Author Margot Mifflin is an expert in the tattooed female body. She learned of the Oatman story after a student, listening to a lecture about the female tattooed body, told her about Oatman’s facial tattoo. Armed with that information, and little else, Mifflin began researching Oatman’s story.
One of the problems with the Eastern intelligentsia who write about the American west is that oftentimes they have absolutely no understanding of the subject. Mifflin is case in point. In her introduction, she shows her ignorance by writing the following:
Oatman’s story reflects the crossed boundaries and trampled frontiers that marked this transaction. She survived the botched pursuit of the American Dream, arrived at a geographical and utopian terminus – California – where, as Joan Didion famously put it, “we have run out of continent,”….Her blue tattoo became a poignant, permanent, ethnic marker, invoking both the cultural imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion.
She concludes the book with the following: “…Oatman is a poster girl for our inherently split and perpetually multiplying national identity….She is a white woman of color, a foreigner in her own country, a beautiful freak whose blue tattoo denotes the shaky fault lines between civilization and savagery…”
Mifflin makes the mistake that many writers before and many after will do. She is so self-involved with her own little world that, in taking a step outside of it, she cannot comprehend her subject. That is the real problem here. Mifflin is no historian. While using some of the older sources about the west, and making some of the “usual” archival rounds in the southwest, she draws on sources that are not what a western historian would use. Relying on ethnographers is nice, but if someone is writing about Arizona, one of the first sources should be Marshall Trimble, the “official” Arizona State Historian.
Historians, writers, and researchers like Trimble, who actually ‘knows his stuff,’ are nowhere to be found. Mifflin relies on rather modern sources and resources for her sociological interpretations of the role of women in the Wild West. She uses the latest information about women and tattoos. The real problem, though, is her sourcing for the “Wild West” is woefully out of date.
Oatman was a fascinating woman. After her arrival at Fort Yuma, she began relearning English. She thirsted for knowledge, eventually even going to a “seminary” that would be much the same as a junior college today. She read books. She wrote poetry. She learned how to speak in public, and quickly mastered the fine art of the newspaper interview. She reveled in the fact that she was a celebrity and made the most of it the rest of her life.
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