A town in the Black Mountains of Mohave County formerly called “Vivian” after a mining company was renamed “Oatman” in 1909 to honor Olive Oatman, the victim of an infamous kidnapping. The Oatmans were Mormon pioneers who left their home in Illinois to build a new life in the Salt Lake Valley of what is now Utah. They were traveling through Arizona in February 1851 when they were ambushed by a tribe, believed to have been Western Yavapai. They killed Royce Oatman and his pregnant wife as well as four of their seven children. One son, Lorenzo, was able to escape. Sisters Olive and Mary Ann, who were about thirteen and eight-years-old, were taken captive. Neither of them had shoes and Olive was terrified that they would kill her little sister because she had a hard time keeping up with the pace of their travel. They were kept as slaves for about a year until they were sold to Mojaves for an assortment of horses, blankets, vegetables, and beads. Life with the Mojaves was more comfortable for Olive and Mary Ann as they were adopted by a tribe leader and his wife and were treated as members of the family rather than servants. In Olive’s earliest interview post-captivity she recalls that the Mojaves treated her and her sister “very well.” Members of their tribe made shoes for the girls and did their best to protect them–which included giving them tribal chin tattoos which were believed to grant access to the afterlife. Despite their best efforts, Mary Ann and several members of the tribe died of starvation during a drought in 1858. White settlers in surrounding communities began to notice Olive’s presence in the Mojave tribe, and they grew increasingly concerned. She became something of a legend before she was willfully released by the tribe to re-enter American society in 1856. Now nineteen-years-old, this transition was jarring for Olive. She had lived with the Yavapais and Mojaves for five years and was a stranger to her old way of life. She struggled to overcome culture shock and grew increasingly homesick for her Mojave family. One bright spot for Olive during these years was reuniting with her brother Lorenzo, who had been searching for her and Mary Ann for years. As she worked to readapt and relearn to dress, speak, and behave–her accounts of her time with the Western Yavapai and Mojave tribes blurred together and turned sour. A reverend, R. B. Stratton, quickly took interest in Olive’s story. He wrote a book, published a year after her return, called Captivity of the Oatman Girls. It was riddled with misinformation and prejudice, and the twisted narrative seemed to become a story Olive herself believed. Stratton arranged speaking tours for Olive all over the country, where she shocked people with this crafted version of her life. At a lecture she gave in Michigan, Olive met a man named John Fairchild, and he seemed to give her the peace she yearned for after so many years of trauma. When they married in 1865 Olive retired from touring and everything to do with Stratton, refusing to perform ever again. John never spoke publicly about her past, and they did their best to live a quiet life in Sherman, Texas. Still she was plagued by her past and mental illnesses, likely PTSD and depression, for the rest of her life. She died in 1903, at the age of 65, leaving behind John and their daughter, Mary Elizabeth. The scraps of information we have from Olive’s fateful childhood could never do her story justice. Regardless of all the hearsay and sensationalism that grew with her fame, even her earliest interviews are difficult to make sense out of. She was solemn and even glum in nearly every account we have of her, yet she laughed in that first interview while talking about her time with the Mojaves. Olive’s story is as compelling today as it was to those who once gathered in crowds around the country to hear her speak, and the true circumstances of her life remain largely as mysterious.
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