Legends of Texas

by Unknown

The underground palace of this legend of “The Horn Worshipers” is a feature common to the lore of many peoples. “The Aztecs,” says Lewis Spence,[1] “believed that the first men emerged from a palace known as Chicomoztoc (The Seven Caverns), located north of Mexico. Various writers have seen in these mystic recesses the fabulous ‘seven cities of Cibola’ and the Casas Grandes, ruins of extensive character in the valley of the River Gila, and so forth.”[2] Then Spence adds a comment on the number seven pertinent also to the legend of “The Horn Worshipers”: “The allusion to the magical number seven in the myth demonstrates that the entire story is purely imaginary and possesses no basis of fact.”

The legend of the underground palace has various forms even in Texas. There are rumors of an underground palace near Leander in Williamson County and of another on the Blanco River. Some such story is connected with the Devil’s Cave on the Devil’s River; with a vast underground passage that workmen are said to have discovered while excavating for the foundation of the second Austin dam; and with the Carlsbad Mammoth Cave, located on the Texas-New Mexico line in the Guadalupe Mountains.

Mr. Bertillion says that he knows a man who claims to have discovered about fifteen years ago a great house within a mountain in West Texas, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet below the surface. This man was out with a surveyor. Searching for a place to set up the flagpole, he discovered a small hole in a rock, “not larger than an ordinary apple.” Secretly, he flashed sunlight into the hole by means of a pocket mirror, and down in a great cave he beheld a wonderful edifice. The details he has kept secret, for he intends to return to the place some day and make his fortune.

Back in the sixties, according to his own account, a Mexican living in Fort Stockton (1911) was carrying the mail between Fort Davis and El Paso. On one trip a band of Indians led by some renegade Mexicans confiscated his mail and express, burned the mail coach, and took him and his horses into an unknown region afterward identified as the Guadalupe Mountains. There, high up on a barren peak, he discovered some giant mahogany logs, “so big that there never has been a car on the Southern Pacific Railroad that could have hauled one of them.” Query: For what else than the palace of the Horn Worshipers could these mighty logs have been transported to that region?

Finally, the palace of the Horn Worshipers inevitably suggests the great legend of the Cave of Montezuma, a version of which follows this.—Editor.]

I am a great lover of horns and have collected and sold many fine pairs. In order to make my collections I have had to keep constantly inquiring for specimens. On one such expedition, a good many years ago, down on the border, I met a very old Yaqui Mexican, by the name of Pedro Osabia, as I remember.

When I made inquiry after long-horned cattle, he told me [[232]]that the long-horned cattle were all dead and that their worshipers were all dead, but that the spirits of the Horn Worshipers never die, but enter into new men when the bodies they inhabit decay. He said that if I continued strong in the worship, some day I would find plenty of long horns.

Further interrogation brought out the story that long years ago—more years than man can count—this whole world belonged to one man, and that this one man lived in a grand temple, such as men do not know how to build any more, and that this temple is located inside one of the great peaks of the Jeff Davis Mountains. This Ruler of the whole world had his subjects scattered over all the earth wherever caves could be found or made in cliffs. And every seven years these subjects journeyed from their caves and their cliffs to the Great Palace to worship, each worshiper bringing the longest horns he had collected from any animal during the seven years. Then the horns were hung in the great hall of horn worship, and the Supreme Ruler stood amidst the horns as judge. The man bringing the longest horns received the first blessing and was not subject to the laws of the great Ruler for seven years, and those bringing the second and the third longest horns received second and third blessings and were immune from the laws for five and for three years. Furthermore, those who willfully refused to bring horns to the general worship were made servants of those bringing the longest horns to the shrine, and would eventually become dead in soul, thus losing the power to rise after death and enjoy the great horn worship in the wide, free spaces and the open air, where search for food would no longer be a necessity.

Finally, though, a great bird came and flew to the cliffs, and destroyed the dwellers throughout the world, and then, when none came to worship at the great palace, the great Ruler died of grief. Our present race is the offspring from a man who had been banished from some colony for his refusal to contribute horns and to join in their worship. Consequently, the great bird on his flight of destruction missed this outcast, who, having lost his blessing through neglect to worship, was doomed, he and all his generations, to work for a living.

Before he died of his grief the great Owner of the world, knowing that some day the mountain would decay and the deserted palace be exposed, placed a magic wand in the greatest [[233]]horn in the great horn room. It is there now, waiting for the hand of some one of the soulless to touch it. Finally when the horn is touched, it will rise into space and draw all those who worshiped in full faith to the great horn worship above, where manual labor and death shall be forever unknown.