Legends and Tales of the American West

by Richard Erdoes

  “What can de mattair be?” said Antoine. “Pauvre Baptiste. Peutětré he has gone ondair?”

  “It’s those Blackfoot devils,” said Gouge-Eye Luke. “They’ve rubbed him out at last.”

  “Maybe a grizzly chewed him up,” said the Panther. “We must find him. Git up! Hiyupo! Let’s go!”

  Luckily, it had not rained and the Panther was the best tracker on the Plains. He had no trouble making out Baptiste’s footprints on account of the hole in the sole of Baptiste’s left moccasin. They tailed him for some seven miles and then noticed that Baptiste’s tracks were followed by others, unnaturally large, unlike any they had ever seen, halfway between the tracks of a huge bear and a catamount, but with seven monstrous toes, or rather claws, on each paw.

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Antoine. “C’est le maudit loup-garou, de wairwolf! Pauvre Baptiste. Il est perdu!” Antoine was shaking like an aspen tree.

  “Holy Mother of God!” said Gouge-Eye Luke. “I’m mighty skeered. This ain’t the loup-garou, it’s that cussed varmint the windigo. I can read his sign.”

  “It ain’t the loo-garou nor the windigo,” said the Panther, “it’s the ghost carcajou, the Wanagi Huhatopa, maybe even the Unktehi, the Great River Monster. That’s poor doin’s for sure. Hurry boys, afore it’s too late!”

  They hastened on. After another seven miles they were terrified to see Baptiste’s footprints changing, getting bigger, the toes coming out of the moccasins—five toes, six toes, seven toes on each foot, changing into claws.

  “Vite, vite!” cried Antoine. “Le loup maudit. Nous sommes foutus! Le bougre ees makin’ pauvre Ba’tiste into a monstre like ’eemself!”

  At last, the three friends came upon a horrid scene. They beheld Baptiste, who, from his waist down, had already been changed into a loup-garou, complete with a bushy tail. Over the poor voyageur towered a monster with a bestial body, the face of a man-devil, a tiger’s fangs, and wicked eyes glowing like coals. The infernal creature was howling and cackling frightfully, turning the men’s veins into ice.

  “Le loup-garou!” screamed Antoine.

  “The windigo!” screamed Gouge-Eye Luke.

  “The ghost carcajou!” screamed the Panther.

  “Windigo, loup-garou, what does it mattair?” cried Baptiste. “Help! Help à moi, mes amis, au secours! I’m goin’ ondair!”

  “Boys, run!” Gouge-Eye Luke yelled, beside himself with fear. “Run for your lives or the dratted thing will get you too!”

  “Non, non, non!” cried Antoine. “Je suis a sinner, a fornicator, a no-good drunkard, but once j’étais un étudiant for de priesthood and I still have zees,” and he drew from the bosom of his greasy buckskin shirt a silver cross, holding it aloft, admonishing the werewolf: “Apage Satanas! Away wiz you, unclean demon, damned mauvais diable! Allez-vous-en, monstreux loup-garou! Vamooze!”

  The monster bared its fangs, foamed at the mouth, snapped at the cross, and howled frightfully, but it retreated step-by-step. Antoine now also produced a tattered Bible from his possible bag, hitting the evil beast over the snout with both the cross and the Good Book. This somewhat amateurish exorcism worked. The monster whimpered. The light in its eyes dimmed. It cowered, it retreated and, finally, fled with gigantic leaps, leaving only its ungodly sulphurous stink behind.

  “Victoire!” exclaimed Antoine. “Nous sommes sauvès! Grace à Dieu, le loup-garou has vanished. Il est disparu!”

  “Hooraw! The windigo is gone! Wagh! We spooked him fo’ sartin!” shouted Gouge-Eye Luke.

  “Washtay!” shouted the Panther. “The ghost carcajou, we horn-swoggled him for sure.”

  “Loup-garou, windigo, carcajou be damned!” Baptisted cried angrily. “Parbleu! Je suis foutu! Look at me!” He hopped clumsily on his hair-covered wolf’s legs. “Look at me! Mes jambes, mes pieds! What jolie fille will give me a tumble now!”

  “Il faut prier,” said Antoine, “we must pray to God an’ all de saints.”

  “Wagh, that’s the way of gettin’ out of a skunk hole,” said Gouge-Eye Luke. “I hain’t done it for years, but this old coon is prayin’: God, Ba’tiste got hisself in a fix. Do somethin’!”

  “Wakan Tanka, onshimala ye!” prayed the Panther, “Ba’tiste here is in a bad way. Grandfather, pity him!”

  Muttering incantations in French, English, and admittedly poor Latin, Antoine passed cross and Bible up and down Baptiste’s animal legs while Luke and the Panther continued praying, and, lo and behold, slowly, before their eyes, the wolf’s legs became human again. Baptiste jumped for joy and clicked his heels, but the very tips of his toes remained furry for ever and his nails resembled claws for the rest of his life.

  “Eh bien,” was Baptiste’s comment, “it could have been worse, n’est-ce pas?”

  The Call of the Wild

  An old legend circulating in the high country of Montana tells of a band of gray wolves that were relentlessly and remorselessly on the hunt for human babies. They ate boy babies, but girl babies were carried off and raised along with their wolf cubs. There was a rancher and his wife, Zach and Betty, who were running cattle in the Beartooth Range. They had a tiny one-year-old-daughter, named Angie, with nut brown curly hair, hazel eyes, and dimples. One moonless night they were roused by a frightful howling around the ranch house. “Them’s wolves,” said Zach. “They’re after the newborn calves, I guess. I think I’ll get myself a wolfskin for a rug.”

  He got his double-barreled shotgun down from the wall, made sure it was loaded, and went out into the night. It was so dark that he could not see anything at all. Now and then, for a fraction of a second only, he had a momentary glimpse of a pair of wolf’s eyes reflecting the light in his window, but always the points of light disappeared before he could aim his gun. He felt himself surrounded by the snarling, growling pack, felt the wolves’ bodies touching his own. There was a snapping of teeth and a sharp pain as wolf fangs fastened upon the calf of his right leg. He tore himself loose and blindly fired one barrel. There was a howl of pain, followed by a whine and a whimper. Zach had enough. His feral foes did not act like normal wolves; they were somehow different, more like human fiends.

  Zach felt their hot breath, heard their panting and slavering. He fired the second barrel, not so much to hit the unseen brutes, but to scare them off. Then he ran back inside the house, slamming the door behind him. He heard them scratching and howling at the door, heard his child scream. Zach went into the bedroom, wiping the cold sweat from his brow.

  “I heard Angie cryin’,” he told his wife. “Maybe you should look in on her.”

  “She’s teethin’, that’s why,” said Betty, “poor little thing.” She went into the small chamber next to the bedroom, where they kept the crib. Zach heard his wife cry out in anguish. He rushed into the tiny room and found his wife sobbing as if her heart was about to break. The crib was empty, Angie gone. The window had been left open to let the air in, because the day had been hot and sultry. Once more Zach loaded his shotgun and ran out into the night, gripped by fear as he remembered the rumors about demon wolves carrying away human babies. His teeth were chattering in spite of the heat. He made out a light in the bunkhouse. The cowhands there had been wakened by the commotion. There was nothing anyone could do in the inky, impenetrable blackness.

  There was an old hermit trapper, living some ten miles off, said to be a good tracker. “Don’t fret yerself,” he told Zach. “If she’s alive, I’ll git her fer you.”

  Zach, his cowpunchers, and neighbors followed the old recluse in search of the missing child. They found numerous wolf tracks, but they all led into a windswept wilderness of bare rocks in which the tracks petered out. The searchers returned with dogs that took up the scent. They followed the eager, yelping dogs to a rushing river. There the dogs lost the scent. A single tuft of wolf’s hair, caught in a thornbush, was the only reward for their pains. Zach and his companions scoured the whole country round about in ever-widening circles—all in vain. Angie was gone. Years went
by. Zach and Betty had other children—twin boys. They had to console themselves with that. But the anguish and uncertainty over what had become of Angie gnawed at their innards and soured life for them.

  But later there were rumors, strange, disturbing, and hard to believe. Now and then some lone line rider, prospector, or a Cheyenne Indian or two, came out of the mountains saying that they had caught a glimpse of gray wolves in the distance, elusive shadows darting in and out of trees and boulders, their glowing eyes reflecting the setting sun. Among the pack, so they said, they had seen, or thought they had seen, a naked white girl with long brown hair. Such rumors grew more and more frequent.

  “I don’t believe any of it,” Zach told his wife. “It’s a case of too much whiskey and a runnin’ mouth! I’m sure it’s nothin’ but a heap of damn lies. But it keeps me awake at night. I can’t rest till I find out for myself whether there’s somethin’ to it.”

  “She would be fifteen by now,” said Betty.

  This time Zach hired an old Sioux Indian, a hunter, trapper, and yuwipi man, meaning someone who had the gift to find lost things. His name, strangely enough, was Wolf Running. The old man, looking more like a shriveled mummy than a human being, his face resembling an oversized, wrinkled walnut, wore a small rawhide bag around his neck.

  “Shunka manitou pejuta,” he explained, “wolf medicine.”

  The old fellow came and went, sometimes in company with other elderly Sioux men. Frequently, he brought back a chunk of venison, or maybe a fox skin. Whenever he heard a rumor that the naked girl had been seen at one or another place, the yuwipi man went there to search. One day he came back to Zach in a great state of excitement, waving his arms, mumbling and stammering.

  “Me saw the winchinchala without clothes,” he said. “She sat on a stone suckling a wolf pup. It was just moonlight, but I saw. The wolves too. Then, suddenly, all gone!”

  At once Zach got together some two dozen riders—his own cowboys and others from nearby ranches. The old Indian led them to the spot where he had seen the naked girl. They brought a lamb with them for bait, tethering it to a tree. Then they waited. All of a sudden the night’s silence was shattered by the howls of wolves and the lamb’s pitiful bleating. Some of the cowboys lit their torches. In the flickering light they saw that the wolves were huge and watched one of them drag the bleating lamb away. They also saw the girl, naked as a jaybird, running with the wolves, long hair streaming behind her. This time the searchers managed to hang on to their prey, torches lighting their way. Dawn came, making their task easier. The girl flew before them like a will-o’-the-wisp, almost as fast as the men’s horses. On and on went the wild hunt. At last, one of the riders got his rope on the girl, jerking her off her feet.

  Zach had not seen Angie since she had been a baby, but he recognized her at once—nut brown hair, hazel eyes, dimples. Zach cried out, “Angie!” and imagined he saw a flicker of remembrance in her eyes. He was wrong. The wolf-girl snarled and sank her teeth into the flesh of his palm. It took two men to pry her jaws apart. They lifted her onto a horse’s back, her ankles tied by a rope under the horse’s belly, brought her to Zach’s house, and locked her in a room. Betty wept, tried to caress her long-lost daughter, saying over and over again, “Angie, Angie, dear Angie,” the girl glowering at her without understanding.

  Whenever Zach and Betty came into her room, Angie would cower in a corner, in a state of rage and fear. Sometimes she attacked them with tooth and nail. She accepted no food save raw meat. She howled like a she-wolf. Sometimes, with the help of friends, they forced clothes upon her, but she tore them off as soon as she was alone.

  Months passed. Angie had calmed down. She no longer fought her parents or twin brothers. She understood a few words and could speak some. After a year she no longer tore her clothes off. She accepted, and learned to like, cooked food. A few months later she joined the family at the table. She began playing with the twins, learned to ride, to sew, and to work at her spelling. At eighteen she had become a ranch girl like her neighbor’s daughters. She made friends, went to dances and hoedowns.

  She met Bill, a rancher’s son, a strapping, handsome lad. He and Angie took a liking to each other. They walked hand in hand, sat together on the swing that Zach had put on the porch. They touched, they kissed. Bill knew next to nothing about her past. Zach and Betty thought that the less he knew, the better. The wedding day was set and a house made ready to receive them.

  Angie looked radiant in her white wedding dress. The young couple enjoyed the wedding feast, the fiddling, and the dancing. They laughed at seeing some of their friends get tipsy. It became time for the guests to depart. Bill carried his bride into the bedroom and set her down. They embraced. He said, “I love you, Angie.” “And I love you, Bill,” she answered back.

  At that moment, there was an uproar outside—snarling and howling, the furious barking of dogs, the neighing and stamping of horses, a heifer’s desperate bellowing.

  “I’ve got to see what’s goin’ on out there,” said Bill.

  “Don’t leave me,” pleaded his young bride.

  “I’ve just got to,” Bill insisted, “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Don’t be long, love, don’t be long.”

  Outside, a life-and-death struggle was in progress between dogs and wolves, and Bill found himself in the middle of a snarling pack, emptying his six-gun at the indistinct, raging shapes, hoping to hit the wolves and not his dogs. Just as suddenly all was quiet again, the wolves gone, the dogs whimpering, licking their wounds, the heifer dead. “Get some sleep,” Bill told a few cowboys who had rushed to his help. He went back into the house, anxious to join his bride. When he reentered the bedroom, Angie was gone. Her wedding gown lay crumpled on the floor. A breeze blew through the open window, stirring up the curtains. Angie was never seen again. And that is the end of the story.

  The Windigo

  The windigo is a fearful creature, the most horrible that ever was. To look at it is to go blind. To hear its unearthly growl is to become deaf. To get a whiff of its rank odor is to lose one’s sense of smell. To come into bodily contact with it means becoming lame, but no one who is touched by the windigo survives longer than seven days.

  The windigo has long, sharp teeth, but no jaws. It has eyes out of which shoot lightning, but it has no face. It has a shaggy fleece, but no body inside it. It has no feet or paws, but large, terrible claws like curved daggers. To cross its path is sure death, but its tracks are easily recognized because they are over twelve inches long.

  The windigo can be killed in only one way. One must have a rifle made by a pious man who prayed over it three times a day while working on it. Such a rifle must be loaded with a silver bullet into which the sign of a cross has been scratched. The silver bullet has to be rammed down with a patch made from a page of the bible. Not any page will serve, but only one with the Lord’s Prayer on it. The hunter must go to church on Easter Day and recite a psalm forward and backward without making a single mistake. Then the hunter must go to a crossroad and be there at the stroke of twelve on a moonlit night, in which case the windigo will appear. And if the hunter does not turn to stone with fright, and if his eyes do not fail him, and if his hands do not tremble with fear so that he cannot aim his weapon, then the hunter might, just might, succeed in killing the windigo. But if the hunter does not do everything exactly as described, the windigo will eat him up in three bites.

  The Great White Stallion of the West

  Nor the team of the Sun, as in fable portrayed,

  Through the firmament rushing in glory arrayed,

  Could match, in wild majesty, beauty and speed,

  That tireless, magnificent, snowy-white steed.

  The phantom horse of legends was known under many names—the Ghost Horse of the Plains, the Snow White Pacer, the Stallion of Solitudes, the Deathless White Mustang, Gray Lightning, the Milk-White Steed of the Prairies, and Equus Superbus, to mention only a few. Hunted by many, but never caught, the G
reat White Stallion became the symbol for men’s yearning for the unattainable. As such, the Super Horse of the Rockies furnished the topic for innumerable related legends.

  The first rumor of the phantom horse to reach readers in the big eastern cities was contained in a passage from A Tour of the Prairies, Washington Irving’s account of his 1832 trip to the Arkansas and Cimarron river country: “We had been disappointed this day in our hopes of meeting with buffalo, but the sight of the wild horse had been a great novelty, and gave a turn to the conversation of the camp for the evening. There were several anecdotes told of a famous gray horse, which has ranged the prairies of this neighborhood for six or seven years, setting at naught every attempt of the hunters to capture him. They say he can pace or rack faster than the fleetest horse can run.” Thus was born the legend of the Ghostly White (sometimes Gray) Steed.

  When Don Francisco Coronado, so the legends have it, crossed the Rio Grande into the land of the pueblo dwellers in his futile search for the fabled golden cities of Cibola, one stallion and one mare broke loose from the expedition’s horse herd and vanished into the wilderness. These two wonderful animals became the ancestors of the Great White Stallion of the West. This phantom steed was marvelous in every respect. Gleaming white, almost iridescent, his silky coat shone like silver in the sunlight, dazzling the eyes of the beholder. Noble was his delicately formed head, regal and full of fire his sparkling eyes. His beauty defied description. When in motion, the ripple of his powerful muscles was likened to the flow of swiftly poured milk.

  The white stallion moved with extraordinary grace, yet also with great force. His speed and endurance seemed supernatural. He moved with a king’s dignity, never at a trot or gallop, but eternally, majestically pacing or ambling, full of disdain for the horses of his pursuers, cantering after him at a furious pace, stretched to the limit, their bellies almost touching the ground. No matter how fast, they could never catch up with him, as the white steed mockingly kept them at the same distance without ever breaking his stride.