[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
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 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 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.