Empire: World History - 163. The Tattooed Girl: From Mormon to Native American

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

In 1850, 13-year-old Olive Oatman and her family set off on the perilous journey by foot from Missouri to Arizona. Olive and her little sister were captured by a group of Native Americans and then sold to another. Yet rather than being treated as slaves, the girls were treated with kindness and welcomed as kin. But her version of her story was to be twisted and rewritten in the years that followed… Listen as Anita and William are joined once again by Katie Hickman to discuss the extraordinary experiences of Olive Oatman. Alongside Katie Hickman's, Bravehearted, available here (https://coles-books.co.uk/pioneering-women-of-the-american-wild-west-by-katie-hickman-hardback), a key source for Olive Oatman's life is The Blue Tattoo by Margot Mifflin, available here (https://coles-books.co.uk/the-blue-tattoo-the-life-of-olive-oatman-by-margot-mifflin). Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. There are rose, a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers, bearing shields, bedite with bits of broken mirror glass, that cast a thousand, unpierced sons towards the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds and number, half-naked or clad in costumes, attic or biblical, or wardrobe out of a fevered dream, with the skins of animals and silk fineries and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood

of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat, and one with an umbrella, and one with white stockings and blood-stained wedding veil, and some in headgear of crane feathers and raw-hide helmets that bore the horns of buffalo or bulls, and one with a pigeon-tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked, and one in the armour of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and paldrons deeply dented with old blows of maces or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust, and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground, and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly coloured cloth, and one whose horse's whole head was painted

crimson with red, and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings, like an army of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue, and riding down upon them like a horde from hell, more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke, like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eyes wanders, and the lip jerks and drools. Oh my God, said the sergeant. That was quite the beginning, William Tarantpur. What have you just been reading? So that's one of my all-time favorite passages from one of my all-time favorite novels. That's Cormat, McCarthy's blood meridian. Well, I'm dying to know whether that's based on something true.

And luckily, we've got someone who can tell us, we have the marvellous Katie Hickman, author of Bravehearted, the dramatic story of the women of the American West. And she was fascinating in the last episode of how this outright war and bloodbath begins between these early emigres who are coming, looking for gold, looking for land, looking for a new Jerusalem in some cases, a new place to practice their new religions. And the people who've lived there for thousands of years. Katie, what was just read by William, his favourite piece? Yes, no, I know it.

It's fantastic. And also, it's fictional, but definitely based on truth. I mean, they were extraordinary to look at and extraordinary in what they wore. And in fact, there is a winter count. So this was a way of Native Americans recording their own history, which they did once a year on buffalo skins. And there is, in one winter count, it's the year in which one of their warriors

finds the Spanish conquistadors armor and wears it. So I wonder if Cormac McCarthy knew that or whether he was just having a prescient moment. But no, it absolutely rings true to me and how I wish I could have seen that for myself. So Cormat McCarthy's Blumbridon is very much set in the world we're going to be talking about in this episode, where relations between the whites and the indigenous nations have completely broken down in the West.

And it's set against the background of this massive emigration towards California, of all the most hard scrabble, hardened men and women trying to make their fortunes, hoping and dreaming of gold on the West Coast and making new lives for themselves, and in the process, coming into collision with the indigenous tribes and nations. So a lot of this history is miserable. find it really depressing. You're hopping from massacre to massacre. There are, though, some stories that stand out, and particularly so thanks to your book. One is the story of Olive Oatman. Let me just give you a little kind of pen portrait of what the world would come to know her

has. She was a white-skinned, bare-breasted, painted skin, and this indelible dark blue tattoo covering her chin, an extraordinary character, but also a symbol of kindness and love and taking someone in the midst of all of these massacres and people killing each other's children with gay abandoned. This is something different. So take us right back to Olive. Who is she and why is she important? So Olive was a young American teenager

whose family were Brewsterites. So the Brewsterites were a weird sort of splinter group from the Mormons. And they like, you know, Joseph Smith enjoined all his followers to go and found a new Jerusalem, which they eventually did under their second leader, Brigham Young, in Utah. And James Brewster, who also claimed to be a visionary, he claimed to have visions when he was 11 years old, and claimed that he too, like Joseph Smith, had been told that he had to find a community of saints, as the Mormons called their followers. But this time it was not in Utah. It was going to be the land of Bashan, he thought he was going to found. And the

land of Bashan, which was a totally imaginary place, James Brewster claimed, was down in the very southern part of what is now the United States. In those days, this is 1850, it was still part of Mexico on a branch of the Colorado River. And a little detail, a little fun fact, especially for you, Willie, that apparently the reason that he decided on this location was because he'd read an early travel book called Scenes in the Colorado Mountains by a man called Rufus Sage who had never actually been down in that southern area, never been south of Taos. By no means the only travel book written by someone that's never been somewhere. I know, I know. And so this man, Rufus Sage portrayed this area as this wonderful lush, green,

heavily timbered, you know, land flowing with milk and honey. And actually, in reality, it was incredibly arid, desert-like place. There was a legendary scout called Kit Carson who said it was so barren, even a wolf wouldn't have been able to survive on it. But anyway, all that was unknown at the time to the Oatman family, and they left the Missouri hopping off places to go on this much more southerly route down to, they were heading for the land of Boshan, which is almost in Calibu.

but not quite. And they, it was a really, really unhappy group of people. There were 90 of them. And they kept quarrelling. They quarrelled constantly. They quarreled about the amount of food. They were going to take. They quarreled about the exact location. I've been on holidays like that. Of this, you know, imaginary land of Bashan. And one of the chief difficulties was Olive Oakman's father, who was known as that he was called a facetious quarreller. He was. He was a very, very quarrelsome man, Royce Oatman. And his fellow pilgrims, really, is what they were. I said at one point that if they could have swapped him for the smallpox,

they would have done because they got so... By a majority vote. A majority vote. They would have just swapped him in. Anyway, this group of 90 people quarreled and split and quarreled and split and quarreled and split. And eventually, the Oatman family found themselves on their own in this incredibly desolate landscape right down in the southern part of what is now sort of Colorado, Arizona border. On their own, the parents had seven children between the ages of two and 17.

And Mrs. Oatman, Marianne Oatman, if you can believe this, this is not a fun fact for you, Anita. This woman, this poor woman was nine months pregnant. Oh, good Lord. They were on starvation rations, basically all their food had gone. that animals were failing because there was no food for the animals. They were absolutely in the most parlour state. And then just when they thought it couldn't get any worse. Just when they thought it couldn't get any worse.

Exactly. This is the journey from hell, this one. It really is just when they thought they were all going to starve to death, apart from anything else. But just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, Olive looked behind her and she saw a group of 19, Yevapai indigenous people walking behind her and they were dressed in wolf skins. This tribe had pretty much never had contact with white people before.

So there was this very uneasy standoff in which the Yawapai came up to this really, they were in a dreadful state, this family. And Yavapai asked them for food because there was a drought in the South. And so all these people were half starving themselves. and obviously, you know, Royce Oatman, the Clesicius Quarola, refused to give them any food because they didn't have any. He does smoke a pipe with them, doesn't he? He's hopeful that at the beginning. At the beginning they had this sort of rather uneasy parley.

And he prided himself this man in being able to, quote unquote, deal with quote unquote natives. So he spoke to pipe with them. But at the same time, big mistake refused to give them any of his food. these people watch them trying to load up their wagon and then they attack them. Okay, and the killing, I mean, we dwelt on the savagery of the American troops in the last episode. This was a savage attack. I mean, bear a mind, this is a woman who is nine months pregnant. There are tiny children present here.

Olive is no more than a girl herself. And they show them absolutely no mercy. Olive gets clubbed on the head. I mean, who gets killed and how do they get killed in this party? They basically, they clubbed them to death, including this pregnant woman and a two-year-old child, the entire family, a club to death by the Yavapai, except for quite inexplicably really, Olive herself, who was 14 at the time, and her younger sister Marianne, who I think was about eight. So these two girls were the only ones who were spared, despite having been the all right clubbed on the head, they took these two girls captive. And yet not inexplicable in the sense that this was the norm, wasn't it, that women and children were not normally killed in race. No, they weren't. They were not normally killed. But they've killed some. They've killed a pregnant woman. I mean, there's not, you know, why do you think they were spared? Well, it's a total mystery, really, why they were spared, because the usual reason for sparing someone who you've attacked would be to take them as slaves, which the Yavapai did use them as slaves, or to marry them off if your tribe was failing in numbers, you might want to.

to increase the numbers in your tribe. Or you might just want to use them, you know, use their labour. But a 14-year-old white girl, on the verge of starving herself and an eight-year-old little girl, were not going to be much use to the tribe, really. They were going to be extra mouths to feed. So it is quite mysterious. No one has really found a satisfactory reason. Maybe they just took pity on them.

Nobody really knows why they took them. Well, they may have taken pity on them, but they have a horrible, year with the Yavapai. I mean, because the Yavapai do use him as slaves. They used them as slaves. They treated them very badly, didn't give them enough to eat, forced them to work and, you know, bad conditions. And they probably, the two girls probably wouldn't have lasted very long under those conditions. But in a sort of miraculous turn of events, a group of another neighbouring tribe, a different tribe called the Mojave, who used to trade with the Yavapai. They used to, the Mojave produced vegetables and they used to trade these with these other people came to the settlement where the Yavapai

were holding these two girls and they basically bought them from the Yavapai they traded them for there was a horse two horses three blankets a bundle of vegetables and some beads and some beads that was the price they paid so they so the Mojave bought these two young girls and took them back to their own village with them. And there, they had this extraordinary experience, which was completely different from the one that they had had before. The Mojave are almost, one could say, even though they're sold into slavery, we should make no bones about that. It's a horrific thing to be bought and sold as a human being. But that happens. But when they're taken to where the Mojave live, it is rather beautiful place. And they think they found the Mormon paradise that they were

promised. And they're just treated completely differently. the first thing that happens is the daughter of one of the leaders shares a blanket with the girls, which hasn't happened before, and another makes them leather shoes for their bruised feet, which is lovely. Yeah, and isn't it, a little Marianne says, here, Olive is the place where they live. It's a beautiful valley. It seems to me I should like to live here.

And Olive says maybe that you will not want to go back to the whites anymore. I mean, it's strange for them a salvation, because for the first time in a very long time, with Quarlesome Father, very pregnant and permanent. and permanently pregnant mother, you know, they're suddenly being shown a kindness in their own right? Yes, I mean, the Mojave were just a very different, a very, it was a very, very, very different situation. As Willie says, they were shown great kindness right from the beginning. Life was, it was not easy for them because nobody had very much to eat. Really, the worst that happened to

these two girls was that they were put to work, but only in the same way that anybody else in the tribe would have been put to work so that they had to gather mesquite, which is a kind of berry, which was their staple diet, which involved walking for long distances every day. But they were given a plot of land that they could cultivate to grow their own vegetables, which they liked doing very much. And they were particularly sort of became part of the family of a man called Espanoli and his wife was Aspaneo, who were, they weren't the chief of the tribe, but they were like tribal, elder tribal leaders. They were in charge of the ceremonial events in the village. And the thing which kind of cemented the idea that these two girls were really completely, you know,

acculturated to the tribe was that one day, two of their, Olive calls them physicians, came to these girls and they ceremonially tattooed their faces and their upper arms with blue ink. So this was something that the Mahave did. Juice from a riverweed. Yes, juice from a riverweed and a blue stone that they pounded

to make us kind of like an ink and they pricked their faces and then rubbed this mixture into it. And Olive forevermore had this tattoo on the lower part of her, lower part of her face. That is sort of definitive proof that these two girls had been completely taken in by the tribe as one of their own. You wouldn't do that to a slave. That's a sign of assimilation into the nation proper. You would not do that to a slave. And there was some means of trying to

tell a different story about that later on. Well, we'll come to, you know, because that's not the story that suits the propaganda that is going out about the savages and what they will do to women and children. Join us after the break when we find out now assimilated within the tribe, how life pans out for Olive and Little Mary Ann. Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about the assimilation of Olive and Mary Ann into finally a happy family situation in a beautiful paradise as they explain it. But then tragedy hits and Little Mary Ann becomes very sick. Talk us through what happens here, Katie. I think she really starved to death. There's a drought, isn't there? Yeah.

Yeah, there was a drought and they didn't have enough food and many in the tribe died or were failing. And Marianne, who was never particularly strong, or was quite a sickly child, died. And Olive writes incredibly touchingly about how the family gathered round and literally wailed and keened, you know, when it became clear that this little girl was going to die as if she really was one of their own. And olive survived because this woman who'd taken her in Aspaneo secretly gave her grain that she was supposed to use. These were seeds that she would have been, she would have used to plant in the next year. She ground this up and made a special kind of gruel for her, not wanting anybody else to see because some of her actual blood relatives were in a very bad status way. We're starving as well. was starving as well.

And Olive survived as a result of this extraordinary act of kindness from this woman. If it wasn't for her, I would have perished, she writes. Absolutely, absolutely. So there was no doubt at all that this tribe not only rescued these two girls from another much more brutal tribe, but took them in and treated them beyond the call of duty and with extraordinary kindness. Well, treated them like family. And yeah, you know, the grieving over tiny Mary Ann is grief for a lost daughter. Yes, completely.

So you have that, you know, Olive left alone now with this family who are showing her love and who she loves back. But then you have a visit from White Explorers. Yes, a visit from White Explorer. So this is this man called Whipple, who came with quite a large group of other US Army officials. They were basically trying to map. They wanted to make another railway from the Mississippi River through to California, but on a more southerly route. And so they were surveyors.

They were land surveyors. And so Whipple and his men, about 90 of them, stayed for about a week in these Mojave villages. And it's a curious fact that at no time during that period was there any suggestion that they had a white girl living with them. So Olive either there's a theory that she might have been hidden away by the tribe or more likely that she decided herself that she would not appear to them because if she had she surely would have been under pressure to return to white society. Katie, there is a later photograph of Olive and she has quite dark hair and dark eyes. It's not impossible that she just looked like everybody else, isn't it? I spoke, well, I don't know, maybe. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought of it like that. I mean, she does have this extraordinary, sort of Gothic beauty. And she's very mysterious looking in all her, in all the photographs and this extraordinary tattoo. And we know she'd forgotten most of her English. There's every reason to imagine that they just, she just looked like everybody else in the village. Yeah, so we don't know with the colour of her eyes, do we? I mean, that was often in the Westerns. That was always a giveaway, wasn't it? These blue eyes and this sort of smudged face, which suggested it was not.

child of the tribe. But so these scientists who, you know, she's she's kind of avoiding because either she doesn't want to be discovered or they don't want her to be discovered. It's interesting that this stay of these white scientists is actually, it's a time of carnival going on in the Mojave camp. What happens when they sort of settle among them? They were welcomed in by the Mojave and they had dancing carnival atmosphere, archery and hoops. And these soldiers were able to visit the Mojave houses and they were taken in and the given, you know, given hospitality, which makes it even more curious that Olive was hidden away and didn't. There was no suggestion at all that they had this white girl. And the local women found the men's beard, the European

men's beards, very funny. Yes, that's right. So this is brilliant. This is so brilliant. So the Mojave women were famously sexually liberated and able to express themselves. However, they, however they wanted to. And so these men, these men, if you think mid-19th century Americans, they all had these huge great Old Testament beers. And the women thought this was hilarious. And they didn't, the American soldiers didn't understand why these women were laughing their heads off. And then making signs as if they were going to be sick. And it turned out that they... But it's because, yeah, go on. Why? Because the reason is hilarious. They thought that they were like talking vaginas. They'd never seen men with hairy faces like

that. The vagina monologues. Exactly. So the women were sort of appalled but thought it was hilarious that these men had all this facial hair because they'd never seen anything quite like it before. And Katie, talking of vaginas, as we like to on this podcast, but it sort of gives, we should, a good segue here. I know what's coming. Off you go, girls. Can we discuss Olive's nickname, Spancer, because does it actually? mean something a bit rude? Yes. So her obviously her name was Olive Oatman in her real family life, but there she was, her nickname was Spancer.

And there's been lots of research to try to find out what Spancer me. And Spancer means either rotten or sore vagina. Follow up question. Why? Yes, follow up question, Kayne Higman. Why? Why? Well, there is speculation as to why this might be. And it thought that it could be because she was very sexually active. That could be one reason why. Even by Mahave standards. Even by Mahavis standard because the women were very sexually free to express themselves and to take lovers and so forth. They didn't think there was anything bad about this,

unlike Mormon society where it would have been appalling to think of it. So either it meant she was very, very sexually active or it could have meant that she had had a lover who was very exceptionally active and strong and was wearing her out in some way. God, okay. This I think is a first on this pod, is that we've got this. This is sex, solicity. This is a conversation that Miranda might be having with Sarah Jessica about. But I think, I think, I think, if you try to kind of turn it round a bit and think of it from

the Mojave point of view, all this is speculation, I should add, that if these women were set very sexually liberated and free, maybe, you know, we think, oh, ho, you know, this has got a bad association for that. then perhaps it didn't. Perhaps it was just, it meant that she was having a good time. Who knows? There is no definitive answer to that question. It sounds like a very, very dodgy nickname to have from our point of view.

But they might not have thought that, I don't know. In a different culture, rotten vagina might be a great compliment. It might be a you-go girl nickname. It might be go-girl, exactly. That might be exactly. And by the way, the Mojave men were, famously good-looking. So Whipple and his and his, you know, surveying group who came through wrote about these men and talked about the incredible, incredible good-looking Mahave men.

I should just say that there's a particular look that comes into Anita's eyes at this point. No, they were tall and beautiful. I've seen pictures of them and they were. They were beautiful, beautiful men. Whipple says they moved like princes. They moved like princes, exactly. And they were very snappy dresses as well. You know, they would have come into the Cornwall MacArthur's description. How's your Google search going, Galita? Have you found any... Just you carry on chatting, I'm busy.

Actually, you know what? Very fine bone structure. Let me describe it, actually. Very, very beautiful. I found one picture. I'm going to send it to you, William, right now. Very fine bone structure. So I'm trying to think of what actor may look like.

A sort of young Brad Pitty kind of look on one of the ones that I found. But no, sort of fine looking tall, Tall dark and handsome would work for this, but also with very feline kind of cheekbones and a beautiful sort of aquiline nose and very dark eyes. Yeah, cold dark eyes. Eyes that flash like diamonds.

Yeah, I can see the good-looking thing. So I think, Olive, you know, we can't feel too sorry for her at this point. I think she was achieved quite a level of contentment. So the scientists come, they leave, all of that happens. What next for Olive? Well, what happens is in an incredible twist of fate, which sounds as like something out of a novel or a movie. And in fact, it's incredibly similar story to the story in The Seekers, you know, the John Ford, the very famous John Ford Western.

Olive believed that all her family had been wiped out by the Yavapai apart from her sister. But, unbeknownst to her, actually one of her brothers, Lorenzo, her older brother, amazingly had survived this really vicious attack. And it was nothing short of a miracle that he did survive. And he was almost starved to death. He at one point apparently even considered eating his own arm. He was so, he was so starving. And he was wrestling. Was he an older or younger brother?

Older brother. I think he was older. I think he was about 17 at the time. And Olive was 14. And so he was then taken in by another Native American group. Anyway, he survived. And he went to live in California. and he realized, because people had found the bodies of the rest of his family,

he realized that there were two of his sisters were missing. And so he believed that perhaps he might be able to find them. And he went on a five-year campaign. He was barely literate, this boy. He was sub-literate. But he went on an incredible five-year campaign writing letters to the local fort, a place called Fort Yuma to the soldiers there, writing to the government, writing to all sorts of people to try to get.

get people to investigate what had happened to his two sisters. And five years after the attack happened, which is in 51, finally news came to this fort, the local fort and the South called Fort Humor, that there was rumours of a white girl in this Mojave tribe. And so they sent out people to the village, and they did indeed find her, and they basically bought her back. They redeemed her. So this is the second time that this woman had been, you know, traded.

This time it was one horse, three blankets and some beads. So a price had gone down by then. But anyway, she was taken to Fort Yuma and the main military man there, a man called Martin Burke, who is the man who in a later television reference to this story was played by Ronald Reagan. You mentioned Reagan earlier on. Ronald Reagan played the part of this army commander. interviewed Olive and first of all told her that her brother had survived and at which point apparently she almost fainted dead away she was so amazing because she thought she was now on her own

in the world that was nobody else in her family surviving and he specifically asked her how she'd been treated he said how did the Mojaveh treat you and she said very well at all points at this juncture of her story and she hardly remembered any English no she hardly remembered any English at all. So one of the people who brings her back to Fort Yuma is a man whose name is Musk Melon, which I love. I love these names. And, you know, it's quite a touching. You can see that she's not just being forced to say they treated me very well, because they're saying goodbye and they're sort of holding hands. They're just about to embrace to say goodbye. But Olive's brother picks up a club once they're reunited and it's going to smash Muskmelon over the head. Either he

thinks that she's being dragged away again or that this is inappropriate or perhaps a flashback of what happened to him. And she's the one who gets in between them and says, no, no, you can't do this. He took good, don't. He's a nice man. He took good care of me. Yes. And then she tells Muskmelon, I'm going to tell them how the Mojave looked after me, how I lived with them, goodbye. And then they shook hands. Yes, they shook hands. She gives him a box of crackers, doesn't she? She gives them a box of crackers to take home. And I believe, you know, the tribe was very, didn't want to part with Olive at all. They wanted. They wanted. to keep her, but they thought that they would, you know, be in trouble with whites if they did

try to hang on to us. At that point, their ways parted again. Extraordinary these stories. We did earlier in the series, the story of the John Demos book, The Unredeemed Captive. And again, the story of a girl that fuses, this is much earlier in Puritan times in the early 17th century. Is this Eunice Williams? It is Eunice Williams. Exactly that. I'm really interested in what the paper said once, they got hold of Olive's story. So, you know, once she's back with her brother, how does she readjust? Because she has had stability in her life, really, with Mojave and being happy and well-treated, and getting some girlfriend. So, you know,

now she's into this quite straight-laced society. How does that go? I think it was incredibly difficult for her, partly because she almost immediately became a kind of media sensation. You know, this young girl who was a lady, quote-unquote. Very fine in appearance, according to the sound. It's very fine in appearance, a young woman of, you know, reasonably good background. And it was a fascinating story. It was the early days of newsprint. You know, in all these very young California towns, newspapers were springing up all over the place. And this was wonderful, wonderful copy.

And in all these early interviews that Olive gave, she unequivocally said at every point how well she'd been. treated that she was like one of the family, but she achieved this kind of celebrity status, which must have been appallingly difficult to have to navigate that. People came to stare at her. They came to stare at her as if she was a wild beast in a show. And I think that having these tattoos absolutely added to her mystique and her rather dark, these rather dark, gothic good looks that she had. You know, she's quite a very striking, very, very striking young woman.

But she becomes a sort of sideshow a little bit. I mean, there's a portrait in your book. I think, Will you might have mentioned this, but we've been looking at it for a long time of her in this sort of calico, cinched, wasted, full-skirted, bustled dress with cage underneath. Yes. Her hair and these sort of very conservative plats

with a stark, middle parting, very much of the era. A very fierce look at her face, though. Yeah, and they picked out the motif of her tattoo, her chin tattoo, and they've stitched it into her clothes. On to her dress as well. So, I mean, they're almost like making her into a sideshow. Completely. I mean, this is what happened.

This was a sort of progression. So she comes out as she's redeemed whether or not she wanted to is an absolutely moot point. Personally, I think she never quite recovered. My own personal opinion is that actually she would have been much happier if she'd stayed where she was because I think she'd become acculturated to this tribe, and now she had to come back and be a kind of respectable, young, white American woman again. She went from California, she and her brother went to Oregon,

and there they met this man, an itinerant Methodist preacher called the Reverend Stratton, and Stratton became the person who was to write their story. And it was by request, I think Lorenzo, So the brother asked him if he would write their story, and he did. But in the process, he totally hijacked the tale. So there were two versions of this story. One was called Life Among the Indians, and that sold out within three weeks. I mean, it was absolute instant bestseller. Her story, by the way, is one of the, I think it's the bestselling captivity narrative. There's a

whole genre of these things. Bestselling captivity narrative of all time. It was hugely successful. And so he then, this man Stratton, then rewrote it again, and it was published as the captivity of the Oatman girls among the Apache and Mojave Indians. And each time he subtly changed the story, so that instead of it being a story about the Mojave taking in these two young girls and treating them well and saving their life, which they did twice. You know, they saved them from the Yavapai and they also saved them during the time when the tribe was stuck. He totally twisted it to be a story about, you know, those barbarous savages who'd taken these girls into captivity. He calls them man-animals, human devils, worse than fiends. Yes. Which is not what Olive wanted and not what Olive ever said.

I've got a very short passage of Stratton's purple prose. Go free, please. It is something, I mean, you just shows you. So when Oliver and Marianne are being bought for the first time into the Mojave village, And then there's celebrations. Everyone is delighted to see them and they have this celebration, you know, food to eat and singing and dancing. It was a happy party, basically, that they give. And so this is Stratton's version of what happened. This was that of a company of indolent, superstitious and lazy heathen, adopting the only method which their darkness and ignorance would allow to signify their joy over the return of a kindred. and the delighted purchase of two foreign captives. Where is the heart but throb sensitive to the dark prison-like condition of these two girls, having been for nearly the whole night of their introduction to a new captivity,

made the subjects of shouting and confusion, heathenish, indelicate and indecent, and towards morning hiding themselves under a scanty covering, slightly salacious, surrounded by unknown savages, speculating for good measure, that under friendly guises their possible treachery might be wrapping and nursing some foul and murderous design. Which is not what she said. She never said that. But it becomes such a powerful narrative.

It eclipses Olive's own. And so her story is not her own anymore. But she does go on tour with this book, with Stratton's book. Yes, she does. She does. And that picture that you described of her in the dress, which with the embroidery that is mimicking her tattoos. Those were promotional photographs.

So it is very curious that she went along with Stratton's. You know, she was just, he was like a Svangali character. I think he just took her over. He took over, you know, he made a lot of money out of this, by the way. So he was writing what he knew people would want to read because it resonated with their own ideas about white superiors. supremacy and Native Americans being savages and heathens and devils and all this kind of thing. And it went down very well with the readership.

And for whatever reason, Olive went along with it. And nobody really understands why. I mean, personally, I think she was suffered from post-traumatic stress when she came out. I think she also demonstrably had depression. But there's an indication, isn't there, that she didn't have much warmth for Stratton? because later on when she gets married, she specifically doesn't invite Stratton to the wedding. And she ducks out of his...

Out of his life. And just talking about this at all, she kind of becomes a little bit reclusive after this and doesn't want anything to do with this. Where's a veil over her famous tattoo? Yes. You know, a subject of intense and probably unwanted curiosity, you know, for the rest of her life.

And when she finally got married, she married this very rich cattle farmer called John Fairchild, the first thing he did was to buy up every single copy that he could of these books and destroy them. So it's such a morality tale of how story can be completely bent in another direction to conform to a certain agenda. Yeah, and her husband doing that, I mean, it sort of makes me think that she didn't like them. And he was doing it for her, you know, rather than for his own name because he can't, you know, she's never going to hide what's happened to her and who she is. She's got a tattoo on her face.

But to buy up all these books that have hurt her and then set them on fire, I like to think that's what happened. Yes. She lives on into the 20th century. She doesn't die until March 20th, 1903 at the age of 65. Yes, she was quite old. But Stratton, I'm happy to say, went mad. And I think he coerced her.

I think it was a case of coercic control. I think she was very vulnerable. and he saw a chance. You know, he was a chancer and he saw money. She was his cash cow. She was his cash cow. So it's a very, very mixed story. Very good things and very bad things too.

In the film version with Ronald Reagan playing Herescuer, are the same horrible stereotypes rolled out? I haven't actually seen that programme. It's quite old. It's from a series called Death Valley Days. And I think it was one episode. in a whole, you know, I think they were sort of like linked stories. But in that period, very unlikely to be in anything other than a negative portrayal of Native Americans.

It's only very recently that that narrative has started to change about time two. It should have happened before, but sadly didn't. Well, listen, it's been a really interesting, again, fascinating look through the prism of one life, at a much wider space of history. Thank you very much, Katie Hickman. That was such a pleasure. Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.