Words and music by Eric Taylor of Houston, Texas. Has an album 'Shameless Love' apparently.

Joseph Cross

Word's come to the mission that the the old man's ailing.
His eyes they are failing and the weather took his hands.
And there's a ring on his finger that's shaped from a bone
From some white man in Missouri, spilled whisky on his wife.

CH: He has travelled the sacred circle
He has travelled the white man's train.
He's killed for hunger his buffalo brother,
He's killed for anger and the white man's name.

His name was Joseph Cross and he was raised by the mission
Just one of a hundred Indian boys who wouldn't tie his shoes.
And he cried the night his grandpa died, he told him in a vision;
'Stay close to the ways of the rattlesnake, stay close to the ways of the grizzly':

In the 1919 chill of December
When the bear and the rattler lay sleeping, hardly breathing,
It's a penny to the kitchen boy to run fetch Sister Lydia,
Go tell her that old Indian lies sleeping, hardly breathing:

Now someone said 'It don't seem right to give him a white man's funeral';
And someone said they'd soon as not float him down the river.
But no-one touched the ring or said a word about his chest,
where it looked like a bear had ripped him and a rattler kissed his cheek:


I'm sorry I can't do anything about the tune.

LTS