Even those who aren't familiar with the name "Olive Oatman" are undoubtedly familiar with her photo.
The young, dark-haired girl with the solemn expression and distinctive chin tattoo has become synonymous with the hardships faced by the pioneers who set out as a part of America's Westward Expansion, a mass migration that helped shape the middle of the 19th century.
Even as thousands of intrepid settlers made their way across the Midwestern plains on the Oregon Trail, groups of Mormon pilgrims headed to another destination: Salt Lake City.
And still others headed deep into the southwestern deserts for reasons that were entirely their own — and that is where the Oatman family was going when they were waylaid at the place now memorialized with a single, plain sign that reminds travellers what happened there: the Oatman Massacre.
The teenage Olive survived the attack that killed most of her family, and experienced a life that few lived to tell of.
She's most famous for her time spent among the Native American tribes of the American southwest, but her story begins much earlier than that: with visions, prophecy, and religious fervor.
Emigrants who packed up everything and left the relative comfort of the East Coast for the wild landscape of the West did so for all kinds of reasons.
Some were just out for adventure, and some, well, it wasn't so much about where they were going but what they wanted to leave behind.
For the Oatman family, their foray into the Western frontier began with the revelations of a prophet.
Roys Oatman and his wife, Mary Ann, had seven children between 1834 and 1849.
