Olive Oatman's Mohave Tattoo Meant More Than You Think

The five blue lines on her chin were not a brand. The Mohave gave that mark to their own daughters so the dead would recognise them on the other side, and they did not give it to the people they captured. For nine years she stood in paying rooms across America and told the opposite. She was thirteen when she was taken and nineteen when she was handed back, and the man who wrote her story controlled the money that fed and schooled her. *Sources* Olive Oatman — Wikipedia, on the attack of 18 February 1851, the Yavapai year, the trade to the Mohave in 1852, the tattoo, the lecture years and her death in 1903 Olive Ann Oatman Fairchild — Handbook of Texas, on the family, the captivity dates, the marriage in 1865, Sherman, and the burial at West Hill Cemetery Margot Mifflin, The Blue Tattoo — on what the chin tattoo actually meant, and why the slave-brand account does not hold Mary Ann Oatman — on her age, the famine in the Mohave valley, and the burial her sister was permitted to give her