Quotes from Margot Mifflin

In late June they arrived in Independence, Missouri, on a stretch of the Missouri River known for its "jumping-off places" — settlements where emigrants met traveling companions or killed time until their parties arrived, before heading west.

The Mohaves were friendly with the Yavapais and the Quechans; enemies of the Pimas, the Maricopas, and the Cocopas; and merely tolerant of the Chemehuevis, who in the 1830s had moved into the valley below them on the western side of the river — an area the Mohaves yielded to them because they believed departed spirits lived there, making it dangerous.

in early 1854 Lt. Amiel Weeks Whipple was sent to map a route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Whipple was a thirty-seven-year-old West Point graduate from Massachusetts, known for his competence and conscientiousness

Traveling with more than a hundred men, from engineers, cartographers, and geologists to astronomers, meteorologists, and botanists, as well as soldiers and guides, Whipple trudged through present-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, into what would become Arizona, on a path that vaguely foreshadowed today's Route 66. The group was guided along the way by Indians — Creeks, Shawnees, and Zunis. But it was the Mohaves who would lead Whipple on the final leg of the journey.2 On

Two of them led the way north into the Mohave Valley, past the Needles, a trio of mountain peaks on the east side of the Colorado. This was where the main body of the tribe resided — including Olive and Mary Ann.

That fall in San Francisco, Lorenzo worked for a wholesaler until he was forced to quit after hurting his back lifting goods. When Dr. Henry Hewit moved back east to be with his family in Connecticut, Lorenzo was orphaned all over again at sixteen.

In El Monte Lorenzo saw a letter his uncle Asa had written to the Richardsons, asking if the boy would be traveling back to Illinois.

In the spring of 1854, he moved down to "the Monte" (later called El Monte), the first exclusively white settlement in Los Angeles County, located on the stage road between San Bernardino and Los Angeles. Susan Thompson's family had opened a hotel there called the Willow Grove Inn, and the Richardsons, another Brewster party family who had made it to California in 1852, had settled just a few miles away.

In all, Whipple would meet five leaders. On his last day in the valley, they came together to inform him they had not only held a national council and approved mapping a road through their country but had also chosen a guide to show his men the best route to the Pacific.

Though he had earned two hundred dollars from a crop and was not working at the time, Lorenzo declined his uncle's invitation to return to Illinois because he was considering going to school

The [Gila River area is] so utterly desolate, desert, and Godforsaken, that Kit Carson says a wolf could not make his living upon it." | U.S. Representative THOMAS HART BENTON addressing the house of representatives, June 26, 1854

In early 1856 a California rancher named Duff Weaver wrote to Lorenzo to say an American woman was living with Mohave Indians and claimed that Fort Yuma's new commander, Martin Burke, had refused an offer to trade her back for a few blankets. Southern California's first newspaper, the Los Angeles Star, ran the story, reprinting Weaver's letter and fulminating about the commanding officer's refusal to ransom "two American women from worse than negro slavery.

Espaniole was most likely a kohota, or festival chief, who was responsible for receiving captives, planning dances, and overseeing celebrations.

The investigating officer, Col. George Nauman, went to Fort Yuma, verified that Burke had never entertained — much less refused — such a proposal, and the two sent runners out to local tribes promising ransoms for the white captives. Word arrived that one of the girls, probably Mary Ann, had died, and Lorenzo, with the support of his neighbors in El Monte, petitioned Governor J. Neely Johnson in Sacramento, asking for help in rescuing Olive.

Espaniole later said he had hoped the Mohaves' good treatment of Olive would encourage the whites, in turn, to treat the Mohaves well.

Olive later said her release provoked mixed reactions from the rest of the tribe.

Espaniole instructed Topeka to travel with Olive, either to ease her journey, to collect her ransom, or both, along with Francisco's brother, two cousins, and Musk Melon, who lived near Olive.

They were described variously as majestic, Herculean, and as one of the Smithsonian Institution's first ethnographers put it, "as fine a race of men physically, perhaps, as there is in existence."14 They painted their faces coal black, with a red streak from the hairline to the chin, and were known for their tattooing and face painting, on both men and women, which communicated everything from military might to grief over the loss of a child.

But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.

For these galas, the Mohaves came together wearing bark masks and face paint or mud-slathered hair, marched upriver to the feasting area, built a fire, and danced until midnight. The next day they ate. The women arrived carrying soup, cakes, or boiled vegetables in dishes and baskets on their heads. Their cakes were made of ground wheat and boiled pumpkin rolled into a dough that was placed in the sand, covered with a leaf, and baked.

When Grinnell approached her, she cried quietly into her hands but let him lead her to the water, where she washed and changed into the calico dress an officer's wife had sent from the fort. Now, free of face paint and hair dye, and wearing Anglo garb, she was ready — or at least dressed — for her return.

Adult Mohaves encouraged the young to indulge themselves sexually while they could, so that by their mid-teens, they were jaded

She gave her name as "Olivino," recalled her father's surname as "Oatman" and said she'd had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, "No. They whipped me." In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she "seemed pleased," noted Burke, and answered, "Very well.

A single pastime carried Olive through her early repatriation: given thread and fabric, she quickly remembered how to sew, and did so in a therapeutic frenzy.