• The Apache Wedding Prayer
• the "legend" attached to Butterfly Releases

The Apache Wedding Prayer was written for the 1950 movie  Broken Arrow starring James Stewart (as Tom Jeffords, superintendent of pony mail express route) and Jeff Chandler (as Cochise). 

There are a lot of interesting aspects to this historic movie - not the least of which that there is no such thing as an Apache wedding as depicted in the movie! 

The first movie after World War II that sided with the Indians, the story revolves around historical characters with an added fictional character,  Sonseeahray, played by Debra Paget, who was added as a love interest for Jeffords.

The script was written by Albert Maltz, one of the writers blacklisted by Hollywood during the McCarthy era, so for a long time the writer was listed as Michael Blankfort, another scriptwriter who put his name on the script as the only way to get it accepted. In 1997 that was put right when the Writers Guild of America voted to restore screen credit to those who had been blacklisted.

The Butterfly Legend is a fabrication of a butterfly breeder.  While butterflies and moths frequently are found in Native American myths, this is because of their beauty power of flight, and complete metamorphosis. Butterflies feature as a symbol of rebirth and regeneration in many Native American stories. The Blackfeet believe that dreams are brought to us in sleep by butterflies. The Mothway myth of the Navajo explains prohibition against incest and features bisexual behaviour.

Further south the Aztecs believed that the happy dead in the form of beautiful butterflies would visit their relatives to assure them that all was well.