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. a b Rowe, Jeremy (2011). Early Maricopa County: 1871–1920. Arcadia Publishing. p.7. ISBN 978-0-7385-7416-5.

a b Stratton, Royal Byron (1858). Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life Among the Apache and Mohave Indians (Thirded.). New York, New York: author. ISBN 9781425529710 . Retrieved 3 February 2022– via google books. Original from the New York Public Library Digitized: 2007-12-18 The Indians killed practically all of the pioneers in the expedition. Afterwards, they decided to take two pioneer girls as slaves: Olive Oatman, 14, and her sister Mary Ann, 8. And so she became the “woman with the blue tattoo.” The Victorian dress they immediately tried to cover her with couldn’t hide the tattoo on her chin. However, what not everyone knew was that her arms and legs also had striking tattoos. But they never saw the light of the Colorado sun again. I was fascinated to learn that "captivity accountings/autobiographies" was a literary genre for the time. A woman taken captive in the 1600's had written an accounting and there are others Mifflin mentions.

Author Bio

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 Leonard, Elmore. The Tonto Woman and Other Western Stories. Delacorte Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0385323864 Olive Ann Oatman (September 7, 1837–March 21, 1903) was a white American woman celebrated in her time for her captivity and later release by Native Americans in the Mojave Desert region when she was a teenager. [1] She later lectured about her experiences.

Varney, Philip (1994). Arizona Ghost Towns and Mining Camps. Arizona Department of Transportation, State of Arizona. p.1905. ISBN 978-0-916179-44-1. At times, some incidents read more like straight history than immersive fiction, but they communicate the context of the sweeping story the book presents. 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 Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of OatmanÕs friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in IllinoisÑincluding the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white societyÑto her later years as a wealthy bankerÕs wife in Texas.Powelson, Benjamin F. (6 December 2015). "Olive Oatman, circa 1863". 58 State St, Rochester, NY. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: location ( link) The author has practiced source criticism on the various accounts of Oatman's life, discounting distortions introduced to serve various political and social biases. The resulting narrative is a fascinatingly ambiguous story. Was Olive better off as an Indian or white woman? It's hard to tell, but clearly she had warm feelings for her former "captors" when she met one of them in later life. The sexual, social, and racial norms of the time are called into question by the story of her life. I had some disappointment in the frequency of times Mifflin deviates from Olive's tale to discuss other happenings of the time. It more or less began to feel like there wasn't enough source material to create an accounting and she was filling in gaps to create a book.

So, there you have it! Blue tattoos are an incredible way to express your individuality, embodying a range of designs, styles, themes, and sizes. Whether you’re a lover of the sea or a geometric pattern enthusiast, there’s a blue tattoo waiting for you. Dive in, and let the color blue make a splash on your canvas! 14 Best Blue Tattoos Designs You Need To See A Blue Butterfly Tattoo, Representing Transformation and New Beginnings 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 A 1965 episode of the TV series Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan recounts the story of Olive Oatman and features her brother Lorenzo's search for her. In this episode he finds her with the Mojave but she doesn't want to leave. Episode title: “The Lawless Have Laws.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0556827/ History, cultural anthropology, and an interesting true story all combined into one. What makes this book really good is that the author has done much research and has exposed some falsehoods that are presented in other books, especially the one written by Stratton. Olive Oatman's 1860s lecture notes tell of her younger sister often yearning to join that better "world" where their "Father and Mother" had gone. [16] Mary Ann died of starvation while the girls were living with the Mohave. This happened in about 1855–56, when Mary Ann was ten or eleven. It has been claimed that there was a drought in the region, [3] :105 and that the tribe experienced a dire shortage of food supplies, and Olive herself would have died had not Aespaneo, the matriarch of the tribe, saved her life by making a gruel to sustain her. [5] :98

Also of Interest

Hsieh, Veronica (November 2011). "Hell on Wheels Handbook – Olive Oatman, a Historical Counterpart to Eva". AMC Network Entertainment LLC . Retrieved 17 January 2019. a b James, Edward T.; James, Janet Wilson; Boyer, Paul S. (1971). Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary. Harvard University Press. pp. 646–47. ISBN 978-0-674-62734-5.