I'm almost in shock when I ran across this. When my grandmother was a little girl in 1928 her father died and while cleaning out his closet in the bottom of a suitcase was a very yellowed piece of paper with the tittle "Bright skies" on the top of the sheet and the rest of the words following down the page. She told me the paper was very old then they figured because of the yellowing. We always thought it was something my great grandfather wrote years before possibly about his own family history, he was a very secretive man who never spoke of his family but always said he was native American decent. I grew up singing this song as my mother put a tune to it since we only had the lyrics. I have always believed this was part of our family.although a few of the words are different in the one we know.