The Captivity of the Oatman Girls Among the Apache and Mohave Indians (Native American)

This book is a "captive narrative" about two children abducted by a breakaway (p. 105) tribe. While some reviewers have classified it as "racist," it's only reasonable that Olive would feel resentment toward her kidnappers and the people who killed her family, regardless of race or creed. Olive, as the narrative progresses, chides herself for originally lumping all Indians together as one, because she learns that each person is an individual (p. 147). However, because some of the language is harsh, and this is a one-sided account, it would be helpful to read this in conjunction with an Indian narrative. The author (the book wasn't written by the Oatmans), when narrating, does come across as racist and as trying to make a point--the conclusion is especially biased and an illustration of "Manifest Destiny."As another reviewer mentioned, the language and writing style can be difficult to follow (and Dover's text spacing is somewhat difficult to read, as can be witnessed in the preview) but once you catch the flow of how three voices have been combined (that of the narrator, Olive, and her brother Lorenzo), it becomes easier to read . . . and quite fascinating.

Overall, it is well written, though sometimes difficult to understand. You feel like you really get to know Olive and Mary. It is remarkable how they adapted to their captivity, learn the native languages, and rely on their faith in God to get through their grief and their daily struggles to survive.

Was a fasinating read if you like history about the old west. Bit disappointing in that there was not much to it. Rather short read. Tended to read a bit amateurish in the writing but then it was written by the people who were the principals in the story. I bought the book because one of the Oatman girls who were captured moved to and lived out her life in Sherman Texas where I live. She is buried in one of our local cemeteries and the house she lived in is still here. Helps to make a connection to history. Quite a bit of fasinating information in the book. Was not a hard read, just not a page turner. I did enjoy it and not disappointed in what was there, just that there wasn't more.

The book was a good read. I have visited the town of Oatman. I was not too happy with the way I received my book though. It had been stuffed into an envelope with the cover bent out of shape. There was a big crease in the front cover. Other than that it was ok.

First off, let me warn you that Amazon mashes all reviews of a title together. I can't speak for other editions of this book, but avoid the Dover edition like the plague. It's a facsimile of a 1935 printing so bad that more often than not, there are no discernible spaces between the words. Add that visual problem to Royal Stratton's often unintelligible bombast, and you are left with an unreadable mess that doesn't even have the virtue of being an early printing. Stratton radically revised the book over its first 3-4 printings, between 1857-1860. Since Olive Oatman eventually and dramatically cut Stratton off, the back-and-forth of the editions is important. This 1935 edition is apparently a reprint of the second edition, which corrected many of the typos and much of the gibberish in the first edition.This is not a first-hand account, for all Stratton's claims to the contrary. He lets the narrative voice drift between him talking about Olive and Olive supposedly speaking for herself. However, he has absolutely no interest in the integrity of the narrative; he will often begin a paragraph pretending to be Olive (complete with his nearly random quotation marks), only to end it with "Olive" referring to herself in the third person. Olive's lecture manuscript makes clear that she did not write like Stratton, and once the conflict of narrator and editor is clear, you can often tell that you are really reading Olive's words rather than listening to Stratton's finger puppet.While the most vicious and relentless anti-Indian vituperation is Stratton being Stratton, there's no question that Olive provided some of the anti-Indian sentiment. Olive's attitudes are a stew of cultural racism, response to the massacre, and real affection for the Mohave people who rescued her from the Yavapai killers of her family. Be alert for pages that begin with Olive speaking affectionately of Mohave friends, only to have Stratton seize the page, so to speak, and contradict what she has been saying. Once you get a sense of that dynamic between Olive's experience and Stratton's livid fantasies, the back-and-forth is actually funny sometimes. For example, in spite of all of Stratton's fulminating about fates worse than death, Olive obviously forced him to write a concluding page that insists fulsomely that Olive returned from the Mohave with her maidenhead intact... a claim at once sad, silly, understandable under the cultural circumstances, and unlikely.Stratton's book is a calculated best seller, not a non-fiction narrative. It invokes every cliche of the captivity narrative, and it becomes incoherent when Olive insists on telling the truth. If you are interested in this strange American literary form, the captivity narrative, here is a good place to start. But if you want to know what happened to Olive, how, and why, you need Brian McGinty's The Oatman Massacre or Margot Mifflin's The Blue Tattoo. McGinty quietly and inexorably dismantles the lies, fantasies, and misstatements in the Stratton narrative, using Olive's debriefing by the commander at Fort Yuma, letters from her relatives, the 1864 manuscript of the lectures she gave to sell the book, and interviews with Mohaves who remembered her. He makes no attempt to identify whether the liar is Stratton or Oatman, because there is no way to dissect the book that closely. However, the first-hand sources McGinty sites all paint a very different story than Stratton's, not one that lessens Olive's experience or her character, but one that evades the cliches and prejudices of Victorian America and comes closer to the truth.Mifflin's The Blue Tattoo is as interested in what happened after the "rescue" as it is in the "captivity." Her first hundred pages have little to offer that you wouldn't get from McGinty, but her second hundred, examining Stratton's revisions to "Olive's" story as it became clearer and clearer what the public wanted to hear, assessing Olive's slow evolution from "former Mohave" to "captivity entrepreneur," and placing Olive's experience in the wider frame of American Indian hating, are ultimately more interesting than the captivity story. What really happened among the Mohave is lost in time -- though not as lost as you might think, if you read Mifflin's summary of Mohave oral traditions -- but what happened after can be traced through documents, and Mifflin has done a fine job of searching those documents.

There are many differences in this & other accounts of the Oatman story. Which one shall we take as true?

Geared more towards the middle school level and is age appropriate for that

This is another of those history as they knew it journal books. It has gone into my collection of reference for the Oatman massacre, which occured in our area of Yuma, AZ.

I liked the content but the fact that the words sometimes were headed together caused difficulty to read the text.

Brilliant

Brilliant read McMillan

brilliant story

I greatly recommend this captivating true story. What these girls went through is unbelievable ! Well written! Impossible to put down until the very end !