Margot Mifflin > Quotes

“Olive later said her release provoked mixed reactions from the rest of the tribe.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“But the Mohaves, like their allies the Quechans, loved bawdy sobriquets referring to—or flatly advertising—genitalia. Quechan names for men at the time, for example, included “Big Cock,” “Cock-with-a-Blue-Head,” and “Good Fucker.” One Mohave woman was nicknamed “Charcoal Testicle,” indicating she liked sex so much that she burned men’s testicles. 22”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“They were described variously as majestic, Herculean, and as one of the Smithsonian Institution’s first ethnographers put it, “as fine a race of men physically, perhaps, as there is in existence.”14 They painted their faces coal black, with a red streak from the hairline to the chin, and were known for their tattooing and face painting, on both men and women, which communicated everything from military might to grief over the loss of a child.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Tsosie says Olive would only have been given a clan name if she were considered a full Mohave. But her clan name also masks her marriage status. If, after some period of adaptation, she was married—and Mohave girls of the period did so in their early to mid-teens—her name wouldn’t show it. The Mohaves were serial monogamists with no wedding ceremony. Marriage meant living together; moving out signaled divorce.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“After a journey marred by droughts and snowstorms, illness and death, the remains of the Brewster party pursuing the land of plenty on the Colorado River stepped off the ferry and took it in. One look at the landscape told them that the boy prophet James Colin Brewster’s visionary powers were as bankrupt as his revelations were changeable. Here was Brewster’s land “of hills, of vallies [sic], of plains and pleasant places, which brings forth in abundance, that they who go there shall prosper.”16 It was a wasteland.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Stratton omitted, exaggerated, and fabricated information in order to deliver a title that was at once pious and titillating for his publisher, Whitton, Towne and Company, an arm of the Methodist Book Concern, which was trying to boost book sales in order to fund less lucrative church projects. His selective storytelling created a collage effect: there was what he knew and told, what he knew and did not tell, and what, perhaps, Olive never revealed, which cannot be reclaimed or reconstructed. Stratton even acknowledged the omissions in his conclusion: “Much of that dreadful period is unwritten, and will remain forever unwritten.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Nahl’s erasure of the tattoo in the book, removes from the story the possibility that the tattoo made her Mohave. And it neglects a larger truth: the Mohaves did not tattoo their captives; they tattooed their own.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“In the summer of 1854, Heintzelman had finally extricated himself from Fort Yuma and yielded command to Brevet Major George Henry Thomas, who was more receptive to Lorenzo’s inquiries, so the boy returned to the area that fall to question travelers and try to form a party to scour “Apache country” for his sisters. Lorenzo found that “a true sympathy is oftenest found among those who have themselves also suffered,” but sympathy didn’t translate into action, and he was repeatedly disappointed by men who promised to search with him and then backed out with a “trifling excuse.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Olive acquired the nickname “Spantsa,” which meant “rotten vagina” or “sore” vagina. 23 She may have been menstruating when she arrived, wrapped in rags, or she may have been perceived as unhygienic by comparison to the Mohaves, who bathed every day in the Colorado River, unlike whites, for whom a splash of toilet water was considered a substitute for washing. 24”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Whipple reported seeing as many as six hundred Indians in a single day in his camp. Few spoke Spanish; most communicated with the whites using hand gestures. Whipple noticed “several sad-looking fellows in the crowd” who were slaves taken in an expedition against the Cocopas, but he saw no white girls, and more significantly, was never approached by the Oatmans, who either remained in their village above the campgrounds or socialized with the others, passing as Mohaves. 15 Either scenario is telling. If they were hidden from the Whipple party, this omission from Olive’s biography is glaringly conspicuous: it was not just her first opportunity for escape during her captivity but also one of the more dramatic events of her Mohave life. And if she wasn’t hidden, she was in a situation where she roamed freely with Mohaves of all ages, but never sought help from any of the hundred-odd whites in the area. Three years into their captivity, with no knowledge that their brother had survived the Oatman massacre, seventeen-year-old Olive and twelve-year-old Mary Ann had crossed the threshold of assimilation.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“A hundred and fifty years after Oatman’s return, writers—amateur and professional, religious and scholarly—continue to rework it, invariably reflecting their own cultural fantasies as vividly as Oatman’s particular experience.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“The sight of the white men’s beards, now tumbling down their chests after many months of travel, afforded them—especially the women—considerable glee. Some tried to touch them to verify that they were real, but, wrote Mollhausen, “they gave us to understand, in an unmistakable manner, that they did not consider these appendages at all attractive, though we were rather proud of them, as testifying to the length of our journey.” When the bearded men rode past them, the women burst into laughter and “put their hands to their mouths, as if the sight of us rather tended to make them sick.” 13 Unaccustomed to hairy faces, the women thought the beards made the men look like talking vaginas. 14 Mollhausen, meanwhile, could not determine whether Mohave men, who had little or no facial hair, shaved, singed, or plucked.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“For these galas, the Mohaves came together wearing bark masks and face paint or mud-slathered hair, marched upriver to the feasting area, built a fire, and danced until midnight. The next day they ate. The women arrived carrying soup, cakes, or boiled vegetables in dishes and baskets on their heads. Their cakes were made of ground wheat and boiled pumpkin rolled into a dough that was placed in the sand, covered with a leaf, and baked.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“When she took the stage in the late 1850s, Olive became the first American woman to show her tattooed body publicly for profit. 32 At the time, tattoos were virtually unseen in the United States.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Stratton claimed his information came from seven years of travel among tribes along the Pacific, something that may have come as a surprise to the Methodists, who had sent him west to harvest settlers’ souls, not to carouse with savages.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“the Mohaves were highly nationalistic, their sense of patriotism had always been more a mental than a territorial construct—one that would soon be tested.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Using a cactus thorn, they “pricked the skin in small regular rows on our chins with a very sharp stick,” Olive wrote, “until they bled freely. They then dipped these same sticks in the juice of a certain weed that grew on the banks of the river, and then in the powder of a blue stone that was to be found in low water.” The stone was burned, then pulverized, then applied to the pinprick patterns that had been etched into their faces.29 The procedure took a few hours, but it was most painful during the healing process of the next three days, when they could eat only soft foods like roasted pumpkin so the wounds would not open. Because the Mohaves prized broad faces, tattoo patterns were designed to create or enhance this impression”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“In El Monte Lorenzo saw a letter his uncle Asa had written to the Richardsons, asking if the boy would be traveling back to Illinois.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“But in 1856, Fort Yuma was hellish for reasons beyond the heat. It was bedeviled by blinding dust storms and prone to Indian attacks. The barracks were plagued with ants, gnats, and, when the river was high, mosquitoes, and the toilets were open trenches heaped with dirt and lime to squelch the stench.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“After entering the Mohave valley, Mollhausen had asked, in his diary, “How long will it now be before a reason is found or invented for beginning a war of extermination against the hitherto peaceful Indians of the valley of the Colorado?” 20 Sooner than he had probably imagined. Within five years, the only trace of the thriving, unified nation Whipple and Mollhausen had met on the bank of the Colorado would be footprints in the sand.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“As captives who were not members of the tribe, Olive and Mary Ann were spared the procedure. The Yavapais didn’t care whether they mounted the stairway to heaven; their souls could wander indefinitely.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Two of them led the way north into the Mohave Valley, past the Needles, a trio of mountain peaks on the east side of the Colorado. This was where the main body of the tribe resided — including Olive and Mary Ann.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison,” written when she was eighty, she says she passed through a painful period of longing for her own people before she began to identify as a Seneca, but within four years—the same period during which Olive was with the Mohaves—“I had become so accustomed to their mode of living, habits, and dispositions, that my anxiety to get away …had almost subsided. 9 She”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Espaniole later said he had hoped the Mohaves’ good treatment of Olive would encourage the whites, in turn, to treat the Mohaves well.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“The harvest of 1855 was bad — fatally so. After a spring drought prevented the banks of the river from overflowing, the crops came up late and the yield was paltry.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Its prickly commander, Samuel P. Heintzelman, a short, bearded West Point graduate who had served in the Mexican-American War and later became a major general in the Civil War, didn’t want to be there and was preoccupied with making extra cash through the thriving ferry service.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“Tsosie alleges that the very fact that Oatman was nicknamed confirms her acceptance within the culture; if she had been marginalized within the tribe, she would never have warranted one. Along with “Aliútman,” the name stuck, and Mary Ann, perhaps too young for teasing, went by her given name.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“The challenge of separating fact from fiction in retelling the Oatman saga has not been easy. Debunking the rumors that swirled around her in life and death is a fairly simple matter of fact checking; distinguishing between what she truly experienced in captivity and how Stratton presented it in Captivity of the Oatman Girls, the biography he ghostwrote for her, is more challenging. But by analyzing Stratton’s motivations in telling her story, his knowledge of and attitude toward Indians and his theological and colonial vision of the West, and by examining the passages in Captivity of the Oatman Girls that are provably false, a clear pattern of manipulation emerges, and it is possible to disentangle—to a degree—his story from hers.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“the sexual practices of the uninhibited Mohaves surely gave a young Mormon from the Midwest ample reason for embarrassment. The Mohaves considered sex natural, fun, and emotionally inconsequential. Children witnessed it at a young age because they lived in one-room houses with their parents and other adults. Many lost their virginity by the time they reached puberty, and most girls had sex soon after they began menstruating. Adult Mohaves encouraged the young to indulge themselves sexually while they could, so that by their mid-teens, they were jaded, at which point, wrote the psychoanalyst George Devereux, “frills” were added to keep things lively: “The Mohave will actually devote some time to thinking up sexual ‘stunts,’ to make the act more exciting.” If their hosts’ sexual frankness didn’t kick the girls’ culture shock to new heights, their flexible definition of gender did: children’s gender was not considered fixed until after puberty and transvestism was not only accepted but merited its own confirmation ceremony, after which some homosexual Mohaves crossed over to become same-sex wives or (less often) husbands. 19”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

“By mid-afternoon, starving and dehydrated in the heat, he passed out on a plateau in the simmering sun. A few hours later he opened his eyes to an audience of gray wolves that came sniffing within arm’s reach. He jumped to his feet, swatting one on the nose, and yelled at them — surprising himself at the sound of his own voice. They backed off as he hurled a stone at another, then they scattered and returned to howl mournfully at him.”
― Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman