Quotes from Margot Mifflin

Olive's freedom to speak her mind so pointedly to the Mohaves — something that would surely have backfired with the Yavapais — confirms her greater sense of freedom within her new tribe.

By mid-afternoon, starving and dehydrated in the heat, he passed out on a plateau in the simmering sun. A few hours later he opened his eyes to an audience of gray wolves that came sniffing within arm's reach. He jumped to his feet, swatting one on the nose, and yelled at them — surprising himself at the sound of his own voice. They backed off as he hurled a stone at another, then they scattered and returned to howl mournfully at him.

Its prickly commander, Samuel P. Heintzelman, a short, bearded West Point graduate who had served in the Mexican-American War and later became a major general in the Civil War, didn't want to be there and was preoccupied with making extra cash through the thriving ferry service.

The Oatman massacre was evidently inspired by the Yavapais' typical late-winter hardship, exacerbated by the previous year's bone-cracking drought.

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.

As captives who were not members of the tribe, Olive and Mary Ann were spared the procedure. The Yavapais didn't care whether they mounted the stairway to heaven; their souls could wander indefinitely.

After entering the Mohave valley, Mollhausen had asked, in his diary, "How long will it now be before a reason is found or invented for beginning a war of extermination against the hitherto peaceful Indians of the valley of the Colorado?" 20 Sooner than he had probably imagined. Within five years, the only trace of the thriving, unified nation Whipple and Mollhausen had met on the bank of the Colorado would be footprints in the sand.

Or send her reasons why she does not wish to come." Burke's caveat may have been inspired by the knowledge that a year earlier when the Whipple party had spent a week with the Mohaves, Olive had not presented herself, or by Francisco, who had talked with Espaniole months earlier and may have gleaned that Olive preferred to stay.

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.

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.

Stratton, of course, had the advantage: Olive knew he controlled the book's production and understood that too much sympathy for the devil would reflect badly on her, reducing her chances of "resuming her position in society," as the Daily Alta had put it. Olive was again a captive—this time of her ghostwriter.

A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison," written when she was eighty, she says she passed through a painful period of longing for her own people before she began to identify as a Seneca, but within four years—the same period during which Olive was with the Mohaves—"I had become so accustomed to their mode of living, habits, and dispositions, that my anxiety to get away …had almost subsided. 9 She

Stratton claimed his information came from seven years of travel among tribes along the Pacific, something that may have come as a surprise to the Methodists, who had sent him west to harvest settlers' souls, not to carouse with savages.

When she took the stage in the late 1850s, Olive became the first American woman to show her tattooed body publicly for profit. 32 At the time, tattoos were virtually unseen in the United States.

the Mohaves were highly nationalistic, their sense of patriotism had always been more a mental than a territorial construct—one that would soon be tested.

Nahl's erasure of the tattoo in the book, removes from the story the possibility that the tattoo made her Mohave. And it neglects a larger truth: the Mohaves did not tattoo their captives; they tattooed their own.

But the Mohaves, like their allies the Quechans, loved bawdy sobriquets referring to—or flatly advertising—genitalia. Quechan names for men at the time, for example, included "Big Cock," "Cock-with-a-Blue-Head," and "Good Fucker." One Mohave woman was nicknamed "Charcoal Testicle," indicating she liked sex so much that she burned men's testicles. 22

Olive acquired the nickname "Spantsa," which meant "rotten vagina" or "sore" vagina. 23 She may have been menstruating when she arrived, wrapped in rags, or she may have been perceived as unhygienic by comparison to the Mohaves, who bathed every day in the Colorado River, unlike whites, for whom a splash of toilet water was considered a substitute for washing. 24

Tsosie alleges that the very fact that Oatman was nicknamed confirms her acceptance within the culture; if she had been marginalized within the tribe, she would never have warranted one. Along with "Aliútman," the name stuck, and Mary Ann, perhaps too young for teasing, went by her given name.

Tsosie says Olive would only have been given a clan name if she were considered a full Mohave. But her clan name also masks her marriage status. If, after some period of adaptation, she was married—and Mohave girls of the period did so in their early to mid-teens—her name wouldn't show it. The Mohaves were serial monogamists with no wedding ceremony. Marriage meant living together; moving out signaled divorce.

Olive's tattoo marked the first stage of her transformation into a Mohave. She was now visually integrated into the tribe and physically traceable as a Mohave because of it.

Standing now astride two cultures, Olive had unwittingly made history: she was the first known tattooed white female in the United States.

But the very pattern Olive wore appears on a ceramic figurine of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that displays traditional Mohave face painting, tattoo, beads, and clothing.

In the coming years, Irataba emerged — from the perspective of the federal government — as the leader and spokesperson not only of the Mohaves, but of all the Colorado River tribes.