In the autumn of 1856 two companies of Mormon emigrants pulling their belongings in handcarts — the Willie company and, behind it, the Martin company — were caught by early winter storms on the high plains of central Wyoming, hundreds of miles short of the Salt Lake Valley. Late departures and worn-out carts had left roughly a thousand people strung out across the trail as the temperature crashed and the snow came, and they began to die of cold and starvation. More than two hundred would not survive. This entry follows the rescue itself; the companies’ long journey from Iowa is told on our sister site, Wagon Wheel Diaries.
The rescue began with a single fast rider. On October 4, 1856, the returning church official Franklin D. Richards reached Salt Lake City and told Brigham Young that hundreds of emigrants were still out on the plains with winter closing in. The next day, at the church’s October general conference, Young set aside the planned program and ordered an immediate relief, telling the congregation in stark terms: ‘Go and bring in those people now on the Plains, and attend strictly to those things which we call temporal, or temporal duties, otherwise your faith will be in vain.’ Within days, wagons loaded with flour, blankets, and clothing rolled east under Captain George D. Grant, the first of a stream of relief teams driving into the storm.
On October 19, 1856, the rescuers found the Willie company first, snowbound and starving on the Sweetwater near South Pass. The relief wagons got food to them, but the company still had to cross Rocky Ridge in a blizzard — a single march of some fifteen miles in deep snow and brutal wind that killed roughly thirteen people, the worst stretch of the disaster for the Willie company. Scouts pressed on east and on October 28 found the Martin company, far worse off, stalled near Red Buttes at the last crossing of the North Platte. They were later guided into a sheltered hollow on the Sweetwater, Martin’s Cove, to wait out the storm while wagons shuttled them west in stages.
It took weeks to bring everyone in. The rescuers carried the weakest in the wagons, walked the rest, buried the dead where they fell, and drove the survivors back across the mountains in relays as fresh relief teams came out from the valley to meet them. The Willie company straggled into Salt Lake in early November and the Martin company near the end of the month. Of the two companies, roughly a third died — about sixty-seven of the Willie company and well over a hundred of the Martin company — in what remains the deadliest single episode of the overland Mormon migration, and one of its most enduring stories of rescue.
On March 18, 1851, a family of Brewsterite emigrants — a splinter group of Latter-day Saints led by Royce Oatman — was attacked on the Gila Trail in what is now western Arizona, on the banks of the Gila River some eighty miles east of modern Yuma. The attackers are generally identified as Tolkepayas, a band of the Western Yavapai, though Olive herself later called them Apache. Most of the family was killed at the bluff. Thirteen-year-old Olive Oatman and her younger sister Mary Ann, about seven, were carried off; their older brother Lorenzo, beaten and left for dead, survived and made his way back to raise the alarm. What followed for the two girls was about a year of captivity among the Yavapai and then several years living among the Mohave along the Colorado River.
The distinction between the two peoples matters and is often blurred in the popular tellings. The Tolkepaya Yavapai who attacked the family held the girls in hard, servile conditions — hauling water and firewood, foraging, beaten and burned by children of the camp. About a year later the sisters were traded to a Mohave family — that of a leader recorded as Espaniole — for horses, vegetables, blankets, and beads, and taken down to the Mohave Valley. There the girls were given a different place. Olive later described being taken into the household, given a plot of land and seed to cultivate, and tattooed on the chin in the blue vertical lines that were a customary Mohave marking — by Olive’s own insistence a sign of tribal belonging, meant to be recognized by ancestors in the land of the dead, not a brand of slavery. When drought and famine struck the Colorado around 1855, food ran short for everyone, and Mary Ann died of starvation along with many Mohave.
In early 1856, word reached Fort Yuma that a young white woman was living among the Mohave. Through the intervention of a Quechan (Yuma) messenger named Francisco and the post authorities, Olive was ransomed and brought to the fort on February 28, 1856 — nineteen years old, sun-darkened, and marked with the tattoo she would carry the rest of her life. Her brother Lorenzo, who had spent five years searching and petitioning officials, was reunited with her there, and their meeting made headlines across the West.
Within a year a Methodist minister, Royal B. Stratton, published ‘Life Among the Indians: or, The Captivity of the Oatman Girls’ (1857), a bestseller of some 30,000 copies that made Olive famous and funded the siblings’ schooling. The book is also the root of much that is doubtful about her story: it leaned hard into the lurid captivity-narrative conventions of the era and almost certainly distorted her years among the Mohave, casting them as villains. Olive lectured on the strength of it, married a Texas cattleman and banker named John Brant Fairchild in 1865, and lived quietly in Sherman, Texas, until her death in 1903 — her real experience always partly hidden behind the sensational one that had been written for her.