The Abduction of Lady Ellerbrook by Miriam Rochester

Sure enough, about 90 miles east of Yuma, on the banks of the Gila River, the family was waylaid by a group of Native Americans, likely Yavapais, who asked them for food and tobacco. And that’s how Royce, his wife Mary, and their seven children, aged 1 to 17, found themselves trekking through the most arid part of the Sonoran Desert on their own. The other families elected to stay in Maricopa Wells until they had recuperated enough to make the journey, but Royce Oatman chose to press on. To continue, it was made clear, was to risk one’s life. When the remaining dregs of the Oatman-led party approached Maricopa Wells, in modern-day Maricopa County, Arizona, they were warned not only that the southwestern trail ahead was barren and dangerous, but that the native tribes in the region were famously violent toward whites. The group of approximately 90 followers had left Independence, Missouri, in the summer of 1850, but when they arrived in the New Mexico Territory, the party split, with Brewster’s faction taking the route to Santa Fe and then south to Socorro, and Royce (sometimes spelled Roys) Oatman leading a group to Socorro and then over to Tucson.

Brewster-they’d been advised that California was, in fact, the true “intended gathering place” for Mormons, rather than Utah. As newly inducted Brewsterites-followers of Mormon rebel James C. In 1851, the Oatman family, having broken from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was traveling through southeastern California and western Arizona, looking for a place to settle. Through a series of strange tragedies (and some possible triumphs), a white Mormon teenager who was traveling with her family through the area in the mid-19 th century ended up sporting one too, a symbol of a complicated dual life she could never quite shake. About a century and a half ago, some Native American tribes of the Southwest used facial tattoos as spiritual rites of passage.

The Abduction of Lady Ellerbrook by Miriam Rochester