Oatman, Arizona: A Name from Tragedy, a Town from Gold

The town is named for Olive Oatman, and her story precedes the town by half a century.

In eighteen fifty-one, a Yavapai raiding party attacked an emigrant wagon train on the Gila River trail and killed most of the Oatman family. Olive Oatman, then fourteen years old, and her younger sister Mary Ann were taken captive and eventually sold to a Mojave family, who adopted them into their community and gave Olive a traditional chin tattoo marking her status. Mary Ann died of starvation after several years. Olive lived with the Mojave for four years before being ransomed and returned to American society in eighteen fifty-six. Her subsequent book, published in eighteen fifty-seven and written with missionary Royal Stratton, became a national bestseller. The story made Olive Oatman one of the most recognized names in the American Southwest. When prospectors named a mining camp in the Black Mountains of northwestern Arizona in the early nineteen hundreds, they chose her name.

The camp earned its name through geology. In nineteen fifteen, rich ore bodies opened simultaneously at the Tom Reed mine and the United Eastern Mining Company's claim nearby, triggering one of the last large gold rushes in the American West. Within a few years Oatman had a population estimated in the thousands, with seven hotels, twenty bars, two banks, and a tent city surrounding a grid of new streets. The district eventually produced an estimated two million ounces of gold.

Then the gold played out. The mines closed in the early nineteen forties, and most of the population left almost as quickly as it had arrived. Route Sixty-Six ran through Oatman in those years, and the highway traffic kept a version of the town alive. When the highway was rerouted to bypass the twisting Black Mountains grade in nineteen fifty-three, even that traffic thinned.

What stayed were the burros. Miners had used pack animals throughout the district, and when operations ended, many were simply turned loose into the mountains. Their descendants still walk Oatman's main street today, accepting carrots from visitors, indifferent to the cars, apparently at home in a town their ancestors helped build.