A small fire was burning on a hill in the middle of the desert along the Mexican-American border. The soothing sounds of the river came from the valley and the scorching sun was finally beginning to sink behind the horizon. Sitting by the fire were Roys and Mary Ann Oatman with their seven young children. They had come from Illinois, which seemed desperately far away that late afternoon. They were exhausted and depressed, having been travelling for almost a year. After a meagre supper, they intended to harness the ox that pulled their dilapidated wagon and set off again. Away from the sand, the cacti and the unbearable heat. To California, to the west, where a patch of fertile land and a new life await them.
Just before dark, the Oatmans received an unexpected visit. They were approached by a group of Indians – the nightmare of every white man who travelled in these inhospitable places in the mid-19th century. Who are these savages and what do they want? Within minutes, sixteen bare-chested men were standing around the fire. “Don’t be afraid, the Indians will do you no harm,” Roys reassured his family.
He first offered tobacco to the uninvited guests, and together they sat down on the sandy floor and lit a pipe. They exchanged a few words in broken Spanish, the lingua franca in this part of the world. The Indians were starving and asked for food. Roys hurried to explain that they had barely enough for themselves and that they still had a long way to go. After a little coaxing, he offered them a piece of bread, which they ate standing up, but it was not enough. They started rummaging around in the cart, where there were sacks of the last of the beans, beef jerky and flour.
There was a sense of unease and tension in the air. Children who had heard stories of bloodthirsty Indians huddled close to their mothers in terror. Roys had not had much experience of them, but he believed that one should never show that one was afraid. So he summoned up all the courage he had and asked them to leave. His determination apparently bore fruit, for the Indians withdrew. The Oatmans were relieved and immediately began to prepare to leave. They wanted to leave this miserable desert and its terrifying inhabitants behind as quickly as possible.
As Roys hurriedly began to load the wagon, a blood-curdling battle cry cut through the air and made his heart stop. The scene that then unfolded around the dilapidated wagon was horrific. The Indians suddenly rushed towards the stunned family, sticks and knives swinging. Roys could not even turn around when the blow split his head open. In seconds, it was all over. The screams of the attackers and the moans of the victims died away. In addition to Roys and Mary Ann, who was in the last month of her pregnancy, Lucy, Charity Ann, Roland, Roys Jr. and Lorenzo, 16, who had been thrown off the cliff by the attackers, were lying in a pool of blood.
After the massacre, the Indians immediately returned to look for the food that the Oatmans had stashed in the cart. They took everything they could carry, including old clothes and a worn-out ox. Their most precious loot was not the supplies and livestock, but Mary Ann, aged eight, and Olive, aged thirteen, who had been spared in the attack. Indeed, kidnapping was a common occurrence among some Indian tribes. People were as much the spoils of war as anyone else. White goods could be exchanged for a variety of useful items, such as a horse or some blankets. Kidnapping could also be a means of revenge between warring tribes.
Mary Ann and Olive suffered a different, no less cruel fate – they became slaves of the Yavapai tribe. Mary Ann never returned from captivity, but Olive, after five years of living among the Indians, did return to the world from which she had been forcibly removed, although a part of her remained in the desert forever. The harrowing story of the Illinois girl who was kidnapped by the Indians became part of 19th century American folklore, in which one of the most popular themes was the struggle between civilised Christians and godless savages. Today it is clear who won that battle, but in the mid-19th century the outcome was still uncertain. The white man’s laws and rules west of the Missouri River were only on paper. The true masters of the deserts of the American Southwest were still the Native Americans.
In search of God
After winning the Mexican-American War in 1848, the US gained a huge amount of new territory, including present-day Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, parts of Utah, Colorado and all of California. In that same year, it was in California that, quite by chance, an event took place which, in a short space of time, radically changed the face of the American West Coast. In the rapids of the eponymous American River, a previously unknown James Marshall stumbled across a small, shiny piece of metal, later discovered to be gold. News of the incredible find spread quickly and a dizzying race began that became known as the gold rush.
Hundreds of thousands of people from other parts of the country and all over the world have moved to the sunny land by the Pacific in just a few years. People naively believed that gold would never run out and that there was enough for everyone. New towns began to spring up along the rivers and mines. San Francisco, for example, was just a small village of two hundred souls in 1842, but ten years later it was a bustling city of 36,000.
For the indigenous people of California, the gold rush was a curse. Thousands were murdered just for being a nuisance to newcomers chasing riches. The whites also brought with them diseases that spread death among the natives.
The Oatmans were among the countless fortune-seekers who made their way west from the east of the USA. They were not driven to California by the desire to get rich, but by religious reasons. The Oatmans were Mormons, members of one of the many religious denominations that sprang from the free American soil in the 19th century. The founder of the church, which today numbers fifteen million people worldwide, was Joseph Smith, a poor farm boy from Vermont. While praying, an angel is said to have appeared to him and told him that buried near his house were golden tablets containing ancient writings composed by the prophets. With the help of special stones given to him by God, 17-year-old Joseph translated the writings and the Book of Mormon was born. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it was officially called, was rapidly gaining new members.
Mormons moved around a lot because they were not welcome everywhere, not least because of the polygamy practiced by their leader. Smith vehemently denounced these accusations in public, even though he had dozens of wives. The Mormons finally found their place in the sun in Illinois. They settled in Commerce, which was renamed Nauvoo when Smith became mayor. His ambition in domestic life even led him to run for President of the United States.
However, Smith’s polygamy and autocratic tendencies made the local population of Nauvoo suspicious of the Mormons. Smith quickly made a lot of enemies who wanted to drive the Mormons out of Illinois. The conflict between the Mormons and the rest of the population grew increasingly bitter, and in June 1844, Smith was shot by a frenzied mob that stormed the jail where he was awaiting trial for treason and inciting rebellion. This made him a martyr in the eyes of his followers, but his opponents still regarded him as an adulterer and a religious fanatic.
After his death, a battle for the vacant throne began in the Mormon Church. The leadership vacuum created a plethora of new divisions and self-proclaimed prophets vying for Smith’s legacy. One of them was James Brewster, a young man from upstate New York. He claimed that when he was 11 years old, an angel appeared to him and showed him the writings of the ancient prophets. He told his followers that somewhere in the West there was a place where no one would persecute them and where the land was so fertile that no one would go hungry.
The Promised Land is supposed to be located on the plain at the mouth of the Colorado River in the Gulf of California. God had ordained this piece of land for them, the persecuted Mormons, Brewster explained. With God’s help, they will create a paradise on earth in California, where all people will be equal and peace will reign forever. The new land will be based on democratic and progressive principles. Alcohol and polygamy will be outlawed and the death penalty abolished.
West!
Roys Oatman was completely captivated by the young prophet’s preaching and began travelling around Illinois, enthusiastically spreading his teachings. He became a preacher himself. He claimed to have healed dozens of people through the Word of God. His faith grew stronger every day. Meanwhile, in the Mormon community, preparations were well underway for the journey to the Promised Land. Roys sold all his possessions and bought a wagon, a few head of cattle, and enough food to last six months. In May 1850, a Mormon caravan of about 100 men left Illinois. They began the nearly three-thousand-mile journey to California.
On the way to the finish line, there were many obstacles to overcome, hidden in the wild American countryside – lush forests, endless prairies and hellish deserts. The abandoned wagons and human bones that could occasionally be seen along the way were a reminder to all those heading west. The caravan travelled very slowly, and it was not until August that it reached the Missouri River, which was considered to be the natural border between civilisation and the wilderness. The laws of the white man on the other bank no longer applied. The most dangerous part of the journey lay ahead of the Mormons.
As the prairie turned into a desert, the first cracks began to appear in the previously united caravan. Many began to doubt the success of the expedition. Food supplies were scarce, the heat was getting worse and the enthusiasm for the Promised Land was diminishing with every mile travelled. Even more troublesome than hunger and fatigue, in the eyes of the pilgrims, were the Indian tribes living in the American Southwest. The Apaches, skilled horsemen, were the most fearsome of all, sowing fear among the whites who dared to walk on their land. The Pilgrims therefore kept watch at night, but during the day they could not shake the feeling that bloodthirsty Indians were watching them at every turn.
Many turned their carriage homewards in despair. But Roys was still convinced he had to bring his family to California. His determination was fed by a mixture of stubbornness and religious fervour. They had come too far to give up, he thought. Of all the people who had set out from distant Illinois more than six months earlier, it was the Oatmans who had come closest to the Promised Land.
When they climbed the rise of the muddy Gila River on 18 February 1851, they were less than three hundred kilometres from Mormon paradise on earth. But the Oatman family never made it to California. That same evening, they were attacked by Yavapai Indians, and the Mormon dream of paradise on earth was over.
Slaves in the desert
For Mary Ann and Olive Oatman, a new life began that fateful afternoon. They had been spared in the massacre, but they wished they had died on that cursed hilltop where the bodies of their loved ones lay. But the kidnappers had other plans and the girls were on the move again. As Olive took one last look towards the wrecked wagon, she collapsed in horror – her father’s bloodied face looming before her eyes. The sobs of her dying relatives still echoed in her head. She did not know it at the time, but 16-year-old Lorenzo, lying in blood at the foot of the hill, had miraculously survived the attack.
In February 1851, a strange group of fifteen Indians, two young American women and a few cattle were walking in the desert along the Mexican-American border. The girls were barefoot, as the Indians had taken their shoes from them to prevent them from running away. Mary Ann was silent the whole way. Her initial shock at the horrors she had witnessed had turned into complete apathy. On the second day, she could no longer walk due to exhaustion and one of the Indians put a sack of potatoes on her shoulders.
After four days of walking, they arrived in a small valley, where around fifty people lived in modest thatched huts. The only source of water was a small stream that flowed not far from the village. The Yavapai were one of many Indian tribes living in the vast and inhospitable deserts of the American Southwest. They were primarily hunters and gatherers, and occasionally grew corn and beans. The harsh climate and infertile soil often meant that they struggled with hunger.
When Mary Ann and Olive arrived in the village, a crowd of surprised locals gathered around them, looking at the young white women with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. The arrival of the two strangers jolted the small village out of its usual drowsiness. Olive and Mary Ann were even more shocked at the sight of the locals. They looked at their new home with horror in their eyes and wondered what their captors would do to them. The stories they heard about the Indians on their way to the Promised Land only added to their fear.
After a few days, they found out why they had been spared in the massacre. They had become slaves. Every day they had to carry water to the village and gather roots in the nearby canyons. At the slightest sign of dissatisfaction, they were beaten. Food was always scarce and they often had to eat locusts and other insects. Before going to bed, Olive was always thinking about how she and her sister could escape. But where? Where would they go? Where to get food and water? Each time, the dream of escape collided with the harsh reality.
Campfire talks
Their lives became much more bearable when, after a few months, they learned the Yavapai language. Olive, in particular, loved to engage in conversation with the curious locals. Although the Yavapai lived quite isolated from Western civilisation, they still had occasional contact with white people. Once it was mainly Mexicans who worked the land along the Gila River, but in the mid-19th century more and more “Americanos” were passing through on their way to California.
Information about the outside world was rare and late reaching the Indians, which made Mary Ann and Olive all the more desirable interlocutors. How many white people are there in the world? How many Amerindianos are there? How do they treat women? Can a man have several wives? As Olive answered their questions and told them about her past life, the locals ate up every word she said.
Life in the desert was slow. During the day, the girls worked and followed the orders of their masters. In the evening, they sat around the campfire and listened to the stories told by the elders. Before going to bed, they prayed in secret and mourned for their murdered relatives. The day was much like the day before, until a large group of men entered the village in the autumn. They were Mojave Indians who were on good terms with the locals and occasionally traded with them. They were carrying vegetables, which they wanted to exchange for animal skins or other goods, but their attention was drawn to two young white women. The two girls could only watch the Indians negotiating their fate.
“I think they will sell us. At first glance, I’d say they’re better off than we are,” Mary Ann told her sister, who feared they would be worse off with new owners than they were now. “That can only happen if they kill us. If we can’t escape, it’s better in any case that we die as soon as possible,” Mary Ann replied resignedly. After a long talk, the strangers left the village empty-handed and life returned to normal.
Winter had turned to spring and Mary Ann and Olive had been living with the Yavapai for almost a year. For them, life in Illinois was just a distant memory. The hope of American cavalry coming to the village to kill the Indians and free them was fading. The desert is not a white man’s land.
New masters
Their saviours were not really white people, but Mojave Indians who revisited their village. This time, they came not for animal skins, but for the two young white women who had made an impression on them the first time they visited. Their language was similar to that of the Yavapai and they exchanged a few words with the girls. They were persuaded to go with them, explaining that they would have a better life there, but Mary Ann and Olive were understandably suspicious of the unusual suitors. Not wanting to offend their current masters, they preferred to keep quiet.
To their surprise, this time the Indians quickly found a common language. Mary Ann and Olive realised that day how much their lives were really worth. At the end of the day, the Yavapai tribe was two horses, a few vegetables, three blankets and a kilo of coral. After the bargain was struck, the girls were on their way again. As they left the valley where they had lived for more than a year, they were pierced with angry looks from their former neighbours. Many shouted at them and threatened them. Olive remembers especially the children, who watched their departure with tears in their eyes.
This journey through the desert lasted 10 days. Home to the Mojave tribe, it was an area that still bears the name of the people who lived there for thousands of years. The Mojave Valley stretches across the junction of present-day California, Nevada and Arizona. It is surrounded on all sides by high mountains, and the Colorado River, which some call the American Nile because it floods almost every year, runs through it, allowing the people who live along its banks to survive.
When Mary Ann and Olive descended into the valley, the first thing that caught their eye were the beautiful little houses, made of wooden beams and roofed with willow branches, scattered on the hills on either side of the river. They were taken to the largest of them, where the chief of the tribe was sitting by a small fire with his daughter and wife. The two girls were confused, not knowing what to expect from their new masters. Topeka, the chief’s daughter, took a cake from the fire and divided it into three pieces, offering the largest to Olive. This was the symbolic beginning of a third life for the Oatman sisters.
The chief’s wife, who introduced herself as Aespaneo, prepared a bed for them by the fire and showed them a small garden in front of the house where they could grow vegetables. The warm welcome took the girls completely by surprise, but they could not shake the feeling that their new masters had something to hide. Why are they here at all? What plans do they have for them? Did their new masters really take pity on them when they saw them during their first visit? We can only guess.
They started to get used to life in the Mojave Valley. Here, too, they had to work, but no one was pushing them. Together with others, they searched for food in the valley and carried water to the village. The people here were quite different from the Yavapai. They were unusually tall and always smiling. In their free time they liked to swim. The word Mojave means “people of the river”. They also occasionally fished, but they lived mainly on primitive agriculture. They grew wheat, maize, watermelons, courgettes and other vegetables. In bad harvests, when the Colorado did not flood, they gathered roots and other edible plants that grew on the valley sides. When the harvest was good, feasts were held and the whole village gathered.
Life among the Indians
At one of these parties, the girls also got to know the social life of the Mojave tribe. “At that time, I witnessed the most shameful scenes in all the five years I spent among the Indians,” recalled Olive, who did not give details. The Mojave Indians were renowned for their relaxed attitude towards sex. Parents were happy if their children had frequent sex, saying, enjoy it while you are young. Sex was something natural and fun for them. They also invented sex games and gave themselves ticklish nicknames to spice things up. For example, American anthropologists studying the customs of the Mojave tribe in the second half of the 19th century met a woman called Charred Testicle. It was said that she was so passionate that the men she was with were burnt to a crisp by her testicles.
The Mojave Indians also had a rather unusual attitude to names. When they got tired of the one their parents chose for them, they invented a new one. It was not unusual for them to have several at the same time. For example, the chief of the tribe introduced himself to Olive as Espaniole, probably because he thought that the Spanish accent would make it easier for her to remember him. Spanish-sounding nicknames were popular among the Mojave Indians because they sounded exotic and trendy, as we would call it today.
Olive has also been given two new names. Olive Oatman originally became Aliutman in the Indian language, but more interesting was her other nickname – Spantsa, which means “painful vagina”. Olive never offered an explanation as to why she was given this nickname. Some researchers believe that during her coexistence with the Indians, Olive assimilated into their society and adopted their sexual habits. She may even have had a husband and children, as she was old enough to start a family at the age of 14. She never spoke publicly about her sex life afterwards. After all, it was unheard of in puritanical white America for a Christian woman to be involved in a love affair with a savage.
The girls quickly learned the local language and started to make close friends with their neighbours. In their free time, when they didn’t have to find food or do housework, they swam in the river and talked to their friends. They became more and more familiar with the culture of the indigenous people and their world view. Their new family took them in as their own. There was only one step on the road to becoming a full member of the tribe.
The vast majority of the locals had a tattoo on their face, symbolising their tribal affiliation. The Mojave Indians believed that without it, a person could not reach the afterlife. One day, a shaman came to the girls and told them that it was time to get their tattoo. The process was short but painful. First, the shaman used a cactus spike to make several small holes from chin to lips in a dense sequence. When the wounds stopped bleeding, he soaked the spike in a mixture of ground river stones and the fruit of a special plant that grew in the valley. He then pierced each wound one last time with the spike so that the mixture was absorbed into the skin.
After three days of pain, the girls had a blue tattoo on their chins, which made them Mojave Indians. Olive then finally accepted that she would never be able to go back to her old life. The tattoo marked her forever. She was convinced that white people would see her as an Indian, not as a young girl from Illinois. These were her words when she returned from captivity after five years. But the events of February 1853 cast a different light on her story.
Who knows what happiness is?
At that time, more than 100 American soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Amiel Whipple arrived in the village. Among them were engineers and cartographers who had come to survey the area where a railway line would one day run, linking the east of the country with California. In the lieutenant’s diary, we can read that the locals were friendly and even gave them a guide to show them around the valley. The Americans carried gifts with them – ceramic vessels and cotton blankets, which were distributed among the people. They were accompanied by a translator from the Quechua tribe who helped to bridge the language barrier. The seven days that the foreigners spent in the valley passed in a friendly atmosphere.
Some historians doubt that the girls lived among the Indians under duress because of this visit, arguing that they already felt at home among them and had no intention of leaving. Where were they supposed to have gone? Their home farm was long gone. Their family lay dead in the desert. After so many years of living among savages, the Amerindians would have looked at them with suspicion. The blue tattoo on their chins was a guarantee that no white man would ever look at them again. So why would they want to leave? They had a new family in the Mojave Valley who took them in. Life here was not luxurious, but it was much better than wandering in the desert in search of a promised land that no one had ever seen.
At no point in his diary did Lieutenant Whipple mention that he encountered captive whites in the Mojave Valley, although he met dozens of people and met many chiefs. Could the Indians have forcibly hidden the girls from the view of their fellow Indians? Even if they had been locked up somewhere that week, they would surely have found out sooner or later that more than a hundred Americans had visited the valley. After all, this visit was the event of the year for the peaceful valley. But Olive never mentioned the arrival of the whites afterwards, which could mean that she might have been happy in the Mojave Valley after all.
It is difficult to judge her happiness, but we can say with certainty that she has had some difficult times during her five years among the Indians. Mary Ann was sickly from an early age and had a harder time coping with the hardships than her older sister. Although there was much more food in the Mojave Valley than in the desert where they had lived before, the harvest was always dependent on the capricious Colorado. When crops were scarce, it was Mary Ann who suffered the most. One year the drought was particularly severe and there was not enough food for everyone. Mary Ann was one of many who succumbed to the famine. Olive was deeply affected by her death and she herself barely survived the terrible drought that hit the valley.
Olive didn’t know exactly when her sister died, as the Indians didn’t know the days and months. She did not even know how old she was. Living in a remote valley had completely changed her perception of time. It also changed her experience of the world around her. Since Mary Ann’s death, Olive had become more and more Indian, resigned to the fact that there was no longer an Oatman family and that she would remain among the Mojave for the rest of her life.
The Illinois girl is gone
She could not have known that her brother Lorenzo had survived the attack on the Gila River and that he had been searching for his lost sisters for years. Even though it had been five years since the tragic event, he still believed they were alive. He was determined to find them and rescue them from captivity, as everything pointed to their abduction. But the task was anything but easy. For years, he sent letters to various places, inquiring about the fate of his sisters. He first turned to the Californian government for help, but it had no sympathy for a poor country boy.
He then wrote to Yuma, an American military post in the desert along the Mexican-American border. Information travelled slowly in those days, so it was a long time before he received any reply. In 1855, hoping to find his sisters, he joined a group of men prospecting for gold in the desert of the American south-west. He returned with no sisters and no gold.
His persistence was rewarded the following year when he received a letter from Yuma saying that rumours had reached the fort of a white woman living among the Indians. Apparently, the story of young Olive had travelled by word of mouth for years across the vast desert along the Mexican-American border. The commander of the fort, Martin Burke, made the decision that she had to be rescued. Francisco, a Yuma Indian who lived near the fort, was entrusted with the task and offered himself as a go-between. He saddled his horse and set off.
Olive was outside her house when she heard that people had come to the valley to rescue her. At first she thought it was a joke, but soon she saw the chief talking to a stranger. Negotiations began. To this day, it is not clear exactly how they went, but after three long days, the natives were richer for a horse, a couple of blankets and a few beads, and Olive had left the Mojave Valley for good.
She later recalled that her departure provoked mixed reactions. Some people mocked her, saying you had finally achieved what you wanted all along, others looked at her with genuine concern, and still others were happy for her. Many wondered where she was going. On the journey to Yuma, which took more than ten days, she was accompanied by Topeka, her Indian sister. In the Mojave Valley, Aespaneo stayed behind, weeping for her lost white daughter.
Exactly five years and four days after she was abducted on a hilltop by the Gila River, Olive returned to the white people. The girl from Illinois was gone. Standing in front of the American soldiers in Yuma was an eighteen-year-old woman who could barely speak English. Her dark complexion was a reminder of life in the desert. But the blue tattoo on her chin was a testament to her difference.
The story of the abduction of the Oatman sisters was published in 1857 in a book, which immediately became a huge bestseller. Olive travelled the country lecturing about her life among the Indians. She was one of the few women in those days to speak publicly. In 1865, she married John Fairchild , a wealthy cattleman. They shared a similar life experience. His brother had died in an Apache attack not far from where the Oatmans were murdered. Olive moved to Texas with her husband and stopped lecturing. As she later recounted, it was the most wonderful time of her life.
Before the wedding, John bought and burned every copy of the Oatman book he came across. Maybe he wanted to erase those terrible five years. Or maybe he was ashamed of his wife’s past. But Olive could not escape her past, for she wore a blue mark on her face that always reminded her of another time.
