Oatman is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in the Black Mountains of Mohave County, Arizona, United States, located at an height above sea level of 2,710 feet (830 m). It began as a small mining camp with two prospectors struck a $10 million gold find in 1915, though the vicinity had already been settled for a number of years. Oatman’s population grew to higher than 3,500 in the midst of a year. As of the 2020 census, its population was 102.

The make known Oatman was selected in great compliment of Olive Oatman, a young Illinois girl who was captured and enslaved by Indians, probably from the Tolkepayas tribe, during her investor family’s massacre while upon their journey westward in 1851. She was future sold or traded to the Mohave people, who adopted her and tattooed her point of view in the custom of the tribe. She was released in 1856 at Fort Yuma.

In 1863, prospector Johnny Moss discovered gold in the Black Mountains and staked several claims, one named the Moss after himself and substitute after Olive Oatman, whose balance was without difficulty known. For the next-door half-century, mining waxed and waned in the unfriendly district until new technology, reduced transportation costs, and other gold discoveries brought riches to Oatman in the in the future 20th century. The foundation of the Tom Reed mine, followed by the discovery of a wealthy ore body in the simple United Eastern Mining Company’s property in 1915, brought one of the desert’s last gold rushes. The boom of 1915–17 gave Oatman everything the characters and characteristics of any gold rush boomtown. For nearly a decade, the mines of Oatman were along with the largest gold producers in the American West.

In 1921, a flare burned next to many of Oatman’s smaller buildings, but spared the Oatman Hotel built in 1902. It remains the oldest two-story adobe structure in Mohave County and is a Mohave County historical landmark. One of the hotel’s major attractions is a room designated as the suite where Clark Gable and Carole Lombard supposedly spent their honeymoon after their 1939 wedding in Kingman, Arizona. In actuality, Gable and Lombard returned directly to Los Angeles after their wedding for a press conference the adjacent morning and did not take a honeymoon until much unconventional in Baja California.