THE OATMAN STORY

By Reverend Edward J. Pettid, S.J. The OATMAN STORY

The Oatman story branded Arizona. The westbound traveler from Kingman crossing the Black Mountains through Sitgreaves Pass loops downgrade into Mohave Valley through the mining town of Oatman. Local legend relates that hardrock miners sentimentally renamed this roaring camp for the young and beautiful Olive Ann Oatman and her younger sister, Mary Ann. Local legendmakers also proudly point out close by Ollie Oatman Spring where Olive Ann was supposedly concealed by her anxious Indian masters from being rescued by the strong Lieutenant A. W. Whipple railroad survey party in 1854. Another Oatman brand on the map of Arizona is the downriver ghost town of Olive City, or Olivia, on the Colorado. East in Maricopa County not far from Gila Bend and closer to the Painted Rocks looms the volcanic black Oatman Mountain peaking at 1732 feet over Dendora Valley. It is not a happy mountain nor is it superstitious. It is a sad mountain forever mourning over the common grave of bleached bones in Oatman Flat just south across the sinuous Gila River-the gravesite of six members of the Oatman family massacred by Indians on 18 February 1851. (continued Was A Captive Among The Indians

OLIVE ANN OATMAN

The Oatman story began in the American Midwest. The Oatmans were Brewsterites, a religious sect splintered from and excommunicated by the Mormons. Their leader, James Collins Brewster, discovered in the prophecies of Esdras a Divine directive pointing out the land of Bashan, at the mouth of the Colorado River of the West as their sure refuge from God's wrath soon to destroy the ungodly. The Lord had directed; it was their destiny. After selling his farm for $1500, Royse Oatman, born in Vermont in 1809 and his wife, born Mary Ann Sperry in New York in 1813, with their seven children: Lucy, Lorenzo D., Olive Ann, Mary Ann, Royse, Jr., C.A., and "baby brother" left Fulton, Illinois, to join the other Brewsterites at Independence, Missouri, for their exodus to Bashan.

On 10 August 1850 the Brewsterite wagon train rolled on the Santa Fe Trail through a series of check points: Ford of the Arkansas River, Rabbit-ear, Wagon Mound to Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory. With every click of the viameter, these rugged individualists became more and more individualistic. Some wanted to continue to Bashan; some to establish a new Bashan in the Rio Grande Valley; some to pan a few bright flakes of gold in California. Whatever the real reasons, the Brewsterites split.

The Oatman party veered south and west along the Cooke wagon route to the Rio San Pedro. They arrived at Santa Cruz, Sonora, Mexico on Christmas Day of 1850. Following the Rio Santa Cruz, the emigrants marveled at the rosary of ruined mission churches extending north to San Xavier del Bac, near the Presidio of Tucson. After a short stopover in Tucson, five families chose to remain while the Kellys, Wilder and Oatman families elected to depart north over the Ninety-mile Desert, "not enough grass to pick a man's teeth:" Picacho Peak, Casa Grande, the Pima Villages, to Maricopa Wells.

Desperately short on food but stubborned with Dutch ancestry and encouraged by Dr. John Lawrence Le Conte, "Dr. Bugs," a distinguished entomologist who had just reconnoitered the Gila River without meeting hostile Indians, Royse Oatman fatally decided to push on alone with his family to the safety of Fort Yuma. By the 15th of February Dr. Le Conte, on his return, overtook the Oatmans encamped on the Gila River, 141 miles from the Fort, and carried forward Mr. Oatman's letter begging the Post Commandant, Brevet Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman, for food, harness and animals. But some thirty miles westward Quechan (Yuma) Indians stole the horses of Dr. Le Conte and Juan, his guide, forcing the two men to proceed on foot.

Continuing west the Oatmans wearily wheeled past Painted Rocks down to the first crossing of the Gila, and missed Dr. Le Conte's posted grim Indian warning., Unlike the sluggish pace of the struggling oxen through the sucking Gila quicksand and eventually to Oatman Flat, scouting Indians like wolves scented their tiring prey and raced in as a pack for the kill.

Late on the tragic afternoon of Tuesday, 18 February 1851, the Oatmans wound their way a mile through tall thickets along the river to the basaltic, cactus-studded escarpment rising roughly sixty feet. Then, after double-teaming and all hands pushing the empty wagon up to the cliff's edge, and lugging up the loads, the family sat down on the black lava rocks to eat their last supper of dry bread and bean soup.

Lorenzo, fourteen years of age and Royse's eldest son, glancing back at the Gila River trail, saw a band of Yavapais approaching. After smoking with Royse for awhile, the Indians demanded food. Refused more food, with surliness they withdrew and menacingly huddled. Suddenly, after first shoving aside the thirteen year old Olive Ann and the seven year old Mary Ann, they attacked the Oatman family with war clubs. Striking Lorenzo the savages flattened his face into the ground, bleeding profusely from ears and mouth; brutally killed Royse, his pregnant wife, daughter Lucy, and their other children with skull-crushing smashes.

Some hours after the Indians had rifled the wagon and left the massacre site, Lorenzo gradually regained semi-consciousness and staggered back along the emigrant trail until he eventually met the oncoming Kellys and Wilder family who retreated with the severely injured Lorenzo to Maricopa Wells. While awaiting reinforcements, Willard Wilder and Robert Kelly rode down to Oatman Flat to bury the mangled dead, halfeaten now by wild animals. In mid-March they began anew their journey to Yuma. During the next five years in California, the grieving Lorenzo collared strangers from across the Plains and the Rockies, joined desert survey parties and prospecting expeditions constantly searching for his missing sisters.

After a hurried departure from the massacre site, the girls "with the speed of horses" ran barefooted with the warriors, fearful of pursuit, throughout the moonlit night northeast into a mountainous region. Shortly, Mary Ann became so exhausted that a brave roughly threw her on his back and bounded on while Olive Ann, with her stone-cut feet trailing blood, followed. Whenever Olive lagged, the Indians beat her.

Arriving at the Indian camp near Date Creek, the girls were subjected to a crude victory dance of jeers, mockery and spittle. This dry camp was in a small canyon surrounded by mountains barren of grass and timber, of running water and snow. These youngsters were compelled to overwork carrying water from rock catchbasins in ollas balanced on their heads and bound bundles of greasewood hung over their shoulders from some miles distance on a diet of deer, quail, rabbits, roots, worms, grasshoppers and reptiles. Whenever they could not understand what was said to them, they were whipped. The girls were reminded that they would ever remain Indian slaves with no hope of returning to the Whites; and were kept concealed as much as possible.

Providentially for the girls, the Mohave Indians were trader friends with the Yavapais. Learning of the two captive girls, the Mohaves bought them at the slave market price of two horses, a few vegetables, a few pounds of beads, and three blankets. The new masters and slaves left the Yavapai camp not far from what is now Congress, Arizona, and after a rapid march of eleven hungry and footsore days sighted the Mohave Valley.

This Mohave Valley was a gigantic desert oasis a mountain fortress; to the south stood the sharp spears of the Needles, while forty miles upstream Pyramid Canyon pinched in the north gate. The formidable east wall, the Black Mountains, faced west twenty miles to the Dead Mountains, northwest peaked legendary Avikwame, "Spirit Mountain: the gods live there." Through this green valley flowed the moody Colorado - Rio del Tizon, Firebrand River which watered the trees of cottonwood and mesquite; reloamed the field patches of wheat, corn and pumpkins; and sloughed to form ponds for fish and croaking frogs.

Descending to the Colorado, the arriving party met the Mohave Indians rejoicing over the Mohaves' most recent booty. These Indians appeared intelligent, inquisitive, and generally possessed pleasant dispositions. The men were tall, erect, with finely proportioned bodies oiled like well-polished mahogony. Some painted their faces black or streaked them red. Men wore breechcloths, women wore topless bark skirts and adorned themselves with shellbead necklaces and tattooed their chins with vertical blue lines.

Arriving at the Mohave village nearly opposite present Needles, California, Chief Espaniole (Moa-auch Qua-niel - "Black Bottom") treated the Oatman girls as his own children.

The girls were tattooed with cactus needlepricks on the chin forming five vertical lines powdered permanently blue to distinguish them as Mohaves yet captives their "Ki-e-chook," lest like untattooed persons dying they descend into a rat's hole. As Mohaves they were assigned a patch of land to grow their own maize, melons and corn; to forage for mesquite beans, dry and mull them with a stone pestle in a hollowed cottonwood stump mortar for mush.

Gradually, a bond of affection developed between Olive Ann and the Chief's squaw because of her practical and unselfish generosity both when and after Mary Ann died. Mary Ann wasted away and, as many Mohaves did, in that famine year, she died of starvation. Through the intercession of the Chief's wife prompted by the pleas of Olive Ann, the Indians did not cremate little Mary Ann according to the Mohave custom, but buried her in a new grave in the garden of Olive. Grief-stricken over the death of her sister, left alone to face the ordeal of captivity, Olive Ann would also have starved except for this same unselfish Indian woman who dared starvation too by taking some seed corn from her own meager cache and mashing it into gruel for Olive Ann.

Such Indian goodness softened the hardships of the four years of captivity among the Mohaves, while scenes of utmost cruelty revolted her. In the spring of 1854, the tribe sent a war party of sixty warriors allied with the Yumas to fight against the Cocopahs near the Gulf of California. The good-hearted wife of the Chief warned Olive to beware of her life should any Mohave warrior die and his relatives think to appease the spirits of the dead by sacrificing her. After a period of tense waiting, Olive Ann was intensely relieved when Ohitia, a warrior-messenger, ran back in advance to announce a Mohave victory with no loss of life. Brought back also by the jubilant warriors was a sad Cocopah captive, Nowercha, who had been separated from her baby. Shortly, she attempted to escape back to her home by swimming downstream but was recaptured and cruelly crucified while the whole tribe danced around the cross singing and shooting arrows in Nowercha's body until she died.

In February of 1856, while Olive Ann was grinding mesquite in her doorway, civilian, military and native wheels were turning to effect her release from captivity. Francisco, a Yuma Indian, told Henry W. Grinnell, a civilian carpenter at the Fort, that Olive Ann was a captive among the Mohaves. Mr. Grinnell, in turn, informed the Post Commander, Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Martin Burke, who then dispatched Fran-cisco as his envoy with a letter to the Mohaves demanding her release together with a ransom of four blankets, six pounds of white beads, some trinkets, and a white horse. Long were the Mohave debates and many the tears of the Chief's wife over losing her "daughter," but Olive Ann was freed. After a long farewell prayer at her sister's grave, and escorted by Francisco, Tokwatha or "Musk Melon," and other Indians, Olive Ann walked, ran, swam and floated free down the Colorado River to Fort Yuma arriving on the 22nd day of February of 1856. While awaiting the arrival of her brother, Lorenzo, who had read of her release in the Los Angeles Star and was riding hard to a tearful reunion, she stayed at the home of Sergeant Reuben Twist where the officers and their ladies were most gracious in helping Olive Ann in every way. Under date of 21 March 1856, L. J. F. Jaeger, the Yuma ferryman, laconically and repetitiously described this reunion of brother and sister: "We had a warm day, and Oatman got in from Los Angeles also after his sister also, and I went up to the Fort with him also, and she did not know him and he did not know her also, so much change in 5 years . . ."

Before leaving Fort Yuma by government wagon train, Olive Ann was interrogated officially yet gently by the bachelor Post Commander, Lieutenant Colonel Burke, concerning her identity, the massacre, and the captivity. She also received offers of a home with the Collins family of San Diego; the loving care of the Sisters of Mercy of San Francisco; and an attempt by the California Legislature to grant her financial assistance. Upon arrival for a short stay at the Thompson Willow Grove Inn in El Monte, she was interviewed at length by the Los Angeles Star. The Evening Bulletin reporter also interviewed her in San Francisco when, together with their cousin, Harvey B. Oatman, she and Lorenzo were traveling through to Phoenix, Oregon Territory, where their cousins farmed and managed a stage station. Here the Reverend Royal Byron Stratton wrote the book, The Capitivity of the Oatman Girls, which was printed in San Francisco in 1857. The success of this sensational book through the first two editions financed the education of Olive Ann and Lorenzo D. at the University of the Pacific then located at Santa Clara, California; and encouraged them later to print in New York City a third edition which also met with success.

After visiting their maternal relatives, the Sperry families in Monroe County, New York, Lorenzo D. acquired a family and moved to Whiteside County, Illinois, while Olive Ann stayed at the Reverend Stratton home in Albany, New York, to continue her education. Olive Ann gave frequent Indian lectures to promote the book sales and to help church fund-raising drives in Syracuse, Little Falls, Victor, East Bloomfield, in New York, and elsewhere until 1865. That year and in Rochester, New York, Olive Ann Oatman married John Brant Fairchild, who was first attracted to her when he saw her as a young woman going to school with little children.

This John B. Fairchild almost lost his life in encounters with the Indians of the Southwest. Once, in 1854 with Dr. B. Homer Fairchild and another brother, he was driving Texas Longhorns through New Mexico and Arizona to the California markets when, in the mountains of Santa Cruz, Sonora, Mexico, the Apaches hit the Fairchild herd with a surprise attack scattering the hired hands. Before the drovers' guns could return fire, the raiders sacked the wagons and ran off 200 head of cattle, leaving one Fairchild dead.

Before moving to Texas in the 1870's, John and Olive Ann Fairchild lived in Detroit, Michigan, for several years. This prominent, romantic, well-thought-of couple eventually made their home in Sherman, Grayson County, Texas for over thirty years. Major Fairchild, a distinguished, handsome, impressive man, with a beard and the usual gold watch chain across his vest, founded the City Bank of Sherman, was active in the Commercial National Bank, and financially interested in the Greiner-Kelly Drug Company in Dallas, Texas, while the lovely, charming, Olive Ann kept their beautiful, two-story, Victorian home on fashionable south Travis and Moore Streets.

In 1873 the Fairchilds adopted a baby girl, Mary Elizabeth or Mamie, their one and only child, and later educated her at St. Joseph's Catholic Academy in Sherman though they themselves were active communicants of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church.

Mrs. Katherine Brents Collie, a resident of Sherman, remembers them. "I knew Olive Ann Oatman," she says, "when I was a small child as her husband, Major Fairchild, was a firm friend of my father . . . She was very shy and retiring, probably due to the blue tatoo around her mouth . . . When she went to town she always wore a dark veil . . . She helped many people in her quiet way . . . at the time of their marriage Major Fairchild bought all available books by Stratton and burned them . . . She was very slender and walked with great dignity. The fact is that I thought that she had the face of an angel."

Four years before her husband's death, and five years before her daughter's, Mary Elizabeth, marriage to Alister MacKay Laing, Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild died at the age of sixty-five of a heart attack about 10:00 on Friday night, 20 March 1903; and after an Episcopal-Presbyterian funeral service at her home, she was buried in West Hill Cemetery, Sherman, Texas.

Thus ends the Oatman story. But one still wonders whether this lady of "kind and gentle ways" at any time during her last long illness ever lovingly remembered her Mohave friends on the Arizona border. The Mohave, at any rate, did not forget her nor did Arizona.

Was Olive Ann mistreated sexually by the Mohaves? Did she have Indian children? Was she married to an Indian chief? To the triple question there is an emphatic triple - NO!

The famous University of California anthropologist, A. L. Kroeber, in his classic Handbook of the Indians of California says, (Captives) "were not violated; in fact, a ceremony had to be made over them else they would bring sickness into the land; and even after this purification they seem more generally not to have been married... In fact, their usual treatment appears to have been rather kindly..."

Doctor Kroeber's judgment is concurred with by another eminent authority, Leslie Spier, in his Yuman Tribes of the Gila River.

Author's postscript Old Fort Yuma

And Olive Ann, in her interview immediately after her arrival at Fort Yuma, replied to the question of Brevet Lieutenant Colonel Martin Burke, "How did the Mohaves treat you and your sister?" by saying, "Very well." On 23 April 1856, about two months after Olive Ann had returned free to Fort Yuma, the Daily Alta California, a San Francisco, California newspaper, published an article titled "Arrival of Miss Oatman": "For the satisfaction of inquiring friends, we would state that Miss Oatman is in good health, and during her long captivity, has invariably been treated with that civility and respect due her sex. She has not been made a wife, as has been heretofore erroneously reported, but has remained single, and her defenceless situation entirely respected during her residence among the Indians." And Olive herself, through the pen of her biographer, the Reverend Mr. Stratton, in The Captivity of the Oatman Girls, says: "To the honor of those savages let it be said, they never offered the least unchaste abuse to me." And, the Mohave Indians of today when the triple question was put to them replied in words to this effect: "Olive was never married" "No. If Olive had married or had children, I would have known about it." And finally, the Bureau of Indian Affairs have no record of any Olive Ann Oatman-descended Indian.

THE AUTHOR

Retracking the old Gila River trail one day he saw a parade of historic shadows: Hohokam Indians traveling to the western seashores in quest of shells, Mohaves moving in an epic exodus, Yavapais bounding on prey and plunder, Father Kino thrusting to the Colorado River, the Forty-niners, the Kearny military expedition, the cattle drives, and the Butterfield Overland Stages. He also saw a historic reality: the Oatman grave. In the dimming evening light, he could yet trace the letters on the headstone: IN MEMORY OF THE OATMAN FAMILY SIX MEMBERS OF THIS PIONEER FAMILY MASSACRED BY INDIANS To him, Arizona history is fascinating. And to him the Oatman story, a saga of human courage, goodness and cruelty, has always been of consuming interest. Father Edward J. Pettid, S.J. was born in Phoenix in November, 1914, the ninth child of Mr. and Mrs. Michael John Pettid, and a grandson of Patrick Pettid, a native of County Roscommon, Ireland. After his parents' marriage in Jerome, Arizona, in 1900, they moved to Phoenix to establish a bakery. This was a good business with ten children to feed. He attended schools in Phoenix (St. Mary's, Brophy Prep and Phoenix College) before joining the Jesuit Order and studying for the Catholic priesthood. After obtaining his A.B., M.A., and S.T.B. degrees, he was ordained a priest in San Francisco in June, 1947. For three years he served as a Catholic Chaplain in the United States Army, after which he spent about twenty years teaching at Loyola High School in Los Angeles, Bellarmine Prep in San Jose, and the Intermountain Indian School in Utah. Besides being a Diamond Key coach in the National Forensic League and helping boys to win National Speech Championships, he assisted at several parishes, mostly in Arizona and California. Presently, he is a faculty member of Brophy College Prep in Phoenix. We are fortunate in having Father Pettid with us this issue, telling a story of old Arizona and we hope that you enjoy The Oatman Story as much as we have. Right now, he is spending his spare time doing research on the Mohave Indians, a subject he finds of great interest.. R.C.