E old men as an actual occurrence of some fifty years ago, concerning a warrior who, having been desperately…
- Date of account
- Material collected chiefly 1887-1890; published 1900
- Source
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
- Reference
- Myths of the Cherokee Extract from the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology · selected passage 178
- Rights
- public_domain
- Language
- English with Cherokee names and material translated from oral testimony
- Translation
- Collected and edited by James Mooney
- Record updated
- 2026-08-24
Record summary
e old men as an actual occurrence of some fifty years ago, concerning a warrior who, having been desperately wounded in an engagement with Mexican troops in southern Texas, was abandoned to die by his retreating comrades
Published source text
Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.
Source passage
Source text · mention onlye old men as an actual occurrence of some fifty years ago, concerning a warrior who, having been desperately wounded in an engagement with Mexican troops in southern Texas, was abandoned to die by his retreating comrades. At night, while lying upon the ground awaiting death, and unable to move, he heard a long howl in the distance, which was repeated nearer and nearer, until at last he heard the patter of feet in the sand, and a wolf came up and licked the festering wounds of the warrior with such soothing effect that he fell asleep. This was repeated several times until the man was able to sit up, when the wolf left him, after telling him--not in the vision of a dream, but as a companion face to face--that he must keep up his courage, and that he would get back in safety to his tribe. Soon afterward the wounded warrior was found by a party of Comanche, who restored him to his people. At the next Sun dance he made public thanksgiving for his rescue (see the author's Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians, in Seventeenth Annual Report Bureau of American Ethnology, part 1, 1901). The story is not impossible.
Historical context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyThis material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.
Modern context
Contextual commentary · mention onlyLattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.
Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.