24 December 2006
The Tattooed Lady
I was on my way to other things, which is what the sage said about the life we actually live, rather than the one we had planned. It was dark. I was packed, showered and ready. The cab was inbound. I was slobbering coffee. I had removed my belt in anticipation of the metal detectors. Shortly I would be entering an aluminum tube and strapping into my seat to hurtle toward Chicago and points west.
Olive Ann Oatman
I just paused a moment to check the status of the flight, and that is where things began to fall apart. Travel is so capricious, dependent on our technology. The Astronauts on the Shuttle needed to come home for the holidays from the International Space Station; their de-orbit was completely dependent on the weather. Here, there, someplace. Supplies were running short and it was time to come down.
Me too. One minute I am in Big Pink, looking at the rain-slicked parking lot and the sad Methodist church across the street, and an hour or two later I am standing, bug-eyed, in front of a harried United Air Lines employee who is explaining for the thousandth time that there are no flights going west, and that I am welcome to sleep on the benches through the Holidays, free of charge.
It is a miracle that it was possible to jet hundreds of miles to be functionally homeless, by which I mean, of course, it is a drag.
I suppose it had always been like this, the uncertainty of travel, but we forget just how bad things used to be.
People have been trying to go west since Europeans first washed up on these shores. In olden times it was harder and involved much more physical labor than just shouting at a hapless airline employee.
I needed some distraction and the line was busy to the Airlines since there were so many people who wanted to shout at them due to the act of God that disrupted Christmas plans for passengers on the 2,000 flights through Denver during this weeks blizzard.
Sometimes you just have to accept things. Better men than me have thought precisely that about the tattooed lady. Goodness knows, the whole thing fascinated Elmore Leonard enough for him to include a modification of the story in his 1984 book “The Tonto Woman.” He modified the historical details a bit, and added to the scope and drama of the tattoos.
Leonard re-named his tattooed captive Sarah, and he expanded the scope of the marks on her mouth and chin. He claims it was her choice, which might have been part of it, and expands the lines across her cheeks as marks of self-chosen abasement. He has his character tell her captors: "...if you’re going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble.”
I think the scene is both ludicrous and quite true, and it speaks to both that season, and all of them ever since. I'll get to that in a minute, but let me cut you in on the background. I have the time. I am supposed to be somewhere else, and have nothing on the schedule.
Royce Oatman and his wife and Mary Ann are exemplars of the difficulty in travel. They were from LeHarpe, Illinois, two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest as the crow flies from where they would eventually put the airport named for Lieutenant Commander “Butch” O'Hare, savior of the USS Lexington and winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
That is the place I was headed for today, but the airport did not exist when the Oatman family set out. People did not fly. In fact, the Gold Rush was the biggest news in that part of the Midwest. It was 1850, the Mexican war was just passed and there were tales of opportunity in the new American lands. Settlers were starting to pour into the Indian territories, infected with “Kansas Fever,” and the allure of the goldfields in fabulous California was tugging them further, to cross the Great Plains and the deserts beyond.
This was by no means the first meeting of the locals and the Europeans. The Spanish first came through three hundred years before. I saw a sign once in a dusty place that commemorated the moment:
By the Valley of the San Rafael
Friar Marcos de Niza
Vie Commissioner of the Franciscan Order
Delegate of the Viceroy in Mexico
Entered Arizona, the First European West of the Rockies April 12, 1539
The Spanish did not come to stay and multiply, only to see and convert and let the multiplication take care of itself. More recently, American mountain men, including the legendary Jedediah Smith appeared in the 1820s, searching for skins. Modern sensibility has ennobled these first Americans west of the Rockies with a mythic status, and I think they deserve it. If the locals knew what it really meant, they would have been murdered at first sight.
Certainly the mountain menywere unique. But other myths would rise in the years to come. Jedediah had problems with the locals, after his peaceful first encounter, and the first killings began not long after other trappers began to appear in the region. There appeared to be a clear conflict between value systems: the Mohave seemed to think that the animals were fine where they were. The trappers believed they should be separated from their skins and it was accpectable to leave the carcasses to rot.
The matter appeared to be irreconcilable.
In 1850, the southwestern territory that included Arizona was annexed by the United States, and with it began the great encroachment.
The Oatman family can be taken as typical of the hardy Americans who moved west. Father Royce was a man of the mercantile trade, and a restless one. He lost his business in the panic of 1842, when the market sank by a third and nine states defaulted on their notes. He was reduced to agricultural pursuits in Pennsylvania and Illinois. His wanderings are extraordinary, given that the best roads of the day were rivers . A farm accident left him partly disabled, though that term would not have been used at the time. Word along the old frontier was that the climate in the new territories gained from Mexico might be beneficial to his condition.
Only in a different age would a wagon journey of over two thousand miles be considered for therapeutic reason. This is where fact and myth diverge. What seems incontrovertible is that Royce became mesmerized by the charismatic Mormon minister James Colin Brewster, and became a follower. Brewster had significant issues with the doctrine of Joseph Smith as pronounced by the second Prophet of the Church, Brigham Young.
Young had led the Mormons to their promised land of Deseret by the Great Salt Lake in 1847, when it was still Mexican land.
Brewster poured over religious texts of antique vintage, searching for revelations that could bring him his own schismatic kingdom.
His eureka moment came when God's truth was revealed to him. There was a glittering kingdom for the saved few in California, where the natives were peaceful, and the streets were paved in gold. It was called “Bashan.”
Brewster gathered fifty-five pilgrims together with twenty wagons in Independence, Missiouri, and set out for paradise on August 9th, 1850. The Oatmans and their oxen were ready for the journey to the kingdom of God: Royce and wife Mary Ann, Lorenzo (15), Olive Ann (13), Royce Jr. (11), Mary Ann (7), Charity Ann (4), and babe-in-arms Roland.
The facts now begin to morph into myth, since the story of what happened in the next six years would become part of the legend of the conquest of the West, filtered through the sensibilities of the day. People of my age think of gruff, but kindly, actor Ward Bond as the master of the train, but that is an image of the black-and-white television. The reality could not be put into weekly episodes.
For months the emigrants traveled the Santa Fe Trail in good spirits, but matters of dogma and doctrine began to intrude. In New Mexico, near Socorro Peak (no relation) Brewster abruptly announced that he had received divine guidance, and was “now as close to heaven” as he intended to go. He left the train right there to set up a colony.
The rest of the train was disturbed at the revelation and decided to press on. Diverting from the Santa Fe Trail, they decided to take the Kearny-Cooke military road to southern California. Lt. Col. Philip St. George Cooke with his Mormon Battalion had marked the new trial during the Mexican War. The way would take them by way of Guadalupe Pass, the Gila River, and the Colorado Desert to San Diego. According to later accounts, all of the wagon train had experienced depredations of one sort or another by the indigenous locals.
When they arrived at the sleepy Mexican settlement, most of those who had made it to Arizona decided to stay right there. They passed Christmas in Tucson, and then three wagons moved on toward El Dorado in January. The Oatman, Wilder and Kelly families still believed.
There was no reason for them to suspect that tensions in the region were rising as they traveled the brutal terrain. Their oxen were growing weary. Any hill to be climbed meant the wagons had to be unloaded to allow the animals to make the grade while the pioneers carried their supplies and household goods uphill.
In February 1851, the three wagons rolled into a Pima Indian village, where the Kellys and Wilders elected to stay. Royce Oatman was running short on resources, and there were no prospects of bettering his lot until spring. Paradise was just ahead. A man named John Le Count was in camp, having arrived from the west. He said he had passed over the trail several times and had encountered no hostiles. He considered it safe.
The last authentic and independently verifiable information about the Oatmans is a note that Royce wrote to the Commander of Fort Yuma on the 15th of February. He addressed himself to Brevett Major S.P. Heintzelman, saying he was “under the necessity of calling upon you for assistance” since without it he was “confident that we must perish.” He said he had been robbed of his livestock, and needed harnesses for his oxen. He offered to meet the Major's men at any place east of the fort. He was only 140 miles away.
I have run 26 miles on a few occasions. I consider the idea of walking the equivalent of more than six marathons with crying children and cranky beasts over rough trail to be a daunting proposition in the best of times. If you add the uncertainty with the locals, it must have seemed as dangerous to stay in one place as to keep moving. He sent the note ahead with Le Count, who was traveling light and alone.
Convinced that they must carry on to Zion, the Oatmans loaded up the wagon, hitched the oxen and left the Pima village headed west.
Tomorrow: Oatman Flats
Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com