Most people familiar with Grayson County, Texas, history know something about Olive Oatman. A warning: This is a long narrative. There is a plethora of books and historical accounts detailing her story, including Olive Oatman’s “official” memoir as told by Methodist minister, Royal Byron Stratton, that chronicle her survival from various perspectives.

Olive Oatman Fairchild went on to live in Sherman, Texas, with her husband, John Brant Fairchild, after years of the hoopla about her magnificent survival media frenzy calmed down. The Fairchilds adopted a baby girl named Mary Elizabeth, called Mamie, and moved into a stylish two-story house. The Fairchilds lived a respectable, bourgeois lifestyle among the prominent business class in Sherman.

I have often wondered what stories traveled through Mamie’s generations, if she had children, about Olive and John Fairchild. This article is also an interesting study of how the free press and media controlled their operations during the U.S.A.’s teenage years in journalism and sensationalism.

Olive’s Not-so-Famous Backstory Origins with Polygamist Religious Sects

Olive Ann Oatman was the second child born to Roys* Oatman and Mary Ann (née Sperry) Oatman on September 7, 1837 in La Harpe, Hancock County, Illinois. Around 1839, Roys and Mary left the Methodist Church to become Mormons under the leadership of Joseph Smith and his Latter Day Saints.

A mob killed Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith, Joseph’s brother, in a Carthage, Illinois, jail, who were charged with inciting a riot over Joseph Smith ordering an anti-Mormon newspaper press destroyed in 1844. The Oatmans did not accept Mormon leadership under the successor to Joseph Smith, Brigham Young.

Incidentally, the article that followed the Smith’s deaths was entitled, “Warsaw Regulators, The end of the Polygamist Joseph Smith kilt at Carthage Jail June 27, 1844”. This title implies that Joseph Smith did not actually destroy the current day anti-Mormon sentiments or press in Carthage, Illinois.

This article title also gives us an interesting angle on why the Oatmans may have wanted to move on with a break off sect that adopted the Joseph Smith Mormon’s ideologies. It begs the question of whether Olive and her six siblings had two or more mommies.

The answer is that Olive’s father more than likely agreed with polygamist practices, but we do not know if the Oatmans practiced polygamy only because they joined the Mormon ideologist leader James Colin Brewster. Brewster founded the Church of Christ with Hazen Aldrich. Eventually, Brewster and Aldrich splintered, as Brewster supported polygamy and Aldrich was anti-polygamy.

The Oatman’s Go on a Pilgrimage for Joseph’s Smith’s Doctrine

As with most of the Mormon Pilgrimage to Utah era, most believers in the Judeo Christian Bible hated the Joseph Smith Mormons for practicing polygamy. The Mormons had to keep moving west. In the 1840s and ‘50s, a large Mormon population lived in Illinois where Joseph Smith’s killing took place. And how the Mormons were hated…

A man named James Brewster self-designated himself as “seer and revelator” after revealing that the Angel Moronit had visited him. Brewster allegedly received revelations that the true “gathering place” of the Mormons was in the “Land of Bashan.” The Land of Bashan is allegedly near today’s Yuma, Arizona, at the confluence of the Gila and Colorado Rivers, or it could have been beyond the Rio Grande Valley.

Bashan, Brewster taled, is a land of rich soil and forests. Most Mormons were migrating to Utah at that time, but the Oatmans followed Brewster. The Brewster Party left from Illinois on August 9, 1850 and headed to a desolate desert in present day Arizona. Disagreements festered on the way to Bashan, and the Brewster Party parted ways.

According to Brian McGinty, author of The Oatman Massacre: A Tale of Desert Captivity and Survival, “On October 9, 1850, Brewster took his followers to Sangre de Cristos Mountains Santa Fe.” McGinty cited that the Kelly’s, Meteers, Oatmans, Thompsons, and Wilders** steered towards the Rio Grande Valley. In 1850, this could have been in the Greater Rio Grande Basin.

The Greater Rio Grande Basin spans over 1,500 miles from southern Colorado to Southern Texas and Mexico. The Oatmans were in a part of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Basin at the time of the Brewster Party splinter. Other sources cite that the Oatmans and party headed to California.

The important fact about Olive Ann’s and Mary Ann’s capture is that six of the Oatman family ended up witnessing and dying in an Indian massacre after the Brewster Party split up.

Olive Ann and Mary Ann Oatman Taken as Indian Captives

Thus begins Olive’s fateful adventure that made her one of the most famous women of her time in the U.S. and Europe. The horrific capture and adaptations that Olive and Mary Ann were forced to accept emotionally scarred Olive for life (1837-1903). This is the part of Olive’s story that most people know well, so I will keep it mildly succinct with only the credible facts or variations of the facts. This account is not a quick read.

Contemporaries of Olive and historians have chronicled Olive Ann Oatman’s story from numerous perspectives. The Brewster Party arrived in New Mexico Territory early in 1851. They did not see a land of rich soil and forests there. They were staring at a vast desert and found the climate wholly uninhabitable.

Roys Oatman had to make a decision at Maricopa Wells, an oasis around a series of watering holes in the Sierra Estrella, a small mountain range about 30 miles southwest of the southwestern portion of present day Phoenix, Arizona. The Oatmans evidently fancied taking the Gila Trail west.

Local residents warned their party that the Gila Trail, part of the Southern Emigration Route to the west, was barren, dangerous, and inhabited by hostile Indians. Roys Oatman was well warned that their lives were on the line on the Gila Trail. In 1851, there was no such word in use as Native Americans.

Some families journeying with the Oatmans opted to stay in Maricopa Wells. By then, Roys Oatman had proved himself a combative traveling companion. Roys Oatman was hell-bent on reaching the utopia of Bashan and thought they were almost there. In reality, Roys was a long way from reaching the confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers.

But Roys Oatman sealed his family’s fate by choosing the Gila Trail for their westward trek. Eventually the Oatmans ended up as a lone wagon facing a deadly environment with diminishing supplies with nowhere to stock up and experiencing multiple dangerous encounters with Indians.

The date of the Oatman Massacre varies by author, historian, or source. Some sources cite February 1851 and others cite March 1851. I am going with the date of February 18, 1851, as cited by the Texas State Historical Association (TSHA). Parked alone atop a rocky mesa on the south bank of the Gila River, the Oatmans chanced upon a band of possibly 19 Indians traveling on foot.

Later, the contemporary media identified them as Apaches, but historical records report these Indians had to be Western Yavapais, or Tolkepayas. The Indians were starving from severe drought and famine affecting the southwestern deserts of the U.S. and Mexico. It is commonly recorded that Roys gave them bread, but refused to give them more substantial food.

Olive and her brother, Lorenzo, much later in life, remembered a different version. Lorenzo reported that Roys had decided to travel the night of February 17th under the full moon to save the animal’s strength. Roys made camp the next day in late afternoon.

Olive and Lorenzo both claimed that the Indians walked into their camp asking for tobacco and a pipe, which Roys gave to them. Next, the Indians wanted to trade two horses to the Oatmans. Roys ignored those transaction requests and went about his work.

The angry Indians let out an ear-piercing sound and attacked the nine-member Oatman family with clubs. They killed Roys, Mary, and four Oatman children. The Indians left Lorenzo for dead, and captured 13-year-old Olive Ann and eight-year-old Mary Ann.

In the dark of the night, Lorenzo, who was 14 or 15-years-old, miraculously escaped about 40 miles from the massacre site, where three historical accounts come into play. Some sources cite that another party of emigrants found him coated in blood. Those men left to investigate. At the massacre site, they found six bodies defiled by wildlife and two of Lorenzo’s sisters missing. 

Other sources cite that Lorenzo traveled, covered in blood, to a friendly Indian village. From there, U.S. soldiers took conservatorship of him and transported him to Fort Yuma at the confluence of the Colorado and Gila Rivers. And for almost five years, no one knew to where the Oatman sisters had disappeared. It is also recorded that Lorenzo made it back to the Brewster Party.

In 1856, Lorenzo was living in Los Angeles when he received word that a young woman had been released at Fort Yuma by Indians. The Western Yavapais or Tolkepayas who first captured Olive and Mary Ann kept them for a year in a Tolkepaya village. Then they traded the white girls to Mohave tribal leader, Aespaneo, who may have been a kohot or festival chief.

Aespaneo’s Mohave tribe occupied a valley to the northwest of the Tolkepaya village, along the Colorado River, between California and Arizona. Mary Ann died of starvation sometime during the 1855 Mohave Valley drought, according to most accounts. Evidence of whether Olive bore one or more Mohave children has long been a subject of scholarly debate.

That part of Olive’s journey is commonly known and also extremely fascinating, but we skip to her release. Historians theorize that territorial authorities negotiated the terms of Olive’s release to Lorenzo. Those terms took time, for reasons that could have been culturally influenced, like if the Mohaves feared retribution for the enslavement of a white child or may not have trusted the U.S. soldiers to treat Olive fairly because they loved her.

Olive was found in indigenous garb, and most accounts declare she was topless when she arrived at Fort Yuma. The Mohaves tattooed Olive and Mary Ann on their chins and arms during a ritual thought to ensure a good afterlife. Olive never believed she would return to the white man’s world. Her release took place at Fort Yuma when Olive was 19 years old.

The next section is where Olive’s story takes an astonishing turn. She reunited with Lorenzo and then moved to Oregon to live with her Oatman cousins, whose families had since settled there. I would call Royal Byron Stratton a shameless promoter, but Stratton rolled through life as a Methodist minister.

Olive’s story of Indian captivity made her sensational headline material for quite some time. Her story grew super long legs in the media. Stratton sought Olive’s collaboration for what he believed to be tailor made for a best-selling book. He wrote her story in his words in what we would call a massive click bait book today. Stratton believed correctly.

Stratton Brazenly Exploits Olive and Mary Ann’s Indian Captivity

Stratton wrote a sensational account of Olive’s life with the Indians. He wrote his story to titillate and entice the reader’s imagination, as many Western adventurers did who spurred on the evolvement of the legendary dime novels.

Stratton published Life Among the Indians first, and later re-titled his tale of Olive, Captivity of the Oatman Girls: Being an Interesting Narrative of Life Among the Apache and Mohave Indians. Stratton wrote for exploitation, not truth. This period of Olive’s life’s journey turned dark because of the shocking fictional details in Stratton’s account because he expertly groomed Olive to lie in her lectures.

Stratton’s book was an instant runaway bestseller. Stratton rattled on in long narratives of fictional anti-Indian rhetoric about Olive’s Indian captivity. He erred in naming the capturing tribe Apaches. San Francisco and New York City publishing houses reprinted Stratton’s book.

Olive Oatman Meets John Fairchild on the Lecture Circuit

The Indian captivity narrative genre is a literary form that was common in Western American history. Not all was shady about Stratton’s publishing deals because the royalties from his book provided an education for Lorenzo and Olive at the University of the Pacific.

The shocking fictional details in Stratton’s account of Olive’s captivity and his mentorship of her lecture content heavily clouded the autobiographical reality of Olive’s captivity in historical research and her true story. This is why so many of the varying Oatman accounts are still fodder for scholarly historical debates today.

Olive moved to New York City with Stratton in 1858 to enter the lecture circuit and promote Stratton’s book. We will never know what it was like to only have live entertainment and travel solely dependent on livestock, with no TV or vehicles. The lecture circuit in the 1850s sold tickets like concert tours do today. The lecture circuit was at the level of high-end dramatic entertainment.

The Western U.S. was trending like viral videos in 1858. Olive became a pop star. The lecture circuit was brutally soul-stealing, kind of like the Eagle’s song, Life in the Fast Lane, described. Olive had to lie like the corporate, mainstream media in Western countries do today. She narrated the fantastic fictional stories Stratton fabricated about her captivity in his book with gusto.

Olive sold tickets galore to her lectures. Olive must have been akin to a future Oscar nominee when she lectured. Please, I beg of you not to come for me because I am quoting modern feminist activists who analyzed and described with passion Olive’s performances.

It is common for today’s feminists to elevate women of history, who had no conception of feminism, up to a feminist icon. But Sarah Richardson dug up some great depictions of Olive Oatman’s lecture performances. I leave it up to the reader to decide if Olive cradled feminist ideologies.

It is noteworthy that the feminist description of Olive’s performances is in the same narrative as those Olive Oatman lecture reviews that sold out of tickets for those wishing to attend Olive’s lectures. Margot Miffin is a pop culture genre author, focusing on women’s history, art, women authors, etc. and appears to hold a feminist bend.

Margot Miffin published The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman in 2009. From the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History and Rhetoric & Composition (CFSHRC), Peitho Volume 22 Issue 3 Spring 2020, by Author Sarah Richardson:

“Margot Mifflin explains that Oatman’s lectures spanned the locations of Toledo, Ohio, Evansville, New York City, and other locations, and the response to her lectures were all the same.”

Here, the CFSHRC quotes Margot Miffin with a feminist perspective and highlights the drama that women historically enjoy participating in or reacting to with dramatic heart-wrenching stories—surely young people today have heard about the “Big 3” network TV’s golden age production of soap operas from their grandparents. Women love drama theater. Chic flics are a Hollywood fact:

“The audience listened with breathless interest, and all were deeply affected.” […] She packed the house: “Her pathetic story, surpassing in interest the most thrilling romance, was told with an unaffected simplicity and grace and a touching pathos that went to every heart and drew tears from eyes unused to weep. Miss Oatman evinces much dramatic power in the grouping of incidents”.

Sarah goes onto say,

“Using the words narrator, duty, and experience provides her [Olive’s] connection to the audience, purpose of her speech, and ethos for speaking her own voice instead of continuing to let the public form her identity.”

Oh, that is so not true. And it is so true.

Olive adapted the way people adapted in order to survive. When Olive performed on the lecture circuit, she had been through more survival efforts for her very life as a naïve, horrifically, and emotionally damaged 19 year old than most people in today’s U.S. can wrap their heads around.

Think about all the pop, music, movie, and TV stars who display the greatest of entertaining talents, but whom we eventually discover their tortured true life stories and how they drew from their emotional upheavals to create art. That is how we can get our heads into Olive’s life and have a logical perspective on her electric performances.

I want to relate that the CFSHRC description of Olive’s performances comes from a feminist ideology formed in the 2000s. Feminism in the 1850s focused on rights for female owned property and admittance to university-level education and entry into male dominated university colleges. Olive was hot with her emotions on stage.

Psychiatry and psychology were not conceptualized in the 1850s. Olive could not consult a therapist. The insane decision of Roys Oatman to ignore all warnings of deadly consequences and take his family to their slaughter left Lorenzo and Olive blindsided with emotional and physical trauma for their entire lives.

Olive was lecturing at a gig in Farmington, Michigan, in 1864. There, she met John Brant Fairchild, a New York-born cattleman and farmer. Olive married Fairchild in Rochester, New York, in 1865. Can you imagine life on a lecture circuit and living like a rock star for eight years by the time Olive met John Fairchild? Eight years is a really long run for a viral act to survive.

We could imagine that Olive was an emotional mess and did not know up from down when John Fairchild fell in love with her, and indeed he did, and Fairchild fiercely protected Olive’s reputation. When she married, Olive quit Stratton, the lecture circuit, and we assume that she tried in vain to find her emotional baseline. It was a seven-year gap from when the Fairchilds married until they found their forever home.

The Fairchilds Settle Down in Sherman, Texas

The Fairchilds moved to Sherman, Texas, in 1872, when Olive was 32-years-old. We know how John Fairchild felt about Stratton’s exploitation of his wife by his actions. It was in Sherman, Texas, that John Fairchild went on a hunting expedition to find every copy of Stratton’s book and destroy them.

Fairchild did succeed in providing his beloved wife and their adopted daughter, Mamie, with the best life-style and amenities any family would enjoy. Fairchild did not succeed in finding every copy of Stratton’s Book. You can purchase Stratton’s book at many online book seller locations. But Olive remained emotionally fragile and self-conscious about her tattoos throughout her remaining life.

Fairchild’s status in Sherman allowed Olive a respectable social reputation among Sherman’s commercial community as a prominent regional business man. Olive sought treatment periodically for physical and nervous ailments and conditions. One time, she traveled to a Canadian facility, which was an arduous journey for a woman in her era.

Today we call this condition complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). in the 1870s, Olive’s emotional state was a “female” issue when CPTSD affected a woman. The Civil War veterans experienced what was known as “shell shock” by WWII, with just as devastating symptoms as what they labeled female insanity. But, it was those times, and explaining multiple trauma effects to unaffected people did not fly far.

Many people hunkered down and dealt with their mentally-ailing loved ones on the American Western frontier, as John Fairchild lovingly did for his wife. Others—not so much. History tells other tales of the mentally infirmed being tortured all over in Western countries at the same time.

Olive left her Sherman home rarely. She covered her chin tattoo with the face powders available in her era, which were toxic, and then wore veils in public. Olive’s letters, found after her death, told of Olive’s mental desperation due to the brutal attack which resulted in the loss of her family.

Plus, Olive alluded this caveat as speculated by her friend Sarah Thompson many years later: "Olive grieved after her return because she had married a Mohave man and birthed two boys."

Olive had vehemently denied during her lecture period that the Indians forced themselves on her and told the horrors of her captivity. In reality, after the trade to Aespaneo, Aespaneo and his wife, Espanesay, gave Olive and Mary Ann their own plots of land when they came of age. Until Mary Ann died, the sisters lived life as Mohave girls and then women when they turned of age to marry in the Mohave culture while in captivity.

Topeka, Aespaneo’s daughter, was a fierce defender of Olive and Mary Ann during the trade from their original Western Yavapais or Tolkepayas captors. The two sisters performed the duties of a Mohave child and then a woman with Aespaneo’s wife and children. Stratton’s lies made Olive deny her own reality for eight years. There are historical accounts of Olive’s fond memories with Aespaneo’s family from her later accounts.

The thought of a white woman laying with a Mohave Indian man would have created social death during Olive’s return to her people when she was 19 years old and on the lecture circuit. Clearly, Olive was a troubled woman. But she still wanted the reality in the white man’s world of being a mother upon her return. Olive may have had a Mohave husband and children and hid that in her soul until she died.

Olive was not in charge of her fate once the U.S. authorities began hearing rumors from explorers and possibly miners that the Mohave were hiding a captive white woman in 1855. She could not refuse her release at Fort Yuma. We will never know if Olive had had a choice, whether she would have chosen to stay with the Mohave. It is not likely that any woman would have chosen to abandon her children in Olive’s position at that time. 

Olive died in Sherman on March 21, 1903. Her letters found after her death alluded to what she had to leave behind with the Mohaves. John Brant Fairchild died four years later, on April 25, 1907. Both are interred in ornate graves that John Fairchild bought in Sherman’s West Hill Cemetery. There is a Texas Historical Marker at the Fairchild’s grave sites, placed there in 1969.

John and Olive Fairchild’s love story lasted 31 years in today’s Texomaland.

* Often erroneously spelled Royce, Royse, or Rois.

** It would be interesting to know if the Wilders were related to Almanzo Wilder, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s husband of the famous Little House book series and TV show, as Almanzo has a history in Illinois.