The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

4. A Year with the Yavapais

44 4 A Year with the Yavapais At the period of its [1853] purchase, Arizona was practically a terra incognita . Hunters and trappers had explored it to some extent; but their accounts of its resources and peculiarities were of a vague and marvelous character. . . . Few people in the United States knew anything about it, save the curious book-worms who had penetrated into the old Spanish records. | j. ross browne, Adventures in the Apache Country The Oatmans’ darkest fantasy, lovingly cultivated if averted along the way west, featured an attack by brutal Apaches. Now, Olive and Mary Ann were in the hands of a tribe with no significant reputation for raiding—for that matter, with no reputation among Anglos at all, because until the late 1840s they’d rarely if ever seen—or been seen by—anyone but Indians. Though Olive later identified her captors as Apaches—commonly assumed, in her era, to encompass a variety of dangerous Southwest tribes—they were likely much less notorious .1 Their proximity to the murder site, regular contact with the Mohave Indians, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and small-scale farming practices suggest they were one of four fluid groups of Yavapais. Most likely they were Tolkepayas, a name that distinguishes them more geographically than culturally from other free-ranging yet interconnected Yavapais: they lived in western Arizona, north of the Gila and east of the Colorado rivers.2 Unlike the Apaches, the Yavapais had not adopted the horse and A Year with the Yavapais 45 did not regularly conduct raids, except against their traditional rivals , the Pimas and the Maricopas. The Oatman incident was somewhat atypical for them. The Yavapais had had minimal contact with emigrants along the Gila Trail, which marked the southern border of their territory. With between thirty thousand and forty thousand miners and pioneers traveling between Arizona and California from 1850 to 1851 alone, the tribe had found little need for plunder there, possibly because so many emigrants shed their belongings on the trail that it had become a free-for-all for scavengers.3 But hair-curling tales of cholera deaths and defeated gold seekers had temporarily staunched the flow of emigrants through Arizona in 1851, leaving fewer pickings. The Oatman massacre was evidently inspired by the Yavapais’ typical , late-winter hardship, exacerbated by the previous year’s bonecracking drought. The tribe had, after all, asked Royce for food before attacking, and had cooked and eaten the Oatmans’ cows immediately afterward. The Yavapais’ primary interest in livestock was as food, which also explains why they had stolen LeConte’s horses days earlier. The smaller number of emigrants on the trail that year made the Oatmans, as well as LeConte, easy targets. Why the Yavapais took the girls, which meant more children to feed, is another question. Native American tribes from east to west had many motives for seizing captives: revenge (which could involve torture and killing), ransom, slave labor, adoption (to increase their numbers or replace dead relatives), and, for some Southwest tribes, the flourishing slave market in Mexico. The Yavapais had, on occasion , practiced ceremonial cannibalism. Just a few years earlier, after an attack on Halchidhoma Indians who entered their region, they had killed twenty people, captured a mother and daughter, roasted the girl alive, and eaten pieces of her. By one account, the woman was forced to eat her daughter’s flesh. Fortunately for the Oatmans, cannibalism was rare among the Yavapais, and its sole purpose was to avenge a death or terrorize tribal enemies. Their interest in the 46 A Year with the Yavapais girls was more mundane. After a few days in captivity, the sisters’ value was clear: they were slaves to the women, and sometimes to the children, who also gave them their orders. They carried water in pots and wood in bundles on their heads, collected from miles around. They were taught to dig roots, which they did for a mindnumbing year during which the women, wrote Olive, “took unwarranted delight in whipping us on beyond our strength.”4 The Yavapais were mountain (and sometimes cave) dwellers who lived on deer, sheep, quail, rabbit, prickly pear, yucca, roots, and the roasted meat of the agave plant. They boiled their meat in clay pots but, according to Olive, did not believe females should eat meat unless they were at death’s door. Olive said that “their own children frequently died...