Red Horn (Siouan Deity) - Red Horn's Sons

Red Horn's Sons

The two wives of Red Horn were pregnant at the time of his death. Red Horn's first wife, the girl in the white beaverskin wrap, gave birth to a son who had the same red hair and human heads hanging from his ears as his father. Red Horn's second wife, the giantess, also gave birth to a red haired boy, but with living faces where his nipples should have been. The sons were spared by the giants and grew up to be very large. One day the eldest son went out to fast in order to get a blessing from the thunderbirds. He went to seek his visions at a place not far from a broad prairie where the giants had a village. He knew that the head of his father, whose hair had by now turned white, hung from a lodge pole there. When he called out to the spirits with a death song, the kind sung by prisoners about to be executed, the giants who heard it would immediately jump into the fire. When the old men of the village saw that so many of their people were jumping in the flames, they guessed at the cause, and ordered four warriors to guard the scalp pole. Two of the guards painted themselves red and the others painted themselves black. Red Horn's two sons decided then to retrieve the heads of their father and his friends. They use their powers to make special red and black arrows to kill the guards, then grabbed the heads and ran with them. As the boys ran they shot the giants with their arrows, each arrow killing many giants. When they ran out of arrows, they used their bows as clubs, almost wiping out the giants completely. A little girl with a boy that she packed on her back are spared so that the race of giants do not become extinct, but they are thrown to the other side of the sea so than will no longer be a threat. The two sons then burn the bodies of the giants and grind up their bones and spread the powder around their own village. The two sons take the head of Red Horn and ask their mothers to sleep with it, but each replies, "How can I sleep with that, it is only a skull?" The boys take all three heads and lay them in a bed in the middle of the lodge. The next day Red Horn, Turtle, and Storms as He Walks are all found alive and sleeping in the bed. Where the sons had scattered the powdered bones of the giants, all the people that the giants had killed were also found alive and sleeping. When Red Horn's wives saw this, they shouted, "Oh, our sons have brought our husbands back to life again!" The boys picked up their fathers and carried them around like children. In honor of this feat, Turtle and Storms as He Walks promise the boys special weapons. In another episode, the sons of Red Horn decide to go on the warpath. The older brother asks Storms as He Walks for the Thunderbird Warbundle. After some effort, it is produced, but the thunderbirds demand that it have a case. A friend of the sons of Red Horn offers his own body as its case. The boys take the Thunderbird Warbundle and with their followers go on a raid to the other side of the sky.

Hall has shown that the mythic cycle of Red Horn and his sons has some interesting analogies with the Hero Twins mythic cycle of Mesoamerica.