The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

Prologue: Emigrant Song

prologue Emigrant Song Within our newly acquired possessions on the borders of Mexico and the Pacific coast, and the recently organized territories in the interior of the continent, are numerous powerful and warlike tribes, of whom little is known, and whose history has no connection with that of the people of the United States, except the fact that they were original occupants of the soil, and that some of them, especially the California Indians, yet dispute our right to sovereignty. | benson j. lossing, “The Extreme Western Tribes,” APictorial History of the United States: For Schools and Families In the early 1850s, Olive Oatman was a typical pioneer girl heading west on a wagon train full of Mormons in search of gold and God. By the end of the decade she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, torn between two cultures. Orphaned at fourteen after her family was massacred by Yavapai Indians in northern Mexico (now southern Arizona), Oatman spent a year as a slave to her attackers before she was traded to the Mohaves, who tattooed her and raised her as their own. Four years later, under threat of war, the Mohaves delivered her back to the whites in exchange for horses, blankets, and beads.1 This much is true. But the fine points of Oatman’s transformation from forty-niner to white savage have been replayed in countless books and articles—modern and Victorian—that read like Rashomans of revisionist history and romantic conjecture. In her day, Oatman was freakish enough to invite speculation and guarded enough 1 2 Prologue to ensure that the speculation never ended. Because her story was saturated with violence, military intrigue, and sexual innuendo, it quickly became legend. She was the subject of a lurid, best-selling biography published in 1857, called Life Among the Indians, by a Methodist reverend named Royal B. Stratton, who stripped her Mormonism from her narrative and portrayed the caring Mohave Indians who raised her as “degraded bipeds.”2 Stratton also launched Oatman’s nearly decade-long public-speaking career. Her experience inspired plays, artworks, and, in the 1880s, theft, when the first tattooed circus ladies used it as a script for their own Wild West fabrications about being taken captive and tattooed by “redskins.” Today, in the Arizona town that bears her name, her cheerless, tattooed face adorns the Olive Oatman Restaurant, across the street from the Oatman Hotel where, in its better days, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon. In 1943 the Galveston Daily News claimed that a group of Southwest scholars had voted the Oatman saga Americans’ “favorite Indian story” of the West. “It is still told constantly around campfires, in college lectures, even on radio programs,” the paper asserted, perhaps a bit too promotionally, because this was the reason for telling it again—incorrectly.3 Because the Mohaves have no written language, their impressions of Oatman’s captivity were not recorded during her lifetime. But in the mid-twentieth century, anthropologist A. L. Kroeber published an interview he had conducted in 1903 with a Mohave who had known her that contradicted what Stratton had written about her allegedly shabby treatment by the tribe, as did Kroeber’s publication of Oatman’s first postransom interview, with the military commander, Martin Burke, who retrieved her. What Oatman told Burke (as well as the first journalists to interview her after her ransom ) differed markedly from the Stratton account and raised questions about whether she ever wanted to leave the Mohaves in the first place. Today, any Mohave who knows her story will say the tribe Prologue 3 saved her life. “They felt sorry for her,” said Llewellyn Barrackman, a tribal elder and spokesperson who died in 2006. “We have a feeling for people.”4 What is merely a historical footnote for the Mohaves has become a lovingly burnished, ever-evolving myth for white Americans. A hundred and fifty years after Oatman’s return, writers—amateur and professional, religious and scholarly—continue to rework it, invariably reflecting their own cultural fantasies as vividly as Oatman’s particular experience. It was the subject of a 1965 episode of Death Valley Days (starring Ronald Reagan), an Elmore Leonard story, two novels , and four children’s books, including a Christian title sold with a collectible Oatman figurine (worth $695)—facial tattoo and all. Since the 1990s, feminist scholars have revisited Oatman, exploring her...