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“A tour de force”
—New York Times
Charlie Scheffel’s story as told in Crack! and Thump will be featured in the History Channel series, WWII in HD, Sunday-Thursday, November 15-19 at 9-11 p.m. ET.
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Book Reviews
A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
—Midwest Book Review
Explaining, not exploiting
THE BLUE TATTOO:
The Life of Olive Oatman
By Margot Mifflin
209 pp. U. of Nebraska Press $24.95
Reviewed by Jack Shakely
The sepia-toned photograph on the cover of The Blue Tattoo is a stunner. In a mid-nineteenth century studio portrait, a pretty young woman with deep-set eyes, hair parted demurely in the middle, stands gazing somewhat dreamily into the camera. She has on a floor-length gown buttoned modestly at the neck, lace cuffs and collar, and the most grotesque facial tattoo this side of a Maori warrior.
The young woman was Olive Oatman, who as a 14-year-old member of a Mormon wagon train in 1851 was captured by Indians. She lived among them for five years before she was ransomed back to the white community. Then, as Margot Mifflin’s well-researched biography details, Olive Oatman’s exploitation really began.
Oatman’s capture by the Yavapai, near what is now Yuma, Arizona, was tragic—her mother, father and four siblings were massacred. The impoverished and starving Yavapai quickly sold her and her younger sister Mary Ann to the relatively prosperous, peaceful, and fun-loving Mohave, who accepted the two girls first as slaves, then as family. Little Mary Ann, who was frail even before the Indian encounter, sickened and died two years after joining the Mohave, but Olive apparently thrived. She learned to speak Mohave fluently—when she was reclaimed by the Army, her English was halting—and was accepted as a member of the tribe. That acceptance entailed elaborate facial tattooing, among both men and women, and Olive’s tattoos were seen as commonplace among the Mohave.
But they were anything but commonplace in white America at the time. Olive Oatman was, in fact, the very first white American woman to wear a tattoo. And it was a beauty. When itinerant preacher Royal Stratton, who had persuaded the Army to place Oatman under his guardianship, took one look at that face, he knew he had hit literary pay dirt. He would write a book about this and make a fortune, he decided. When Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in 1850, his fictional Hester Prynne wore her mark of shame on her clothing; Olive Oatman bore hers on her face. Of course, Stratton figured, he would have to punch up the story a little.
Or a lot. When Stratton’s book, bearing the incredibly lengthy title common to books of the time, Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life Among the Apache and Mohave Indians, was published in 1857, it bore little resemblance to Olive’s real story. She was no longer a Mormon; the Yavapai, whom nobody had ever heard of, were changed to Apaches; the Mohave, whom Olive had described as good-natured and generous in an earlier interview with the San Francisco Star, were now “lumps of degraded humanity,” “filthy looking,” and “lazy.” Most of all Stratton had to sequester the fact that the Mohave told Olive she could leave any time she chose.
Stratton’s book, luridly illustrated by Charles and Arthur Nahl, sold out in three weeks. A second and third edition, each more titillating and preachy, also “flew off the shelves,” Mifflin wrote, “at a dollar a copy.” Not bad in an era when three-bedroom homes sold for $500.
One of the unexpected pleasures of The Blue Tattoo, is, in fact, not so much the story of Olive Oatman, but the story of America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for this type of narrative. Called “captivity stories,” there were by Mifflin’s accounting more than 2,000 such books in American literature by the time Olive Oatman’s tale hit the stores. America’s first bestseller, published in 1682, was just such a tale. But what that book, A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, and subsequent books lacked, of course, was Olive Oatman herself, whose blue visage provided somber testimony to her treatment by the “savages.”
So to keep book sales up the opportunistic Stratton dressed Olive in gingham and hauled her all over the country on a ten-year lecture odyssey that made him rich and Olive famous—and confused, alienated and perhaps, near the end of her life, emotionally unstable.
The Blue Tattoo is one of the most thoroughly researched books I have ever read, with hundreds of footnotes and an equal number of referenced books, private letters, articles, poems, and military communications. I never thought I’d say this, but the last section of the book, where author Mifflin spends three pages parsing an old episode of “Death Valley Days” that even further romanticized the Oatman story, might be just a wee bit too thoroughly researched, or at least reported. But maybe that’s a little like having too much ice cream. Just put down your spoon and go about your business.
The Blue Tattoo is a wonderful peek at an era and a literary genre by a first-class researcher. And if Olive Oatman could time-travel back to read the book, I think she’d be delighted to discover that finally there was a sympathetic author more interested in explaining than exploiting her captivity story.
Jack Shakely is the author of the award-winning historical novel The Confederate War Bonnet. His latest novel, Prisoners at Chigger Lake, will be published in 2010. Shakely is also a senior fellow at the Center for Philanthropy and Public Policy at the University of Southern California.
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