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.Mowry wrote that all [the] old officers ad-vise the young ones to resign while they are young enough to dosomething else. 15 Those with low tolerance deserted.Those whostayed risked the wrath of angry Quechans whom the army haddriven from their planting grounds along the Colorado.The contrast between this benumbed lifestyle and what Olive had116 Hell s Outpost left behind was dramatic: she had never known a Mohave to tradesex for money.She had lived in a lovely valley bordered with willowand cottonwood trees, where her people delighted in swimming andsports, group dancing and storytelling.The debased physical condi-tions at the fort alone must have been appalling to her.To compli-cate matters, no one there spoke Mohave, so her transition back toEnglish was achieved by total immersion.Even Yuma s one natural beauty was marred for Olive.LieutenantSweeny, who had called the region about as ineligible a site for afort as an ice-burg in the Atlantic, conceded that Yuma nights wereglorious. The stars shine like loop-holes into the Heaven of heav-ens, and [the] moon like the home of calmness, purity and peace.But there is a never-ceasing hum of millions of insects, and the Col-orado murmurs like an uneasy Titan, and shines, and whirls its redflood along, like a huge bronze serpent, whose glittering scales reflectthe moonbeams. 16 Sweeny didn t mention another source of eve-ning light: the glow of Indian campfires that dotted the vast desertlandscape, reminding Olive of her former home.A single pastimecarried Olive through her early repatriation: given thread and fab-ric, she quickly remembered how to sew, and did so in a therapeuticfrenzy.Weeks after Olive s ransom, on a sunny March day in El Monte,California, Lorenzo stood chopping wood the latest of a series ofmenial jobs he d taken since moving down from San Francisco ina forest a few miles from where he was living with the Thompsonfamily.At the sound of pounding hooves, he looked up to see hisfriend, Jesse Low, galloping through the woods with a newspaperunder his arm.In Los Angeles Jesse had helped Lorenzo in his searchfor his sisters, where together they had published queries about thegirls status.Near Yuma, the two had gone searching for them onhorseback.Low arrived now with the final clue to the Oatman mys-tery.Without so much as a greeting, he handed Lorenzo the MarchHell s Outpost 117 8 Star article announcing Olive s return: From Mr.Joseph Fort, ofthe Pacific Express Company, we learn that Miss Olive Oatman, whowas taken prisoner by the Apaches in 1851.has been rescued, andis now at Fort Yuma.Further particulars next week. 17Lorenzo was floored. I now thought I saw a realization, he said, in part, of my long cherished hopes.I saw no mention of MaryAnn, and at once concluded that the first report obtained by wayof Fort Yuma.was probably sadly true, that but one was alive. 18He jumped on a horse and rode straight to the Star offices on MainStreet in Los Angeles for verification, where the editor showed himBurke s letter asking that the news be printed with a view that MissOatman s friends may be aware of what has occurred. 19 Lorenzo bor-rowed money and horses from Low and took off for Fort Yuma, des-perate to see his sister, yet afraid that there had been a mistake thatthe report was wrong or the captive was not Olive; he had been dis-appointed so many times before.Ten days later he and Olive were publicly reunited.By then, shehad regained much of her English, which promptly failed her in theface of this momentous encounter. For nearly one hour, Olive said, neither of us could speak a word for the history, the most thrillingand unaccountable history of years was crowded into that hour. 20Though whites, Mexicans, and Indians alike were said to be tearyover the tender reunion, the ferryman L.J.F.Jaeger observed it with-out sentiment in his diary: We had a warm day, and Oatman got infrom Los Angeles also after his sister.and I went up to the fortwith him.and she did not know him and he did not know heralso, so much change in five years. 21 Lorenzo never commented onhis reaction to Olive s tattoo.Most of the men Lorenzo had met at Fort Yuma, the site of his re-covery, were gone: Heintzelman had returned to San Diego, Sweenyhad moved on to other posts, Dr.Hewit, of course, had left withLorenzo, and Dr.Bugs was now teaching in New York.Jaeger andGrinnell were perhaps the only familiar faces.The landscape had118 Hell s Outpost also changed: adobe buildings had sprung up in place of the brushtents that once served as officers quarters, and the hospital Hewithad battled Heintzelman to build was fully functional.A sutler hadset up shop and soldiers now bought their provisions from him.Thanks to the Great Western, the town of Yuma, then called Colo-rado City, was sprouting on the opposite bank, though it had onlyabout a dozen residents.Lorenzo spent two days visiting with Olive, rehearsing the pastand discussing the future, before taking her back to El Monte.Theday they left on a Los Angeles bound government wagon train,Musk Melon returned from the Indian settlement downriver wherehe had spent the past few weeks, in hopes of seeing Lorenzo.Hearrived when the caravan was pulling out, and called to Olive, whowas riding behind the train.When she dismounted to talk to him,Lorenzo grabbed a club and lunged at him. Don t! Olive exclaimed. He s a nice man.He took good careof me. Her brother backed off, and when she introduced the twomen, Lorenzo handed Musk Melon a box of crackers as a peace of-fering, which he accepted.Olive turned to her friend, speaking Mohave. This is the last Ishall see of you, she said. I will tell all about the Mohave and howI lived with them. They shook hands, and Musk Melon watchedher disappear into the desert.22Olive would have ample opportunity to tell the world about theMohaves.Within a month she was a media darling.In the nascentCalifornia print world of the 1850s, fed by articles about phrenologyand spiritualism, temperance and bloomers, Pacific Coast fog andthe legal admissibility of Chinese and Negro testimony againstwhites, Olive presented a human interest epic with legs.23 She wasoften called beautiful.In this era before photojournalism, readersrelied largely on verbal descriptions for their visual impressions ofthe white Indian. The rescued lady is said to be very fine in appear-Hell s Outpost 119 ance with agreeable manners, but has entirely forgotten her nativelanguage, wrote the San Francisco Weekly Chronicle.24 Her hands, wrists, and arms are largely developed, observed theSan Francisco Herald. The hair of the young lady, [is] of light goldencolor, the Indians dyed it black using the bark of the mesquite tree.She is more fully developed than many girls of twenty. 25The Star applauded her lady-like deportment, pleasing man-ners, and amiable disposition and said she was rather a prettygirl but had been disfigured by tattooed lines on the chin. Quash-ing the rumor it had planted in January, it also stated what no onewanted to ask but everyone wanted to know: She has not beenmade a wife.and her defenseless situation entirely respected dur-ing her residence among the Indians. 26 Olive, the paper assuredreaders, had not been raped.The captive was a lady; she had to be,otherwise she would not merit the attention the media eagerly lav-ished on her stranger-than-fiction story.But she was no less a freak:one Star article described her patience with people who rush tosee her and stare at her, with about as much sense of feeling as theywould to a show of wild animals [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Mowry wrote that all [the] old officers ad-vise the young ones to resign while they are young enough to dosomething else. 15 Those with low tolerance deserted.Those whostayed risked the wrath of angry Quechans whom the army haddriven from their planting grounds along the Colorado.The contrast between this benumbed lifestyle and what Olive had116 Hell s Outpost left behind was dramatic: she had never known a Mohave to tradesex for money.She had lived in a lovely valley bordered with willowand cottonwood trees, where her people delighted in swimming andsports, group dancing and storytelling.The debased physical condi-tions at the fort alone must have been appalling to her.To compli-cate matters, no one there spoke Mohave, so her transition back toEnglish was achieved by total immersion.Even Yuma s one natural beauty was marred for Olive.LieutenantSweeny, who had called the region about as ineligible a site for afort as an ice-burg in the Atlantic, conceded that Yuma nights wereglorious. The stars shine like loop-holes into the Heaven of heav-ens, and [the] moon like the home of calmness, purity and peace.But there is a never-ceasing hum of millions of insects, and the Col-orado murmurs like an uneasy Titan, and shines, and whirls its redflood along, like a huge bronze serpent, whose glittering scales reflectthe moonbeams. 16 Sweeny didn t mention another source of eve-ning light: the glow of Indian campfires that dotted the vast desertlandscape, reminding Olive of her former home.A single pastimecarried Olive through her early repatriation: given thread and fab-ric, she quickly remembered how to sew, and did so in a therapeuticfrenzy.Weeks after Olive s ransom, on a sunny March day in El Monte,California, Lorenzo stood chopping wood the latest of a series ofmenial jobs he d taken since moving down from San Francisco ina forest a few miles from where he was living with the Thompsonfamily.At the sound of pounding hooves, he looked up to see hisfriend, Jesse Low, galloping through the woods with a newspaperunder his arm.In Los Angeles Jesse had helped Lorenzo in his searchfor his sisters, where together they had published queries about thegirls status.Near Yuma, the two had gone searching for them onhorseback.Low arrived now with the final clue to the Oatman mys-tery.Without so much as a greeting, he handed Lorenzo the MarchHell s Outpost 117 8 Star article announcing Olive s return: From Mr.Joseph Fort, ofthe Pacific Express Company, we learn that Miss Olive Oatman, whowas taken prisoner by the Apaches in 1851.has been rescued, andis now at Fort Yuma.Further particulars next week. 17Lorenzo was floored. I now thought I saw a realization, he said, in part, of my long cherished hopes.I saw no mention of MaryAnn, and at once concluded that the first report obtained by wayof Fort Yuma.was probably sadly true, that but one was alive. 18He jumped on a horse and rode straight to the Star offices on MainStreet in Los Angeles for verification, where the editor showed himBurke s letter asking that the news be printed with a view that MissOatman s friends may be aware of what has occurred. 19 Lorenzo bor-rowed money and horses from Low and took off for Fort Yuma, des-perate to see his sister, yet afraid that there had been a mistake thatthe report was wrong or the captive was not Olive; he had been dis-appointed so many times before.Ten days later he and Olive were publicly reunited.By then, shehad regained much of her English, which promptly failed her in theface of this momentous encounter. For nearly one hour, Olive said, neither of us could speak a word for the history, the most thrillingand unaccountable history of years was crowded into that hour. 20Though whites, Mexicans, and Indians alike were said to be tearyover the tender reunion, the ferryman L.J.F.Jaeger observed it with-out sentiment in his diary: We had a warm day, and Oatman got infrom Los Angeles also after his sister.and I went up to the fortwith him.and she did not know him and he did not know heralso, so much change in five years. 21 Lorenzo never commented onhis reaction to Olive s tattoo.Most of the men Lorenzo had met at Fort Yuma, the site of his re-covery, were gone: Heintzelman had returned to San Diego, Sweenyhad moved on to other posts, Dr.Hewit, of course, had left withLorenzo, and Dr.Bugs was now teaching in New York.Jaeger andGrinnell were perhaps the only familiar faces.The landscape had118 Hell s Outpost also changed: adobe buildings had sprung up in place of the brushtents that once served as officers quarters, and the hospital Hewithad battled Heintzelman to build was fully functional.A sutler hadset up shop and soldiers now bought their provisions from him.Thanks to the Great Western, the town of Yuma, then called Colo-rado City, was sprouting on the opposite bank, though it had onlyabout a dozen residents.Lorenzo spent two days visiting with Olive, rehearsing the pastand discussing the future, before taking her back to El Monte.Theday they left on a Los Angeles bound government wagon train,Musk Melon returned from the Indian settlement downriver wherehe had spent the past few weeks, in hopes of seeing Lorenzo.Hearrived when the caravan was pulling out, and called to Olive, whowas riding behind the train.When she dismounted to talk to him,Lorenzo grabbed a club and lunged at him. Don t! Olive exclaimed. He s a nice man.He took good careof me. Her brother backed off, and when she introduced the twomen, Lorenzo handed Musk Melon a box of crackers as a peace of-fering, which he accepted.Olive turned to her friend, speaking Mohave. This is the last Ishall see of you, she said. I will tell all about the Mohave and howI lived with them. They shook hands, and Musk Melon watchedher disappear into the desert.22Olive would have ample opportunity to tell the world about theMohaves.Within a month she was a media darling.In the nascentCalifornia print world of the 1850s, fed by articles about phrenologyand spiritualism, temperance and bloomers, Pacific Coast fog andthe legal admissibility of Chinese and Negro testimony againstwhites, Olive presented a human interest epic with legs.23 She wasoften called beautiful.In this era before photojournalism, readersrelied largely on verbal descriptions for their visual impressions ofthe white Indian. The rescued lady is said to be very fine in appear-Hell s Outpost 119 ance with agreeable manners, but has entirely forgotten her nativelanguage, wrote the San Francisco Weekly Chronicle.24 Her hands, wrists, and arms are largely developed, observed theSan Francisco Herald. The hair of the young lady, [is] of light goldencolor, the Indians dyed it black using the bark of the mesquite tree.She is more fully developed than many girls of twenty. 25The Star applauded her lady-like deportment, pleasing man-ners, and amiable disposition and said she was rather a prettygirl but had been disfigured by tattooed lines on the chin. Quash-ing the rumor it had planted in January, it also stated what no onewanted to ask but everyone wanted to know: She has not beenmade a wife.and her defenseless situation entirely respected dur-ing her residence among the Indians. 26 Olive, the paper assuredreaders, had not been raped.The captive was a lady; she had to be,otherwise she would not merit the attention the media eagerly lav-ished on her stranger-than-fiction story.But she was no less a freak:one Star article described her patience with people who rush tosee her and stare at her, with about as much sense of feeling as theywould to a show of wild animals [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]