The Easter Fires

The state of Texas put a story on a roadside marker in 1968 that cannot be true, and what undoes it is a calendar. The marker says that in March 1847, when Comanches and whites signed a major peace treaty, the Indians lighted huge signal fires on the hills, and that a mother calmed her children by telling them the smoke came from pots in which the Easter Bunny was dyeing eggs with flowers. The council on the San Saba broke up on 2 March. Easter Sunday in 1847 fell on 4 April, so Easter Eve was 3 April, a month and a day later, and the treaty was not signed at Fredericksburg until 9 May. The Handbook of Texas has long noted the mismatch. What the fires actually are is Osterfeuer, a spring bonfire tradition from Westphalia and Lower Saxony, carried to Texas most likely by the Hanoverians among the early settlers.

The Handbook of Texas calls it a pagan custom that passed into Teutonic Christianity, though the regional folklore authority for Westphalia itself considers a heathen origin extremely unlikely. Fredericksburg is described as the only survivor of the fires once lit across the Hill Country, on as many as twenty two hills on the Saturday before Easter. The Cross Mountain marker puts it more carefully, saying the fires recall a German habit of burning off old growth and also commemorate the treaty, which is a different verb from reproduce.

A pageant grew out of it, scripted by Bill Petmecky, and the starting year is given variously as 1946 and 1948, with 1948 the better supported because 27 March that year was itself an Easter Eve. It was suspended in 2005 and revived by 2013, and a year's hill fires can fail on a burn ban alone, as they did in 2022.