by Wendy Lawton
“Children,” said Ma quietly. “Slowly begin loading our things back into the wagon. Mary Ann, sit on that stone over there and hold the reins of the oxen so they don’t move during the packing. Olive and Lucy, move back to the far side.”
As the family began to break camp, the Yavapai pulled off to the side of the camp and began a vigorous whispered debate in the Yuman tongue. The family couldn’t understand the language, but they could read the agitation.
As Olive loaded one large box, shivers started across her shoulders as her hair stood on end. A moment later she heard an almost inhuman shriek, and she feared she would die at this very place.
The confusion, the dust, the screams, the cries of her family—it was all too noisy, frightening, and confusing for Olive to comprehend what was taking place. She remembered hearing a sickening thud and feeling Lucy slump down the side of the wagon onto Olive’s feet. Lucy’s weight nearly knocked Olive down.
She felt a roaring in her ears that jumbled all the sounds. Everything happened as if in slow motion. Olive stood in stunned paralysis and waited to die. Through a fog of dust she watched one of the men raise a club high above him and bring it down onto Lorenzo’s head. Her brother hit the ground hard. She saw his eyes open, but then he squeezed them shut.
As Olive watched the frenzied attackers rummaging through the wagon, she realized they had no plans to kill her. With her whole family dead, would she have to go on alone? Perhaps Mother had been right, and God had accompanied them on this journey—because, although Olive could not feel a thing, she somehow knew that God wept at the evil all around them.
The Captive Journey
Olive, where’s Mama?”
Olive thought she was hearing things. The quivery voice was almost inaudible. “Mary Ann?”
Still sitting stiffly on the rock and holding the reins of the lead ox was Mary Ann. Her face was drained, and she shook uncontrollably.
“Oh, Mary Ann.” Olive wrapped arms around her sister and they sat huddled together, little caring what would happen next.
The men went through every box in the wagon. They ripped the canvas off the spines and took the wheels off as well. One man searched until he found every piece of food and tied it together in a piece of canvas and put the bundle aside. Another took his knife and ripped open the featherbed, laughing as the feathers floated around the camp.
Olive shielded Mary Ann from the scene as best she could, though the little girl did not seem to comprehend anything.
After their attackers had plundered as much of their belongings as they could carry, they prodded Olive and Mary Ann to move and herded them back toward the river. Olive couldn’t help looking back to see her family one last time. Not a single tear came to her eyes—it was as if she viewed a tableau. Seeing Lucy’s tangled hair and crumpled form tossed in the dust of the desert gave Olive a momentary jolt of reality.
“Until California, dear sister, until California.”
Discarded on the rocky ground near Ma and the baby, Olive saw the partially unwrapped oilcloth bundle with the slip from Ma’s lilac bush.
And Pa, ever-hopeful Pa. Olive remembered that day back in Fulton when she heard the story of the farmer who saw the elephant. The man shrugged off the loss of his entire crop spilled in the ditch and said it was worth it to have seen the beast. What a stupid story!
One of her captors put his club in the middle of her back and gave a hard shove until she stumbled onto the path back down to the river. She could no longer see the remnants of her life that lay scattered on the plateau.
“Where’s Mama, Olive?”
Olive looked at Mary Ann. When the family forded the river this afternoon, they had all removed their shoes. When the Yavapai had come into the camp, neither Mary Ann nor Olive had yet put on their shoes—they now found themselves barefoot and stumbling along a rocky trail. “Mama went to heaven, Mary Ann. With the baby in her arms, she went to heaven.”
Mary Ann continued walking without commenting. Olive wondered how she could tell the seven-year-old that Pa had died along with their beloved Lucy, Royce, and little Charity Ann as well. Even Lorenzo, who always took care of them—gone. Maybe it didn’t matter. She and Mary Ann would undoubtedly be dead before morning. Maybe her sister would never have to know.
After following the trail about a half of a mile beyond the river, they came upon the place the Yavapai must have camped the night before. Their captors stopped and prepared a meal, using some of the provisions taken from the Oatmans. Olive watched a man start a fire using a flint and some wild cotton they carried with them. The mundane act of cooking supper seemed at such odds to the events of just an hour ago. The shorter man mixed some flour with water and cooked the flat loaf of dough directly in the ash of the fire. This hard lump was then soaked in the bean soup before eating.
The Yavapai pushed some bread toward the girls, but the smell of food caused Olive’s stomach to lurch. One man laughed at her refusal. Olive felt as if the captors enjoyed seeing her distress. She decided it was important to keep her grief in check.
Mary Ann showed no grief at all. Olive could tell that her sister was still in shock. She moved stiffly—almost doll-like. For now that was a blessing.
Olive remembered the whispered conversation of the night before when she and her brothers and sisters worried about an Indian attack. She had vowed to find some way to escape if taken captive. She looked over at Mary Ann, staring blankly into the night. What foolish words. She never considered that she might have someone to protect. And even if Mary Ann were not here, how did one go about escaping?
She looked up at the cliff leading up to the plateau. The journey from the Pima villages was hard enough with their whole family to help. How could she manage the escape, the journey, and still care for Mary Ann?Besides,she thought as she looked at the men assigned to watch them,even if we managed to slip away from these experienced trackers, they’d have us back in no time. It was easy enough to talk big when you’re snuggled up with your brothers and sisters, but Olive realized that when she found herself on the trail with a pack of killers and a stunned little sister, it became another matter.
Snuggled up with brothers and sisters . . .Olive could not believe they were gone. Gone.
“Yakoa!”
The man angrily gestured toward the trail. Apparently they planned to move out tonight. While Olive had contemplated the impossibility of escape, her captors had packed up the campsite.
Olive took Mary Ann’s hand and pulled her to her feet. The club poking into Olive ’s back again was the signal to walk. Five Indians seemed to be in charge of them, the rest busied themselves in moving the livestock and carrying their plunder.
The pace outstripped the strength of the sisters in a short time. They had been on the trail for months, but the Indians moved at a gallop. Even running and stumbling along, Olive and Mary Ann kept lagging behind. Their bare feet were cut and bleeding, their legs scratched and bruised, and their lungs burned with the exertion. Olive determined early not to complain about anything. She’d keep up or die trying. As best as she could figure, they were traveling about five miles each hour.
As they climbed higher, the girls were bullied and pushed along. Olive looked back at Mary Ann and saw tears silently streaming down her cheeks. If only there was something Olive could do.
“Beauty,” Olive whispered to Mary Ann, winking to let her know it was a new game.
Mary Ann looked up at Olive, shaking her head as if to wake up.
“Keep climbing, Beauty. The palace cannot be far.”
“Yakoa!” screamed one of the men as he raised his club.
Mary Ann sat down in the middle of the trail. “I cannot go any farther, Olive.”
“Come on, please get up, Mary Ann.”
“I cannot even feel my feet, Olive. I don’t care if they kill me. They are bad men.”
The angriest man grabbed Mary Ann and tried to put her on her feet, but she let her body go limp and slide out of his gr
ip. Olive’s heart began thudding in her ears as he began to hit Mary Ann. Mary Ann simply did not care.
“Stop!” Olive said, getting in between the furious Yavapai and the exhausted girl. The man turned some of his blows toward Olive before another man stepped in to pick up Mary Ann. He slung her over his shoulder like a sack of flour and, without a word, started off at the same hurried pace.
Olive followed behind. She could see the blood from Mary Ann’s badly cut feet dripping down the man’s back.
The breakneck pace continued. Olive watched the sky and figured they traveled mostly in a northeasterly direction. To keep herself from panic, she began noting landmarks and trails. They traveled over the bluffs of a high mountain chain—it must have still been the Gila Mountains. Eventually they moved down into a winding valley.
As she watched the route, she again considered the possibility of escape. This was no game like the one Royce and his friends played back on the trail, and there was no wagon train to run back to after wriggling out of schoolboy tethers of twine.
Every time her mind wandered back to recent memories, she remembered that her family was gone—utterly and forever gone. Who even wanted to escape? She wanted to join her mother and father and family in heaven.
“Olive?”
She heard the faint whisper of Mary Ann, slumped over the wolfskin-covered back of the Yavapai striding ahead of her.
“Don’t leave me, Olive.”
“I’m here, Mary Ann.” Olive shook her head to clear her thoughts. They weren’t all dead. She knew that she had to live as long as Mary Ann lived. For some reason the killers had spared Olive and Mary Ann. Her sister needed her.
After several hours of travel, while it was still night, they reached a flat sandy meadow in what seemed like a box canyon, rimmed by high mountains. Mary Ann was dumped onto the sand like a bundle of rags. The men seemed very familiar with the place and, for the first time, did not appear to be watching their back trail and hurrying from some hidden enemy.
The thought of an unseen rescuer had not occurred to Olive. Dr. Lecount had hurried to Fort Yuma to send back help to the Oatman party. When they came upon the campsite, would they know that two family members were missing? She thought it very likely since Dr. Lecount kept saying he’d tell the commander that a family with seven children traveled alone.
In fact, the reason Indians usually took prisoners was for ransom. The Indians learned that the army would pay handsomely for the return of captives. Once Mr. Brewster had mentioned that Apaches very often took young girls, not to make them wives, as so many silly dime novels suggested, but because they were easily captured and subdued. Mr. Brewster also said that many of the tribes had discovered that girls who were raised to be submissive gave the captors less trouble. Besides, nothing loosened the pocketbooks of Americans faster than the thought of “helpless young girls held by savages.”
Olive wondered if their captors had begun to have second thoughts about how easily they could control her and her sister. As Olive pictured her frail seven-year-old sister sitting in the road, refusing to take another step, and a frustrated Yavapai throwing her over his shoulder, she smiled for the first time since the massacre. Her mother’s strength had sustained their family over many a bumpy road. Perhaps these Indians would discover that they’d underestimated the pluck of an Oatman female.
They’d rested silently for about two hours when another band of Yavapai came in by a different route, herding the Oatman livestock. In the excited conversation that followed, the girls were able to huddle together tightly and whisper to each other unnoticed.
“Mama and Pa died, didn’t they, Olive.” It was not a question.
“Yes. And Lucy, Lorenzo, Royce, Charity Ann, and the baby.”
“I know. I saw it.”
“I am so glad we have each other, Mary Ann. We need to stay strong and be ready to escape or be ransomed.”
“Where would we go?” Mary Ann’s question made sense. Where would they go?
“I think we would go to Fort Yuma, and they’d give escort back to Ma’s relatives in New York. Or maybe we could go to Susan’s family staying in Tucson.”
“Oh dear, my feet hurt.”
“I know. I wish they at least waited until we had shoes and socks on.” Olive realized an important thing. It was easier to talk about the present—even the present sufferings—than to think about the past.
“Remember how Ma used to say that she believed God walked with us on the journey and that He grieved for our troubles?”
“I remember. Do you think so, Olive?”
“Ma said so. I want to think about getting us out of trouble, and I’m going to let the Lord grieve for the evil that took our family.”
“Can we remember the good things about our family?”
“I hope we can, Mary Ann. It’s just that right now I feel such a big, sore emptiness that I don’t even want to touch it. If I do, I might just give up. We need to keep going for each other.”
Mary Ann curled even tighter into Olive’s arms. Being huddled together felt better than any words Olive could say, and they watched silently as the men killed two of the cattle and butchered them, dividing up the pieces of meat into equal portions. They wrapped these into bundles to be carried with them—one parcel for each man. They roasted one large portion and made another batch of the burned bread. The smell of roasting meat made the girls’ stomachs growl, despite their fear.
It surprised Olive, as they ate, that no food had ever been quite so welcome as that piece of stringy beef and hard, ash-covered bread. She longed for sleep, but apparently the band of Indians planned to set out again without sleeping.
That day’s journey became the hardest miles Olive ever covered. They set a punishing pace over rocky ground. Olive had become good at estimating miles covered. If they kept up the pace they would cover almost thirty-five miles in a day.
Before long, Mary Ann plopped down in the middle of the trail again, refusing to take another step. The man who’d been prodding her along stumbled right over the top of her. Furious, he began beating her again, but his blows didn’t faze Mary Ann.
Olive thought she detected a grudging respect in the way he leaned down and hoisted her over his shoulder once again.
The Yavapai who’d been trailing Olive had her sit on a rock while he took dried grass and roughly wiped the blood off the soles of her feet. He stopped to remove some stickers and puncture vine thorns. Strangely, she ’d never even felt them. He took some thick, hard leatherlike material and tied it onto the soles of her feet. It made the walking easier, though the flap slap flap of the makeshift sandal raised a lot more dust and she kept getting pebbles caught between the sole and her foot.
The men continued to watch the back trail, observing much closer than Olive’s fellow travelers had ever watched. It gave her a brief glimpse into the wariness and fear that marked these people. The threat of wagon after wagon of settlers must have weighed heavily on them.
At about noon, their path intersected with another band of about ten Indians—not Yavapai, maybe Apache. Olive noticed that while a group talked and gestured excitedly with the captors—mostly about her it seemed—two Indians came around behind. Olive saw one step out from the ravine. He leveled his bow straight at Olive and let an arrow fly. Mary Ann screamed, but Olive stood frozen. The arrow pierced her skirt and petticoat but did not injure her.
As the man reached for another arrow, several of Olive’s captors jumped him and began clubbing him. Olive managed to figure out from gestures and Spanish words that the Indian had recently lost his brother to a white man and had vowed to kill the next settler to cross his path to avenge his brother.
The Yavapai fought the intruders and managed to send them running.
If anything, the pace quickened after that. They did not stop until about midnight, since the moon still shone bright and made night travel easy.
As Olive and Mary Ann lay down side by side, using their own blankets stolen
from the Oatman wagon, sleep did not come right away. Looking up into the starry sky, Olive pointed out constellations to Mary Ann, reminding her of summer nights when they used to sleep outdoors in Illinois.
“See. There ’s the Old Dipper. Do you remember the time we were sleeping on the grass in the dooryard,and you jumped up to get the dipper out of the bucket to show Royce why it was called that?”
“I remember. Royce kept squinting his eyes trying to see which stars looked like a water dipper.” Mary Ann was quiet for a long time. “Do you think that Royce is now seeing the stars close up?”
“I don’t know. He ’d sure enjoy exploring if he could.” Olive wished she understood heaven and kept trying to remember what she’d learned.
The journey ended on the fourth day after traveling a distance Olive gauged to be about a hundred miles. As the group drew near to an Indian village, dogs came out to greet them, barking and yipping in frenzied excitement. Next came excited children and curious women.
At the sight of women, Olive felt relieved. Perhaps they’d find friends of sorts among their captors. One woman came very close, and Olive smiled at her. The woman seemed stunned. She pulled back and without warning spat in Olive’s face. Another reached down and scooped up a handful of sand and threw it at Mary Ann.
So much for a friendly welcome.
The Ransom Price
The captors set Olive and Mary Ann atop a pile of brush and bark. Olive ’s mangled feet kept slipping, but she eventually managed to find a solid perch. Mary Ann clung to her sister’s waist. Would they be burned at the stake, like Joan of Arc? None of this made any sense.
Confusion seemed to reign among their captors as well. To the chorus of barking dogs and screaming, chanting Indians, musical instruments were added. Some pounded on stones with clubs or blew animal horns; others pulled a small string—like a fiddle bow—across a piece of warped bark. The noise was deafening but rhythmic.