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.The sight of the white men sbeards, now tumbling down their chests after many months of travel,afforded them especially the women considerable glee.Sometried to touch them to verify that they were real, but, wrote Moll-hausen, they gave us to understand, in an unmistakable manner,that they did not consider these appendages at all attractive, thoughwe were rather proud of them, as testifying to the length of our jour-ney. When the bearded men rode past them, the women burst intolaughter and put their hands to their mouths, as if the sight of usrather tended to make them sick. 13 Unaccustomed to hairy faces, thewomen thought the beards made the men look like talking vaginas.14Mollhausen, meanwhile, could not determine whether Mohave men,who had little or no facial hair, shaved, singed, or plucked.One night Mollhausen and a lieutenant named Fitzball revivedtheir boyhood magic tricks for the entranced tribe, and Fitzball wasinspired to perform sleight of hand with his false front tooth.Heflashed the tooth, secured by a spring, pretended to swallow it byclosing his mouth and removing it, then covered his mouth and re-placed it.The half-terrified Mohaves invited their friends to see themagic, and Fitzball repeated the performance late into the night, un-til an old warrior asked him to do it with another tooth.When he re-fused, the spell was broken and the disillusioned crowd dispersed.Whipple reported seeing as many as six hundred Indians in a sin-gle day in his camp.Few spoke Spanish; most communicated withthe whites using hand gestures.Whipple noticed several sad-lookingfellows in the crowd who were slaves taken in an expedition againstthe Cocopas, but he saw no white girls, and more significantly, wasnever approached by the Oatmans, who either remained in their vil-lage above the campgrounds or socialized with the others, passingas Mohaves.15 Either scenario is telling.If they were hidden fromthe Whipple party, this omission from Olive s biography is glaringlyconspicuous: it was not just her first opportunity for escape duringher captivity but also one of the more dramatic events of her Mo-88 Deeper fig.11.The Whipple party on the Colorado River near the Mohave Villages.Illustration by J.J.Young, based on a sketch by A.H.Campbell.have life.And if she wasn t hidden, she was in a situation where sheroamed freely with Mohaves of all ages, but never sought help fromany of the hundred odd whites in the area.Three years into their cap-tivity, with no knowledge that their brother had survived the Oat-man massacre, seventeen-year-old Olive and twelve-year-old MaryAnn had crossed the threshold of assimilation.Whipple s men continued surveying through the valley and evenvisited the Mohaves homes, respecting their requests not to tram-ple their fields along the river.Like Olive, Mollhausen noticed theircrops would have done better with an irrigation system, but he wasalso impressed by the wicker granaries, three to five feet wide, thatstood outside their houses, filled with corn, beans, and flour.WhereOlive had scolded the tribe for short-sightedness, Mollhausen praisedthem: This provident care for the future.I had never seen amongIndian tribes east of the Rocky Mountains. 16 They had also beenable to trade two-foot-wide pumpkins in February because of theirDeeper 89 practice of wrapping pumpkins and melons and burying them topreserve them.Standing on their low rooftops, the villagers watchedthe strangers pass then joined them in a train that extended a milebehind them.On the fifth day, Whipple and his men inflated an India rubberpontoon and made repeated attempts to ford the river.As they strug-gled, using a pulley system to transport their belongings to an is-land midway across, a third leader, Homoseh Quahote, arrived togreet them, preceded by a messenger, flanked by a page and an in-terpreter, and followed by what appeared to be a whole village car-rying baskets on their heads.A respected statesman who was oversix feet tall, he advanced ceremonially, wearing a blanket around hisshoulders and an elaborate black plumed headdress that fell nearlyto the ground.He too presented his credentials from Heintzelman,listened to Whipple s description of his expedition, and in a longand enthusiastic speech endorsed it.In all, Whipple would meet five leaders.On his last day in the val-ley, they came together to inform him they had not only held a na-tional council and approved mapping a road through their countrybut had also chosen a guide to show his men the best route to thePacific.It would be the third time the Mohave had helped strangersnavigate their trail after Smith, decades earlier, and Francisco Garces,nearly a century before.They asked Whipple to draw up papers cer-tifying the good treatment the Mohaves had given them, to presentto subsequent visitors.Furthermore, wrote Whipple, They wishedus to report favorably to our great chief, in order that he might sendmany more of his people to pass this way, and bring clothing andutensils to trade for the produce of their fields. When yet another round of trading was proposed, Whipple s menhad nothing left to barter. The Indians, he wrote, expressed nodisappointment, but wandered from fire to fire, laughing, joking,curious but not meddlesome; trying with capital imitative tongue tolearn our language, and to teach their own.Every day these In-90 Deeper dians have passed with us has been like a holiday fair, and never didpeople seem to enjoy such occasions more than the Mohaves havedone. 17In opening their valley to pathfinders and sharing their secret roadto the Pacific, the tribe clearly anticipated changes to come with noidea how devastating they would be.The Mohaves eagerness to tradewas a dark omen of a future that would leave them both bankruptand deracinated.Cairook, a subchief, and his friend, Irataba thetwo men appointed to lead Whipple to the Mohave Road wouldbe the last great leaders of the tribe.18 The pair s physical transfor-mation on the road out of the valley foretold their fate poetically:As Mollhausen observed: A striking and by no means advantageouschange had taken place in the appearance of these two since they hadleft home.When they joined us on the day of our departure from theColorado, their fine muscular naked forms were fully displayed; butnow their powerful limbs were hidden under such a heap of clothesand coverings, that they were scarcely recognizable. Wearing vir-tually everything their friends had given them before leaving, theynow look[ed] like wandering bundles of old clothes. 19After entering the Mohave valley, Mollhausen had asked, in hisdiary, How long will it now be before a reason is found or inventedfor beginning a war of extermination against the hitherto peacefulIndians of the valley of the Colorado? 20 Sooner than he had prob-ably imagined.Within five years, the only trace of the thriving, uni-fied nation Whipple and Mollhausen had met on the bank of theColorado would be footprints in the sand.Deeper 91 8 There Is a Happy Land, Far, Far Away I plainly saw that grief, or want of food, or both, were slowlyand inch by inch, enfeebling and wasting away Mary Ann. | olive oatmanThe Mohaves were famously ferocious warriors, but their conflictswere often instigated by war leaders who steamrolled the pacifistmajority of the tribe in their push to battle.They went to war fora variety of reasons: to exact revenge, to take prisoners, to protecttheir territory, but most often to enhance their nationalistic and spir-itual identities, which were intertwined
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