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Book Review
| The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival. By Brian McGinty. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005. xiv + 258 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $27.95.)
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The steady gaze of the composed young woman with a grid of dark tattoos framing her chin gives pause to every reader and researcher who comes upon a photograph of Olive Oatman. The basic facts are well known: an immigrant family of parents and seven children traveling alone on the trail to Yuma in 1851 was massacred by Indians who stole two young sisters, kept one long enough to brand her with tattoos, and traded her back as a young adult five years later in 1856. Soon, a narrative account, "Captivity of the Oatman Girls," became a best-selling book, and the marked face of Olive Oatman became an iconic symbol of the troubled relationship between immigrants and Indians in the West. |
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The story was never so simple and The Oatman Massacre reveals a far more complex series of events surrounding the tragedy. Most importantly, this new account respects and represents the southwestern Indian tribes caught in uneasy truces and ancestral feuds, troubles compounded by drought and famine. It exonerates the Apaches and implicates the Western Yavapais or Toklepayas as the probable abductors. It presents strong evidence of compassionate treatment of the two girls in spite of Mary Ann Oatman's death by starvation—famine killed many American Indians as well. Humane treatment ensured Olive Oatman's survival, and some evidence that she willingly married and bore children whom she had to abandon at her repatriation explains much about the sadness of her later life. Secondly, this book explains the Mormon connection ignored in the 1857 account because the Methodist minister, Royal Stratton, who collaborated with Olive and her only surviving brother Lorenzo, framed the Oatman story to serve his own ends. Stratton's captivity narrative cast the events as "a heroic crusade against 'Indian savagery'" and employed epithet, derision, and arguments of Manifest Destiny to assert Christian superiority (p. 162). Stratton did not consider Mormons to be Christians and omitted Roys Oatman's membership in the Mormon church in Nauvoo, Illinois. Oatman rejected Brigham Young's leadership to follow the "Boy Prophet," James Colin Brewster, who had visions and "translated" scripture. Brewster led his followers toward a refuge at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado rivers he had seen in a vision and which he described as green with vegetation, divided by streams, rich of soil with "'exuberant fecundity,'" a veritable Eden surrounded, he said, by friendly Indians (p. 36). Oatman, a religious seeker of unusual stubbornness and combative temperament, forged ahead of the wagon train at a terrible cost. Well-written and researched, with cautious guidance where fact and conjecture meet, this fine book offers the best solution thus far to an enduring puzzle. |
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| Valeen Tippetts Avery, Emeritus
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| Northern Arizona University |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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