The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin
The Blue Tattoo, Margot Mifflin
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The Blue Tattoo
The Life of Olive Oatman

Author: Margot Mifflin

Narrator: Kaipo Schwab

Unabridged: 6 hr 47 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/29/2016

Synopsis

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year-old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.

Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman's friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life, from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker's wife in Texas.

About Margot Mifflin

Margot Mifflin is an author, journalist, and professor who writes about women's history and the arts. The author of Bodies of Subversion and The Blue Tattoo, she has written for the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Elle, salon.com, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Believer, the New Yorker, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other publications.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Allen on April 22, 2013

I happened on the cover picture in a blog recently, and like many people, immediately thought "Hey, that's the tattoo from Hell on Wheels". Apparently the character's tattooing in that series was borrowed explicitly from Olive Oatman's. It's ironic that the TV character was a prostitute, as the Oatm......more

Goodreads review by Frank on July 14, 2023

This was a very interesting and compelling telling of the life of Olive Oatman. In the early 1850s, Olive was a pioneer girl heading west with her family on a wagon train with a splinter group of Mormons called the “Brewsterites”, a group headed by James Colin Brewster, who broke off from Joseph Smi......more

Goodreads review by Jessaka on November 08, 2016

History, cultural anthropology, and an interesting true story all combined into one. What makes this book really good is that the author has done much research and has exposed some falsehoods that are presented in other books, especially the one written by Stratton. In 1851, a family heads out to Cal......more

Goodreads review by Pat on March 26, 2015

I didn't know that "women in captivity" was an entire genre of 19th century writing. The first such book was 'A True History of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson," and was actually the first American bestseller in 1682. It was the story of a preacher's wife who spent 11 weeks in......more

Goodreads review by Debby on September 20, 2014

Very disappointing....I enjoyed the (short) story part but didn't expect the dissertation on the various other books pertaining to Olive Oatman. This author spent more time tearing about the other books as not believable and spent a lot of time on Stratton, the preacher who "helped" write Olive's ow......more

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