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Olive Oatman - Pioneer Woman Kidnapped Then Adopted By Native Americans · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Hey Alex, good to see you, man.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Hey, Kelly, what's going on, man?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's going well.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's going well.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: Summertime is here.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: I know both of us have got uh trips up north planned.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: Did you run into any problems on your way up to New York?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, but the person I want to talk about today did.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_01: On the way from uh She was actually going from Illinois to um California in uh 18.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she was born in 1837, died in 1903, ran into her problems around 1849, 1850.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you asked me earlier before we started recording if this was a household name.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it is a household name.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, she's pretty famous during the early 1900s and late 1800s because of uh her experience, but she wasn't really a household name, and I don't think she is today.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll give you a couple more couple more hints.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um was she um Native American?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: She was not by birth a Native American, but she did live with a tribe of Native Americans for five years.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: She was um Mormon, and her family was headed west to go settle in uh not Salt Lake City, um, but they were what were called Brewsterites, which were a different sect, different sect of the Mormons going towards uh a different place that was being founded by a guy named James Brewster rather than Brigham Young.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mm.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: This is tough because you told me it's not a household name unless I lived in the 1800s.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's it's not really one you you probably would guess, but I'll tell you what her name was.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Her name was Olive Ann Oatman.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever heard of Olive Ann Oatman?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good thing you didn't leave me keep guessing.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: She was um the daughter of uh Royce Boise Oatman and Ann Sperry Oatman, and she was born in Illinois, like I said earlier, one of seven children, and her parents were originally Methodists, but then they decided to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormons, uh, early in the Mormons' time, under the leadership of Joseph Smith, who was the founder of the of the Mormons.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh Joseph Smith was actually killed by a mob in 1844, and there were some factions that developed within the Mormon community, and there was a guy named James Brewster, who was uh he was sort of a rival to Brigham Young, and they were jockeying for position of who should lead the church and also of who should found kind of the utopian society that that um that was eventually founded by Brigham Young.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: So James Brewster was 11 years old when he first saw visions and he published them, and this caught the attention of some of the of the um LDS members who decided to follow him.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: He was going to build a uh utopia for for what they actually called themselves uh saints, um Latter-day Saints, for the Saints near uh modern Yuma, Arizona, where the Colorado and the Gila River um cross.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of know that part of the country, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: A little bit, yeah.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Very hot, very um desolate.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the desert?
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is it is desert, although at the time, um, because these rivers hadn't been dammed, they were very wide and they would flood and they would actually create some fertility and plants would grow and the Native Americans would plant things out there.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so there actually was more life, more greenery, more um sustainability, or the ability to live there without modern conveniences existed at that time.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: But it was still pretty harsh.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you can compare it to Illinois, it was a big deal.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: So Royce and Ann, Marianne Um Oatman took their seven children and met up with the group of um Latter-day Saints that were going out to this place along with uh Joseph um or along with James C.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: Brewster.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: They met in Missouri and they got on a wagon train.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I never really thought about uh logistics involved in a wagon train.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: You just heard about people going west, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: It was just like, hey, they were going west.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: You think they just hop in their wagon and go.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it wasn't like that at all.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: Can you imagine what it must have been like?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you had to have a separate car with food on it, right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: You had to have um you had to have relatives on the same uh train, and there were several, several uh wagons, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was like uh 50 wagons going at the same time, not just and you had to be watching out for um people that are trying to, you know, kill you or whatever, yeah.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Animals.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, it doesn't seem like something I would uh be uh interested in doing.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: They met up in Independence, Missouri, and they had 93 people in 24 wagons when they decided to head out.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now they were under the the leadership of this uh James Brewster guy who was telling them that they should all come to this intended place of gathering for the followers of um Latter-day Saints.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so they got onto the wagon train, they started moving, and at first it was actually a pretty good time for them.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: They were a large group, they had plenty of supplies, they brought enough food for six months was the minimum.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and those were staples, but then they would also bring rifles to hunt with, so they would hunt along the way.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_01: They had different um people that were in charge of it, and as they were going along, things were going pretty well, but as they got closer to the New Mexico territory, they started to have some uh clashes of personalities.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Royce Oatman was apparently kind of a difficult man, he didn't want to listen to anybody else.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Brewster was um, you know, having these visions and kind of telling them where they should go based on where, you know, where he said they should go or where God said they should go.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and while it wasn't outright doubt that Royce Oatman had about his visions, he he was doubting um Brewster and starting to wonder if they were going the right thing.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's a whole different kind of route trip.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Especially when you're traveling by wagon and there's no showers and there's no TV and there's no going to your own room at night to get away.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: They were all together.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: They would circle the wagons, they would camp fires, you know.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you basically can only travel when it's light out.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they didn't have flashlights, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think so.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, and so yeah, so you're you're really limited on how far you can travel in a day.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: Plus the terrain, you don't really know, especially when you don't know what's coming up ahead.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: You get to a river and all of a sudden you're, you know, you're stuck.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're stuck for like, I mean, you could maybe cross it, but it's gonna take a lot longer than you thought.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, after after several months of travel, um, they reached a place called Maricopa Wells, which is near modern Phoenix, Arizona.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: And they were kind of they were greeted by some people there that lived in Maricopa Wells.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now, a lot of this at the time was Mexican territory, but also um some of it had just been ceded to the United States.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the Western territories that we have, New Mexico, Arizona, California, all belonged to Mexico um during the 1800s and became American right around this time.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so this was a place that the United States was trying to colonize.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they were like, hey, we've got all this land now, go out there.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so people did live out there in Maricopa Wells and Yuma and places like that.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it was, they were told a couple of different things.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: They were told that um it was, they were told by one person who was a scientist who had been out studying uh animals and insects.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: He said that the natives were friendly, he didn't have any trouble with them, they could go on their way.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Other people told them it was dangerous, that the Native Americans were coming after them.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: And um, remember, this is August, this started in August of 1850, so this is kind of late 1850, early 1851.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know what had gone on just a year before in 1849?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: The Civil War.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, the gold rush.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, the gold rush.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: You've heard of the minor 49ers, right?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: 1849.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so there had been this large stream of people going out west towards California to strike their fortunes.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the Native Americans were getting tired of it because these people, at first, when they were coming out, the Native Americans helped them and were kind to them and traded with them.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it got to be more and more of a threat the more and more people they saw.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they saw people that were not only um not only groups, but large, large groups of them coming and settling on their land.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: Some people would just stop and take land and say, okay, this is my land, because that was what the government told them they could do.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the Native Americans started to get more and more hostile.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: So around this time when Brewster and uh his followers, you know, which which included um the Oatman family, they kind of had a split.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them decided to stay in Maricopa Wells because they heard that the uh the path was dangerous, they heard that the uh Gila River would flood, they heard that the natives, um, Native Americans out there were were hostile.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that didn't stop Royce and Marianne.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um they decided to go on and they went on by themselves, just as a family.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's seven children, two parents, and the mother was pregnant with her eighth child at the time.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh it's hard enough to get one or two kids into a car for a two-hour road trip, right?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but I think kids were a lot more obedient back then.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: I guess that might have been it.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they they decided to go on their way to to continue um the the direction they were going.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And as they were going along, they they realized also that they could actually become part of the gold rush.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: That was an option for them.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Royce didn't start off to be uh a miner, but he thought, well, if everybody's going out here to strike it rich on gold, and he had hold heard plenty of stories, I guess we could do that as well.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: We could take some land and start farming.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he had a lot of dreams and and hopes of what he could do.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, when he got to the Gila River, it was, and I don't know if I'm saying that right, if it's gila or gila.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might be Gila, yeah.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um the Gila River.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: It was very wide and very shallow.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So not more than one or two feet across it, but very wide because it because of the season that they were in.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was something that caused a lot of trouble for their oxen.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: They had some oxen that were pulling wagons.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: They actually had to leave one of their wagons behind.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: They had two wagons for the family for the for the, I guess, um nine of them.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: They had two wagons, they had to leave one behind, and they kind of got stuck on several sandbars out in the river as they were pulling it across and ended up camping on one of the sandbars one night.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that night um was the last night the family would spend together because the next day they were approached by Native Americans, and the Native Americans had traditionally been friendly.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh Royce Oatman had dealt with them before and knew, I say dealt with them, had had interacted with them before, and and kind of knew oftentimes what they wanted.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted a trade or they wanted um food or they wanted tobacco, things like that.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so he gave a little bit uh to this group, and but they asked for more.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when they asked for more, um, he said he couldn't give more because his family would starve.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, these were uh Yavapai who got irate.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: They felt like he was lying to them about how much food he had, and they attacked the family.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: They clubbed um Royce and his wife, and they were all killed.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Now, at this time, for some reason, Olive and her younger sister, who was also named Marianne, same as the mother, were not hurt, but they were taken as um prisoners and marched back to the Yavapai's um home.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Unbeknownst to everyone, one of the brothers, so there's Royce Jr.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: who had been killed.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: His other brother named Lorenzo actually survived all of this and heard them being taken away, but he couldn't do anything about it because he had been hit, he was bleeding.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they had another older sister who was immediately killed, and a couple of younger kids that were immediately killed, including Royce Jr.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: And of course the mother was pregnant, and so she was killed.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: But terrible, terrible scene.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the kids, um, the two girls, Olive and Marianne, who are, like I said, 14 and 7, are marched back to the Yabapies um camp, you know, where they where they lived.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: And it was pretty rough on them because the Yabapies made them take their shoes off because they didn't want anybody to be able to track them and find find the shoes.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: That would be a giveaway that these were the uh kidnapped girls.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: So they made them take their shoes off, their feet bled, um, they walked for three days, they were hardly fed anything, they wouldn't really eat anything because they were in shock.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_01: And they ended up going all the way back to um this uh place in the mountains in Arizona, where when they arrived, the Yavapis initiated them by um circling around them and taunting them.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was their initiation.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: Now you've just been through all this.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_01: Your your family's been killed, you're in the wilderness with no idea what's gonna happen, and they line you up and they they yell at you and they poke fun at you, and even the children came out and did this to them.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I I think a lot of where that came from, you know, from what I've read, is their general distrust and dislike of the white man at that time.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course, you know.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Just like you said that that people's experiences with natives were mixed.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure natives' experience with the settlers was mixed too.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes they wouldn't pay them any mind, sometimes they'd go on the offensive.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was no manual about this.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, this was all yeah, all new stuff happening.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the the girls were um taken as slaves, and they were forced to gather roots.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it turns out that the Yavapis, part of the reasons they had attacked, um, you know, it was found out later or sort of um figured out later that part of the reasons they had attacked the families because they were actually starving.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: They were having a very bad year with their crops, they their food had supplies had run out.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so attacking, stealing the um the oatmen's um remaining cattle and oxen and slaughtering them, and and that all had been um a bit of survival for them.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So this goes on for a little less than a year, and one day, and the and the girls kind of settle into it.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Marianne is not as robust as um Olive.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Marianne is a bit more of a sickly child, uh, has you know, she's younger, she's seven years younger, so she's very, very emotional and she's crying all the time.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they both talk about wanting to be killed, you know, how they're they're just like they hate their lives so much they want to be killed.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: But they have this idea that maybe someday they'll be rescued, that you know, there could be a small chance that they'll be rescued.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, while this is going on, there is a group of Mojave uh Native Americans that come to their camp.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the daughter of the chief, whose name is Topeka, is actually in charge of this expedition.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: They had heard about these girls and saw them and saw how sad they looked and how pathetic they look.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And they actually offered to trade for the girls.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Mojave and the Yavapis would do trades, you know, a couple times a year.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they wanted the girls.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: And Topeka immediately, uh, you know, one of the things that's interesting is Olive describes these two um different tribes very differently.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: The Yavapai, she said, were very um sad and and bad hygiene and very comparatively, uh, whereas the Mojave were more majestic and more just seemed to have their act together a little bit better, and that their um the vibe they gave off gave off was a lot better.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and they sensed this.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um Marianne and Olive sensed this when Topeka came with her group from that tribe.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, at first the Yabapis didn't want to give them up, but eventually they traded the girls for two horses, vegetables, blankets, and beads.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: So it's two girls, two girls?
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Two girls, yep.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: In exchange for two horses, two horses, blankets, vegetables, and beads.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: Vegetables and beads.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think horses were pretty much a fair trade.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_01: Two unwilling girls.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: I I think actually the Yavapies probably thought they got the better end of the deal.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because they didn't have to deal with the girls anymore.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right, right.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: They had the and they had these horses and they had blankets and they had vegetables.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, you have crying girls.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um, the Oatman girls were taken by the Mojave's to their um to their new home, which was the Mojave's.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just let me just say off the set, slavery is wrong.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't matter who's doing it.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you might try and figure out whether that was a fair trade.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: I just realized, oh, wait, slavery's wrong.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Shouldn't do that in the first place.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I guess you're thinking about it from the perspective of the people doing the trading at the time.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, yeah, you should never have uh don't don't have slaves.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_01: Especially if you killed their families to get them.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not quite.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: If you get anything from this podcast, slavery is bad.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: All the time.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the Mojavis took them back, and when they got back again, they kind of um realized that they were at a place that was more prosperous.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: This tribe of Mojavis was much more kind.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they were actually very Mojavis were known to be uh very jovial and very quick-witted and to tell jokes.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: At this point, because they had lived with the Yavapai for a year, the girls kind of understood the language.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: The languages weren't the same, though.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: They were similar, you know.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was kind of like Spanish and Portuguese kind of thing, I think.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of things that were the same, but not exactly.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: So they couldn't exactly understand what was going on, but they had a lot more understanding at this point than they did when they were first brought into the Yavapai camp.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: And they were actually put into um Topeka's family, the who was who was a leader of the tribe, adopted them.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the father and mother, uh, Topeka's father and mother adopted them into their home and gave them food, fed them much better, and the food was better because they had better food.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they started to um give them nicknames, they gave them their own little plot of land to farm.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: They just treated them a whole lot better than the Avapai had treated them.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: What happened to the boy?
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: The boy woke up and he realized what had happened, and he made it his quest to find the girls.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: He wanted to rescue the girls.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, at this point, he's an orphan, right?
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he is not uh not very well read, like he's not very educated.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he he because of the leaving the leaving Illinois, he had dropped out of school, so he didn't read very well, he didn't write very well.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is Lorenzo, their brother.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he ends up going back to Maricopa Wells and he connects with um some military people there and some traders, and they bring him back towards the goal uh towards Yuma, where where he was trying to go, and he ends up in a military camp there and in a hospital, and he is slowly recovering, and he ends up going to live in what today is Los Angeles.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: He goes to San Francisco.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then he's brought down to Los Angeles and he's just barely scraping by.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so we'll get back to him in a minute because he discovers that they're alive at some point.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: But all this time he doesn't know if they're alive or not.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: He knows they weren't killed because he heard them walking away, he saw them walking away with the Abbapai.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: But um he's still kind of in the dark.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they um end up, as I said, becoming sort of assimilated into the Mojave tribe.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: And part of what they um do when they are assimilated is they get tattoos.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_01: So they got these tattoos on their chins, and the tattoos were representative of how you find your tribe or your family in the afterlife.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it is said that it was very painful for these tattoos to be applied.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: There were like lines going up and down on the chin, blue lines.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: You may have seen a picture now if you think about it.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: If you've seen a white woman with these blue lines, you know, in an old-timey picture, that might have been Olive Oatman because she was kind of famous for that.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: It is thought that those were actually an acceptance into the tribe.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: Getting those tattoos didn't, they weren't a punishment, they weren't a um torture.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: They were actually something that was consistent with the traditions of the Mojave, and it was something that was done to a member of the tribe, but not to a slave.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: So the girls had graduated from being slaves.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: Also, um, at least on Olive's tattoo, the lines were very straight and very precise, which makes people think she didn't resist.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like if she had been fighting it when they did it to her, they wouldn't have looked as straight and precise as they did.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this goes on for five years.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: And during this time, a couple of things happened.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, um, several times there were groups of military men or explorers, white white explorers, who came through the camp, and uh no one pointed out Olive.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: Olive was not seen.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, they were right there, but Olive was not seen.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: Also, her sister died.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: Marianne, um, there was a time that they had a very bad harvest and these girls were starving.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: Her sister Marianne died, and at that time, actually, they were supposed to burn the body, but the Marianne wanted wanted to bury her sister, and it was a big deal that the Mojave's let her bury her sister rather than, or they buried her sister for her rather than burning it, because that's not something they traditionally did.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: So when you say she wasn't seen, you mean she had applimated, acculturated, or they weren't, or that she wasn't trying to leave anymore.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not clear.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not clear if if uh if she wasn't trying to leave, um, or if she was hiding because she didn't want to leave, or if they hid her because they didn't want her to be found.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: All of these tribes, the Yavapai and the Mojave, were definitely afraid of retribution for having kidnapped the girls.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now the Mojave hadn't actually kidnapped them, and it was known that the Yavapai had killed because of the way they were killed and some signs that were left there, it was known that the Yavapai had actually done the murdering of the family.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: But they were they were pretty concerned about having retribution happen.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it could have been that they were afraid that if these military men saw that they had this white girl, that she would be taken and that they would be, you know, they would face the consequences for it.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because this was a big news story.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, I should have mentioned this earlier.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: When the Oatman family was killed, it was it was put on all the newspapers.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: People back east heard about it.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was a big deal because of the way they were killed so brutally.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: And even the fact that the two girls had been kidnapped was a big deal, and people were looking for them.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it wasn't like they were flying under the radar.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was there was a lot of people that were aware of this.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this guy named Francisco, who was a Yuma Indian, he said, Hey, I've seen um a white girl with the Mojave's.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, he he negotiated a deal to basically help rescue her.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: They ended up going out there and they found her and they saw her.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: And at first, um the Mojaves denied that Oatman was white.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: She's like, no, she's she's one of us, you know, she's she's not a white girl.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then after some negotiation and some back and forth, they actually traded her for a white horse.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: And again, same thing: food, blankets, um vegetables, and a white horse.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so this time it was not known if um Olive was happy about this.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: As a matter of fact, it's said that she cried and cried and was very upset upon her initial release because she didn't want to leave.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: She loved her family, she loved Topeka, she loved um her adopted parents, like she she actually had, you know, kind of grown up with them.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: She was 19 years old at the time.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: So she started when she was 14 with uh Yavapai, moved to the Mojave's when she was 15, and then spent four more years with the Mojave's and had really bonded.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it it it was weird for her because she had been a a a little girl who had been kidnapped, and then she had spent five years um living with this group of people that kind of became her family, and then all of a sudden she's back in this white world that she doesn't really know or understand because she hasn't been in it for such a long time, she didn't grow up in it, and she's famous, and everybody's got an opinion about her, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And but we see that today, and people always talk about Stockholm syndrome, right?
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: Where you where you fall in love with your captor?
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or you at the very at the very least, you can maybe uh sympathize or empathize with your captors, right?
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know how tough they have it, you've seen life from their eyes, and you think, well, yeah, it's not so bad what they did to me, and you can you can empathize uh with them.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, she reunited with her brother.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: Lorenzo was there.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, he came to Fort Yuma and they reunited and and and and and under good circumstances, they became close, they became friends.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it wasn't there was no hard feelings about it.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: He she knew and and she was told by many people that he had stuck it out and tried to find her and her sister.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then she also met in 1857 a pastor named Royal Byron Stratton.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they told him their stories, which were different stories, but had originated or happened, started the same way.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote this book that was very different from the actual story.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in Stratton's book, this this Reverend Royal Byron Stratton, he's changed the story.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: He said they weren't he didn't mention them being Mormon because Mormonism at the time was a little controversial.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: He killed off Marianne early in the story so that Olive would be alone for most of the story.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: She thought he thought it was a better story if she was by herself.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um he made up stories about the Mojave's torturing um captives that would run away, and so made it sound like um Olive couldn't run away because if she did, she'd be tortured.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: She was afraid of that.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um he basically had all these white supremacy themes in the book, you know, and villainized the Native Americans.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, yeah, but you say it was a bestseller, huh?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was uh it was a um a very popular book.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: It made a lot of money for this guy, Stratton, and he did actually um use some of that money to he pay he paid um Lorenzo and Olive some of that money, and he used some of that money to uh send them to school.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: So they were both sent to school um and were able to get an education.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um Olive became a speaker.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: She she went on a speaking tour and she went all over the country speaking to people, and they would l fill these halls to hear what she had to say, you know, what had happened.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Well, in 1865 in Rochester, New York, she was doing a lecture and she met a guy named John Brandt Fairchild, and he had been a rancher, or had was a rancher, and had lost his brother to an attack of Native Americans during a cattle drive in 1854, around the same time when when uh Olive was living with the Mojave.
• 31:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they kind of started talking about that, and they became close.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: She liked Fairchild's family, his sisters, his mother.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: He she met all of them.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: She ended up falling in love with him and getting married.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: And after the two got married, they moved to Sherman, Texas, and they lived there while um Fairchild was doing businesses, he opened some businesses, like you know, stores and stuff like that, but he also was still ranching and and did pretty well.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, Olive had all this money from the book and from her from her time uh giving uh talks and stuff like that.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: But this guy, Fairchild, did not like the book, he did not like the way it portrayed uh Olive, he didn't like the falseness of it, you know, the fact that they said she wasn't Mormon, the fact that, you know, it vilified her family.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: And Olive always played everything very close to the vest.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: She didn't really share a lot um beyond what she said in her lectures.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: And those lectures were very scripted.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so this guy, Fairchild, actually, every time he would find a copy of the book, he would burn it or destroy it because he didn't like the way it portrayed her.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, they actually adopted a daughter together.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Her name was Mary Elizabeth, named after each of their mothers, and they nicknamed her Mamie.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And um she became a mother, and that became her kind of third chapter of her life, I guess.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, chapter one being maybe the fourth chapter, chapter one being her childhood, chapter two being her time with the Mojave, chapter three being her time after that doing lectures, and then chapter four married with a child.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you say she was famous.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: She was famous, yeah.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: Although in Sherman, she would wear a scarf around her face so that people couldn't see it, and she tried to kind of lay low when she lived in Sherman, Texas with Fairchild.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: She she she became less famous, but she also tried to stay under the radar after she got married.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: So she ended up um well, Lorenzo, her brother, died in 1901.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Olive died in 1903 of a heart attack, and she's actually buried in Sherman, Texas.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you're driving through there, West Hill Cemetery in Sherman, Texas, Olive Oatman.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh her husband died shortly thereafter as well.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think four or five years later, he he died as well.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_01: She olive was 65 when she died.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there is a town of Oatman, Arizona that is uh named after her.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: The uh city of Olive City, Arizona is also another one named in her honor.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's a place um kind of near where the Oatman family was killed called Oatman Flats.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently you can still see a grave marker um for where the family was killed.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to that actual location and see maybe some remnants of uh stones that were stacked there.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, that's uh Olive Ann Oatman, a uh pioneer woman from the late 19th century, early 20th century, who kind of had a really interesting life.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Such a different life than ours, for sure.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Probably different than most of the people in Dirt Knap City, would you say?
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, talk about every day being an adventure, every day being at risk uh for uh death and disease, um, very uh risk, uh risky life, uh, not very long lifespans, but um, hey, those those people um for better or for worse built what we have now, right?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were a lot tougher than we were, too.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, that's for sure.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thanks for listening.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: For a cradle, no good.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: I was a child and my name was told, a story told in the desert cold.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: Who was it freedom or a chain of gold?
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_02: The mark of my skin, the tail on my skin, is it a card?
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, I think they say they say what did they say?
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_02: A girl ghost in a crazy dear.
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: They call me sister, they call me dear, but my heart stays tired.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_02: You have to eat our little bees, I love the ways, counting my time in the face of taste, who was it free to place to stay questions?
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is it a cut?
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_02: They say they say, What's it they say?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's not a quiet face, they won't hear a false face.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_02: But my truth is in a shadow space, it's not theirs to take.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_02: Not there's to trade.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_02: Crowds want stories, it's not a quiet face.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_02: They won't hear a false face.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: But my truth is in the shadow space.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_02: Not there's to trade.