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  • Texas | Columns | "Texas Tales"

    A Campfire Tale

    by Mike Cox
    Mike Cox

    When Earl Nance sat down to write the “Boy Scout News” column for that week’s issue of the Kerrville Mountain Sun, he was planning to take the scouts of Troop 100 on a hike at Enchanted Rock.

    First, however, each boy in the troop had to pass two scout requirements, things like mastering the use of a compass or learning how to tie knots. As Nance noted in his column for July 6, 1933, “Only boys who have passed the required tests will be allowed to go on this hike.”

    Evidently hoping to inspire his scouts to complete their badge work by getting them more excited about the coming excursion, Nance offered a “History of Enchanted Rock.” Despite that unenchanting title, what the scoutmaster did was tell just one story about the rock. Decades after its publication, what Nance wrote reads more like a campfire tale than history.

    “Many years ago when Indians roamed the hills of Southwest Texas, the Enchanted Rock was regarded with awe and fear by members of tribes in its vicinity,” he began.

    The reason the giant granite formation in what is now Llano County meant so much to the Indians, Nance continued, was that the “Evil Spirits that the Great Spirit had chased from the heavens” inhabited the rock. The Indians took that ethereal occupancy so seriously, he wrote, that they would not even touch the rock, much less venture on top of it.

    One reason the Indians believed spirits lived at the rock had to do with the way it sometimes appeared at night. Any time a heavy dew fell on a moonlit night, the massive rock appeared to glow. While that is perfectly logical scientifically, the eerie look of the rock at night certainly helped reinforce the notion that there was something special about the formation in a bad way.

    Of course, there is something special about E-Rock, as it’s now popularly known. Since prehistoric times, the giant igneous rock has loomed as Central Texas’ most singular landmark. Though most would say it hasn’t attracted spirits good or bad, it certainly lured Indians and later, explorers and travelers of European descent. The rock served as waypoint and lookout.

    The celebrated Texas Ranger Capt. Jack Hays supposedly staved off an attack by Comanches at the rock, and in the more pacific days since then, generations of Texans have enjoyed climbing it or camping beneath it.

    But to get back to Nance’s tale, the Indians feared that if the evil spirits were allowed to leave the rock, they would cause their people serious trouble, as in death and destruction. To keep the spirits in check, the scout leader wrote, the Indians periodically offered a human sacrifice at the base of the rock.

    Rather than reducing the size of their tribe by one unfortunate person, the Indians raided the Spanish settlement of San Antonio de Bexar to find someone suitable to appease the evil spirits. At the edge of town, Nance wrote, the Indians killed an elderly Spaniard and captured his beautiful daughter.

    The Indians carried the hapless girl back to Enchanted Rock, where they intended to burn her at the stake to cool down the malevolent spirits.

    Learning that his beloved had been carried away by Indians, the senorita’s boyfriend quickly recruited volunteers from San Antonio and Goliad to ride in pursuit of her abductors. As soon as he had an ample force, the young man and his comrades in arms rode out on the trail of the Indians. It led them to Enchanted Rock.

    “At the Enchanted Rock everything was in readiness for the sacrifice,” Nash wrote. The fire that would consign the young lady’s soul to the evil spirits would be lit as soon as the moon rose.

    You can almost see the glowing campfire coals and taste the ‘smores as the scoutmaster went on with his story:

    “The poor girl was hysterical at first, for she believed that the end was near. Controlling herself, she prayed that God might rescue her from this terrible ordeal.”

    However, as the time drew nearer, she grew calm, resigned to her awful fate.

    The Indians tied the young woman to the stake, piled brush and wood at her feet, and began a ceremonial dance that would be the prelude to the sacrifice.

    Just at that moment, Nance wrote, “a wailing, scream-like cry came from some part of the rock.”

    Surely, the Indians thought, the evil spirits had spoken. For whatever reason, despite the pending sacrifice, the spirits had grown annoyed. In truth, all the Indians had heard was the cry of a mountain lion.

    Then, “like a bolt out of the sky,” the young Spaniard and his fellow riders charged the Indians. Thinking the mean-spirited spirit and its allies had decided to attack them, the Indians scattered, leaving their intended sacrifice victim unharmed.

    Well, that’s the story. Not only did it never happen, given what is known of the culture of the Indians who once lived in the Hill Country, it isn’t even plausible. Even so, chances are that when Nance’s teenage charges read their scoutmaster’s column on Enchanted Rock, they got their badge work out of the way in a hurry.


    © Mike Cox - June 5, 2013 column
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