It is all She-Who-Is-Alone has left to remind her of her family. On its head were brilliant blue feathers from the bird who cries ‘Jay-jay-jay’”. She has a doll made from buckskin who means the world to her. Many of the old people, the sick, and the children have died already and still the rains do not come. The environment is sketchy and spare - merely suggested. Tomie dePaola has provided his own illustrations, concentrating on depicting the Comanche People using a naive style.

The illustrations are also simple, stylised water colours without decoration or much detail. It feels like traditional storytelling around a campfire. The Legend of the Bluebonnet tells the tale in simple words, written as a long poem: one without rhyme or metre. How could I then resist reading this lovely folk tale, when my own favourite flowers are bluebells, which when undisturbed, flourish in splendour, in English woods in the Spring. They grow so widely in the Texas fields, that from a distance it looks like a misty blue carpet: I only saw a picture of beautiful bluebonnets for the first time a few months ago. “their early life in Texas before it became impossible for these brave people to share the land with the settlers and they were expelled or had to flee.”

It honours the Comanche People and their culture. The author Tomie dePaola collected as many sources as he could, before retelling this tale for himself. This is now the name which is familiar to most people. When white settlers moved to what we now call Texas, they termed the flower “bluebonnet”, as it reminded them of the bonnets worn by many of the white women to protect them from the heat of the Texan sun. The Legend of the Bluebonnet is a folk tale of the Comanche People, to explain the flowering en masse of the lovely wild flower called variously Lupine, Buffalo Clover, Wolf Flower, and “El Conejo” (“the rabbit”) in Texas, every Spring.

Legend of the bluebonnet book