The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West)

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The author has practiced source criticism on the various accounts of Oatman's life, discounting distortions introduced to serve various political and social biases. The resulting narrative is a fascinatingly ambiguous story. Was Olive better off as an Indian or white woman? It's hard to tell, but clearly she had warm feelings for her former "captors" when she met one of them in later life. The sexual, social, and racial norms of the time are called into question by the story of her life. which prophecy did come true.....but for himself and his own family. It made my blood run chill to watch the character of Royce Oatman, and how he was proud, argumentative and headstrong.....all the way leading his family to a terrible fate. It seems that when Mary Ann married Royce, she married herself and her children to tragedy.

Dillon, Richard H. (1981). "Tragedy at Oatman Flat: Massacre, Captivity, Mystery". American West. Vol.18, no.2. pp.46–59. Laffoley describes the devastation very well. I saw a clear picture of the destruction, the wounded and the dead. I would get choked up and would have to take breaks because the images and heartache were a lot to read. But it was important to understand the scope of the explosion. Olive Oatman's 1860s lecture notes tell of her younger sister often yearning to join that better "world" where their "Father and Mother" had gone. [16] Mary Ann died of starvation while the girls were living with the Mohave. This happened in about 1855–56, when Mary Ann was ten or eleven. It has been claimed that there was a drought in the region, [3] :105 and that the tribe experienced a dire shortage of food supplies, and Olive herself would have died had not Aespaneo, the matriarch of the tribe, saved her life by making a gruel to sustain her. [5] :98 a b Van Huygen, Meg (2015-11-16). "Olive Oatman, the Pioneer Girl Abducted by Native Americans Who Returned a Marked Woman". Mental Floss . Retrieved 2022-08-05. a b c d e f g McGinty, Brian (2005). The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 9780806137704. OCLC 1005485817 . Retrieved July 31, 2020– via Google Books.Lawrence, Deborah; Lawrence, Jon (2012). Violent Encounters: Interviews on Western Massacres. University of Oklahoma Press. pp.27–28. ISBN 978-0-8061-8434-0. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Mifflin, Margot (2009). The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (PDF). Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9780803235175. OCLC 1128156875. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-06 . Retrieved 2016-06-19. Named in her honor, the historic town of Olive City, Arizona, near the present town of Ehrenberg, was a steamboat stop on the Colorado River during the gold rush days. Other namesakes in Arizona are Oatman Mountain and the adjacent Oatman Flat. [33] [30] Oatman Flat Station was a stage stop for the Butterfield Overland Mail from 1858 to 1861. [5] :183 In popular culture [ edit ] Television and film [ edit ] Another thing that suggests Olive and Mary Ann were not held in forced captivity by the Mohave is that both girls were tattooed on their chins and arms, [14] [15] in keeping with the tribal custom. Oatman later claimed (in Stratton's book and in her lectures) that she was tattooed to mark her as a slave, but this is not consistent with the Mohave tradition, where such marks were given only to their own people to ensure that they would enter the land of the dead and be recognized there by their ancestors as members of the Mohave tribe. [5] :78 The tribe did not care if their slaves could reach the land of the dead, however, so they did not tattoo them. It has also been suggested that the evenness of Olive's facial markings may indicate her compliance with the procedure. [5] :78

a b Rasmussen, Cecilia (16 July 2000). "Tale of Kindness Didn't Fit Notion of Savage Indian". Los Angeles Times. Running through this story of unbearable tragedy and suffering is the story of Elizabeth. She is an independent woman of the time from a well-to-do family. She is involved in womens' rights and equality in a man's world and gives women a voice in the politics of war. She is attending medical school and knows she must work harder than the male students to reach her goal of becoming a doctor. She is being courted by the son of the most prominent and wealthy Halifax family, Wallace, who is frankly a snob. Olive Ann Oatman (September 7, 1837–March 21, 1903) was a white American woman celebrated in her time for her captivity and later release by Native Americans in the Mojave Desert region when she was a teenager. [1] She later lectured about her experiences. The descriptions of the horrors that followed the explosion are truly gripping. All of these sections were 5⭐️ to me - they were heartbreaking but the author kept them completely raw. I think it’s important not to sugar coat historic events so I love how this was handled. ⁣What transpires after this is, Olive meets a Methodist minister by the name of Stratton, who then decides to write a book of her account, making the Mojave Indians appear as savages, and Olive, who has to live in this white society goes along with him, even giving speeches throughout the country. In an episode of the series The Ghost Inside My Child: The Wild West and Tribal Quest, a southern American Baptist family claims that their daughter Olivia says she is the reincarnation of Olive Oatman. [35]

a b James, Edward T.; James, Janet Wilson; Boyer, Paul S. (1971). Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Harvard University Press. pp. 646–47. ISBN 978-0-674-62734-5.a b "Fairchild, Olive Ann Oatman". Texas State Historical Association. 2010-06-12 . Retrieved August 10, 2012. Stratton, Royal B. "Life Among the Indians: Being an Interesting Narrative of the Captivity of the Oatman Girls, Among the Apache and Mohave Indians". The Bancroft Library University of Berkeley. Archived from the original on 2021-04-26 . Retrieved 2021-03-23. Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman’s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker’s wife in Texas.