Olive Oatman and Caroline Hoffman

Olive Oatman.  It’s a pleasant alliterative woman’s name that might bring to us senior citizens a fleeting memory of Popeye’s girlfriend, Olive Oyl.

 While Miss Oyl was a cartoon character, Miss Oatman was an attractive real woman with a tragic and harrowing life story.

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a fourteen-year-old girl, one of seven children of a couple who were in route to a new life in northern New Mexico. They had begun their trip in a wagon train of Mormon families, but had split off to continue on their own, just the one family and their one wagon in the vast prairie.

One day, a  band of hungry Native American men, who were walking, approached the wagon and asked for tobacco and food. Mr. Oatman gave them bread, but refused to share more of their supplies. The Indians attacked the family, murdering the father, his pregnant wife, four small children, and, seemingly, one teenage son, Lorenzo. Olive and Mary Ann, her eleven-year-old sister, were taken as captives.

 The two sisters survived a long and arduous trek on foot, only, to use an overly polite term, to live as concubines. Olive’s younger sister died. Both were crudely tattooed on face, arms, and probably chest, in the fashion of the women of the tribe.

Olive's teenage brother Lorenzo had not died during the attack on the family, and heroically walked back to the wagon train the Oatman wagon had split from. He recovered and for five years searched for his taken siblings. I don’t think John Wayne’s The Searchers classic western movie  is based on the Oatman story, but there is a resemblance, and it might well have been one inspiration for the Duke’s fine film.

At the age of nineteen, after five years of captivity, Olive Oatman was discovered and freed. One thread of her actual story suggests Olive left behind two children, conceived by rape and born during her captivity, but the poor lady would not confirm that. I can’t imagine how any parent would cope with that added complication.

Olive lived until she was sixty, and her life as a freed prisoner is worth a quick reading on Wikipedia. It is a story of post-traumatic stress and contradictions. She wore a veil over her face and long sleeved dresses to hide the tattoos, yet she posed for the photos included here, and even went on the lecture circuit to promote a popular book about her captivity. In spite of the horrors of the story, she was willing to time and again revisit the terrible years by speaking about them from a stage.

Olive Oatman wound up recanting her story as told in the lurid book, written by a profit-driven preacher. In an example of unexpected rectifying grace, while on a speaking tour, Miss Oatman met and  married a good man in 1865. They adopted a baby girl, and she quietly lived the second half of her life, as a housewife. Olive died in Sherman, Texas in 1905 at the age of sixty-five.

In real Texas history, Comanche and Apache depredations were the catalyst for the Texas Ranger Callahan Expedition in 1855, which is the topic of my new novel-in-progress. By the way, the word depredations was a popular term in the 1800’s for Indian raids in which the slaughter of cattle, the theft of horses, the murder of settlers, and the ‘taking’  of women and children were the norm.

To set the stage in my new novel for the historical Callahan Expedition, undertaken to punish the hostile Native Americans, I’ve included a fictitious depredation by a band of Lipan Apaches. It was tough to spend a few pages creating likable characters, and then telling of the sudden horror that turned a special day into a nightmare of death and captivity.

As a writer, I find it uncomfortable and highly unsettling to think up and type paragraphs that vividly describe the violence, horror, and just plain ugliness of two utterly different cultures clashing along their shared frontier. Yet, to gloss over the cruelty of either culture towards the other is not acceptable to the historian in me.

My story does indeed include a ‘taken’ young woman named Caroline Hoffman. Is she rescued as Olive Oatman was? Does she die in cruel captivity as Olive’s little sister did?  The book won’t be finished for several more months, but even then, I imagine my answer will be a sidestep to encourage folks to read A Different Country Entirely.  Stay tuned.