Comments by "christine paris" (@christineparis5607) on "Olive Oatman: Life among the Mohave" video.

There is a book called captive, about two german settler brothers who were taken captive for several years, and when one was returned, he completely identified with the indians because he had been taken around 8 or 9 and went through his teen and young adult years with them, an extremely formative time. He was always very unhappy to go back to the thankless and constrained life of a farmer, and was considered an outsider by everyone around him, finally living most of the time in a cave outside of town until old age. I found this fascinating because I have family through marriage that lives in the exact area, and there are many stories passed down of indians trying to, or taking young children of all kinds. The tribe were not racially motivated, and healthy children were important to keep the tribes alive, so there were many Mexicans, black and european indians who intermarried with each other and considered themselves as indians. My mother is supposedly (we haven't gotten dna proof yet) half indian as a result of grandma falling for an indian at a reservation while her husband was working as a cowboy for a big ranch outside Dallas, Texas in the early 1920s. He was gone all the time, and I heard parts of this from grandma herself, who talked to me at length when I was a child about her best "friend" who was an indian. She obviously loved him and never got over it, as I heard about it many times, although she tried to disguise the identity of her friend. My mother DID always look like a central casting movie Indian all her life, she had black hair and eyes, was very tall and had high cheekbones and a hawk like nose. Everyone else was blond..... Back then, it would have been disastrous to have had a child in a relationship
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charly horse Some of the tribes dealt in slaves and also used captives to get ransom money...of course there were always kind as well as vicious personalities in every tribe, just like every other group of people... What I find hard to comprehend is the absolutely thankless, unforgiving nature of trying to settle the wild spaces opened to settlers, it was practically impossible in many ways. The fact that some, like the King Ranch family, were able to hang on, finds ways to overcome those odds and become the most powerful family in the state, always completely fascinates me. They were smart enough to hire the Mexican vaqueros, who passed on their invaluable knowledge of riding and roping to the white settlers. Without them, it couldn't have been done.
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@louiseskip3488 That poor boy is my brother in laws great great uncle or something...they are related and the family are still in Fredricksburg, Texas. I talked to his mom several times about it, she is in her 90s, and remembers her mom telling her that her grandfather was killed by indians when out plowing their fields. The kids ran and hid and got away, but some children were usually found and taken. People back then believed a great deal in eugenics, not understanding that the way a child is raised has the most bearing on their future behavior. Most people thought if you were raised a white, German Lutheran, that even if you were raised from babyhood to be an indian, you would immediately snap back to being a Lutheran the second you got back, and forget all about the 10 or 15 years of being completely immersed in the indian culture. It happened so often. Olive Oatman was another famous example of a young white girl taken by Indians who grew up, married a brave, had children and her lower face famously tattooed to show her as a wife, then was forcibly returned to the settlers and died a couple of years later, unable to adjust to losing her family and identity. It's very sad...
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