25 December 2006

The Searchers

It is Christmas morning, and not a creature is stirring except me. I searched briefly for anyone else, and came up empty except the squirt of news from London. The world has been busy overnight, with nominally Christian Ethiopian MiGs flying east to bomb confirmedly Muslim Somalia; a new war on the eve of a new year.

Apparently Addis Ababa does not desire a new terror state on its flanks, and is doing something about it.

Then, from Atlanta via the UK was the word that icon James Brown, hardest working man in his field,  left this morning for a gig uptown; his legacy is now for others to proclaim.

He was seventy-three, a pretty good run for a man who lived as hard as he did. The other icons of his generation are long gone.

Like Olive Ann Oatman, who has spent the holidays with me. Her life spanned the opening and closing of the west, and had she lived a few months longer, she would have seen man's first powered flight. The story she brought back to American society of life as a captive of the Apaches and an adopted member of the Mohave tribes is as exotic now as it was then.

I was searching for something else, as is so often the case, when her eyes captured me, looking out from her portrait. She talked about the murder of her family for profit, assisted in the publication of a book about the aftermath, and then lived quietly the rest of her life as a proper woman of her time.

But her eyes are so deep, looking across the years, and the marks below her mouth are so erotic. You can't be infatuated with a woman more than a century in the Texas soil, can you? But those eyes, and the small curve of her lips above the enigmatic tattoos……



Olive is ambiguous. She is about survival. We have learned about captivity in our recent wars, and no longer expect our captured soldiers to resist to the death. We still expect them to try, though, and that is part of the story that she told. She did not ask to be captured and enslaved. Like Parry Hearst's brief bonding with the Simbionese Liberation Army, she undoubtedly came to identify with the Mohave family who showed her kindness after an awful year with the Apaches.

I do not know if she married while with the Mohaves. If she did, it was in the context of survival. She had opportunities to leave before her chance for rescue appeared, but if, as some sources suggest, she had two children in the four years she was with them, timing would not have been optimal.

But if she did, it was something she denied it to her grave. It is simple enough to determine these things nowadays, but I have no particular interest in that. I came to this story in an attempt to understand something that is older that the founding of Rome, and the incorporation of the Sabine Women into the growing city-state, and has reemerged as an effective tactic in the bitter ethnic wars from Bosnia to Darfur.

Why we do not show more outrage at this awful and intimate war crime eludes me. It seems there is a sort of war against women that continues around the world, and a version of slavery that is predicated not on color but gender.

I admire Olive because she was a survivor. Having made her fortune on the lecture circuit, and with her future secured through a good match, she was content. But the story is larger than her, and more compelling. Her story sold out its first three print runs, made a wealthy man of her ghostwriter, and is still in print, a century and a half later.

In death, she has been adopted by each of the Great Perceptions of the succeeding generations that have come since. In Victorian times, she exemplified Pluck and Resourcefulness. She had both kind and cutting things to say about the Mohaves, and the marks on her face were regarded as the testament of her courage as a slave to savages.

Except that apparently wasn't precisely the truth. In researching the story, I found partisans who bitterly dispute the purpose of the marking. Some claim the marks were intended to identify her as property, others as the mark of puberty, and still others as the identification of marital status.

The choices range from abasement and shame, to maturity, marriage and acceptance and pride.

In our current age, she has been adopted by all the tribes: feminists, free-love advocates, romance novelists and the proponents of tattooing as individual expression.

Along the way there are accounts of the two children she bore while with the Mohaves, which sparks zealous defense of her modesty on the one hand, incomprehension at the ideas that an American woman could submit to a relationship with a savage, or the incredulous reaction to the idea she could walk away from her own flesh.

Olive is now anything for anyone, and only the transcribed notes of her lectures, and the processed recollection contained in her book. A quick read will show that the account is chock-filled with details that ring true and some that resound hollowly, clunking with the cloying sentiments of the Minister who ghosted it.

Taken as a whole, with just a little salt, I think there is every reason to believe that she was, in fact, adopted and welcome among the Mohave, and probably married there in accordance with their customs.

The first reaction by the public to her emergence was of intense curiosity. Later, as the West was tamed and such hostage-taking became impossible, the racial relations between the tribes and the settlers came to center stage, symbolizing something else.

If John Ford is the greatest Western director, as I believe, then The Searchers is likely his best film. Ford crafted this one around the fantastic scenery of Monument Valley, not far removed from Oatman Flat. He also depicts a complex moral code in a remarkably nuanced performance by John Wayne, another iconic American.

In the film, Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who returns to his brother Aaron's frontier cabin three years after the end of the Civil War. Ethan still has his rebel uniform and weapons, a large stash of Yankee gold, and no explanation as to what he has been up to since Lee's surrender.

He holds a bitter hatred of Indians, though he is well immersed in their language and culture. Perhaps it is this familiarity that breeds his deep contempt, hinting at secrets only he knows about their nature. The bad guys in this film are the Comanche, not the Apache, and the setting is Texas.

In the course of a dispute with the renegades, Ethan joins a rag-tag group of Rangers. After some great action scenes,  he returns to his brother's to discover his brother and sister-in-law dead and their two daughters kidnapped. One of them dies. Ethan spends the next five years with surviving nephew Martin looking for the girl that lives.

It may be coincidence that the facts are so similar to the Oatman saga, but I doubt it. Martin is too much like Lorenzo. Mary Ann, Olive's younger sister, also died. Olive may or may not have married the son of a Chief, and born him children. She spent five years and ten days in captivity.

Tension in the film is produced by the contrary goals of the search. Martin wants to rescue his sister and bring her home. Ethan seems primarily motivated by his hatred of the Comanches. It is a tough to determine if he wants to rescue Debbie, or kill the girl who has become polluted by living with Indians too long and too intimately.

John Ford was masterful in allowing Wayne to give the performance of his career. By the end, his hatred for the Indians and his obsession with his version of honor seems like madness.

Natalie Wood is striking in her brief role as the 16-year-old Debbie, lost between the worlds of the Comanche and proud Confederate. She has no marks on her face, but John Ford was clever enough to place them elsewhere. Otherwise, she is almost a dead-ringer for Olive.

The movie was a turning point in the American perception of the taming of the West, and really a pivot-point in how America viewed itself in the wider world. John Wayne's performance paved the way for Clint Eastwood and the anti-western, and the whole host of anti-heroes who populated the next generation of film.

Meanwhile, Olive herself was being reinvented to serve the purposes of New Revelation. Her words are used to advance the concept of the Indian as Virtuous Victim, at one with a peaceful universe; others have recently used the same words in a fundamentalist context to indict them as murderous savages.

I hold with neither extreme, being fully aware that I have the capacity to be both, should circumstance dictate. I hold myself to be civilized, in my way, as I assume they did back in the day, white and red.

I don't know what the truth is, and of course that is not the point any more. I know that a man named John Oatman was a Mojave Indian who lived near the mining town of Vivian, Arizona. In 1909, he fought to have the town renamed, successfully, in honor of his grandmother, Olive.

For her part, Olive Ann Oatman died in her bed. On a night-table, she always kept a jar of hazelnuts for luck, since that was the food she searched for on the flinty land when she lived with the Mohaves.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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