Quotes About Mohave

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

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.

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.

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.

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.