June 29, 2015 • 34 mins
In 1851, Olive Oatman's family was attacked while traveling near the Gila River in Arizona. Olive was taken by her attackers, and lived for five years with Native Americans before being ransomed by the U.S. government.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from hot
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Froy. I don't like Tracy V. Wilson, and today's
topic is one that I have kind of been dancing
around for a while. Uh. She was a media sensation
(00:22):
long before the concept of reality TV came around, and
long before TV. Even her story sounds adventurous and incredible
because it was she was a frontier girl when in
eighteen fifty one she was captured by Native Americans who
attacked her family's wagon. And her story is full of
twists and turns. So I'm not going to do the
usual um. You know, usually we do a little bit
(00:44):
more intro, but I don't want to in this one
because I want to just let it unfold because it
really is quite an amazing story. We were talking today
about Olive Oatman, so I love was the daughter of
Royce and Mary Anne Sperry Oatman, and she was one
of seven kids. She was born in Eleanor in eighteen
thirty seven, although there are some records that indicate that
it might have actually been eighteen thirty nine. Yeah, it
(01:06):
makes me wonder if that wasn't one of those cases
of poor penmanship where a nine and a seven looked
kind of similar, because you'll see it written both ways.
And in May of eighteen fifty, uh, the Oatman family
joined a wagon train with several other members from their
Mormon church to strike out for the West. And the
Oatman's first traveled from Illinois and then they met up
(01:28):
with the larger group in Independence, Missouri, and that's where
they all set out with nine wagons in a plan
to travel to California. But not long after the journey began,
the Oatman's, along with a couple of other wagons, separated
from that group, and by the time they and the
remaining families got to Arizona, a famine there made the
(01:48):
prospect of staying kind of a daunting idea. Yeah, they
had always intended to keep going west, but you know,
they weren't sure where they were going to stay at
various points. Um. But they really did not want to
linger in Arizona. Uh. But there was also this fear
that if they continued west that they were going to
(02:09):
be attacked on the road by native tribes. This was
apparently the problem that was going on. It was pretty
common with settlers. Uh And after they had had a
little bit of a reassurance from a fellow traveler that
he had not seen any immediate threats on the road,
the Oatman's decided that they were going to take sort
of the more daring path, and they left behind those
remaining traveling companions to continue towards California. And during this
(02:33):
they followed the Heila River, which at the time was
the border between the US and Mexico, and they were
traveling along what's called Cook's Wagon Road. So they had
really hoped that this path was going to be clear
of any attacks. But on February eighteen fifty one, the
Oapmans were met on the road by a group of
nineteen Native Americans, and this was near HeLa Bend, Arizona.
(02:54):
According to an account that was written later based on
olives recollection, the last thing Roy said to his family
was do not be alarmed. The Indians won't harm you. Yeah.
He's generally characterized as a man who actually believed that
most Native American violence was born of poor treatment from
white settlers, and that if you treated people kindly, they
(03:17):
would treat you kindly in return. But unfortunately this did
not play out in this particular interaction. After that, the
natives that they had come in contact with first asked
for tobacco and other supplies, which the Oatman's handed over.
The interloper started rummaging through the Oatman's wagon, and when
Royce Oatman finally told them he just could not give
(03:37):
them any more food without damning his family to starvation,
things turned violent. The group of men attacked the Oatman's
They killed both Royce and Marianne and four of the children.
Olive fainted and when she regained consciousness, she heard her
mother groaning and tried to go to help her, but
she was held back by their attackers. She and her sister, Marianne,
(03:59):
who were both was terrified, watched while the men looted
the wagon and the bodies. One of the other children,
Lorenzo Oatman, was fifteen at the time, and he had
been clubbed and left for dead, and in fact he
had been tossed over this kind of raveneage. But he
did eventually regain consciousness sometime after the event had happened,
(04:21):
and when he did, he quickly realized that most of
his family had been murdered, but his sister's Olive and
Maryanne were simply gone. Lorenzo tried to make his way
back to the wagon train that the family had originally
split off from. They were at Maricopa Wells, Arizona, which
was a little less than fifty miles or eighty kilometers away.
(04:42):
This was a really long and slow journey, and he
was extremely injured. Fortunately, he was found by two men
from a nearby village who recognized him and got him
to America a Wells. Lorenzo received treatment for his wounds
there before going back to bury his family. And in
(05:02):
sort of a cruel twist to this story, I mean,
the whole thing is extremely cruel, but Royce Oatman had
actually sent word ahead to fort Yuma that the family
supplies were running low, that he had seven children with him,
and that they really needed assistance. And an entomologist that
they had met on the road named John Lacante had
been carrying that request to fort Yuma, and on his
(05:24):
way there, he and his guide encountered a band of
Native Americans on the trail uh and that group stole
the horses that Lacante and his guide had been riding,
And so those two men decided that they were going
to continue towards fort Yuma on foot, but they also
knew that they may not get that note delivered in
a particularly timely manner since they no longer had horses,
(05:44):
and so Lacante had actually posted a warning card on
the tree for the Oatman's that there were hostile Native
Americans in the area. We don't know if Royce ever
saw that warning or not. Uh there has been some
speculation that the same men that stole Lacante and his
guide's horses were part of this party that eventually attacked
the Oatman's. Meanwhile, the two surviving Oatmen girls were basically
(06:07):
starting a new life as captives of the people who
had left them orphaned. Olive was fourteen at the time
and Marianne was seven. After the attack, the two girls
were forced to walk barefoot for four days over approximately
sixty miles or kilometers worth of terrain. Olive would later
tell people that their captors had been apaches, but that
(06:31):
has largely been dismissed. The more likely group to have
captured these girls and attacked the family would have been Yavapaie.
They had a village much closer to the side of
the attack. It just made more logical sense, and it's
highly likely that they were Tolka Paias, which is a
specific small branch of the Yavapaie. They kind of identified
by geographic location, so we don't think it was Apache's. Initially,
(06:54):
Olive was afraid that her kidnappers are going to burn
them alive. She also feared that as they arch, they
would try to leave Maryanne behind because she was struggling
to keep up. Maryanne, who was suffering from shock, was
beaten when she refused to go any further because she
was basically exhausted. However, the two girls were both kept alive,
(07:15):
and while the Yavapie had dabbled in ceremonial cannibalism on occasion,
that was apparently a fairly rare occurrence, and that is
not the fate of the Oatman girls. For a year,
these two girls were basically kept as slaves. They were
doing the bidding of the Yavapaie women and children. Before
we get to the next event, which really shifts the
(07:37):
fortune of the Oatman sisters, let's pause for a word
from some sponsors. So back to the story of Olive
and Maryanne. In the fall of eighteen fifty one, So
at this point. The girls were with the Yavapaie for
a number of months. Uh the Yavapaie and the Mojabbs
engaged in a trading summit of sorts. This was an
(07:59):
annual event that they did every year, and it was
during this trading ritual that the Mojave tribe first offered
to trade for these two white girls. And initially the
Yavapie refused, and these girls remained with their captors through
that winter. But in the spring, the Mojave chief sent
his daughter and five men to once again try to
make a deal for the girls. After a lot of debate,
(08:21):
the Yavapai took the deal, although the Mojave were really
insistent that they were acting out of kindness and concern
for these white children. The java Pie, though, told Olive
that they were going to be sold or killed, so
as she and Marianne were traded to their new owners,
they were completely uncertain of whether their situation was improving
(08:41):
or getting worse. In the end, the Mojave paid two horses,
three blankets, and an assortment of vegetables and beads for
the two captives, and initially the Mohave might have seemed
just as cruel as the Yavapaie had been uh. This
is a tribe that normally traveled very quickly, and as
had been the case with their kidnapper, the girls struggled
to keep pace as they traveled. However, unlike the Yavapaie,
(09:05):
the Mojave saw that these girls were struggling and they
made adjustments to try to accommodate the situation. So they
actually made the girls some foot coverings, kind of ad
hoc foot coverings, out of some animal skins that they had,
and they decided that they were going to shorten the
distance that they traveled each day, like they would just
let the journey take longer, so that these girls could
(09:26):
actually make the journey and not be you know, potentially
physically harmed by the grueling schedule they were trying to keep.
It ended up taking eleven days of travel for this
party to reach the Mojave Valley. While they were with
the Mohave, the Oatman girls were treated as tribe members
rather than as slave. They were fed, and they were
cared for, neither of which had seemed routine during their
(09:49):
time with the Yavapaie. It seems like they were adopted
by a leader and his wife. And that this family
is probably also who are who arranged for the two
of them to be traded for the tribe that had
kept them as slaves. They wound up being raised as
part of the family, and during this time, the girls
were tattooed, and this is often what you see all
(10:11):
of Oatman kind of referred to as the woman who
lived with Native Americans and returned with this tattoo on
her face. So this was a pattern of lines and
triangles on their chins, and it was blue. And while
these were pretty common markings in the Mohave culture and
they served as symbolic sort of passports into the land
(10:31):
of the dead, it was really quite a spiritual marking.
All of would later tell people that this inking marked
them as slaves, and we'll get to why that may
have played out later, But regardless of how all of
would have eventually painted it, and even taking into account
that this is likely something that the Mojave did believing
it was going to benefit the girls, this marking did
(10:54):
change them permanently in a way that was going to
forever set them apart if they were ever to return
to the life they had once known. So it was
one of those things that really kind of became a
significant demarcation of like you can never go back from this.
There's still a lot of uncertainty about how indoctrinated Olive
would have become into the tribe's customs, especially as it
(11:16):
related to sexual practices. So the Mojave are said to
have been very sexually pretty liberal, especially compared to the
upbringing that Olive had had. It was common for them
to encourage young people to be sexually active, but there
they also had a fear of having sexual activities with
other races. So Olive categorically denied any sexual activity during
(11:40):
her time with the Mojave, but the debate among historians
really continues. Uh, Polly and I were talking before we
started about how a lot of the biographies of Olive
opmen Um from earlier in the past are really highly sensationalized.
So I have a feeling that that plays a part
in all of that as well. It does. And what's
actually interest sting in this particular instance and on this
(12:02):
particular issue, is that there are believers and detractors in
terms of like whether or not she was ever uh
married or sexually active within the tribe on both sides,
both on the sensationalist angle and the more kind of
um measured and historically researched angle, because there are some
(12:25):
experts in this tribal culture that say, look, the odds
of her getting marked that way and not having been
part of the tribe's full culture are pretty low. But
then there are others who point out, no, they had
this fear of sexual intermingling with other races. And then,
of course on the sensational side, it was very exciting
to kind of, you know, think about the horrible things
(12:47):
that these girls might have had to endure, and some
of that may have been sexual in nature. And so
it's an interesting area where there are a lot of
voices and a lot of dissenting opinions, but they come
from all different directions. Uh. You may have noticed that
at this point we're talking about Alis specifically, and that
is because Marianne actually died while they were living with
the tribe. This happened when she was around the age
(13:08):
of twelve. Uh. This was not something that happened to
her because she was a captive, though she suffered the
same fate as many of the other members of the
Majave when a drought in eighteen fifty five caused a
severe food shortage and it starved many of them to death.
So this was a time when the American West was
still being colonized and as contact with Native American people's
(13:30):
was becoming more common. The presence of a white woman
already living with a Native tribe didn't go unnoticed. But
at the same time, people who were new to the
area tended to just disbelieve this information when it was
circulated as rumor rather than its fact. Yeah, and there's
actually an interesting instant incident that happened in eighteen fifty four.
(13:54):
So at that point, the Whipple Expedition, which was a
wagon train of soldiers, servants, herders, and scientist us that
were assembled to survey a route for a transcontinental railroad,
actually came in contact with the Mohave and they traded
with Olive's tribe for a week. And the presence of
Olive and her sister, because she would have still been
alive at this time at the Native American settlement, would
(14:16):
have been obvious, and this maybe where many of the
stories that spread about white women living there began. But
it seems that Olive didn't really make an effort to
approach or reach out to any of the members of
the Whipple survey. She would later tell people that the
Mojave always told her that she was free to leave,
but that she never knew which way to go from
the settlement, so she stayed. This seems like an opportunity
(14:39):
for an avenue back to a white settlement, but she
didn't really seem to ever explore it. Yeah, there's even
some debate over whether she may have hidden from the
men of the Whipple expedition um so that that remains
sort of an odd question mark. But eventually, once the
confirmation of this unusual situation and of a white woman
(15:01):
living with this tribe was the real deal was actually happening,
there was action taken and a message was eventually sent
after a lot of political maneuvering to the Mojave village
asking for Olive's release and uh. This started a very
long series of negotiations. At one point the chief told
(15:21):
the negotiators, I would like to raise this girl. We
traveled far to buy her. We like her, and we
want to make friends through her. When those who come
by us know how we treat her, they will treat
us well too. If the officers want to see her.
They had better come here and talk with me. Yeah,
he really wanted he he felt earnestly that if he
(15:42):
talked to the people in charge they would understand Um
and more conversations and negotiations continued, because this was sort
of a big deal. At this point, a ransom was offered,
and that ransom, we should point out, was not asked
for by the Majave Uh. It was simply offered by
these negotiators that were trying to get Alive back uh.
(16:04):
And Olive was actually present for some of these talks
about her future, though it doesn't seem like she had
a lot of input. Eventually she was released for a
negotiated ransom of two horses, blankets, and beads, so very
similar to the deal that the Yavapae had made with
the Mohave for Olive and Marianne. And then Olive was
taken to fort Yuma. When Olah was turned over to
(16:28):
the U. S Army, she wept, but these were not
tears of joy. She grieved the loss of her Mojave family.
She tried to bury herself in a sand bank by
the Colorado River, although there's some debate about exactly why
she did this. Some accounts say that she was trying
to hide her toplessness, and others claimed that it was
driven by being reluctant to return to a world of
(16:51):
white culture and a in a white town. But before
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first purchase. Olives reintroduction to white society was as you
(18:19):
would probably imagine, a little bit jarring. First, as we
kind of hinted at a little while ago, her clothing
was inappropriate. It left her upper tor so completely uncovered,
so she had to be changed into proper clothing, which
is something she had not worn for at this point years. Uh.
She also needed to be bathed, and one of the
sort of big transition things is that her hair at
(18:41):
this point had been darkened with mesquite from its normal
light brown shade to a deep black, so she kind
of was like literally watching off her majave culture at
this point. Uh. Second, Yuma at this time is often
characterized as a sort of hell on earth. It was hot,
which was part of it, but it was always hot. However,
that particular year in there were some extremely violent dust storms,
(19:06):
and they also had a really serious bug problem at
the time, and just the conditions there at fort Yuma
were not fabulous. People cheered for her when she arrived,
but she didn't really understand why. She gave a formal
interview with an officer during which she recounted all that
she had been through to the best of her recollection.
(19:27):
Some of her answers were incorrect, and some of the
timelines were a little off, which is not really surprising. UH.
And when she spoke of the Mojave she said, they
saved my life. Yeah. This initial UH interview that she
did is often kind of brought up as as evidence
against UH many of the later writings about her that, No,
(19:50):
this doesn't really line up with the first things that
she told white people when she started talking to them
about what she had been through. UH. This is also
was during that interview that the time that she learned
that her brother had actually survived the attack by the
Heiler River, so very quickly she and Lorenzo were reunited.
He had actually been searching for her. In the years
since their separation. He had been looking for his two
(20:12):
sisters pretty continuously, and he even went on scouting trips
of his own. He petitioned authorities to take a more
active role in searching for answers about just what had
happened to his missing sisters. She basically became famous overnight
newspapers Sucker story and really ran with it, and soon
everybody knew some version of Olives story. Yeah, and there
(20:33):
was actually a book that came out the year after
she Uh left the Majave in seven And this book
was titled Life among the Indians, and it was written
by Royal B. Stratton. He was a minister and he
certainly had an agenda in the writing of it. Uh.
This book flew off the shelves, and on the plus side,
it made enough money to put both Alive and Lorenzo
(20:55):
through school at the University of the Pacific. The book
was a deep sensationalized and a lot of its content
appears to have been basically invented. It was not an
accurate account of Olive's time living with Native Americans. Is
actually probably was its appeal that reinforced a lot of
false beliefs and fears and prejudices that the white colonists
(21:18):
already had, and this book also launched all of his
career as a public speaker, so in the years following,
she would spend a lot of time touring the country
and relaying her story, although it did seem at this
point that the story that she was telling was the
one that people wanted to hear and that lined up
with Stratton's book, rather than the one that she actually
(21:39):
lived and had initially described in her interview with the
military officer when she first came back. There's also some
speculation that one of the reasons that her story shifted
is that she experienced some degree of post traumatic stress
disorder while trying to return to white society, and that
to some degree, her memories and her impressions over time
with them mojave but game kind of muddled with her
(22:01):
time with her original captors. And it's certainly not unusual
for someone who's been through a trauma, and frankly someone
who hasn't been through a trauma to experience some degree
of memory distortion. Uh. And she kind of talked about
this in letters to family as she was settling back
into life among white colonists, where she would be like, oh,
(22:23):
I'm just from now realizing you know, what I've been
through and what what's going on. And so we don't
know how much of the reality shifted during this time
in her mind, and we'll never know for certain whether
her telling of this story as she did in these
public lectures was colored by mental anguish or to some
degree a sense of theatrics. Remember this really was supporting
(22:43):
her at this point, or if it was some mingling
of the two. In eighteen sixty five, all Have got
married to a cattleman named John B. Fairchild. The two
of them met after one of her lectures, and according
to some accounts, her new husband was really not interested
in Olive's past, to the point that he seemed to
just want to erase it. He stopped her from going
on lecture tours, he burned all of the copies of
(23:06):
the Stratton account of her time as a captive that
he could get his hands on. We don't really know
if he was trying to protect her or if he
found her past shameful. Yeah, he apparently really went to
some great effort to procure every possible copy. He could
have that book and have it destroyed. Uh. And what's
interesting is that this marriage to Fairchild, and it seems
(23:27):
like they had really quite a good match. I want
to be careful that we don't sort of just paint
this as a man who was very controlling and wanted
to eliminate her history. But he we don't know what
his his motivations were, but we do know that at
this point she pretty much severed all ties with her
biographer Stratton, and Stratton had also been the person responsible
(23:48):
for booking her lectures, and he is really said to
have strongly encouraged her distorted version of her story. He
knew it was going to draw crownds and so he
was really pretty gung ho on this since they renal
version and he eventually went mad and ended up dying
in an asylum, but after her marriage to Fairchild, he
was no longer part of all of his life. Seven
(24:09):
years after their wedding, John and Olive moved to Charman, Texas,
and four years after that, in eighteen seventy six, they
adopted a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who they called Mamie. Yeah.
Her name, Mary Elizabeth was the combination of each of
their mother's names UH and as she aged, even though
her life in many ways seemed to be kind of
settled and really pretty stable, Olive experienced a lot of
(24:32):
bouts of depression, which is probably not a big surprise
when you consider what she had endured at a very
early age. She was also frequently troubled with headaches. There
are rumors that she went into an asylum, although none
of that is substantiated, but we do know that in
eighteen eighty one she spent several months at a medical
spa in Canada, UH and that most of her time
there was basically spent just on bed rest. In nineteen
(24:56):
o three, Olive Opmen Fairchild died of a heart attack
at the age of sixty five. She's buried at West
Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas, and in nineteen sixty nine
a Texas Historical marker was added to the grave site.
The story of all of Oatman's life has so many
variations depending on the telling that there are always going
to be a lot of question marks involved in it,
(25:17):
and the sensational nature of it, even without the Stratton
biography and the kind of really amped up crazy stories
that he included, actually inspired other performers to adopt some
of all of story as their own. So there were
actually some circus ladies that would sometimes tell almost identical
tales of having been adopted by so called quote redskins
(25:38):
and tattooed to show that they belonged to a tribe.
And this, of course, you know, further diluted the truth
of all of original story in the public mind, and
it led to some you know, sort of legend and
confusion and some of the more lurid accounts of her life.
There were even some claims that people made after the
(25:58):
fact that they had rescued Olive from her captors, but
we're basically really easy to expose as false because they
had a number of inaccuracies. Yeah, there was one guy
that claimed that he had walked into the t P
where these people were keeping her and he had carried
her out, and uh, there were some other elements to it,
(26:20):
and and someone very quickly was like, hey, those Native
Americans don't use tps. So there were things like that
that just kept coming up that that pretty quickly made
those crazy accounts obviously falsified. But another part of the
mystique of Olive story comes from the vast contrast that
would have existed at the time, of course, between her
(26:41):
very ly serious Mormon upbringing up to the time of
her kidnapping, and then her time in the Mojave culture,
which was so very different in terms of values. Her
family had led a very serious life, whereas Oatman's adoptive
family would likely have been a much more lighthearted group. Uh.
It's that that the Mojave's really loved a good joke,
(27:01):
and that they were very comical, They loved laughter. They
would make some very very off color jokes. Uh. And
in fact, her nickname when she was with them is
a very dirty word. Basically, we're not sure exactly why
she got that nickname, but it did not seem to
be in any way derisive. Uh. They also were in
(27:22):
at that point in a society where women would have
had a great deal more freedom and a higher social
standing than that they would have been in you know,
white culture and particularly in this era. Uh So, while
there's always been speculation about this juxtaposition and what it
meant in terms of olives demeanor, we really don't know though,
(27:43):
what level of autonomy she may have had in her
time with the Mojave versus you know what she had
experienced prior or after that. But we do know that
after she returned to white culture she was consistently stoic
and serious. There's actually only one written account of her
ever laughing, and that was during that first interview that
(28:03):
she gave after she had returned. So part of Olive's
mystique undoubtedly also comes from the vast contrast that existed
between her Mormon upbringing up to the time of her
kidnapping and her time with Native Americans and specifically the
Majave culture. Whereas her family had led a very serious life, uh,
(28:24):
all of adoptive family with the Mojave would likely have
been much more comical and lighthearted. Uh. This is a
culture that at the time certainly was all about jokes.
They really liked a good joke, including good dirty jokes.
Laughter was very important. Uh. And at this point women
in their society would have had a great deal more
(28:45):
freedom and a higher social standing than would have been
the case with the white culture that Olive came from.
While there's always been speculation about this juxtaposition and what
it meant in terms of all ofs demeanor, we don't
truly know what level of autonomy she may have had
in her time uh with the Mahave, but as a
woman returned to white culture, she was consistently very stoic
(29:06):
and serious. There's actually only one account on record of
her laughing, and it was actually during that first interview
that she did with the military, right after she came
back from living with the Mahave. As for the Mojave
version of Olive's time with them, we don't really have
a lot of documentation because they had no written language.
The only first person account we have of the Oatman
(29:28):
children during this time is from an interview that was
conducted in nineteen o three. Anthropologist A. L. Crowber spoke
with a member of the tribe who knew Olive, and
that man's account was really vastly different from the story
that was put forth in Stratton's book. Yeah, it's um.
It's definitely much more in line with the initial account
that Olive gave Uh. It's certainly characterizes her relationship with
(29:54):
the tribe as much more of a family situation, in
one where she seemed pretty settled, respected and fairly happy,
So very different from Stratton's book and alive legacy lives on.
Actually in a number of ways. There's an area near
where the Oatman family camped right by the Heila River,
which is called Oatman Flat. And there's actually a mining
(30:15):
town in western Arizona that was renamed Oatman in nine.
In two thousand, six hundred and fifty years to the
day after Olive left the Majave tribe, there was a
gathering in Yuma, Arizona, at the site of the Omen massacre.
One of Olive's family descendants retold Olive's story to the crowd,
(30:36):
and uh, kind of to to summarize the nature of
this story in Margot Mifflin's book The Blue Tattoo, which
came out in and it's kind of the uh scholarly
biography done of her that really researched all of the
various accounts and tried to to sort out the sensational
(30:57):
from what was really going on. The author sums up
the mythology of all of Oatman kind of perfectly by
writing quote, in her day, Oatman was freakish enough to
invite speculation and guarded enough to ensure the speculation never ended. Yes,
so that is our alive Oatman episode. Like I said,
I wanted to do this for a long time, and
(31:19):
I really could have made it go on for days
because there's so many details of her story in her time,
both uh as a in white culture and in Native
American culture that are so fascinating. Highly recommend that book.
By the way, do you have some listener mail to
cap this all off? This listener mail is from our listener,
(31:39):
Jordan's and Uh. She sent us a lovely letter, and
first of all, I have to say, Jordan, your penmanship
is spectacular. I am not kidding, she says, Hey, Tracy
and Holly, I was just going to separately mail these
postcards to you. She included postcards with the letter, but
decided I did not have enough room to write anything
of importance, So this is my letter. I have been
a listener now for a few years, and I have
(32:00):
recently hooked my mom, dad, and sister on your podcast.
We spend family trips engrossed in multiple episodes at a time.
Family discussions have never been so rich and educational. This
past weekend, my family and I made a trip to
Kansas City, Missouri. The first things we planned were visits
to two local museums. First was the Negro League's Baseball Museum,
as I am a huge fan of baseball and the
(32:21):
history of it has tied to our nation's history. Uh.
The second museum we trecked our way to was the
National World War One Museum at Liberty Memorial. Both were
full of facts I have never heard until now. The
whole time I was at these museums, I thought of YouTube.
Hopefully you find some sort of joy and interest from
these postcards and they spark a desire for future episodes
p s. I would also like to thank you for
(32:42):
all of the wonderful episodes on History's Finest Women. I
have been finding the most joy in these episodes, especially
Alice Roosevelt. I've been writing the names of these inspiring
women down in a notebook with a short summary of
the amazing things they did. I looked at this list
in times when I'm meeting a little extra motivation or sass.
Thank you again, sincerely, Jordan Jordan, this is a great letter.
(33:02):
Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us,
and your postcards are awesome. I love them. Uh. You know,
I like knowing that she's sharing her love of history
with her family and they're getting some good talks out
of the whole thing. It's a good thing. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so.
Our email is history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(33:23):
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(33:44):
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(34:06):
com and missed in History dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff
works dot com. M
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from hot
works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Holly Froy. I don't like Tracy V. Wilson, and today's
topic is one that I have kind of been dancing
around for a while. Uh. She was a media sensation
(00:22):
long before the concept of reality TV came around, and
long before TV. Even her story sounds adventurous and incredible
because it was she was a frontier girl when in
eighteen fifty one she was captured by Native Americans who
attacked her family's wagon. And her story is full of
twists and turns. So I'm not going to do the
usual um. You know, usually we do a little bit
(00:44):
more intro, but I don't want to in this one
because I want to just let it unfold because it
really is quite an amazing story. We were talking today
about Olive Oatman, so I love was the daughter of
Royce and Mary Anne Sperry Oatman, and she was one
of seven kids. She was born in Eleanor in eighteen
thirty seven, although there are some records that indicate that
it might have actually been eighteen thirty nine. Yeah, it
(01:06):
makes me wonder if that wasn't one of those cases
of poor penmanship where a nine and a seven looked
kind of similar, because you'll see it written both ways.
And in May of eighteen fifty, uh, the Oatman family
joined a wagon train with several other members from their
Mormon church to strike out for the West. And the
Oatman's first traveled from Illinois and then they met up
(01:28):
with the larger group in Independence, Missouri, and that's where
they all set out with nine wagons in a plan
to travel to California. But not long after the journey began,
the Oatman's, along with a couple of other wagons, separated
from that group, and by the time they and the
remaining families got to Arizona, a famine there made the
(01:48):
prospect of staying kind of a daunting idea. Yeah, they
had always intended to keep going west, but you know,
they weren't sure where they were going to stay at
various points. Um. But they really did not want to
linger in Arizona. Uh. But there was also this fear
that if they continued west that they were going to
(02:09):
be attacked on the road by native tribes. This was
apparently the problem that was going on. It was pretty
common with settlers. Uh And after they had had a
little bit of a reassurance from a fellow traveler that
he had not seen any immediate threats on the road,
the Oatman's decided that they were going to take sort
of the more daring path, and they left behind those
remaining traveling companions to continue towards California. And during this
(02:33):
they followed the Heila River, which at the time was
the border between the US and Mexico, and they were
traveling along what's called Cook's Wagon Road. So they had
really hoped that this path was going to be clear
of any attacks. But on February eighteen fifty one, the
Oapmans were met on the road by a group of
nineteen Native Americans, and this was near HeLa Bend, Arizona.
(02:54):
According to an account that was written later based on
olives recollection, the last thing Roy said to his family
was do not be alarmed. The Indians won't harm you. Yeah.
He's generally characterized as a man who actually believed that
most Native American violence was born of poor treatment from
white settlers, and that if you treated people kindly, they
(03:17):
would treat you kindly in return. But unfortunately this did
not play out in this particular interaction. After that, the
natives that they had come in contact with first asked
for tobacco and other supplies, which the Oatman's handed over.
The interloper started rummaging through the Oatman's wagon, and when
Royce Oatman finally told them he just could not give
(03:37):
them any more food without damning his family to starvation,
things turned violent. The group of men attacked the Oatman's
They killed both Royce and Marianne and four of the children.
Olive fainted and when she regained consciousness, she heard her
mother groaning and tried to go to help her, but
she was held back by their attackers. She and her sister, Marianne,
(03:59):
who were both was terrified, watched while the men looted
the wagon and the bodies. One of the other children,
Lorenzo Oatman, was fifteen at the time, and he had
been clubbed and left for dead, and in fact he
had been tossed over this kind of raveneage. But he
did eventually regain consciousness sometime after the event had happened,
(04:21):
and when he did, he quickly realized that most of
his family had been murdered, but his sister's Olive and
Maryanne were simply gone. Lorenzo tried to make his way
back to the wagon train that the family had originally
split off from. They were at Maricopa Wells, Arizona, which
was a little less than fifty miles or eighty kilometers away.
(04:42):
This was a really long and slow journey, and he
was extremely injured. Fortunately, he was found by two men
from a nearby village who recognized him and got him
to America a Wells. Lorenzo received treatment for his wounds
there before going back to bury his family. And in
(05:02):
sort of a cruel twist to this story, I mean,
the whole thing is extremely cruel, but Royce Oatman had
actually sent word ahead to fort Yuma that the family
supplies were running low, that he had seven children with him,
and that they really needed assistance. And an entomologist that
they had met on the road named John Lacante had
been carrying that request to fort Yuma, and on his
(05:24):
way there, he and his guide encountered a band of
Native Americans on the trail uh and that group stole
the horses that Lacante and his guide had been riding,
And so those two men decided that they were going
to continue towards fort Yuma on foot, but they also
knew that they may not get that note delivered in
a particularly timely manner since they no longer had horses,
(05:44):
and so Lacante had actually posted a warning card on
the tree for the Oatman's that there were hostile Native
Americans in the area. We don't know if Royce ever
saw that warning or not. Uh there has been some
speculation that the same men that stole Lacante and his
guide's horses were part of this party that eventually attacked
the Oatman's. Meanwhile, the two surviving Oatmen girls were basically
(06:07):
starting a new life as captives of the people who
had left them orphaned. Olive was fourteen at the time
and Marianne was seven. After the attack, the two girls
were forced to walk barefoot for four days over approximately
sixty miles or kilometers worth of terrain. Olive would later
tell people that their captors had been apaches, but that
(06:31):
has largely been dismissed. The more likely group to have
captured these girls and attacked the family would have been Yavapaie.
They had a village much closer to the side of
the attack. It just made more logical sense, and it's
highly likely that they were Tolka Paias, which is a
specific small branch of the Yavapaie. They kind of identified
by geographic location, so we don't think it was Apache's. Initially,
(06:54):
Olive was afraid that her kidnappers are going to burn
them alive. She also feared that as they arch, they
would try to leave Maryanne behind because she was struggling
to keep up. Maryanne, who was suffering from shock, was
beaten when she refused to go any further because she
was basically exhausted. However, the two girls were both kept alive,
(07:15):
and while the Yavapie had dabbled in ceremonial cannibalism on occasion,
that was apparently a fairly rare occurrence, and that is
not the fate of the Oatman girls. For a year,
these two girls were basically kept as slaves. They were
doing the bidding of the Yavapaie women and children. Before
we get to the next event, which really shifts the
(07:37):
fortune of the Oatman sisters, let's pause for a word
from some sponsors. So back to the story of Olive
and Maryanne. In the fall of eighteen fifty one, So
at this point. The girls were with the Yavapaie for
a number of months. Uh the Yavapaie and the Mojabbs
engaged in a trading summit of sorts. This was an
(07:59):
annual event that they did every year, and it was
during this trading ritual that the Mojave tribe first offered
to trade for these two white girls. And initially the
Yavapie refused, and these girls remained with their captors through
that winter. But in the spring, the Mojave chief sent
his daughter and five men to once again try to
make a deal for the girls. After a lot of debate,
(08:21):
the Yavapai took the deal, although the Mojave were really
insistent that they were acting out of kindness and concern
for these white children. The java Pie, though, told Olive
that they were going to be sold or killed, so
as she and Marianne were traded to their new owners,
they were completely uncertain of whether their situation was improving
(08:41):
or getting worse. In the end, the Mojave paid two horses,
three blankets, and an assortment of vegetables and beads for
the two captives, and initially the Mohave might have seemed
just as cruel as the Yavapaie had been uh. This
is a tribe that normally traveled very quickly, and as
had been the case with their kidnapper, the girls struggled
to keep pace as they traveled. However, unlike the Yavapaie,
(09:05):
the Mojave saw that these girls were struggling and they
made adjustments to try to accommodate the situation. So they
actually made the girls some foot coverings, kind of ad
hoc foot coverings, out of some animal skins that they had,
and they decided that they were going to shorten the
distance that they traveled each day, like they would just
let the journey take longer, so that these girls could
(09:26):
actually make the journey and not be you know, potentially
physically harmed by the grueling schedule they were trying to keep.
It ended up taking eleven days of travel for this
party to reach the Mojave Valley. While they were with
the Mohave, the Oatman girls were treated as tribe members
rather than as slave. They were fed, and they were
cared for, neither of which had seemed routine during their
(09:49):
time with the Yavapaie. It seems like they were adopted
by a leader and his wife. And that this family
is probably also who are who arranged for the two
of them to be traded for the tribe that had
kept them as slaves. They wound up being raised as
part of the family, and during this time, the girls
were tattooed, and this is often what you see all
(10:11):
of Oatman kind of referred to as the woman who
lived with Native Americans and returned with this tattoo on
her face. So this was a pattern of lines and
triangles on their chins, and it was blue. And while
these were pretty common markings in the Mohave culture and
they served as symbolic sort of passports into the land
(10:31):
of the dead, it was really quite a spiritual marking.
All of would later tell people that this inking marked
them as slaves, and we'll get to why that may
have played out later, But regardless of how all of
would have eventually painted it, and even taking into account
that this is likely something that the Mojave did believing
it was going to benefit the girls, this marking did
(10:54):
change them permanently in a way that was going to
forever set them apart if they were ever to return
to the life they had once known. So it was
one of those things that really kind of became a
significant demarcation of like you can never go back from this.
There's still a lot of uncertainty about how indoctrinated Olive
would have become into the tribe's customs, especially as it
(11:16):
related to sexual practices. So the Mojave are said to
have been very sexually pretty liberal, especially compared to the
upbringing that Olive had had. It was common for them
to encourage young people to be sexually active, but there
they also had a fear of having sexual activities with
other races. So Olive categorically denied any sexual activity during
(11:40):
her time with the Mojave, but the debate among historians
really continues. Uh, Polly and I were talking before we
started about how a lot of the biographies of Olive
opmen Um from earlier in the past are really highly sensationalized.
So I have a feeling that that plays a part
in all of that as well. It does. And what's
actually interest sting in this particular instance and on this
(12:02):
particular issue, is that there are believers and detractors in
terms of like whether or not she was ever uh
married or sexually active within the tribe on both sides,
both on the sensationalist angle and the more kind of
um measured and historically researched angle, because there are some
(12:25):
experts in this tribal culture that say, look, the odds
of her getting marked that way and not having been
part of the tribe's full culture are pretty low. But
then there are others who point out, no, they had
this fear of sexual intermingling with other races. And then,
of course on the sensational side, it was very exciting
to kind of, you know, think about the horrible things
(12:47):
that these girls might have had to endure, and some
of that may have been sexual in nature. And so
it's an interesting area where there are a lot of
voices and a lot of dissenting opinions, but they come
from all different directions. Uh. You may have noticed that
at this point we're talking about Alis specifically, and that
is because Marianne actually died while they were living with
the tribe. This happened when she was around the age
(13:08):
of twelve. Uh. This was not something that happened to
her because she was a captive, though she suffered the
same fate as many of the other members of the
Majave when a drought in eighteen fifty five caused a
severe food shortage and it starved many of them to death.
So this was a time when the American West was
still being colonized and as contact with Native American people's
(13:30):
was becoming more common. The presence of a white woman
already living with a Native tribe didn't go unnoticed. But
at the same time, people who were new to the
area tended to just disbelieve this information when it was
circulated as rumor rather than its fact. Yeah, and there's
actually an interesting instant incident that happened in eighteen fifty four.
(13:54):
So at that point, the Whipple Expedition, which was a
wagon train of soldiers, servants, herders, and scientist us that
were assembled to survey a route for a transcontinental railroad,
actually came in contact with the Mohave and they traded
with Olive's tribe for a week. And the presence of
Olive and her sister, because she would have still been
alive at this time at the Native American settlement, would
(14:16):
have been obvious, and this maybe where many of the
stories that spread about white women living there began. But
it seems that Olive didn't really make an effort to
approach or reach out to any of the members of
the Whipple survey. She would later tell people that the
Mojave always told her that she was free to leave,
but that she never knew which way to go from
the settlement, so she stayed. This seems like an opportunity
(14:39):
for an avenue back to a white settlement, but she
didn't really seem to ever explore it. Yeah, there's even
some debate over whether she may have hidden from the
men of the Whipple expedition um so that that remains
sort of an odd question mark. But eventually, once the
confirmation of this unusual situation and of a white woman
(15:01):
living with this tribe was the real deal was actually happening,
there was action taken and a message was eventually sent
after a lot of political maneuvering to the Mojave village
asking for Olive's release and uh. This started a very
long series of negotiations. At one point the chief told
(15:21):
the negotiators, I would like to raise this girl. We
traveled far to buy her. We like her, and we
want to make friends through her. When those who come
by us know how we treat her, they will treat
us well too. If the officers want to see her.
They had better come here and talk with me. Yeah,
he really wanted he he felt earnestly that if he
(15:42):
talked to the people in charge they would understand Um
and more conversations and negotiations continued, because this was sort
of a big deal. At this point, a ransom was offered,
and that ransom, we should point out, was not asked
for by the Majave Uh. It was simply offered by
these negotiators that were trying to get Alive back uh.
(16:04):
And Olive was actually present for some of these talks
about her future, though it doesn't seem like she had
a lot of input. Eventually she was released for a
negotiated ransom of two horses, blankets, and beads, so very
similar to the deal that the Yavapae had made with
the Mohave for Olive and Marianne. And then Olive was
taken to fort Yuma. When Olah was turned over to
(16:28):
the U. S Army, she wept, but these were not
tears of joy. She grieved the loss of her Mojave family.
She tried to bury herself in a sand bank by
the Colorado River, although there's some debate about exactly why
she did this. Some accounts say that she was trying
to hide her toplessness, and others claimed that it was
driven by being reluctant to return to a world of
(16:51):
white culture and a in a white town. But before
we get to olive life after her time with the Mohave,
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first purchase. Olives reintroduction to white society was as you
(18:19):
would probably imagine, a little bit jarring. First, as we
kind of hinted at a little while ago, her clothing
was inappropriate. It left her upper tor so completely uncovered,
so she had to be changed into proper clothing, which
is something she had not worn for at this point years. Uh.
She also needed to be bathed, and one of the
sort of big transition things is that her hair at
(18:41):
this point had been darkened with mesquite from its normal
light brown shade to a deep black, so she kind
of was like literally watching off her majave culture at
this point. Uh. Second, Yuma at this time is often
characterized as a sort of hell on earth. It was hot,
which was part of it, but it was always hot. However,
that particular year in there were some extremely violent dust storms,
(19:06):
and they also had a really serious bug problem at
the time, and just the conditions there at fort Yuma
were not fabulous. People cheered for her when she arrived,
but she didn't really understand why. She gave a formal
interview with an officer during which she recounted all that
she had been through to the best of her recollection.
(19:27):
Some of her answers were incorrect, and some of the
timelines were a little off, which is not really surprising. UH.
And when she spoke of the Mojave she said, they
saved my life. Yeah. This initial UH interview that she
did is often kind of brought up as as evidence
against UH many of the later writings about her that, No,
(19:50):
this doesn't really line up with the first things that
she told white people when she started talking to them
about what she had been through. UH. This is also
was during that interview that the time that she learned
that her brother had actually survived the attack by the
Heiler River, so very quickly she and Lorenzo were reunited.
He had actually been searching for her. In the years
since their separation. He had been looking for his two
(20:12):
sisters pretty continuously, and he even went on scouting trips
of his own. He petitioned authorities to take a more
active role in searching for answers about just what had
happened to his missing sisters. She basically became famous overnight
newspapers Sucker story and really ran with it, and soon
everybody knew some version of Olives story. Yeah, and there
(20:33):
was actually a book that came out the year after
she Uh left the Majave in seven And this book
was titled Life among the Indians, and it was written
by Royal B. Stratton. He was a minister and he
certainly had an agenda in the writing of it. Uh.
This book flew off the shelves, and on the plus side,
it made enough money to put both Alive and Lorenzo
(20:55):
through school at the University of the Pacific. The book
was a deep sensationalized and a lot of its content
appears to have been basically invented. It was not an
accurate account of Olive's time living with Native Americans. Is
actually probably was its appeal that reinforced a lot of
false beliefs and fears and prejudices that the white colonists
(21:18):
already had, and this book also launched all of his
career as a public speaker, so in the years following,
she would spend a lot of time touring the country
and relaying her story, although it did seem at this
point that the story that she was telling was the
one that people wanted to hear and that lined up
with Stratton's book, rather than the one that she actually
(21:39):
lived and had initially described in her interview with the
military officer when she first came back. There's also some
speculation that one of the reasons that her story shifted
is that she experienced some degree of post traumatic stress
disorder while trying to return to white society, and that
to some degree, her memories and her impressions over time
with them mojave but game kind of muddled with her
(22:01):
time with her original captors. And it's certainly not unusual
for someone who's been through a trauma, and frankly someone
who hasn't been through a trauma to experience some degree
of memory distortion. Uh. And she kind of talked about
this in letters to family as she was settling back
into life among white colonists, where she would be like, oh,
(22:23):
I'm just from now realizing you know, what I've been
through and what what's going on. And so we don't
know how much of the reality shifted during this time
in her mind, and we'll never know for certain whether
her telling of this story as she did in these
public lectures was colored by mental anguish or to some
degree a sense of theatrics. Remember this really was supporting
(22:43):
her at this point, or if it was some mingling
of the two. In eighteen sixty five, all Have got
married to a cattleman named John B. Fairchild. The two
of them met after one of her lectures, and according
to some accounts, her new husband was really not interested
in Olive's past, to the point that he seemed to
just want to erase it. He stopped her from going
on lecture tours, he burned all of the copies of
(23:06):
the Stratton account of her time as a captive that
he could get his hands on. We don't really know
if he was trying to protect her or if he
found her past shameful. Yeah, he apparently really went to
some great effort to procure every possible copy. He could
have that book and have it destroyed. Uh. And what's
interesting is that this marriage to Fairchild, and it seems
(23:27):
like they had really quite a good match. I want
to be careful that we don't sort of just paint
this as a man who was very controlling and wanted
to eliminate her history. But he we don't know what
his his motivations were, but we do know that at
this point she pretty much severed all ties with her
biographer Stratton, and Stratton had also been the person responsible
(23:48):
for booking her lectures, and he is really said to
have strongly encouraged her distorted version of her story. He
knew it was going to draw crownds and so he
was really pretty gung ho on this since they renal
version and he eventually went mad and ended up dying
in an asylum, but after her marriage to Fairchild, he
was no longer part of all of his life. Seven
(24:09):
years after their wedding, John and Olive moved to Charman, Texas,
and four years after that, in eighteen seventy six, they
adopted a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, who they called Mamie. Yeah.
Her name, Mary Elizabeth was the combination of each of
their mother's names UH and as she aged, even though
her life in many ways seemed to be kind of
settled and really pretty stable, Olive experienced a lot of
(24:32):
bouts of depression, which is probably not a big surprise
when you consider what she had endured at a very
early age. She was also frequently troubled with headaches. There
are rumors that she went into an asylum, although none
of that is substantiated, but we do know that in
eighteen eighty one she spent several months at a medical
spa in Canada, UH and that most of her time
there was basically spent just on bed rest. In nineteen
(24:56):
o three, Olive Opmen Fairchild died of a heart attack
at the age of sixty five. She's buried at West
Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas, and in nineteen sixty nine
a Texas Historical marker was added to the grave site.
The story of all of Oatman's life has so many
variations depending on the telling that there are always going
to be a lot of question marks involved in it,
(25:17):
and the sensational nature of it, even without the Stratton
biography and the kind of really amped up crazy stories
that he included, actually inspired other performers to adopt some
of all of story as their own. So there were
actually some circus ladies that would sometimes tell almost identical
tales of having been adopted by so called quote redskins
(25:38):
and tattooed to show that they belonged to a tribe.
And this, of course, you know, further diluted the truth
of all of original story in the public mind, and
it led to some you know, sort of legend and
confusion and some of the more lurid accounts of her life.
There were even some claims that people made after the
(25:58):
fact that they had rescued Olive from her captors, but
we're basically really easy to expose as false because they
had a number of inaccuracies. Yeah, there was one guy
that claimed that he had walked into the t P
where these people were keeping her and he had carried
her out, and uh, there were some other elements to it,
(26:20):
and and someone very quickly was like, hey, those Native
Americans don't use tps. So there were things like that
that just kept coming up that that pretty quickly made
those crazy accounts obviously falsified. But another part of the
mystique of Olive story comes from the vast contrast that
would have existed at the time, of course, between her
(26:41):
very ly serious Mormon upbringing up to the time of
her kidnapping, and then her time in the Mojave culture,
which was so very different in terms of values. Her
family had led a very serious life, whereas Oatman's adoptive
family would likely have been a much more lighthearted group. Uh.
It's that that the Mojave's really loved a good joke,
(27:01):
and that they were very comical, They loved laughter. They
would make some very very off color jokes. Uh. And
in fact, her nickname when she was with them is
a very dirty word. Basically, we're not sure exactly why
she got that nickname, but it did not seem to
be in any way derisive. Uh. They also were in
(27:22):
at that point in a society where women would have
had a great deal more freedom and a higher social
standing than that they would have been in you know,
white culture and particularly in this era. Uh So, while
there's always been speculation about this juxtaposition and what it
meant in terms of olives demeanor, we really don't know though,
(27:43):
what level of autonomy she may have had in her
time with the Mojave versus you know what she had
experienced prior or after that. But we do know that
after she returned to white culture she was consistently stoic
and serious. There's actually only one written account of her
ever laughing, and that was during that first interview that
(28:03):
she gave after she had returned. So part of Olive's
mystique undoubtedly also comes from the vast contrast that existed
between her Mormon upbringing up to the time of her
kidnapping and her time with Native Americans and specifically the
Majave culture. Whereas her family had led a very serious life, uh,
(28:24):
all of adoptive family with the Mojave would likely have
been much more comical and lighthearted. Uh. This is a
culture that at the time certainly was all about jokes.
They really liked a good joke, including good dirty jokes.
Laughter was very important. Uh. And at this point women
in their society would have had a great deal more
(28:45):
freedom and a higher social standing than would have been
the case with the white culture that Olive came from.
While there's always been speculation about this juxtaposition and what
it meant in terms of all ofs demeanor, we don't
truly know what level of autonomy she may have had
in her time uh with the Mahave, but as a
woman returned to white culture, she was consistently very stoic
(29:06):
and serious. There's actually only one account on record of
her laughing, and it was actually during that first interview
that she did with the military, right after she came
back from living with the Mahave. As for the Mojave
version of Olive's time with them, we don't really have
a lot of documentation because they had no written language.
The only first person account we have of the Oatman
(29:28):
children during this time is from an interview that was
conducted in nineteen o three. Anthropologist A. L. Crowber spoke
with a member of the tribe who knew Olive, and
that man's account was really vastly different from the story
that was put forth in Stratton's book. Yeah, it's um.
It's definitely much more in line with the initial account
that Olive gave Uh. It's certainly characterizes her relationship with
(29:54):
the tribe as much more of a family situation, in
one where she seemed pretty settled, respected and fairly happy,
So very different from Stratton's book and alive legacy lives on.
Actually in a number of ways. There's an area near
where the Oatman family camped right by the Heila River,
which is called Oatman Flat. And there's actually a mining
(30:15):
town in western Arizona that was renamed Oatman in nine.
In two thousand, six hundred and fifty years to the
day after Olive left the Majave tribe, there was a
gathering in Yuma, Arizona, at the site of the Omen massacre.
One of Olive's family descendants retold Olive's story to the crowd,
(30:36):
and uh, kind of to to summarize the nature of
this story in Margot Mifflin's book The Blue Tattoo, which
came out in and it's kind of the uh scholarly
biography done of her that really researched all of the
various accounts and tried to to sort out the sensational
(30:57):
from what was really going on. The author sums up
the mythology of all of Oatman kind of perfectly by
writing quote, in her day, Oatman was freakish enough to
invite speculation and guarded enough to ensure the speculation never ended. Yes,
so that is our alive Oatman episode. Like I said,
I wanted to do this for a long time, and
(31:19):
I really could have made it go on for days
because there's so many details of her story in her time,
both uh as a in white culture and in Native
American culture that are so fascinating. Highly recommend that book.
By the way, do you have some listener mail to
cap this all off? This listener mail is from our listener,
(31:39):
Jordan's and Uh. She sent us a lovely letter, and
first of all, I have to say, Jordan, your penmanship
is spectacular. I am not kidding, she says, Hey, Tracy
and Holly, I was just going to separately mail these
postcards to you. She included postcards with the letter, but
decided I did not have enough room to write anything
of importance, So this is my letter. I have been
a listener now for a few years, and I have
(32:00):
recently hooked my mom, dad, and sister on your podcast.
We spend family trips engrossed in multiple episodes at a time.
Family discussions have never been so rich and educational. This
past weekend, my family and I made a trip to
Kansas City, Missouri. The first things we planned were visits
to two local museums. First was the Negro League's Baseball Museum,
as I am a huge fan of baseball and the
(32:21):
history of it has tied to our nation's history. Uh.
The second museum we trecked our way to was the
National World War One Museum at Liberty Memorial. Both were
full of facts I have never heard until now. The
whole time I was at these museums, I thought of YouTube.
Hopefully you find some sort of joy and interest from
these postcards and they spark a desire for future episodes
p s. I would also like to thank you for
(32:42):
all of the wonderful episodes on History's Finest Women. I
have been finding the most joy in these episodes, especially
Alice Roosevelt. I've been writing the names of these inspiring
women down in a notebook with a short summary of
the amazing things they did. I looked at this list
in times when I'm meeting a little extra motivation or sass.
Thank you again, sincerely, Jordan Jordan, this is a great letter.
(33:02):
Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us,
and your postcards are awesome. I love them. Uh. You know,
I like knowing that she's sharing her love of history
with her family and they're getting some good talks out
of the whole thing. It's a good thing. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so.
Our email is history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(33:23):
You can connect with this at Facebook dot com, slash
missed in History on Twitter, at misst in history, at
misst in history dot tumbler dot com, at pendriest dot com,
slash missed in History, and at missed in History dot
spreadshirt dot com. If you would like to purchase any
missed in History goodies for yourself or your friends and family.
If you would like to uh visit our parents site,
(33:44):
you can do so. That it's how stuff works. You
can search for almost anything your mind can conjure and
you will find some very interesting articles, videos, and other
content around it. Or you can visit us at miss
in history dot com where we have all of our
episodes they are available. We have show notes for any
of our episodes since tree See and I became part
of the podcast, and the occasional other goodies. So we
hope you visit us again at how stuff works dot
(34:06):
com and missed in History dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff
works dot com. M
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Tracy Wilson
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