The Mysterious Lady In Blue

Dennis reported a strange custom among the Indians of Eastern Texas. Often, he wrote, they asked for blue cloth in which to bury their dead. The reason, as always, was that a woman dressed in blue had come among them a great many years before and had baptized everyone including the medicine man of the village. So great was the impression she made that the Indians wanted their dead to be like the woman in the next world-and as a step in this direction they wanted their ghosts to be dressed in olue.

Arizona, alas, was not quite so kind to the mysterious Lady in Blue. Yet in Arizona her actions were even more miraculous and unexplainable than they were elsewhere in the Southwest. Possibly the hostility of her Arizona reception was the result of her own actions. In Arizona, unlike Texas and New Mexico, the Lady in Blue did not speak to the Indians in their own language. Instead, she used an unknown tongue, and she continued to talk to them even though they twice shot her full of arrows.

But let us allow the records to speak again, concerning the deeds of the mysterious Lady in Blue. This time that tireless Jesuit, Father Eusebio Kino, is one of the participants.

It happened in the year 1690, when Father Kino and another enthusiastic Jesuit missionary, Juan Matheo Manje, were visiting Indians in the Colorado-Gila River region. In fact, the missionaries ran into the story twice within a five-day period, first in the village of Sonoita and later at a gathering of Pima, Yuma, and Cocomaricopa Indians on the Gila.

This time, as Manje reported the story, the Indians remembered a strange white woman who appeared among them when the oldest living Indians were boys.

"A beautiful white woman carrying a cross came to their lands," is the way Manje recorded their reminiscences. "She was dressed in white, gray, and blue, clear to her feet, her head covered with a cloth or veil."

As for her actions, "She spoke to them, shouted, and harangued them in a language which they did not understand. The tribes of the Rio Colorado shot her with arrows and twice left her for dead. But coming to life, she left by air.... A few days later she returned many times to harangue them."

So it was that the mysterious Lady in Blue did not meet quite the same reverent reception in Arizona as she did in other places that she visited. It is strange that in Arizona alone, of all the places where her visits were remembered, she was unable to speak the native tongue. Thus, while they remembered her, the Indians were unable to understand or follow her teachings.

Kino and Manje, being somewhat dubious at first, tried to test the Indian memories further. Had they ever seen white men before, the padres asked. The oldest Indians nodded vigorously. Once again, many years before the Lady in Blue had appeared, their fathers talked of a white captain who passed through through their territory with soldiers and horses. That captain, the missionaries knew, must have been Juan de Oñate, who led an expedition to the the Colorado River and California in 1604.

If memories of the Oñate tradition were true, which they undoubtedly were, the padres reasoned, why not also the story of the mysterious (and this time ill-fated) Lady in Blue?

And so it was, from eastern Texas through New Mexico and Arizona, to the border of California, were found tales of the Lady in Blue. Who was she? Where did she come from? Where did she go? How could a single woman, a member of the church orders, maintain herself in the vast Southwestern wilderness? She was never seen to take nourishment, although several times the Indians offered her food. Each time she appeared, her arrival was unheralded and mysterious. Her disappearances, too, were equally mysterious. Who? What? Where? How? All are questions that loom large in the story. Only the when, and the why-conversion of the Indians are easily discernible.

Yet there is an answer to all the questions, although the answer, itself, is as weird and mysterious as the rest of the story.

In the year 1602 a daughter was born to a prominent family in the town of Agreda, in Spain. She was born Maria Coronel but, after she became a nun at the age of seventeen, she was known as Maria de Jesus de Agreda.

Maria was a devout young woman and, even though the Pope made her head of her order when she was only twenty-seven, she still longed to do greater things for her faith. Men of the various religious orders were preaching to natives in the New World. Many of those churchmen were dying at the hands of their prospective converts, thereby winning a martyr's crown and greater glory in Heaven. Maria wanted the chance to do likewise.

But, as we have noted before, the New World in those days was no place for a woman, particularly a young, beautiful, and holy one. It was out of the question for Maria to visit the wild land in person and preach to the savages there.

So she continued her peaceful life, performing her duties and ministering to her sisters and to the poor in Agreda. But her spirit was not satisfied and, before long, she found herself visiting the New World in dreams. They were very real, those dreams. Sometimes she visited several places in a single day. Always she preached, and always she noted names and places, recalling them later as clearly as though she had actually visited them.

Those dreams continued for a three-year period-from 1629 to 1631-exactly the time when the Indians of the Southwest remembered seeing the mysterious Lady in Blue. The robes worn by Maria's order were blue.

The visits, of course, were made in secret, at times when the young nun was in the seclusion of her simply furnished room in the convent. None the less, she wrote of her visits, and she also told of them orally to Fray Alonso de Benavides, the same man who also recorded an account of her visit from reports of Indians in New Mexico.

Maria de Jesus de Agreda gave accurate reports of places and scenes in the New World-places in some cases not visited by white men until a quarter of a century after her death. On one occasion, to clinch the matter in Benavides' mind, she even reported an incident that occurred in his presence in New Mexico at a time when she also was present in spirit but was invisible to him.

Later writers, not endowed with the extreme faith of the seventeenth century, are inclined to be skeptical. They have searched the records to see whether, perchance, Maria de Jesus de Agreda did not at some time actually leave her Spanish convent and visit the New World. But not one of the carefully kept accounts of her time records a day when she was absent from her convent. Such a trip could not have been made in less than a year's time, and the Blue Lady's visits spanned at least a three-year period.

After her confession to Benavides, Maria's dream visits to the New World ceased, even though she lived for more than thirty years thereafter. So also ceased the appearances of the mysterious Lady in Blue among the Southwestern Indians.

And so the legend remains, as much of a mystery as ever.

Three explanations have been advanced by those who have sought a solution to the mystery, and each is followed by an unanswered question. They are: First, that Maria de Jesus de Agreda actually visited the widely separated Indian tribes in person. (Yet why are there no Spanish records of such a visit?) Second, that the Indians were visited by some young, female missionary whose identity is unknown, and that Maria assumed the identity of that woman. (But then why are there no records of Maria-or of any other womanvisiting the Indians at that time?) Third, that her visits were made in trances. (Then why could the Indians see her as clearly as she could see them?) So, reader, decide for yourself-if you can. And, when you visit the Casa Grande Ruins, or wander through the quiet halls of old San Xavier del Bac, or gaze at the crumbling remains of Tumacacori, when you drive through the Southwestern deserts, and marvel at the majestic scenery-remember the mysterious Lady in Blue who preceded you, more than three centuries ago.

A Plea for Model "P" By Chester Newton Hess

Dear Sir: I see you write about guns and there is something I get pretty riled up about. This is the way moving pictures and now television keep making bad mistakes about guns they show. There was one picture on the Seminole Indian war where the hero was toting a Colt revolver which was not even made till 1873-and I think the Seminole campaign was around 1839!... 1 am pretty tired of seeing Colts kicked around in particular.

Very truly yours, "An Oldtimer"

The best known firearm in American history is easily the Colt single action, solid frame, center-fire metallic cartridge revolver first issued to the Army in 1873, sold commercially as the Peacemaker and later designated by the factory Frontier Six Shooter and Single Action Army. This is the revolver referred to by "Oldtimer." At the Colt works it has long been called simply Model "P."

Traditional handgun of the cowboy and established in folklore over the years by printed fiction, stage and motion picture, this specific arm is as familiar a prop in the Hollywood "horse opera" as the sheriff's star, the stagecoach, or the frontier saloon bar. For many of adventurous heart the Colt six shooter is symbolic of a time and life holding deep appeal . . . a yesteryear world of raw peril and primitive action to be recaptured through electronic sounds and ghostly images on a lifeless screen. But a world nonetheless real and pulsing to the imaginative who stand in the very boots of the gallant cavalry troop facing the hot fury of Indian attack with their smoking Colts.

Yes, as real as this is to many, you may be sure that some don't know one revolver (or pistol) from another. To them such details are not important. But it is equally certain that others do know what gun is technically right for the period represented. A Colt Peacemaker blazing away 34 years before its time is like a wrist watch on a Spanish-American War soldier-only a lot more conspicuous.

The subject of this particular Colt revolver now almost universally known as the six shooter (the Colt factory never hyphenated this name) has been well and exhaustively covered. There is scarcely any major contribution left to be made. Yet now comes a matter of some importance, we suspect, to a number of people. This is anachronism in depicting the gun itself.

Some motion pictures and teleplays furnish pure examples of such playing fast and loose with time. How the knowledgeable movie western fan must wince every time he sees men only lately from Civil War battlefields carrying Colt Frontier six shooters. And old scout Kit Carson, turning over enviously in his grave, would have loved the beautiful pair of bone-handled sixguns packed by his television portrayer. Trouble is, Kit just didn't live long enough for the first one to be made. At the height of his career the single action Colt was nearly a quarter of a century in the future.

Granted the cinema western is not made just for "gun cranks." Still, this widely popular type of film inescapably selects an audience that includes a vast legion of firearms enthusiasts-experts and novices alike-who know a great deal about gun lore, past and present. They do not like their knowledge ignored by disregard of authenticity. They want accurate portrayal. And they are entitled to this, we believe.

Oldtimer, we fear there's little if any remedy for your just complaint. This has been going on for years now, and the end is not yet. Once in a while a pre-Peacemaker film comes along where someone has cared enough to report faithfully. But not often enough. Research at fault? Fifteen minutes at any public library will place the time of any gun in history. Studio property departments generally are informed. It must be the basic attitude: "Who cares?" or "Who knows the difference, anyway?" You are right about the Seminole picture. But you know it's easier just to reach for a six shooter than to rent or borrow an 1836 Paterson Colt five-shot, the gun they should have used

Randolph Scott holds here a pair of Colt .44 Dragoons of 1848 represented as the “Colt .45” in a color western motion picture. The Colt .45 Peacemaker did not exist until 1873.