The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

So I picked up this book strictly because of the cover.  The picture intrigued me and I wanted to know about the woman with the chin tattoo who looked very Victorian.  It helped that when I turned to the inside jacket that it said she was Mormon.  That's all it took for me to check it out.  Apparently Olive Oatman is pretty famous and I just didn't know it so you may have already heard of her.  She and her younger sister were taken captive in 1851 by the Yavapai after they slaughtered her family as they traveled through what is now southern Arizona.  After a year, she and her sister were traded to the Mojave and spent four years with them.  Then Olive was traded back to the Americans and started her life all over again in mainstream America.   

The only thing the author got wrong for me, as far as I could tell, was that the Oatman family were never Mormon.  They followed a man named Brewster who splintered off from the main branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  His followers were called Brewsterites.  From what I read, the Oatman's never joined the Church and then said they would follow Brewster; they seemed to have joined Brewster after he split from the Mormons.  So, whenever she talks about Mormons, it's usually not really about Mormons; it's Brewsterites.  Luckily religion plays a small role in the story of Olive Oatman so it is easy to ignore the author's opinions and conjectures about it. 

I found the story to be quite exciting and intriguing.  The book is paced well and reads quickly except for a few pages here and there when you get bogged down in history.  The book also includes some short insights into other survivor stories in American history.  The real intrigue with Olive Oatman is that she seemed to always be very private and was often contradictory.  The only one who knew the true story was Olive Oatman and it seems like she never shared that story or her opinion about her adventures.  But there have been plenty of people who have taken advantage of her story and made up their own story about her.  Read the book to find out more about this and other interesting things.