28 Quotes by Margot Mifflin

Espaniole later said he had hoped the Mohaves’ good treatment of Olive would encourage the whites, in turn, to treat the Mohaves well.

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.

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.

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.

When Grinnell approached her, she cried quietly into her hands but let him lead her to the water, where she washed and changed into the calico dress an officer’s wife had sent from the fort. Now, free of face paint and hair dye, and wearing Anglo garb, she was ready – or at least dressed – for her return.

Olive later said her release provoked mixed reactions from the rest of the tribe.

In all, Whipple would meet five leaders. On his last day in the valley, they came together to inform him they had not only held a national council and approved mapping a road through their country but had also chosen a guide to show his men the best route to the Pacific.

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.

The Mohaves were friendly with the Yavapais and the Quechans; enemies of the Pimas, the Maricopas, and the Cocopas; and merely tolerant of the Chemehuevis, who in the 1830s had moved into the valley below them on the western side of the river – an area the Mohaves yielded to them because they believed departed spirits lived there, making it dangerous.