Christina Vaughan is a writer and retired book editor. She was born in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, and spent her first year in the Vaughan family home on Grandview. When she was a year old, her parents bought a ranch in the Pershing area near Pawhuska. When she was six, her father, George Clay Vaughan, took a job with Cities Service Oil Company and the family moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which became Christina’s home town. She left Oklahoma to move to San Francisco when she was twenty-one.
In college she studied foreign languages, creative writing, music, ancient history, and anthropology. She has always been fascinated by ancient cultures and civilizations, as well as the evolution of languages. Her interest began in Pawhuska. Her father’s best friends and ranch hands were Osages. The Vaughan family had a close relationship with the Osages ever since her grandfather, W.W. Vaughan and his wife, Rosa Belle, moved to Pawhuska in 1920. He was an attorney helping Osages get free of their government imposed guardianships, and her grandmother, who graduated from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, was the town piano teacher. Many of her students were young Osage girls. W. W. Vaughan was murdered for his role in trying to bring killers of Osages to justice, covered by David Grann in his book Killers of the Flower Moon.
Christina loved to dance, and accompanied her parents to the Osage Dances. The flickering campfire, the colorful blankets, the jingling of the leg bands of bells worn by the men, the fancy dance Ponca Dancers with their feathered headdresses and costumes, the rhythm of the drums and the mysterious chanting, all thrilled her. Even after they moved to Bartlesville, they sometimes attended the dances.
Christina’s mother, Melanie Constance Papajohn Vaughan, nicknamed Connie, had a Greek father and a Belgian mother, who met in San Francisco after emigrating from their respective homelands. When Connie was bedridden for a while after the birth of Christina’s younger brother, she hired Marjorie temporarily to look after the children. Marjorie was a black woman who belonged to a Pentecostal church. When Christina was around three or four, Marjorie took her to church one Sunday. There was dancing in the aisles, with clapping, and wild singing. She loved it. She could jump up and down and dance instead of having to sit quietly in a pew.
While in elementary school Christina discovered her mother’s stacks of National Geographic Magazines dating back to 1922 and looked through them all, searching for and reading articles of interest, and continued reading the new issues that came in the mail.
From Aztec costume coloring books to books in the library as she grew, Christina investigated Aztec, Greek, and Roman civilizations. She was intensely interested in the evolution and cultural growth of our species. In the 1960s there were no archaeology classes at OSU, but she was able to take an ancient history course.
She continued delving into ancient history while working in San Francisco. She married, had a son, eventually divorced and went back to college. Later she became Senior Editor at a small publishing company and wrote many books of her own. She married again and in 2020 they moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, where the mammoth hunters in Oklahoma were magically revealed.