More interesting than Bass’s rather pretentious monument is that of his comrade, Seaborn Barnes, who sleeps the long sleep by his side. A rough sandstone stands at the head of this grave. It has been chipped away until the name is gone. The inscription, however, remains along with the date of his death. Were there [[230]]no legend of Sam Bass in Texas, this inscription would make one. It is written in language Bass would have loved; it has a certain impertinence to law abiding people in the nearby graves, a certain pride in the leader at whose heels Barnes died. The epitaph contains seven words. The spirit of the person who wrote the seven words of that epitaph is the spirit that has created the legend of Sam Bass in Texas.
He Was Right Bower to Sam Bass
THE HORN WORSHIPERS
By L. D. Bertillion
[From an ethnological point of view, the legend, or more properly myth, of “The Horn Worshipers” is the most interesting in this collection of legends. None of the scholars at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Society held in New York, December, 1923, knew any parallel for it among the aborigines of America.
However, horns have been significant among many primitive peoples. Many of the Plains Indians of America, notably the Sioux, wore buffalo horns, and if I mistake not the totem of one tribe was a head of buffalo horns. However, the buffalo horn was to the Plains Indian merely a symbol of the power that he admired, an emblem of the animal that he was so far dependent on for food and shelter. In the Asia Magazine for December, 1922, is a picture of a pair of ox-horns fastened over the entrance to a village near Rodosto, Turkey. The horns so fastened are said to bring good luck to those who pass under them.
The medicinal properties ascribed to horns among primitive peoples have a corollary interest here. In a letter accompanying his legend of “The Horn Worshipers,” Mr. Bertillion says: “As late as ten years ago I bought a beautiful pair of buck horns, several points of which I had to sharpen because they had been sawed off a half inch or more for the purpose of curing some disease, which, to the best of my memory, was measles, the cure being a dose of pulverized horn, about a teaspoonful.”
In the same letter, Mr. Bertillion encloses a clipping from a syndicated article appearing in the McKinney, Texas, Examiner, November 9, 1922, which tells of an Indian rhinoceros horn presented to Pope Gregory XIV in 1590 as a protection against poisoning. According to the article, “The horn given to the pope by the prior and brothers of the monastery of St. Mary of Guadalupe in Spain, was credited with sweating in the presence of poison, by the way of warning, and if powdered and taken internally, with acting as an antidote. The tip is missing. It was cut off in 1591 and administered to the pope in his last illness.”
I myself recall as a pioneer remedy for distemper in horses, the smoke of burning horn-chips and rags, funneled through a horn up the horse’s nostrils. The Mexicans sometimes used the same remedy for colds. [[231]]