AN INDIAN LEGEND OF THE BLUE BONNET
By Mrs. Bruce Reid
[Considering the popularity of Texas blue bonnets, it is rather strange that legend concerning the flower is not more widespread. Corroborative versions prove conclusively that there is a legend. The first version is supplied by Mrs. Mattie Austin Hatcher, of the University of Texas; it was given her by a Mrs. Lida Lea of Austin.
When the first Spanish missionaries came to the Southwest, they brought with them the seeds of a blue flower which grew originally on the hillsides of Jerusalem. They planted the seeds first within the walls of the mission gardens; they sprouted, and, though the soil was alien, the flowers grew and bloomed and soon spread far beyond the mission lands. Thus came the blue bonnet to Texas.
Another version of the legend was given to Mrs. Hatcher by a Mexican lady from the City of Mexico. She said that she had always heard that the flower came to the Southwest in this manner: There was a terrible pestilence in the land of the Aztecs. The prayers of the priests and the pleadings of the people had brought no relief. At length the voice of the god to whom they prayed proclaimed that a living sacrifice of some sinless human being must be made to atone for the wickedness of the people. A certain Aztec maiden offered to make the sacrifice. Her offer was accepted. When she went up to the altar on the hillside, her little bonnet dropped from her head without being noticed, and the next morning the ground around the altar was covered with flowers in the pattern and color of her bonnet, each splotched with the hue of her spilt blood. The pestilence passed. Now the Mexicans call the flower el conejo (cotton-tail rabbit), but in Texas it is the blue bonnet.
This legend is very characteristic of the Southwest. Mr. J. H. Tipps of San Antonio saw a cross high on a hill near Roma, Texas. He asked an old Mexican why it was there. The Mexican said that it was to commemorate the life of a girl who had saved the community by prayer. A terrible drouth was ruining the country, the most terrible ever known. There was not a sprig of forage for animal kind to eat; the people were starving. Then the girl went up on the mountain to pray for rain. For a long, long time she prayed. She prayed until she was no longer conscious. Then it rained, but the girl died before she could be brought down. She gave her life, and the cross was erected on top of her Mount of Olives.
Comparative folk-lorists will associate the springing of the blue bonnet from human blood with the Greek legends of the hyacinth and the narcissus. It is related, too, to the legend of the bleeding heart shamrock, said to have first appeared in Saint Roche’s Cemetery at New Orleans, from the blood spattered on some clover by a lover who stabbed himself to death over the grave of his sweetheart.
The legend told by Mrs. Reid must have come from the Comanches rather than from the Cherokees (who did, however, bring with them to Texas the legend of the Cherokee Rose). The Cherokees were in Texas only twenty [[198]]years, and then hardly into the blue bonnet lands. See “The Last of the Cherokees in Texas,” by Albert Woldert, Chronicles of Oklahoma, issued by the Oklahoma Historical Society, June, 1923, pp. 179–226.—Editor.]
The teller of legends often adds details to his narrative in order to give it reality. I do not pretend that all of the details in the following legend are as I heard them, but something like this legend was told me by the late “Jack” Mitchell, whose people lived for fifty years among the Indians of the piney-woods and cross-timbers of Texas. My understanding is that the legend came to him either from the Cherokees or the Comanches. There is another Indian legend about the blue bonnet. It has to do with a fight among warriors in the happy hunting grounds, during the course of which they knocked from the sky chunks of blue that fell to the earth and assumed the form of the blue bonnet.
There had been a great flood followed by a greater drouth, and then on the drouth came a bitter winter of sleet and ice. Even in the far south, where the cold breath of winter is seldom felt, the woods and grasses of the coastal plains were sheathed with a rattling icy armor. All the game was dead or gone. The Indian people were starving to death. A dreadful disease had broken out among them. It was clear that the Great Spirit had indeed turned his face away from his children. Day and night the medicine men chanted their incantations, danced to the music of the sacred tomtoms, and mutilated their bodies in agony for a promise from the angered Spirit. At last the Great Spirit spoke. This was his message. In penance for the wrong-doing that had brought the evils upon the tribe there must be a burnt offering of its most valued possession, and the ashes of this offering must be scattered to the east and to the west, to the north and to the south.
Now among those who sat in discreet and becoming silence, beyond the anxious warriors gathered about the fires, was a little maid, too young for the heavy burdens of Indian womanhood to have yet begun to fall upon her small shoulders. Hidden among the folds of her scanty garments she tightly clasped a tiny figure of white fawn-skin, rudely shaped into the likeness of a papoose, with long braids of black horse-hair, and eyes, nose, and mouth painted on it with the juice of various berries. This figure the little maid had robed in a skirt, mantle, and high head-dress, out of the feathers of a bird of the rarest of hues in nature—the big, proudly crested, black-collared bird that calls “Jay! Jay!” through the topmost branches of the tallest and largest trees. Very, very [[199]]beautiful were the feathers of this bird, soft, richly blue as the late afternoon skies when they clear after showers which have lasted through a day; and as an older mother loves her living child, so did the little maid love her deer-skin baby. Almost would she rather have died than have parted with it. Well she knew that it was by far the most precious of things owned by the tribe; and her heart was very heavy indeed for the rest of that day, and the part of a night that she lay beside her mother in their tepee, sleepless for that she saw her duty so clearly.
At last she arose, and stooping to lift from the smouldering fire within the tepee a bit of wood, one end of which was a glowing coal, she slipped out into the night. Under the twinkling, frosty stars she knelt, and prayed that her offering might be accepted and the fact of the acceptance made known to her.
Then blinking her eyes to keep back the tears, which an Indian child early learns must never be shed, she made a fire of twigs and grasses, and thrust her beloved papoose deep down into the glowing heart of the blaze, till the last bit of skin and shred of feather were consumed to ashes. The ashes she carefully scooped up in the hollow of her hand and scattered, to the east and the west, to the north and the south. Then putting out what remained of the fire, she patted the earth smooth and flat again.
As she did this last she felt beneath her palms something as fine and soft as the plumage with which she had clothed her doll—something that had not been in that place upon the ground when she cleared it to make her little fire. Believing that this might be the sign for which she had prayed, she would have picked up what lay against her hand, but she found it to be rooted in the soil.
So, returning to the tepee, she waited until morning and then with her mother, whom she told of what she had done, she went to the place where she had burned the little deer-skin papoose. But all about, as far as the ashes had traveled upon the early spring night breeze, was nothing but a blanket of such flowers as had never before enriched the landscape; and their thick tassels, in so great a profusion as nearly to hide the tender green of their leaves, were of the same deep, deep blue as the feathers of the bird that calls “Jay! Jay!” through the high tree-tops.
When the chief of the medicine men heard the story told by the mother and daughter, and saw for himself the expanse of blue flowers, he called the tribe together, and solemnly informed them that the command of the Great Spirit had been obeyed and [[200]]the sacrifice accepted, and that the evil which had for so long pursued them would now be at an end.
It was even so. At once the plains and the open places, between lines and clumps of trees, began to renew their verdure, scattered over with gayly colored wild flowers; the birds and four-footed things came back to raise their families; and the tribal crops, natural and cultivated, gave every sign of abundant harvest.
In place of the name the little maid had borne, another was given her, a name of many musically flowing syllables, the meaning of which, in the red men’s tongue, was “she who dearly loves her people.”
Because the great shaggy animals, whose herds of old thundered across the far-flung prairies, were so fond of its succulent green abundance, the blue flower was called an Indian name which the pale-faces translated into “buffalo clover.” After the manner of its class of plant, it bore prodigious quantities of fertile seed and rapidly extended the limits of its growth.
HOW THE WATER LILIES CAME IN THE SAN MARCOS RIVER[1]
By Bella French Swisher
[This sentimental legend is not an invention of Bella French Swisher’s, who was given to turning legends to literary uses, but not to manufacturing them. I have heard of it from a lady who grew up on the San Marcos and was familiar with the story of the Indian lovers forty-five years ago. It is akin to another Indian legend of the same flower, Castalia elegans, according to which a star maiden fell in love with the red people of the earth and came down to live among them in the form of a water lily. This latter legend is quoted from the Grolier Society’s The Book of Knowledge, by Kate Peel Anderson in the Houston Chronicle, September 16, 1923, page 8. The San Marcos version is probably appropriated from some other stream.—Editor.] [[201]]
All pearly and bright, by the day and the night,
(Beautiful, beautiful river)
Reflecting the sky and the clouds passing by,
Flows the San Marcos forever.
The lilies arise in their damp paradise,
And they open their petals in glory;
But on every leaf is written, in brief,
Such a sweet little Indian story!
Far back in a day when the red men held sway,
On the banks of the beautiful river,
An Indian maid of the world grew afraid,
And gave back her sweet life to the Giver.
A princess was she of a royal degree.
Who had loved far beneath her high station;
She suffered the blame, the sorrow and shame,
Like a maid of some wealthier nation.
But her heart-strings were torn, when one bright April morn,
He was slain—her most worshipful lover.
On the green banks he lay, all the long, weary day,
With only the sky for a cover.
But just at the night, when the star-beams were bright,
Her despair gave her power to sever
The terrible bands, that imprisoned her hands,
And she fled to the banks of the river,
To the spot where he lay ’mid the shadows so gray,
Colder still than the bright pearly water.
Just a prayer and a breath, and they met there in death,
The slain lover and the chieftain’s mad daughter.
But the breath and the prayer, as a seedling fell there,
Though the waters were ever so chilly.
They discovered her not, but morn found on the spot
Where she died, a white water-lily.
Since then, waxen and white, in the sun’s golden light,
And as well in the evening glooming,
May ever be seen, ’mid their foliage green
In the water, the white lilies blooming.
And e’er since that day, tradition doth say,
Have the Indians shunned the fair river;
Though pearly and bright, by day and by night,
Flows the San Marcos forever.
[1] Reprinted from The American Sketch Book (Texas Pioneer Magazine), Vol. I (Vol. IV), 1879, p. 146; “republished by request” in Vol. II (Vol. V), 1880, pp. 91–92. [↑]