Apache Captives’ Ordeal

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Yet life among the Mojave was not without small consolations. The chief’s wife, Aespaneo, gave the sisters a tiny garden to grow their own food. The Mojave frequently asked the captives to sing for them, and the girls would respond with Sunday school hymns and little songs of Mother Goose. The delighted Indians would reward their captives with presents of beads and small scraps of red flannel.

After Olive and Mary Ann had learned the Mojave language, they found themselves again bombarded with endless questions about the whites and their way of life. Once, Olive tried to describe how one could plow the soil and increase the Mojaves’ wheat yield tenfold. Her captors answered with scorn, ‘You whites have forsaken nature and want to possess the earth, but you will not be able.’ Her explanations of Christianity brought shrieks of merriment. ‘When you go up to your heaven, you had better take a strong piece of bark and tie yourself up,’ one squaw scoffed, ‘or before long you will be falling down among us again.’

The laughter soon stopped as the autumn of 1853 brought tragedy to captors and captives alike. There had been no rain the year before, and the meager crops of the Mojave failed. The dwindling supply of mesquite seeds could no longer meet the tribe’s needs; it was a time of terrible hunger, then starvation. Mary Ann, who had never fully recovered from her forced marches across the desert, weakened at an alarming rate. Olive frantically searched for roots and blackbird eggs to keep her sister alive, but most of these were confiscated by the Mojave for their own dying children.

In the end, Mary Ann could no longer move. She lay in the shade of a cottonwood tree and weakly sang songs to herself; the Mojave would often gather to listen. Some of them would stand for whole hours and gaze upon her countenance as if enchanted by a strange sight, even while some of their own kindred were dying in other parts of the village.

Late one evening, Mary Ann said to her sister: ‘Olive, I shall die soon. You will live and get away.’ All too quickly half of that prophecy came to pass. Mary Ann wasted away and died, her sister recalled, ‘as sinks the innocent infant to sleep in its mother’s arms.’

The Mojave customarily burned their dead. Aespaneo, however, was able to get her husband’s permission for Mary Ann to be buried in the little garden she and her sister had tilled. In her third year of captivity, Olive Oatman found herself alone among the Indians.

‘This was the only time,’ Olive later recalled, ‘in which, without any reserve, I really hoped to die.’ She expected and hoped for–nothing better than to starve to death. However, one morning Aespaneo came with a handful of corn meal ‘in a sly and unobserved manner, and enjoined secrecy upon me.’ It was part of the tribe’s last reserves of seed corn. This, with a little mesquite soup kept Olive alive. By March 1854 the appearance of fish in a nearby lake rescued the Mojave from wholesale famine. Rains again overflowed the Colorado and brought new life to the Mojave Valley.

Yet no sooner had this danger passed than a new one threatened. In the spring of 1854 the Mojave made war on the Cocopah, a numerous tribe dwelling some 700 miles distant. The day the war party left, Olive learned to her horror an unfailing custom among the Mojave: whenever one of their warriors died in battle, a prisoner was sacrificed to appease his angry spirit. Since Olive was the only captive in the village, her death now seemed certain. For five long months the girl’s every waking hour was haunted by fear; she alternated between despair and wild impulses to run away to the hills. In the end, her delivery seemed nothing short of miraculous–the Mojave triumphed over their enemies without losing a man. ‘I buried my face in my hands,’ she said, ‘and silently thanked God.’

Olive soon had good reason to be grateful that her planned escape was never attempted. A young Cocopah girl, Nowercha, was brought back to the valley as a prisoner; the next night she ran away. Captured by a neighboring tribe, the fugitive was brought back to the Mojave. Olive was forced to watch as Nowercha was crucified and slowly shot full of arrows.

Afterward, Olive ‘thought it best now to conciliate the best wishes of all, and by every possible means, to avoid all occasions of awakening their displeasure.’ Setting aside hopes of rescue or escape, she settled as best she could into the life of a true Mojave, buoyed by the continuing friendship and support of Aespaneo and Topeka.

Although she had no way of knowing, Olive possessed one other fervent ally. For years her brother had carried on his own relentless battle in California, pleading with strangers and demanding justice from local officials. Nothing happened. ‘I learned,’ Lorenzo observed, ‘that men do not come across the plains to hunt captives among the Indians.’ He joined various parties of miners exploring Southern California, always hoping to turn them toward Arizona. In 1854, hearing that a new garrison had returned to Fort Yuma, Lorenzo sent a letter requesting the Army’s help. Yes, he was told, there were two girls being held captive by the Mojave, but no one knew what to do. Furious, Lorenzo wrote the editor of the Los Angeles Star, detailing the tragedy and describing the indifference he had received.

The Star responded with a blistering editorial, damning the Army as a pack of incompetents and cowards. With publicity briefly reviving interest in the Oatman girls, Lorenzo hurriedly petitioned California’s Governor Johnson to raise an expeditionary force. Johnson replied that he was more than willing to do so, but lacked the necessary authority. He kindly suggested that Lorenzo contact the Indian Department in Washington. Wearily, Lorenzo began drawing up yet another petition, having no faith that it would prove more useful than the others. Unknown to him, however, the Star’s editorial was to have unexpected and fateful consequences for his lost sister.

Henry Grinnell was a carpenter at Fort Yuma, friendly with many of the tribesmen who traded at the fort. One night in late January 1856, he was awakened by someone creeping into his room; Grinnell jumped from bed, his pistol cocked. The intruder was Francisco, a Yuma Indian. When Grinnell demanded to know what he was doing there, the Yuma said only that he wanted to chat awhile, ‘Carpentero, what is this you say so much about two American girls among the Indians?’ Francisco asked.

‘I said that there were two girls among the Mojaves or Apaches,’ Grinnell replied. ‘And you know it, and we know you know it. Now listen to this.’ So saying, Grinnell picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Star and began reading aloud the Oatman article. The crafty carpenter did not stop when he reached the end of the story; still pretending to read, he added his own imaginative conclusion. The president of the United States, Grinnell declared, had ordered 5 million American soldiers to surround the Mojave Valley and slaughter every single Indian living there unless the Oatmans were released unharmed.

Francisco was impressed. ‘I know where there is one white girl among the Mojaves; there were two, but one is dead,’ he said. ‘You give me four blankets and some beads, and I will bring that girl here in 20 days.’

After a hurried conference with the fort’s commander, the deal was struck; Grinnell himself would stand payment for the blankets and beads. On February 8, Francisco and three companions set out for the land of the Mojave.

Olive Oatman was digging groundnuts on the morning she heard of Francisco’s arrival. Rumors buzzed among the Mojave; some said the Yuma had come to seek ‘Onata’s’ release. But if the captive’s hopes were raised by this news, they were soon dashed. Olive was seized and carried to the chief’s ki, to be confined there while the Mojave council debated Francisco’s offer.

Olive had little faith in the wisdom of the council, a body she considered ‘an aimless convening of wild maniacs.’ They could as easily decide to kill their hostage as to release her. After three long days, she was taken out and plastered with mud, giving her ‘a dun, dingy color, unlike that of any race I ever saw.’ She was ordered to speak only in gibberish; if Francisco was given any reason to think her an American, her life would be forfeit on the spot. ‘They had told Francisco that I was not an American, that I was from a race of people much like the Indians, living away from the setting sun.’

Dragged before the council, Olive came face to face at last with her would-be rescuer. The Yuma showed her a note, the first writing she had seen in five years: ‘Francisco, Yuma Indian, bearer of this, goes to the Mojave Nation to obtain a white woman there, named OLIVIA. It is desirable she should come to this post, or send her reasons why she does not wish to come. MARTIN BURKE, Lieut. Col. Commanding.’

Olive then spoke to Francisco in plain English. She told him who she was; she spoke of the planned deception by the Mojave. Francisco jumped up in a fury. If the Mojave refused to release the girl, he said, that was well and good. He would return to Colonel Burke and tell him this; the white soldiers from the fort would come to take up the argument.

The council erupted into shouts and threats. Some said they should kill the girl; others wanted to fight the soldiers. Most wished to make the best of a bad situation–take what they could get for Olive and send her back to the fort. In the end, Chief Espaniola demanded that a horse be thrown into the bargain–and Topeka must accompany Olive to Fort Yuma to be certain the Yuma did not steal Onata for themselves.

The next day, after a last breakfast of sour mesquite mush, Olive set out with her traveling companions. Before leaving, she lingered awhile at the grave of her sister, ‘who had come with me to that lonely exile; and now I felt what it was to know she could not go with me from it.’ Olive had wanted to take along her beads and scraps of cloth–’I prized these beads beyond their real value, especially one string that had been worn by Mary.’ But this the Mojave denied her. She would take nothing but the bark garments she wore. Olive contented herself with keeping a few of the groundnuts that she had spent the better part of five years gathering for her captors.

The long trek toward freedom lasted little more than a week. It was without incident until Olive came to the ferry that was to take her across the Colorado. Here she hesitated. She did not wish to enter the fort wearing only bark garments. In the end, an officer’s wife sent over the gift of a gaily colored party dress.

On the morning of February 28, 1856, with the guns of Fort Yuma booming a salute and the entire garrison turned out to give three cheers, Olive Oatman returned to her people at last. Her journey to Fort Yuma, begun with her family at Maricopa Wells amid such hopes and anxiety, had been delayed by five years and 10 days.

Olive was incoherent for several days after her release. Shocked by the abrupt turn of events that gained her freedom, she was scarcely less dumbfounded to learn that the brother she had long thought dead was alive in California. Lorenzo soon rejoined his sister at Fort Yuma. Together they traveled to Jackson County, Ore., to take up residence with a cousin. There, an enterprising gentleman named Royal Stratton interviewed the pair and set down their adventures in a book, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, which sold out three separate editions. In 1858, Olive journeyed east to deliver a series of popular lectures. All this left her a relatively wealthy young woman, able to continue her neglected education in prestigious schools.

While in New York, Olive was introduced to John B. Fairchild; they later married and settled in Sherman, Texas. They adopted a child and lived happily for many years. Olive died in 1903 and is buried in Sherman.

In 1909, a Mojave Indian who called himself John Oatman was instrumental in having the village of Vivian, Ariz., change its name to Oatman. John claimed to have been the son of Olive Oatman, though few people of the time seem to have taken this claim seriously. Nonetheless, the little town of Oatman still stands today, 25 miles southwest of Kingman. Its chief claim to fame (besides an extremely tenuous and doubtful connection to the Oatman tragedy) lies in the fact that Clark Gable and Carole Lombard spent their honeymoon at the Oatman Hotel.

To the end of her life Olive kept near her a small jar containing those same groundnuts she had once gathered with a heavy heart in a land now far distant, a bitter remembrance of frequent cruelty and occasional kindness among a people more given to the former than the latter.

This article was written by Robert B. Smith and originally appeared in the August 2001 issue of Wild West.

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Tags: Native American History, Social History, The Wild West, Wild West, Women's History

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