Tattooed girl stepped into Yuma history

In the mid-1800s, a young woman walked into Yuma with a blue tattoo inked across her chin.

Olive Oatman, orphaned as a girl when her pioneer family was massacred, had finally been released from captivity by the Mohave Tribe.

Oatman's haunting tale remains a popular story in Western lore. Her story made headlines around the nation back then and has since been chronicled in a handful of books.

Author Margot Mifflin recently contributed her own literary offering to the Oatman legacy. In her new book, "Blue Tattoo," Mifflin tells how Oatman's family had been traveling West in search of Zion with other Mormon pioneers.

The family was massacred by the Yavapai Indians about 90 miles east of Yuma along the Gila River. Everyone died but a Olive, a brother and a sister. The two girls were carried off as slaves but later sold to the Mohave.

"Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo caught between cultures," Mifflin said. "She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at 19, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high, and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime."

Prior to "Blue Tattoo," Mifflin has written several books, in addition to articles for publications ranging from The New York Times to Salon.com.

"Blue Tattoo" is available for sale on the author's Web site, MargotMifflin.com.

Yuma is mentioned numerous times in Mifflin's book, including the story about Oatman's release. She had traveled into Fort Yuma, where she was reunited with her brother, Lorenzo.

For years authors and historians have speculated about Oatman's feelings for her native captors. In "Blue Tattoo," Mifflin makes the case that the young woman's relationship with the tribe might have been more loving than society wanted to believe back then.

"Oatman’s blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion," Mifflin said. "It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: She never wanted to go home."

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A conversation with the author

YUMA SUN: How did this unique story from Arizona's past capture your interest as a book project?

MIFFLIN: I was giving a slide lecture on my book "Bodies of Subversion" (a feminist history of tattoo art) in Nebraska, talking about the history of women’s tattooing going back to circus women of the 1880s.

After the lecture, a graduate student approached me and asked if I knew that there had been a  tattooed woman in the 1850s, well known in her day, named Olive Oatman. I went home and looked her up and sure enough, even in my local library in a small town on the Hudson River, there was a photo of her in a book on Western women pioneers. But not much had been written about her.

After I found out about her, I kept telling people about her and everyone was amazed and wanted more details, which prompted me to research her more, until I realized I had a great book idea. No scholar or journalist in the 20th or 21st century had written anything more than an essay or article about her, and many of the existing articles contradicted each other. I’ve almost never met anyone outside of Arizona who’s even heard of her, except for scholars who’ve written or read about her.  

People love to hear about her because she’s an unlikely heroine - a Mormon pioneer who “went Indian” - whose story is filled with personal drama, sexual innuendo and frontier adventure.

Does your book take an academic and historical approach or simply aim to tell a good story from history?

I’m a journalist, and my goal was to tell a good historical story using a journalistic approach. But I also wanted to convey how her story had been received and interpreted over the years, and what that said about the people doing the interpreting, which required more scholarly research.

Does your book present information that hasn't been provided in other books or take a different angle?

It does correct a number of factual errors about her experience, and it argues forcefully that she didn’t want to be returned to the whites.

But the main thing it does differently is offer a deeper portrait of the Mohaves themselves. I had no idea what a rich culture they had, how isolated they were in the mid-19th century when Oatman joined them.

I also did not know how high profile they became soon after Oatman left them - less because of her than because of white incursions into their land and because they had a very charismatic leader, Irataba, who ended up going to meet Lincoln in Washington - and then how quickly they were pushed off their land and utterly forgotten.

The National Museum of the American Indian site listings for Native Tribes of the U.S. doesn’t even list them, though they still exist, and the Smithsonian has little information on them and was unable to refer me to a single authority on them, even as they struggle along, trying to preserve their culture and protect their language.

Describe the places and people involved in researching "Blue Tattoo."

I researched in most of the places Oatman lived: Fulton, Ill., where she spent her early childhood and where some of her descendants still live; southern Arizona, where she was taken by the Yavapai near Gila Bend; Needles, Calif., where she lived with the Mohave; and Albany, N.Y., where she lived for a few years after her ransom.

I also interviewed her descendants all over the country, as well as some experts on Mohave culture and the Mohave language. The research involved digging up a lot of historical documents about the period of westward expansion in the 1850s and about the Mormon splinter group the Oatman family was a part of, reading newspaper accounts of her redemption and descriptions of the Mohave by the few pathfinders who encountered them in that era, since the Mohave didn’t have a written language.

The most interesting interviews I conducted were with Mohave elders Llewellyn and Betty Barrackman shortly before they both died. I met them at the Mohave cultural center, which is in a trailer on the Mohave Reservation in Needles. Mr. Barrackman was the chairperson of the tribe and its unofficial historian - as I understand it, their last.

They spoke Mohave to each other - a dying language spoken by only about 60 people now. The information they gave me was critical to the evolution of my theory that Oatman didn’t want to leave the Mohave when she was ransomed in 1856, and that she didn’t have a Mohave husband or children. Mrs. Barrackman also clarified the meaning of the word “Spantsa,” a nickname the Mohave had for Olive, the meaning of which is not printable here!

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More about the author

Margot Mifflin is an author and journalist who writes about women, art and contemporary culture.

Mifflin is the author of "Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo" and has written for many publications, including The New York Times, the New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, the Believer and Salon.com. Mifflin is an assistant professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and directs the Arts and Culture program at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she also teaches.

Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Los Angeles MOCA and New York University. She appeared in MSNBC’s documentary, “Women and Tattoo,” which first aired in 2001, and CNN’s “Women of the Ink,” which first aired in 1998. She lives in Nyack, N.Y.

Source: MargotMifflin.com