stratton, Captivity, 233–34.

7. Lorenzo Oatman to Asa and Sarah Abbott, May 15, 1855, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

8. Lorenzo Oatman to Asa and Sarah Abbott, January 5, 1856, Abbott Fam-ily private collection, Morrison IL.

9. Lorenzo Oatman to Governor J. Neely Johnson, January 2, 1856, photo-copy in Patricia Carreon private collection, Foothills Ranch CA.

10. Stratton, Captivity, 270.

11. Olive Ann Oatman Papers, Center for Archival Collections, Jerome Li-brary, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green OH.

12. Stratton, Captivity, 236.

13. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 2.

14. Stratton, Captivity, 259–62.

15. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 3.

16. See Palmer, “Observations,” 103. Michael Tsosie considers the episode apocryphal because, he says, no Mohave would have taken back a gift. Michael Tsosie, interview with the author, March 3 and 14, 2007.

17. Stratton, Captivity, 264.

18. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 22.

19. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 3.

20. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 4.

1. Twain, Roughing It, 307.

2. According to Llewellyn Barrackman (interview with the author, February 26, 2005), the Mohaves dyed their hair using mesquite and clay to kill lice and control dandruff. Women also did it to make the color as black as possible.

3. Kroeber and Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s First Account,” 311–12.

4. “Rescued from Captivity,” San Francisco Herald, March 9, 1856.

5. “Rescued from Captivity,” San Francisco Herald, March 9, 1956.

6. “Miss Oatman Rescued from the Mohave Indians,” Daily Alta California, March 24, 1856.

7. Elliott, “Great Western,” 4.

8. Sandwich, Great Western, 13, 25.

9. Sylvester Mowry to E. J. Bricknall, April 8, 1856, Collection of West-ern Americana, Beineke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University.

10. Love, Hell’s Outpost, 9.

11. Mowry, “Notes on the Indians of the Colorado.”

12. Mowry was referring to what Sweeny called the “El-thu-dhik,” which is probably a rendering of the “yak tadii” (also “yaly tadii” or “yaly tadiik”), the willow bark “apron” (according to Pamela Munro, interview with the author, February 15, 2005) that the Quechan women typically wore. Mowry, “Notes on the Indians of the Colorado.”

13. Mowry, “Notes on the Indians of the Colorado.”

14. U.S. Congress, Message from the President, 590.

15. Sylvester Mowry to E. J. Bricknall, April 8, 1856, Collection of Western Americana.

16. Woodward, Journal, 31, 61.

17. “Highly Important,” Los Angeles Star, March 8, 1856.

18. Stratton, Captivity, 249.

19. “Rescue of Miss Oatman,” Los Angeles Star, March 15, 1856.

20. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 23.

21. Beattie, “Diary of Ferryman,” 101.

22. A. Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s Return,” 5.

23. “Admissibility of Chinese and Negro Testimony,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, April 10, 1857.

24. “Rescue of Young American Woman from the Indians,” San Francisco Weekly Chronicle, March 15, 1856.

25. “Rescued from Captivity,” San Francisco Herald, March 9, 1856.

26. “Arrival of Miss Oatman,” Los Angeles Star, April 12, 1856; “Olive Oatman: The Apache Captive,” Los Angeles Star, April 19, 1856.

27. “Arrival of Miss Oatman,” Los Angeles Star, April 12, 1856

28. Sansome, “The White Girl’s Friend” (letter), Daily Evening Bulletin, April 26, 1856.

29. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 29, 16, 18; S. Hughes, “Murder at Oatman’s Flat,” 4.

30. Barney, “Oatman Massacre,” 18.

31. “Miss Oatman,” Los Angeles Star, June 21, 1856

32. Los Angeles Star, June 28, 1856.

33. “Five Years Among the Indians: Story of Olive Oatman,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco), June 24, 1856.

1. Hegne, “Captivity of Olive Oatman,” 5.

2. Clark, Down, and Blue, History of Oregon, 236–37.

3. Moses Williams, Diary, entry of October 22, 1858.

4. Harrison Oatman to Jackson and Bina, March 20, 1858, Oregon Histori-cal Society collections, Portland OR.

5. Reinhart, Golden Frontier, 166.

6. John Hughes to R. C. Williamson and Carie, July 22, 1856, Newberry Li-brary Special Collections.

7. “The Captivity of Olive Oatman,” Table Rock Sentinel, February 1982, 19.

8. Washburn in Vaughan, Narratives, xvii.

9. Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 148.

10. Quoted in Derounian-Stodola and Levernier, Indian Captivity Narra-tive, 80.

11. Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 148.

12. Hacker, Cynthia Ann Parker, 40.

13. Namias, White Captives, 50–51; Jemison in Derounian-Stodola, Women’s In-dian Captivity Narratives, 155–56; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 186–87; Sides, Blood and Thunder, 243, 247. When Jemison’s Seneca sister proposed taking her to see two white captives executed, her Indian mother scolded her, “How can you think of conducting to that melancholy spot your poor sister …who has so lately been a prisoner, who has lost her parents and brothers by hands of the bloody warriors, and who has felt all the hor-rors of the loss of her freedom, in lonesome captivity? Oh! how can you think of making her bleed at the wounds which are now but partially healed?” The sisters stayed home and missed the spectacle, in which the prisoners were beheaded, cut up, and burned (quoted in Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 155–56).

14. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers, 58, 154n34.

15. Root, Following the Pot of Gold, 18.

16. Kroeber and Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s First Account,” 313.

17. Harrison Oatman to Olive and Lorenzo Oatman, October 12, 1857, Rich-ard Nolan private collection.

18. Moses Williams, Diary, entry of November 25, 1857.

19. C. Brooks, “Politics of Forgetting.”

20. Stanton, “Report of the Secretary of War.”

21. Anthony, Fifty Years of Methodism, 91, 130–31; Roberts, Letters of William Roberts, 222.

22. Stratton, Captivity, 283.

23. Stratton, Captivity, 34, 37.

24. Stratton, Captivity, 211, 200.

25. Stratton, Church Government.

26. Stratton, Captivity, 137, 163, 151.

27. Devereux, Mohave Etiquette, 5–6.

28. Stratton, Captivity, 185, 186.

29. Stratton, Captivity, 156.

30. Olive had lost track of both annual time and her own age by the time of her ransom, but she could calculate months, Mohave style, by lunar cy-cles. She told Burke that Mary Ann had died the previous year. Kroeber and Kroeber, “Olive Oatman’s First Account,” 312.

31. Woodward, Journal, June 12, 1853. Dendrochronological (tree ring) records show that the water level of the Colorado was above average in 1853, av-erage in 1854, and 25 percent below average in 1855 — enough to forestall the overflow the Colorado River Indians relied on for spring planting (McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 105), resulting in Mary Ann’s death by late summer or fall.

32. Stratton, Captivity, 200–201.

33. Stratton, Captivity, 218.

34. A. Kroeber, Report on Aboriginal Territory, 12.

35. Stratton, Captivity, 224, 164–65, 163.

36. Stratton, Captivity, 229.

37. A. Kroeber, Report on Aboriginal Territory, 12.

38. Stratton, Captivity, 167.

39. Stratton, Captivity, 261.

40. Stratton, Captivity, 161, 282.

1. The third edition inexplicably showed Olive back in her bark skirt, shak-ing Burke’s hand, as Jennifer Putzi writes, “capturing the liminal moment in this transaction, the moment in which Olive is both white and Indian, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’” (Identifying Marks, 35).

2. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 290.

3. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 10.

4. Vail, Voice of the Old Frontier, 22.

5. Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, xi.

6. Castiglia, Bound and Determined, 114.

7. Quoted in Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 46.

8. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 231.

9. Carroll, Rhetorical Drag, 5.

10. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 3rd ed., “Notices,” 2.

11. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 3rd ed., “Notices,” 2.

12. Castiglia, Bound and Determined, 4.

13. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 113.

14. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 211.

15. As Robert Hughes explains in American Visions (185–88), the depiction of tribal Americans mutated throughout nineteenth-century America from the Noble Savage of empathetic artists such as Charles Bird King, George Catlin, and Karl Bodmer to the Demonic Indian of Charles Wimar’s 1856 The Attack on an Emigrant Train to the Doomed Indian, crystallized in Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s The Last of the Race (1847).

16. Quoted in Fryd, “Two Sculptures for the Capitol,” 25.

17. Rescue remained on the Capitol steps until 1958. In 1939 the House moved (unsuccessfully) for its removal, proposing that it be “ground into dust, and scattered to the four winds, that no more remembrance may be per-petuated of our barbaric past, and that it may not be a constant reminder to our American Indian citizens.” In 1959 the sculpture was moved in preparation for the building’s expansion then stored and forgotten until 1976, when it was dropped and broken as it was being transferred to a new facility. Fryd, “Two Sculptures for the Capitol,” 17.

18. Hunt, History of the College, 11.

19. Catalog of the University of the Pacific, 6–19.

20. Collier, “Mohave Tattoo,” 7.

21. Lorenzo Oatman to Asa Abbott, May 19, 1854, Abbott Family private col-lection, Morrison IL.

22. Moses Sperry to Asa Abbott, June 7, 1858, Abbott Family private collec-tion, Morrison IL.

23. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 14.

24. Stratton, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 279–81.

25. “Six Years’ Captivity Among the Indians — Narrative of Miss Olive Oat-man,” New York Times, May 4, 1858.

26. “Indian Lectures: ‘Lo! The Poor Captive!’” (advertisement), New York Tribune, May 10, 1858.

27. Olive Oatman to Abbott cousins, October 20, c. 1890s, Fields Family pri-vate collection, Morrison IL.

28. Royal B. Stratton to Asa Abbott, undated (probably 1861), Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

29. Minutes of the California Annual Conference, 6.

30. Quoted in “Five Years Among Wild Savages.”

31. “‘Lo! The Indian’ Captive!”

32. She was also the only documented white captive to go on the national lec-ture circuit, though, according to Derounian-Stodola, some captives taken during the Dakota war of 1862 lectured locally.

33. Grosz, “Intolerable Ambiguity,” 56–57.

34. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 1.

35. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 2, 24.

36. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 39, 44.

37. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 183.

38. See “Female Figure” (artist unknown) in Furst, Mojave Pottery, plate 17, p. 120.

39. Palmer’s sculpture, commissioned by former New York governor and sen-ator Hamilton Fish, attracted three thousand viewers in two weeks when it was displayed in late 1859. Now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was considered a turning point in the maturation of American art.

40. Quoted in Kasson, Marble Queens, 74.

41. Quoted in Kasson, Marble Queens, 80.

42. Quoted in Webster, Erastus D. Palmer, 30.

43. Kasson, Marble Queens, 82.

44. Quoted in Kasson, Marble Queens, 84.

45. New York Times article and review in the Terre Haute News both quoted in “Five Years Among Wild Savages.”

46. “The Apachee Captive,” Rochester Daily Union and Advertiser, April 28, 1865.

47. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 59.

48. Quoted in Matthews, Rise of Public Woman, 117.

49. Quoted in Piepmeier, Out in Public, 123.

50. Quoted in “Five Years Among Wild Savages.”

51. Stratton, Church Government, 23.

1. Ives, Report Upon the Colorado River, 68–69.

2. Ives, Report Upon the Colorado River, 71–73.

3. Woodward, “Irataba,” 56.

4. Edward Fitzgerald Beale was sent not only to blaze a path for emigrant travel and military operations in the West but also to test the feasibility of camels for military transport. His twenty-five camels, imported from Egypt and led by a Turkish camel driver named Hadji Ali, proved impractical be-cause the pads of their feet were too soft for rocky ground and they spooked other pack animals (Martin, Yuma Crossing, 184). They were later sold to zoos and circuses or set free in the desert, where camel sightings were reported for decades. Beale’s Wagon Road became Route 66 and was later absorbed into Interstate 40. At the time the Rose-Baley party used it (see Baley, Disaster on the Colorado), Beale considered his trail unfit for emigrant travel.

5. Sherer, Bitterness Road, 69n5.

6. Sherer, Bitterness Road, 101n3.

7. Woodward, “Irataba,” 60.

8. Sherer, Bitterness Road, 102n6.

9. Carlson, “Martial Experiences,” 492.

10. Quoted in Woodward, “Irataba,” 62.

11. “Arrival of the Indian Warrior, Irataba,” New York Times, February 7, 1864; “Indian Chieftains from the Far West,” Harper’s Weekly, February 13, 1864; quoted in Woodward, “Irataba,” 62.

12. O. Oatman, “Narrative,” 57–58.

13. Tuttle, “River Colorado,” 61. Irataba’s granddaughter later reported, “The White men taught him that that was the way to get land — to push people out by force. … My grandfather felt that even though this land (the Nee-dles area) had been formerly his, the soldiers had taken it from him — just as he had taken the land around Parker from the ‘Pima.’ He therefore asked (the President) that the Mohave should be settled here [in Parker].” De-vereux, “Mohave Chieftainship,” 39.

14. Mollhausen, Diary of a Journey, 247–48.

Epigraph. “Her Veil Hid Scars of Indian Imprisonment,” Sherman Democrat, July 4, 1976.

1. “Apache Hank,” Reese River Reveille (Austin NV), May 23, 1863.

2. Quoted in McGinty, Oatman Massacre, 182.

3. “Death of Rev. R. B. Stratton,” Worcester Evening Gazette, January 25, 1875.

4. Worcester County Probates, case 57, 295: Royal B. Stratton.

5. Quoted in Clark and Clark, Oatman Story, 81; Collier, “Mohave Tattoo,” 7; Hall, “Olive A. Oatman,” 227.

6. Edna Oatman to Sarah Abbott, February 3, 1871, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

7. Lucena Oatman to Sarah Abbott, October 31, 1866, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

8. Wilson, Taking the Waters, 32–34. Mack had designed a speculum that he had produced by a local tinsmith, and in 1862 he claimed to have per-formed one hundred gynecological operations on women without com-plications. But he was best known for studying Florence Nightingale’s nursing methods in London, opening in 1873 the first nursing school in Canada to employ them. He died weeks after Olive left the Springbank; there is no record of whether he treated her directly.

9. John Fairchild to Asa Abbott, August 2, 1881, Abbott Family private col-lection, Morrison IL.

10. In her famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gil-man described a troubled woman going insane as a result of the rest cure. Gilman wrote the story in 1892, five years after emerging from the rest cure herself, as prescribed by her doctor, Weir Mitchell.

11. Will, “Nervous Origins of the American Western,” 301.

12. Clark and Clark, Oatman Story, 83.

13. Hildebrandt’s promotional broadside said the tattooing was ordered by the Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull, who wanted Hildebrandt as his “squaw.” At the time, however, Sitting Bull had surrendered to U.S. troops and was being held at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory.

14. “Facts Relating to Irene Woodward,” 2.

15. Bancroft’s books include History of the Pacific States of North America (1882) and History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1883 (1889).

16. “Death of Rev. R. B. Stratton,” Worcester Evening Gazette, January 25, 1875.

17. Olive Oatman to Sarah Abbott, January 9, 1889, Abbott Family private collection, Morrison IL.

18. “Items,” Arizona Republican, March 27, 1893.

19. Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 271, 309.

20. Derounian-Stodola, Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, 247.

21. “L. D. Oatman’s Sudden Demise,” Red Cloud Nation, October 10, 1901; “Lorenzo Dow Oatman,” Red Cloud Chief, October 11, 1901.

22. Quoted in Pettid, “Oatman Story,” 199.

23. “Mrs. Fairchild Dead: A Most Estimable Lady Called to Her Reward,” Sherman Daily Register, March 21, 1903; “Mrs. Fairchild Dead: Wife of Major J. B. Fairchild Passed Away Monday Night,” Sherman Weekly Demo-crat, March 26, 1903.

1. The third generation of the ten-member Oatman family consisted of just two people: Mamie and her cousin Royal (Lorenzo’s son), who was the last blood Oatman relative. Because Mamie was adopted and Roy never had biological children (he and his wife, Harriet Rants, adopted a son, named William Robert), the Oatman bloodline ended with Roy, though the family tree continued down the generations — a fitting denouement for a saga driven by strong adoptive relationships.

2. Robert Doman, “Tribal Atrocities Alleged in Divorce Suit Against Wealthy Mohave Indian Outdoes Fiction,” Arizona Republican, April 30, 1922.

3. When the book was republished by Grabhorn Press in 1935, it featured a preface that perpetuated the myth that Olive had died in an insane asylum.

4. See Tinnemeyer, “Rescuing the Past”; and the introduction to Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It?.

5. Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? xiii, xxxv.

6. Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? 17.

7. Ruiz de Burton, Who Would Have Thought It? 11.

8. Andrews, “The Lawless Have Laws,” 1. The only significant factual bio-graphical error in the script is the assertion, in the conclusion narrated by Reagan, that Oatman lived in San Francisco and Oregon for twenty years after her ransom. The scriptwriter, Robert Hardy Andrews, includes an au-thor’s note specifying that the details of the Oatman story vary and ref-erencing two books as sources: Paul I. Wellman’s Death in the Desert (which contains a one-paragraph footnote on the Oatman massacre) and Oscar Lewis’s The Autobiography of the West. The latter, which contains six pages on Oatman’s captivity, mostly excerpted from The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, is the source of Lorenzo’s misspelled name. Andrews had also taken details about Mohave life from some unspecified edition of The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, which he calls “her diary” in the script (4).

9. Andrews, “The Lawless Have Laws,” 11.

10. Andrews, “The Lawless Have Laws,” 9.

11. Andrews, “The Lawless Have Laws,” 22.

12. Andrews, “The Lawless Have Laws,” 13, 31.

13. See Barbara Mortimer’s essay “Resisting Rescue: The Problem of the Cap-tive’s Agency in The Searchers,” in her book Hollywood’s Frontier Captives.

14. Leonard, Tonto Woman, 2, 6. A striptease is a common prelude to Oat-man’s redemption. Stratton presents her bare-breasted on the riverbank at Yuma before her ransom, where she waits for an officer’s wife to bring her a dress; newspaper accounts describe her prostrate in the sand for the same reason; and in Who Would Have Thought It? Ruiz de Burton wraps Lola in a red shawl that slips off when she arrives in the Norval household, exposing “a little girl very black indeed” (16).

15. Leonard, Tonto Woman, 8, 13, 15.

16. Grayson, So Wide the Sky, 305.

17. Grayson, So Wide the Sky, 92.

18. Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, 136–37, 111. For an insightful study of the body as text in the nineteenth century, including deeper analysis of The Scarlet Letter, see Putzi, Identifying Marks.

19. Lawton, Ransom’s Mark, 126.

20. Vaughn and Clark, Puritans Among the Indians, 2. A self-described evan-gelist-historian named Little Bear Wheeler goes Lawton one better, cast-ing the captivity not as the punishment for sin but as a metaphor for sin itself. In a six-minute segment on his CD compilation Historical Devotionals, Wheeler recounts the massacre and then takes a sudden turn into the storyof Adam and Eve, explaining that the two sinners were “captured [by sin]and suffered great hardship, even worse than poor little Olive Oatman.” In vertiginous associative leaps, Wheeler equates biblical sin with Indian captivity (the captives are imprisoned by their own worst impulses, as savage Indians are wont to do) and interprets the tattoo as its indelible result:“Many who have come back [to God] have been tattooed by the captivity of sin, and they still have scars in their hearts, but Jesus still loves us and he looks past those scars.”

21. Deloria, Playing Indian, 22, 37.

22. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, “Ellis Island,” http://www.nps.gov/elis (accessed May 11, 2007).

23. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 930.

24. Morely Winograd and Michael Hais, “The Boomers Had Their Day: Make Way for the Millennials,” Washington Post, February 3, 2008.