Reprinted from the Morning Star, Houston, 1839
[The following legend (reference to which was contributed by Mr. E. W. Winkler, Librarian of the University of Texas) is taken from the first daily newspaper of Texas, the Morning Star, Houston, June 13, 1839, Vol. I, No. 56, pp. 2–3, which in turn reprinted it from the Richmond Telescope. A week after the Morning Star printed the legend, the Telegraph and Texas Register reprinted it, June 19, 1839. A few typographical errors have been corrected in this reprinting and some of the original punctuation has been [[202]]redistributed. The legend of how Eagle Lake got its name has persisted down to the present day, but this version is probably the oldest that we shall ever find.
A version with many changes was published in The American Sketch Book (Texas Pioneer Magazine), Austin, Vol. VII, No. 2 (1881), pp. 99–102. The article in which it is embodied is unsigned, but the legend itself is said to be “fresh from the pen of Mrs. F. Darden” [Mrs. F. A. D. Darden], and it is apparently quoted from some other publication. According to this version, one of the lovers, Sonoto, was old and fierce; the other, Gray Cloud, was youthful and bold. The tree that the rivals climbed was a cottonwood. Gray Cloud reached the nest first and had grasped one of the eaglets to bring it down when he was assaulted by the fierce parent eagle. Sonoto seized the opportunity to hurl his opponent to the ground a hundred feet below. Out in the lake were the Indians, watching the contest from their canoes. When she saw her lover’s fate, the maiden, Forest Flower, began the death chant; then she leaped into the water and was drowned. Later the two lovers were buried side by side at the foot of the tree.
The Eagle Lake Headlight, according to its editor, Mr. Bruce W. McCarty, printed in 1903 a version of the legend written by Mrs. Emma Duke, now dead. A year ago another version, in verse form, “written for the Eagle Lake Chamber of Commerce” by Mrs. H. W. Carothers, formerly of Eagle Lake but now of Houston, and printed on a folio leaflet for popular distribution, was sent me by the mayor of Eagle Lake. It shows all the crassitude of modern “boosting.” In it a smug young Indian gets the eaglet and presents it to the maiden—his success an emblem of “the spirit of endeavor” that characterizes the modern “progressive” inhabitants of Eagle Lake! Mr. Louis Landa, who is Oldright fellow at the University of Texas and whose home is at Eagle Lake, says that the legend in one form or another is common in the vicinity.
Thus may be traced over a period of almost a century the progress of what was originally a very simple, a very dramatic, and a beautiful legend.—Editor.]
Eagle Lake is a beautiful sheet of water, about seven miles in circumference, and is connected by a bayou bearing the same name—a kind of outlet—with the Colorado. That body of land through which Eagle Lake Bayou passes may be said to be without exceptions the most fertile in the world. Besides its qualities of unsurpassed fruitfulness, there is no part of the known western hemisphere where the common grape grows so abundantly or abounds so spontaneously.
A large sycamore tree is shown on the west shore of the lake, where a large eagle, the Falco Washingtonianis, built her nest. The remains of the nest are there, consisting of branches of trees and tufts of grass, which hang fully 110 feet from the surface of the earth below. The bird was called by the inhabitants of the country the king eagle, and its nest was considered inaccessible. [[203]]The “king eagle’s nest” and “eagle’s water’s wave” were proverbial phrases with the various tribes of Indians in western Texas.
The daughter of an Indian chief—a beautiful, dark-eyed girl—was wooed by two young warriors of equal pretensions to consideration among the Indians. Each was anxious to obtain the hand of the fawn-like damsel of the woods, and each, no doubt, loved with all the ardor and fervency, simplicity and sincerity, of a rude youth of the forest. To say which should become the husband of his daughter was a great perplexity to the mind of the maiden’s father. He had his political interests to strengthen and his views to carry out, as have greater men in greater nations. After many cogitations he resolved upon the following plan by which the suitors themselves could give a decision.
It was in the summer season, and the “great eagle” had hatched her young. The old chief’s plan was no more nor less than that the young man of the two in question who could bring him the young eagles alive, by a certain time, without cutting down the tree, should have his daughter. The proposition was accepted, and the rival lovers set out to procure, if possible, the young eagles. Each prepared himself with a raw-hide rope to throw over some limb of the tree, which could be fastened and facilitate the ascent. They both arrived alone and about the same time at the king eagle’s tree.
Each had precisely the other’s means to come at the young eagles, and the other’s means seemed to each so sure to succeed that neither would consent for the other to make the first attempt; whereupon arose a dispute, a quarrel, and a fight, which terminated in the immediate death of one, and the infliction of a mortal wound upon the other, who died a few days after the combat upon the spot where they had fought, being unable from debility to leave it.