The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West) [Hardcover]

Margot Mifflin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2009 | Series: Women in the West

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.

Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman’s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker’s wife in Texas.

Oatman’s story has since become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film, radio plays, and even an episode of Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan. Its themes, from the perils of religious utopianism to the permeable border between civilization and savagery, are deeply rooted in the American psyche. Oatman’s blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion. It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: she never wanted to go home.
 

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

This engaging biography examines the life of Olive Oatman, who was 13 years old when Indians attacked her Illinois Mormon family on its journey west; she was subsequently adopted and raised by the Mohave tribe. Mifflin (English, Lehman Coll., CUNY) tells Oatman's story, from the unorthodox religious convictions that led her family west, through her captivity and assimilation into Mohave culture, to her rescue and reassimilation. Mifflin engagingly describes Oatman's ordeal and theorizes about its impact on Oatman herself as well as on popular imagination. The author seeks to correct much of the myth that has sprung up around Oatman, owing partly to a biography written with Oatman's participation during her life. Mifflin takes the position that Oatman was almost fully assimilated into Mohave culture and resisted "rescue," and that her return to mainstream society was a cause of ambivalence, if not anxiety. Though Mifflin sometimes seems a bit eager to make this argument, her book adds nuance to Oatman's story and also humanizes the Mohave who adopted her. Recommended for general readers as well as students and scholars.—Julie Biando Edwards, Maureen & Mike Mansfield Lib., Univ. of Montana, Missoula
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"The Blue Tattoo is well-researched history that reads like unbelievable fiction, telling the story of Olive Oatman, the first tattooed American white woman. . . . Mifflin weaves together Olive's story with the history of American westward expansion, the Mohave, tattooing in America, and captivity literature in the 1800s."—Elizabeth Quinn, Bust

(Elizabeth Quinn Bust )

"In The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin slices away the decades of mythology and puts the story in its proper historical context. What emerges is a riveting, well-researched portrait of a young woman—a survivor, but someone marked for life by the experience."—Jon Shumaker, Tucson Weekly

(Jon Shumaker Tucson Weekly 20090910)

“Although Oatman’s story on its own is full of intrigue, Mifflin adeptly uses her tale as a springboard for larger issues of the time.”—Feminist Review

(Feminist Review 20091107)

"The Blue Tattoo is well written and well researched; it re-opens the story of white women and men going West and Native people trying to survive these travels."—June Namias, Pacific Historical Review

(June Namias Pacific Historical Review 20100501)

“Mifflin’s treatment of Olive’s sojourns [provides] an excellent teaching opportunity about America’s ongoing captivation with ethnic/gender crossings.”—Western American Literature

 

 

(Western American Literature 20091203)

“Mifflin engagingly describes Oatman’s ordeal and theorizes about its impact on Oatman herself as well as on popular imagination…. Her book adds nuance to Oatman’s story and also humanizes the Mohave who adopted her. Recommended for general readers as well as students and scholars.”—Library Journal

(Library Journal 20090401)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 280 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press (April 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803211481
• ISBN-13: 978-0803211483
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #332,140 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margot Mifflin writes about women, art, and contemporary culture. The author of "Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo," she has written for The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Believer, and Salon.com. Mifflin is an associate professor in the English Department of Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY)and directs the Arts and Culture program at CUNY's Graduate School of Journalism, where she also teaches. Her book, "The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman" was published by The University of Nebraska in 2009.

Mifflin has appeared as a lecturer and keynote speaker at dozens of colleges, universities and museums, including Barnard College, Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, Los Angeles MOCA and New York University. She appeared in MSNBC's documentary, "Women and Tattoo," which first aired in 2001, and CNN's "Women of the Ink," which first aired in 1998. She lives in Nyack, New York.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Well-written, but Left with questions October 20, 2009

By Ruth P. Price

Format:Hardcover

After tribe members murdered her parents and most of her siblings, the Yavapai Indians kidnapped Olive Oatman and her younger sister Mary Ann. Brutally treated as slaves by their captors, Olive and her sister were later traded to the Mohave Indians who eventually adopted them into the tribe where they were treated as family. Mary Ann died of starvation during a bleak winter, but Olive survived and was later traded by her Mohave family to whites. A brother who the Yavapai left for dead survived and later reconnected with Olive.

Interviews during her first days back into white society show that Olive grieved her Mohave family and spoke of them as being kind and caring. Later, under the influence of a minister who hated Indians, Olive lectured throughout the East about her terrible treatment from both tribes. Olive received an excellent education and was a spell-binding speaker. She later married and her husband made every effort to erase her captive past.

The book is well-written and thoroughly researched, but I had difficulty with the author laying the entire blame for Olive's shifting position toward her Indian life entirely on the preacher. Olive was clearly an intelligent and independent woman who could have taken a more even-handed approach in her lectures about her treatment. Certainly some white women who were former captives and then integrated back into white society were able to speak more fairly about their captivity. I was left with many questions about why Olive was both able to seek out, in her later life, a meeting with one of the members of the Mohave tribe in Washington, D. C., as a seemingly fond gesture and yet also took part through her lectures in promoting the annihilation of the Indians.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A thorough and thoroughly interesting account December 15, 2009

By Eric S. Ludwig

Format:Hardcover

Maybe 15 years ago I found a used reprint copy of the 'Captivity of the Oatman Girls' while on a trip through the Mother Lode country with my wife and kids. The prose was turgid and the story heated up; the author's provocative sexual elisions made for a rollicking if only partially believable tale. I couldn't stop wondering what Olive's life was like after she returned to "civilization". Since then, I always shiver a bit when I drive under the freeway sign on the Arizona border that says "Oatman exit". Wow. Here is the real place where her family was massacred and her brother left for dead by the local indians.

This book is exactly the kind of scholarship that needed to be done on the topic. Although the girls were kidnapped and their family destroyed, Olive Oatman ended up living for four years with the Mohave indians in a land-locked paradise of cool water and abundant food. She was not a captive but an adopted daughter and her return to 19th century 'civilization' was anything but a rescue. The book is a sweeping review of the widely dispersed resources available to a trained researcher: archives, secondary literature, ethnographic studies, newspaper articles and eyewitness accounts. The author has assembled an extremely readable account of Olive's life and the historical period of Western expansionism. This is not a biography. It is a very interesting story; fascinating and immanently readable. I particularly liked the fact that the author dealt with Olive's twofold cultural assimilation at an impressionable age, first to a Native American culture at age 14 and then back to the Anglo world five years later. Rather than declaim on the effect it had on her personality, the author allows friends and relatives to share their impressions from letters and first hand accounts.... Naturally, it would have been incredibly hard to remain true to BOTH cultures at the time; I understand why Olive had a air of constant melancholy about her. Her life with the Mohave had been free and casual; her life back in 'society' was stilted and austere.

The book is amply researched but immanently readable. Altogether an insightful picture of a young woman whose life was profoundly uprooted two times over. If you are looking for a lurid and exploitative adventure, read "The Captivity of the Oatman Girls". If you are interested in real history and the human condition where the stone age meets the Age of Expansion, read "the Blue Tattoo." Read more ›

30 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Young Mormon Girl Enters A Strange Sexual Utopia May 26, 2009

By Ben Franklin Bookshop

Format:Hardcover

Using family letters, documents and contemporary accounts, Margot Mifflin uncovers previously unknown aspects of one of the best known Indian Captivity stories -that of Olive Oatman, the woman whose chin bore the "blue tattoo." On her return to white culture as a "redeemed captive," Olive's tattoo served as a question mark to the shocked and sympathetic audiences who heard her lecture on her experiences - asking the question no respectable person of the time dare voice, what did the savages really do to her?
The horrific massacre of her Morman pioneer family by Yavapai Indians in 1851 began thirteen year old Olive's six-year adventure (or ordeal, as the legend would later have it). She and her sister, at first slaves of the cruel Yavapai, were purchased a year later by the much gentler, now little-known, Mohave people. In a secret valley of the Colorado River, the "American Nile" (the yearly fertile flooding ended with the construction of Hoover Dam), the girls entered an ancient Utopian culture, perhaps unique among American Indians.
The Mohaves lived a near-vegetarian, near-nudist, sexually promiscuous life, and the girls participated in every aspect of the culture -- so much so that the hardboiled cavalry officer sent to "rescue" Olive, and who spoke enough Mohave to understand her nickname (which indicated an exaggerated interest in sex.) changed her name in the Army's paperwork. Olive's tattoo, which was to identify her as Mohave in the afterlife, shows that she became a full member of the tribe, in spite of later revisions to her story.
Olive's adventures didn't end with her return to white culture.... She became a successful author and lecturer under the influence of a preacher-with-an-agenda who practiced a sort of ventriloquism, revising Olive's experience as a "captive" while using her to deliver his own message of racial hate and misogyny.
Margot Mifflin, who has a special interest in women and tattooing, is also the author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo. Here she examines the effect of Olive's tattoos -- as well as five-plus years of nudity and sexual freedom-- on Olive's body-image and sense of self, and how shaping and retelling her story allowed her to move into polite society. Mifflin's portrayal of Mohave culture and Olive's life within the tribe was the highlight of the story for this reader, but the entire book was a can't-put-it-down kind of read.

Michael Houghton
Ben Franklin Bookshop Read more ›