Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman’s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker’s wife in Texas.
Oatman’s story has since become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film, radio plays, and even an episode of Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan. Its themes, from the perils of religious utopianism to the permeable border between civilization and savagery, are deeply rooted in the American psyche. Oatman’s blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion. It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: she never wanted to go home.
“An important and engrossing book, which reveals as much about the appetites and formulas of emerging mass culture as it does about tribal cultures in nineteenth-century America.”—Christine Bold, Times Literary Supplement
This engaging biography examines the life of Olive Oatman, who was 13 years old when Indians attacked her Illinois Mormon family on its journey west; she was subsequently adopted and raised by the Mohave tribe. Mifflin (English, Lehman Coll., CUNY) tells Oatman's story, from the unorthodox religious convictions that led her family west, through her captivity and assimilation into Mohave culture, to her rescue and reassimilation. Mifflin engagingly describes Oatman's ordeal and theorizes about its impact on Oatman herself as well as on popular imagination. The author seeks to correct much of the myth that has sprung up around Oatman, owing partly to a biography written with Oatman's participation during her life. Mifflin takes the position that Oatman was almost fully assimilated into Mohave culture and resisted "rescue," and that her return to mainstream society was a cause of ambivalence, if not anxiety. Though Mifflin sometimes seems a bit eager to make this argument, her book adds nuance to Oatman's story and also humanizes the Mohave who adopted her. Recommended for general readers as well as students and scholars.
—Julie Biando Edwards
— Elizabeth Quinn
"The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. . . . This is a revealing read as it delves into the social morays and prejudice of the time."—Sandy Amazeen, MonstersAndCritics.com
— Sandy Amazeen
"Mifflin, whose admirable and enjoyable book offers analysis of both the reality and the mythology of Oatman''s life, shows that there is much beyond the blue tattoo."—Spencer Dew, Rain Taxi
— Spencer Dew
— Jack Shakely, Internet Review of Books
“Margot Mifflin has written a winner. A young Mormon girl is forced to live with ‘savages.’ And loves it. Returns to civilization to become a serious young woman who falls into pious, manipulative hands. The Blue Tattoo offers quite intense drama along with thorough scholarship.”
—Elmore Leonard, best-selling author of Killshot, Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories, and The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories
"Mifflin does a careful job of reconstructing the fascinating story behind how this woman came to wear that tattoo, ascertaining the most accurate possible accounting of the 1851 murder of Oatman''s family near Yuma, Arizona, her captivity by a band of Yavapai Indians, her sale to the Mohaves, and Oatman''s eventual return to white society."—Jenny Shank, NewWest.com
— Jenny Shank
"Extremely well written, The Blue Tattoo is unquestionably a significant contribution to Oatman studies."—Deborah and Jon Lawrence, Overland Journal
— Deborah and Jon Lawrence
“Although Oatman’s story on its own is full of intrigue, Mifflin adeptly uses her tale as a springboard for larger issues of the time.”—Feminist Review
— June Namias
“Margot Mifflin has written a winner. . . . The Blue Tattoo offers quite intense drama along with thorough scholarship.”—Elmore Leonard, best-selling author of Three-Ten to Yuma and Other Stories
“Lucid and engaging, The Blue Tattoo contextualizes Olive Oatman''s life by delving into Mohave culture and history (including interviews with contemporary Mohaves) and by explaining why her story captured the American popular imagination and continued to be retold and revisited so many times, in so many different media.”—Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, editor of Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives
“Mifflin’s treatment of Olive’s sojourns [provides] an excellent teaching opportunity about America’s ongoing captivation with ethnic/gender crossings.”—Western American Literature
“One can read this work of non-fiction as if it were a sensational novel—with progressive feminist implications.”—Irish Times.com
“The book’s already received rave reviews, and for good reason. . . . A fascinating dose of both tattoo and American history.”—Tattoo History
“Mifflin catches the poignancy of this story that manages to combine the conquest of the West, life among its victims and the national myths that justified it.”—Doubleday Book Club
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue: Emigrant Song 1
1 Quicksand 9
2 Indian Country 17
3 "How Little We Thought What Was Before Us" 22
4 A Year with the Yavapais 44
5 Lorenzo's Tale 53
6 Becoming Mohave 64
7 Deeper 82
8 "There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away" 92
9 Journey to Yuma 100
10 Hell's Outpost 109
11 Rewriting History in Gassburg, Oregon 126
12 Captive Audiences 146
13 "We Met as Friends, Giving the Left Hand in Friendship" 173
14 Olive Fairchild, Texan 182
Epilogue: Oatman's Literary Half-Life 198
Postscript: Letter from Farmington 210
Notes 219
Bibliography 239
Index 255
seasaw
Posted Thu May 17 00:00:00 EDT 2012
A history lover would love this book. It takes you back into the world of a young girl's life that was suddenly changed forever. Seeing her parents and sibbings killed and thinking that she and her younger sister were the only ones spared and taken capative by one Indian tribe than sold to another to find acceptance within the second tribe and raised as one of their own even while losing her sister shaped her for the rest of her life after being returned to the none Indian world. The authur based all her information on docomented information and then drew conclusions from that information. The illustrations and photographs help the reader to see the changes as time went on.
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Overview
In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and ...