28 Quotes by Margot Mifflin

She gave her name as “Olivino,” recalled her father’s surname as “Oatman” and said she’d had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, “No. They whipped me.” In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she “seemed pleased,” noted Burke, and answered, “Very well.

Espaniole instructed Topeka to travel with Olive, either to ease her journey, to collect her ransom, or both, along with Francisco’s brother, two cousins, and Musk Melon, who lived near Olive.

Though he had earned two hundred dollars from a crop and was not working at the time, Lorenzo declined his uncle’s invitation to return to Illinois because he was considering going to school.

The Oatman massacre was evidently inspired by the Yavapais’ typical late-winter hardship, exacerbated by the previous year’s bone-cracking drought.

Traveling with more than a hundred men, from engineers, cartographers, and geologists to astronomers, meteorologists, and botanists, as well as soldiers and guides, Whipple trudged through present-day Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, into what would become Arizona, on a path that vaguely foreshadowed today’s Route 66. The group was guided along the way by Indians – Creeks, Shawnees, and Zunis. But it was the Mohaves who would lead Whipple on the final leg of the journey.2 On.

A single pastime carried Olive through her early repatriation: given thread and fabric, she quickly remembered how to sew, and did so in a therapeutic frenzy.

But the very pattern Olive wore appears on a ceramic figurine of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century that displays traditional Mohave face painting, tattoo, beads, and clothing.

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.

Espaniole was most likely a kohota, or festival chief, who was responsible for receiving captives, planning dances, and overseeing celebrations.