Thirty years ago, two hikers stumbled across the body while hiking in the US Alps. Authorities arrived, quickly evacuating the corpse by helicopter and taking it for forensic testing. It wasn't uncommon in these parts to lose mountaineers to the peaks, but when they unzipped the body bag, what the scientists saw was something different and something better than they could ever have hoped for. They christened the body Utsi, after
the mountain range where they found him. Outsie was a perfect specimen, having been safely cocooned in snow and ice for over four thousand years. Over time, those scientists would learn more about his final hours. Piecing together clues from the contents of his stomach, his weapons, and an arrowhead lodged in his back. It became evident that they had a murder mystery on their hands. But before you think this is just another true crime story, I want to
point you to something else that was also interesting. Ootsie, you see, was special for another reason. His skin was decorated with over sixty lines and crosses, largely concentrated on his spine, knees, and ankles, lying right there prone on their table, was the world's oldest tattooed mummy. For years, the Western world has been debating the merits of tattooing, but these days we know more than ever before, and the past is telling today. Our knowledge of tattooing history
stretches back to the fifth century BC. Tattooing has spanned the globe. In the case of the ancient Greeks, they were used to communicate spy messages, and the Maya, Inca and Aztec people's used them for rituals. The Norse and Saxon's tattooed their family crests during the Crusades across tattoo indicated the desire for a proper Catholic burial in the event of death. Tattoos were used as protective charms among ancient Egyptian women, and both as medicine and to mark
criminals in ancient China. But as the world expanded outward, conquering cultures began to view tattoos, usually the ones that were different from their own, as markers of barbarism and savagery. This sentiment would be an everlasting one, as indelible as inc history tells us that in fifteen sixty six, after a violent encounter with French sailors, A tattooed Inuit woman with her child were kidnapped and put on display throughout Western Europe. Surviving handbills tell the story of the murder
of her husband and her capture for audiences. Stories about this family devolved into tales of savagery and heathenism, an attempt to justify European expansion. Over the course of her captivity, this woman's body became a trophy of colonial desire. And you can guess what happened next. Audiences clamored for more of these human curiosities, and curiosities they got more. Captive Native Americans were brought to Europe for display against their will.
The Europeans used their hostages to spread strategic messages. They became living, breathing propaganda machines. There are indigenous identities were erased in favor of new stories that would serve the colonial agenda. There's nothing more human than wanting to tell the stories of our lives, and we do that in part through how we decorate ourselves. And sometimes, perhaps in the midst of transition or even an identity crisis, we find the opportunity to change, to doll ourselves up differently
and become someone totally new. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to the side show. Their caravan rolled westward, wagons pulling toward the sinking march sun Olive Oatman, along with her brothers and sisters and their parents, held onto the dream of a better life. In the rear view was the frontier town of Independence, Missouri. Independence lived up to its name, serving as a departure point, not just for the Oatman's
but for travelers and seekers of all kinds. The territory had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, which was the U. S government's acquisition of almost one million square miles of land that carved out the heart of North America. The area had traded hands from the French, giving the States the legal right to obtain indigenous lands by treaty or conquest. Adding salt to the wound, Congress had recently created the Indian Reservation System. They provided funds to relocate indigenous communities.
There was another step that the American government was taking towards systematic displacement and disenfranchisement of millions of Native peoples. The Oatman's, though hoped to find home in the Louisiana Territory. Manifest destiny was on their minds, and they had plenty of company. You see, the Oatman's were part of the Brewster Rights, a Mormon splinter sect that believed the Promised
Land layout in the Rio Grand Valley. They were all traveling together, and so they packed their wagons with salt, meat and hardtack, trunks of quilts, and the last of their few family mementos. Their wagon caravans snaked out of town and into a landscape whose rumors had filled their heads with visions of heaven and hell. The Brewster Rights took to the Santa Fe Trail, a nine mile track that cut through blistering hot deserts and jagged, rocky mountains.
They wouldn't be strangers to drought, lightning storms, or rattlesnakes. But here, seven months into their trip, and just eighty miles outside their final destination of Yuma, Arizona, their journey would come to a catastrophe end. The caravan wanted to stop, you see, but Olive's dad, Royce, wanted to push onward. The promised Land was just a few miles out of reach, So onward the Oatman's went breaking from the pack and
rolling ahead alone. And it's here, according to Olive's later retelling, that her family encountered members of the Java Pie tribe. After exchanging pleasantries that quickly grew unpleasant, the family tried to move on. A skirmish ensued, and the Oatmans were struck down in the carnage. One brother survived and found his way to the remaining Brewster rights, while Olive and her sister Mary disappeared alive as captives into the Arizona wilderness.
They were traded to the Mojave people, and it's with them that Olive and her sister would live and, according to their telling thrive. We know that Olive was given both a clan name and a nickname, She was dressed in traditional garments, and, as some scholars believe, was allowed to come and go as she pleased. We also know that within five years time, after a devastating famine and the death of her sister, she was rescued and brought back to fort Yuma, a post built for the protection
of trade routes. We can imagine that Olive's return was full of emotion for her, but also for the others there. White settlers had been perfecting the art of fearing this particular predicament for centuries. In fact, there's a whole genre of literature dedicated to these tales called captivity narratives. The first other group to receive this literary treatment in the
English language were Muslim pirates from North Africa. When European colonizers arrived in North America, they brought the archetype with them, With the earliest ones published in six two, the precedent for how to interface with the new world had been set. Olive's returned to her community of origin was striking beyond the fact that she was taken and survived because there was something else us. It appeared that she bore a mark that outlasted her challenge. Her face had been tattooed.
She now wore blue lines on her chin that ran down from her lips. They were also long, straight lines drawn on her arms. Olive's cactus thorn tattoos marked her integration into the tribe. They functioned as a visual means that expressed tribal affiliation, cultural pride, and personhood. They were marks of social organization and religion, and a visual umbilical cord connecting worlds seen and unseen, and most importantly, they
were voluntary. She wasn't immediately forthcoming about her time with the Mojave, but where her silence left space, the frontier megaphone was eager to fill it. In Contemporary accounts painted her time away to be years of torment. It was just too difficult for them to believe that she had become acculturated, marrying the son of the tribe's chief and starting her own family. But now back in her old world, she would forever be marked as an outsider, a savage,
a freak. In eighteen fifty seven, she was on tour after a local pastor wrote and published her biography. She needed to be palatable, because being palatable meant earning money. Pulling back her straight brown hair into a bun and wearing a plain dress, she was able to attract audiences that otherwise might be put off by women taking to the podium. Scholars still debate, though, as to what actually transpired over the course of those five years she was gone.
It's thought that Olive's sense of her own tattoos remained unclear throughout her life. As she grew older, she remarried, started anew and began veiling her face, But she was forever stuck between two worlds, never able to erase her identity. Olive Oatman was forever marked, an indelible stain upon her skin. But what those marks meant only she knew the truth. Any sailor worth their salt had heard about Martin Hildebrand, and any sailor worth more than fifty cents could be
tattooed by him. Martin, an old sea dog himself, was the proprietor of not just the first tattoo shop in New York City, but the first in the entire nation. On the walls of his tavern turned studio hung ready made art, poised for the chance to leap from the page and onto a lucky body. These designs were his biggest money makers. He dealt in crucifixes and Ballerina's, Masonic emblems and odd Fellow signs. His most popular, though, was a curvy young woman laying across the top of a
mausoleum with a sleeping willow. By eight, Martin and his tattooing partner had completed an ambitious project, a full body suit on a local jeweler named Harry Decorsi. They aimed to rival, a man who went by the title the Tattooed Greek, a protege of P. T. Barnum's, He too was covered from head to foot, and purportedly the first person to do so for the sake of the stage. So, with his new look and a new name, the Tattooed Albanian Harry Dicorci took the stage at George Bourbonnell's Dime Museum.
But these two men soon had copycats. They wouldn't be the first men, nor certainly the last to get tattooed to earn a profit. In fact, their performances soon lost their cutting edge. However, two new acts soon appeared on the stage, ones that would stir up both reactions and money. Irene Woodward and Norah Hildebrand, the two first and most
famous tattooed ladies of their day. Irene was billed as the first, the one, the only, and appeared on stage at George's Dime Museum on March twenty first of eighteen eighty two. It's here that she took to the stage in a venue not unlike Barnum's American Museum. In fact, many of the same folks orbited through the two venues together. She draped herself in velvet, silk and lace, and was sold,
on George's words as a vision of punctured purity. Irene was a thrilling provocateur who gave audiences a glimpse of flesh the likes of which they had never seen before. It was bare, it was colorful, and it belonged to a lady. To audiences, this calculus was both ironic and enchanting, and it didn't take a language whiz to understand the innuendo. It was rumored that Martin had a hand in Irene's making,
but this has never been confirmed. What history does tell us, though, is that a woman with his last name soon appeared on stage, a manufactured rival to Irene. A woman by the name of Nora killed a brand. Whether this was a common law marriage, they were siblings, or they had no relationship beyond tattoo artist and customer is a truth that's been lost to history, but the association of the
last name undoubtedly helped. She too, secured a contract at the Dime Museum and appeared shortly after Irene, as the story went. Nora was born in Australia in eighteen sixty and left for private school in New York as a teenager. It's here that she would meet her estranged father, a sailor and tattooist. They took off west to Utah, and once they're settled up on horseback for the final leg
of their journey. While traveling, it said that they encountered and I quote, red skinned devils and even Sitting Bull himself. They were taken captive, with Norah's father sentenced to burn at the stake and Norah herself to be the chief's concubine. But there was a twist. The promotional materials claimed that as Norah's father was being tied to the stake, his captors noticed his tattoos. With a change of heart, Sitting Bull promised Norah's father his freedom if he would tattoo
his warriors. But when those warriors objected, Sitting Bull was said to have changed his mind and ordered the father to tattoo Nora from head to toe. She was bound tied to a tree, and it said that he worked six hours a day for a year, resulting in three hundred sixty five designs across his daughter's body. And of course something had to give in a fit of madness. Norah's father broke his needles, and with that he was
promptly sanctioned and burned at the stake. It said that in the aftermath, Nora was rescued and taken to Denver to recuperate. It's here in the hospital, blinded by pain, that famed side show manager W. K. Leary discovered her. He paid the bill for her trip back to New York, where she now miraculously cured from the whole ordeal took two stages throughout North America and Europe. But of course
this was all just a story. These colorful women were prime examples of the working class struggle to escape poverty, and were more successful than many women of their time. But you see the idea and the truth of young domestic servants trying to eke out another stream of income falls short on intrigue. Tattooed ladies, not just Irene and Nora, were exactly that. To this end, the tattooed lady represented
herself as a victim for profit. Many of these women toured with stories of their captivity, torture, and forced tattooing, whether or not rural audiences believed that. And again I quote savages captured and tattooed these women. They were willing to indulge this attractive narrative hook, especially if she was going to show them a bit of skin and regale visitors with impolite tales of torture that she was forced
to submit to. You see, the transgressions of a white woman's purity couldn't be explicitly mentioned, so it was implied in the captivity narratives of the tattooed ladies. Words like vile lation and in dignity implied assault. Anything more than an implication and innuendo, well, that was considered pornographic. The sideshow had long hit on and capitalized on a nineteenth century truth, sex cells, and honestly, it's amazing how tattooed ladies were able to subvert the social limits imposed on
them by pretending to comply. They went along with the damsel in distress backstories, if only to hide their self determined and remarkably autonomous ways of moving throughout the world. They were making choices for themselves, rather than relying on parents, husbands, or brothers to make those decisions for them. Polite society was far more comfortable with tales of violation and victimhood, and far less comfortable with the idea that young working
class women could determine their own future. And in the end what they did was powerful in its simplicity. They changed their lives and charmed their audiences with just a few courts of ink and some stories to tell. The nineteen o four St. Louis World's Fair was a beacon of hope, welcoming visitors into the new century. At the Palace of Electricity, visitors saw the first X ray machines
and displays of babies and incubators. The fair promised Americans that the future was here and that there were limitless possibilities and innovation. Just ahead of the thousands of people to walk the grounds, two kindred spirits managed to find each other in the crowd, Maud Stevens, an aerial artist from Kansas, and Gus Wagner, a tattoo artist from Ohio. Maud agreed to date Gus as long as he held up his end of the bargain. He had to both tattoo her and allow her to apprentice him, and he did,
unveiling yet another tattooed lady. The same year that saw the formation of a new social group, an organization called I Kid You Not, the American Society for Keeping Women in her Proper Sphere. And with that Maud became the first known female artist in the United States, inking the bodies of rapscallions, and gentle women alike, both on the outside and within the confines of the sideshow walls. But
soon the market began to shift. You see, the tattoo gun had been patented a few years before her time, allowing the average consumer to ink and be inked. Tattooed men and women were becoming more common, and when an act is a dime a dozen, demand for it drops. But still the sideshow had an undeniable gravitational pull. It attracted folks who weren't able to find work elsewhere because of their physical limitations, but also those with remarkable talent.
And as you've seen by how it dealt in both trafficked people and autonomous actors all at the same time. Together those folks work side by side in a social stew unlike anything the world had seen before. One of the last tattooed women was a gal by the name of Anna May Burlington. As she tells her story, she and her sister went to see a traveling side show
in Wisconsin. Being too poor to escape her small town, she accepted an invitation from a worker name Red Gibbons to become a tattooed lady and join him in traveling the world. So she did just that. She quite literally ran away to join the circus. Between nineteen twelve and nineteen nineteen, read tattooed Anna's entire body. A lifelong member of the Episcopal Church, her full color artwork suited her faith.
She even had a portrait of George Washington to show just how patriotic she was and to suit the times she changed her story. Gone were the days of captivity. Narratives would had fallen out of style in the wake of an industrialized America. In its place was another idea, that of maternal impression. Audiences frequently asked Anna how she came to look as she did. Was she borne that way? And she would tease them with a nod. She claimed that her mother had watched too many monster movies in
her day. It soon became common practice for hospitals to quarantine patients with tattoos for fear of disease. Some cities banned tattooing altogether for fear of spreading both cancer and criminality. It seems that tattoos were still considered unfit for a civilized people, and thus still dangerous and even erotic in their allure. But for Anna, tattoos were her livelihood. For her entire career. She could be seen walking carnival grounds and riding circus trains wearing a full length cape, and
she did this for decades. She traveled with sideshows and circuses and exhibited herself in museums. But as the years wore on into the nineteen sixties, everything began to change. The world was becoming smaller, ideas about bodies were changing, and Anna was aging. It's a fear that most women face, and the reason that I creams have such a stranglehold
on society, the terror of becoming invisible with age. But for a woman like Anna, who spent her career on the road, and who had provided for her husband and raised a family, she and her tattoos weren't about to fade quietly. As she grew older. The world Anna found herself in was not the same one she had bargained for. No longer did folks have to pay cash to go see freaks. They can now just turn on their television
sets or go to the movies. There were no long lines or bustling crowds to elbow through for a chance to suspend their disbelief. The circus parades stopped and audiences got smaller. More working opportunities were also opening up for folks with disabilities. The side show hit its lowest level of popularity in the nineteen forties and fifties, but by the nineteen sixties they were back, and Anna was back too, and this time she was billed as the tattooed grandmother.
As the story goes, she was working a side show in Dallas when one of the last performers of the night called in sick Jack Woods. The sideshow lecturer recommended that Anna step up to close out the show, but the manager didn't think that she would be a good fit due to her advanced age. Jack, determined to save the show, got to work. He stepped out to the audience and gave Anna an intro that he would never
live down. He called her the strangest of them all, far stranger than anything here on stage, because she's a human oddity who was not born a freak. She was introduced as a man and made monstrosity with a husband who had been so jealous of her that he disfigured her body with permanent markings. The side show manager was satisfied with this. Anna, however, was not picture this a slight elderly woman giving a word whipping to a fellow man decades her jr. Anna was livid, and she let
Jack have it. He was told to never call her a monstrosity again. Suffice to say, the act was successful. This story was successful, so Anna kept performing, and from that night on, unbeknownst to her, Jack kept telling his tall tale. He was just careful to keep the volume a bit lower so that Anna, one of the oldest and most successful tattooed ladies in the world, couldn't hear him. In a world where many of us take tattoos for granted, it's amazing what sorts of tales they paint for us.
From captivity narratives to independent women, there has been so much more on display than just a bit of ink. And I hope today's journey has helped you see that. But we're not done just yet. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear one more tale about the side show and maybe find a bit of artistic inspiration along the way. For the going price of seventeen dollars and fifty cents per foot, Dr Fred Foster Bloodgood sourced
all kinds of snakes. They were central to his act, after all, one in which he pitted these animals against human opponents, drawing blood drew audiences, and the average casualty rate for the snakes didn't bode well for blood Goods slippery acquisitions. For a decade, blood Good worked the carnival circuit, shouting from the Bally platform and offering audiences a taste
of the grotesque. In his words, he offered one of the most disgusting, one of the most repulsive, yet one of the most interesting attractions ever conceived by the mind of mortal man blood Good, who, as you have probably guessed correctly at this point, was certainly no doctor, would step onto the platform in a lab coat, and then
his act would go something like this. He would tell his audiences the story of Niola, a woman from the African continent who was brought here during the Scopes Monkey Trial. Of As the story went, she was discovered by scientists living in a cave of snakes replicated here in front of blood Good as a pit. Niola, who was actually a man wearing a long wig, would then face off against these reptiles, allowing them to rattle, to bite, and to draw blood. The act crescendo would come when Niola
would pick up one of the larger snakes. She would then place its head between her teeth, bite it off, and then proceed, according to blood Good, to skin it like a banana and devour the rest. Naturally, audiences were horrified and probably terribly pleased to be getting their money's worth.
The world of made freaks like folks performing in blood Good snake Pit was simple and its execution, though complicated in its design, what he was serving up was a departure from the conjoined Hilton sisters or the little tom Thumbs of the world. But to understand this, we have to understand the social hierarchy among sideshow performers. Born freaks reigned supreme on the sideshow circuit, commanding top dollar and top billing. Blood Good himself dealt with able bodied outsiders
through decoration, performance, and sometimes assuming a new identity. They would learn a trade and hitch their success to the traveling sideshow trains the scholars up though on made freaks is just much thinner. They were considered to be less valuable with the least sideshow cultural cachet, and they could often move between worlds as they pleased. They were easily replaceable because their acts were largely theatrical and at the bottom most wrong of the side show laddered. The lowest
of the made freaks were the geeks. The word finds its origin in the German word ghek, meaning fool. Maybe today the label conjures up images of calculators and pocket protectors and algebra class but the original geeks were otherwise normal looking folks exhibiting abnormal behaviors like lighting the heads off of snakes. So while audiences could point, stare, and even laugh at performers with bodies different than there's, the geek school was to strike fear into the audience through
overt action and through subversive suggestion. Absent of all physical markers, geeks appeared to be the pinnacle of normalcy, perhaps someone you'd otherwise find working as a mailman or a bank teller. In this way, these performers confronted those looking at them with a very uncomfortable idea. Perhaps the audience members were more like the freaks than they cared to admit. Side show was written by Robin Minat with narration by me
Aaron Mankey. Research for the series was by Robin Minator, Taylor Haggard Dorn, and Sam Alberty, with production assistants from Josh Than, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. Grim and Mile Presents was created in partnership with I Heart Radio. You can learn more about this show and everything else from Grim and mild Over at Grim and mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.