25 December 2006

Oatman Flat

The Oatman family pushed west with their scrawney tired oxen and wagon from the Pima Village into the desert.


Olive Ann Oatman in her twenties

They were on a path that now incorporates part of Interstate 8, which runs toward Gila Bend and Yuma through the sand and rocks and cactus. I flogged a little Dodge across that patch of blasted desert. I was having temperature problems with the engine, and had to run with the heater at full blast with the windows down.

It was miserable. When I finally scaled the heights of the Coastal range and the engine slowly began to cool down, tears ran down my cheeks.

I can only imagine how awful it was to be on foot, on the sand amid the towering barrel cacti. The Oatmans came to the Gila River and elected to camp on an island in the midst of the shallow muddy stream. The children frolicked in the water. Olive said that Royce had his head in his hands, apparently feeling that the Calvary was not going to come and rescue him, and that the nine Oatmans were very much alone.

They had encountered no Indians until after passing Gila Bend, and they presently reached the place now known as Oatman Flats. February 18, 1851, was not a good travel day for them.

Tonto Apaches, or perhaps warriors of the Yavapais band, came upon the family in the course of their affairs and engaged in negotiations for food. There were nineteen of them, armed either with clubs or bows and arrows.

If the weapons were mostly clubs, the identity of the locals would be more clear, since the Yavapais preferred the bludgeon as their weapon of choice. What happened shortly suggests to me that it was the latter, but this is the last point in the story in which there is more than one voice to provide witness. The visitors demanded food. Royce Oatman demurred, saying that he would be starving his children if he gave it up.

The Indians were quite insistent.

At length, Royce produced some handfuls of bread, which only provoked demands for more. The visitors walked off a short distance to confer, and apparently decided to take direct action.

After the conference, the visitors turned and “with savage yells, set upon their victims.” Two of the Indians took Olive and Mary Ann aside, holding them.

Lorenzo was knocked out immediately, and fell with his head bloodied. He appeared to be dead, and was cast over a deep embankment by the attackers.

All the rest of the Oatmans were bludgeoned to death, Royce and his wife with little Roland at her breast, and the small ones, Lucy and Charity Ann.

Regaining consciousness in the ravine, Lorenzo looked with horror at the carnage. He was dazed and dizzy and wandered two days before being befriended by two Pimas, who took pity on him and guided him back to where the Kellys and Wilders were wintering over. Eventually a band made their way to Oatman Flat, and gathered the remains of the family together. The ground was too hard in which to dig, and so a cairn of stones was raised over them, the first of three internments for the Oatman bones.

Then Lorenzo joined an expedition headed for California.

Olive and Mary Ann were held as the warriors stripped whatever appeared to be useful on the wagon, and then hustled them off, as was their custom.

The two sisters were forced north and west at the quick-march toward the site of the present-day ghost-town of Congress. They were barefoot on the rocky soil, but when they faltered, they were beaten forward. There was no stopping. The raiding party did not want to attract the attention of soldiers from Fort Yuma. Mary Ann, the younger of the two, finally could go no further. She was slung over a shoulder and carried like a bag of grain. Olive later estimated the total distance they traveled to be more than a hundred miles.

Arriving eventually at a village, the two girls were “thrown on some sticks, where they were further tormented by Indians whooping and laughing in a circle around them.”

Olive's recollection was that they thought they had been taken prisoner in order to be tortured and killed in some sort of ceremony.

That was not the case. The girls became slave laborers, being compelled to pack wood and water on their backs over long distances. If the girls didn't do as they were told, and remember, they had no Apache language skills, they were beaten. It was a powerful incentive, and they learned quickly. As they gained skill, the Indian children quizzed the slave on their life before, and said their people must be horrible people indeed to teach their children to lie so often.

Their frantic flight and hard wear ruined the girl's clothing, and none was provided. Olive was forced to matt together tree-bark to make crude skirts. The covering offered only slight warmth, and that winter they nearly froze. It was a cruel and barren life as a slave, and the girls became as thin as rails.

The Mohave people lived in adjacent land to the west, and had friendly relations with their captors. The next summer one of their chiefs made an offer for the two girls. and Apaches were friends, and the following summer, the Mohaves bartered for the two sisters. A deal was struck, with the price to be two horses, two blankets, some vegetables and some beans.

The girls were led off for a ten-day walk over mountainous country to the Mohave village along the Colorado River in western Arizona. Olive said they were barefoot and not permitted food, except for "a piece of meat about the size of my fist" on the fourth day of travel.

Arriving sick and weak, their fortunes suddenly looked up. They were adopted into the Mohave chief's family in the status of his own children. It was “the first time since their captivity that they were shown any kindness.”

The customs of the Native Americans varied, just as they do everywhere. The Mohaves were farmers and warriors, unlike the Apaches who continued a hunter-gathering existence. The traditions regarding captives were as dissimilar as the concept of hospitality.

There had been European captives among the Native Americans almost since the first arrival. During the initial westward expansion beyond the mountains into Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley. Case in point was Mary Jemison, perhaps the most famous of the captives taken during the French and Indian War. When she was sixteen years old, a war party attacked her family's home.

Mary was saved, but the rest of her family was murdered. Her Shawnee captors took her to Fort Duquesne, the French bastion that would become Pittsburgh, and then to an Indian village on the Ohio River, where the burned remains of tortured captives remained suspended on stick near the shore.

The sight horrified her, but an entirely different yet compatible fate awaited her. She was adopted by two Seneca women to replace a brother who had been slain in the fighting. The response to captives was entirely situational. In time of war, or mourning, prisoners could be killed as part of a ritual catharsis.

At other times, they could be adopted as full equals. In May's case, she was given an Indian name and taught the Seneca language.

Her two marriages to Indian men and her several children by them were proof of the success that Indians often had in incorporating white captives into their communities as family members and equals.

In 1823, Mary told the story of her life to an interviewer, who published it a year later. It is still read today as one of the best examples of the Indian captivity genre in American literature. Mary died in 1833 at age 91. "Jemison" remains a common surname among the Seneca of western New York.

A similar arrangement seemed to emerge for the Oatman girls, who began to thrive with the Mojave. They were given blankets and food as well as a plot of land on which to grow corn, melons and beans. They also foraged for hazelnuts, a Mohave staple. Olive said she was told that she could leave any time she wished.

Mohave's of the lower Colorado River had a passion for personal decoration, which they practiced through tattooing and body painting. Both sexes wore prominent ink on their chins and sometimes their foreheads and cheeks. Warriors sometimes had circles tattooed on their chests

Part of the Mohave belief system held that any man or woman without a tattoo on the face would be refused entrance to Sil'aid, the land of the dead. Their belief was so strong that Olive's later contention that the tattoo was intended to mark her as a slave is absurd. It is more likely to mark her as part of the tribe.

Chin designs were chosen by the tattooists and were based on the facial structure. Narrow-faced people usually wore designs of narrow lines or dots to accentuate the length of the face, while those with broader faces tended to have wider lines and cover more of the chin. The upper lip was rarely tattooed.

Both Oatman girls were marked on their chins and arms in the traditional manner, by sticking cactus thorns into them and then rubbing dye or charcoal into the wounds.

Only the evidence of the facial tattoos survives, since no photo of a proper woman would display her bare arms. Their chins were marked with five vertical lines dropping from their lips, with dramatic triangles projecting from the lines on either side below the mouth.

After about a year with the tribe, a terrible famine struck. Several Indian children died. Mary Ann grew so weak that she could no longer get up to forage for food. Accordingly to Olive's later account, written by a minister, when Mary told the Indians that she wished to die, they gathered around her, “listening while she sang a hymn in a crystal clear voice.”

Olive was permitted to bury Mary Ann, instead of cremating her as was the tribal custom. The grave served as a sort of shrine. It was the only link she had to her past, and she said she desperately longed for it. It is a curious thing that the next year she  did not contact the Whipple railroad survey party that spent weeks trading and socializing with the Mohaves. Some say it might have been because she was pregnant.

She certainly didn't tell it that way later. Olive said that an incident occurred that made her fear for her life if she had tried to escape. A Cocopah woman was brought to the village as a slave, but ran away to rejoin her own people. According to Olive, she swam down the Colorado River by night and hid by day. She made it nearly a hundred miles before she was detained by the Yumas, allies of the Mohaves,

When she was returned, the Mohaves improvised a cross, crucified the woman and took their time shooting her to death with arrows.

While Olive lived among the Mohaves, her brother Lorenzo never gave up hope for her rescue. He began a campaign to have the Army search for her, and word got to the council fires of the Yuma people who lived near the fort. A Yuma named Francisco was enlisted in the search, and a few weeks later he arrived at the Mohave village to negotiate her release.

The agreed price was six pounds of white beads, four blankets, two horses, and some other trinkets. Her price had increased while with the tribe. Her adopted mother cried all that day and night. The next morning, Olive and Francisco left on foot for Fort Yuma. They traveled with great speed, having to swim the Colorado River in two places. Ten days later, she was reunited with a sobbing Lorenzo, as soldiers fired cannons from the Fort.

Olive was the real deal, the white girl seized by savages and then returned, with the mark of her abasement painted right on her face.

Returning to California with Lorenzo, Olive spent six months in school in the Santa Clara Valley. The tattoos naturally attracted attention, as did the veil she sometimes wore to cover them. They also attracted the attention of a Methodist minister in Eureka named Royal B. Stratton.

It was Stratton who eventually wrote the book “Life Among the Indians, or the Ordeal of the Oatman Girls,” which has been in print for century and a half. He took the brother and sister back east, and after a stay with the Sperry family near Rochester, New York, Lorenzo went back to Whiteside County, Illinois, where the Oatmans had started so long before.

Stratton put Olive on the lecture circuit, where she was a smash.

Perhaps it is the sensibility of our time, but tattoos or not, Olive was a very attractive woman. Even in this ink-happy society today, permanent markings on the face are a pretty significant statement. Ask Mike Tyson about that.

Meanwhile, the man who liberated her was also doing well for a time. Francisco won great favor with the Army, and was made chief of the Yuma tribe. He was known thereafter as El Sol Francisco, and was reported to be arrogant in his new station, but was always friendly with the whites.

At least he was until 1857, when the Yumas and Mohaves organized a joint expedition against the Maricopas. They raised a large band, attacking villages, burning houses and killing women and children.

The Maricopas were reinforced by allies from the Pima and Papagoes tribes, and at a climatic battle a few miles west of Maricopa Wells the Yumas were defeated. Francisco fell in this fight, only two years after helping to rescue Olive. Some say he was killed by his own men who thought he had brought disaster upon them by defending the whites.

Olive and Lorenzo remained close all the rest of their lives. She married Major John Brant Fairchild, an old Indian fighter who she met in New York. The Fairchilds thereafter lived in Detroit for seven years before moving to Sherman, Texas, where John consolidated his fortune as a banker and real estate man. They adopted a daughter, and named her Mary Elizabeth, after Olive's mother and sister.

Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-five. It was a Friday night, 10 March 1903. After an Episcopal Presbyterian funeral service in her home, she was laid to rest in West Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas, where the state erected a historic marker in 1969.

The story is hardly over, now that it belongs to all of us. The massacre at Oatman Flat was also the subject of a 1965 episode of the television show "Death Valley Days.” 

The role of the cavalry officer who helped Lorenzo in the search for his sisters was portrayed by actor Ronald Reagan, who also hosted the show. He went on to be elected President twice, and he called his autobiography “Where is the Rest of Me?”

In the Death Valley Days episode, he played a character that appropriately didn't exist.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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