Legends of Texas

by Unknown

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.