Spent some time earlier looking for good firefly quotes. As much of a cult hit as Firefly is, it’s rather hard to find quotes about the lightning bugs as opposed to the Whedon show. One quote did keep cropping up that I liked though, from an Indian chief:
“What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
– Chief Crowfoot, Blackfoot Indian Chief
It showed up in any number of quote compilation pages across the net (Google the first two sentences and you get over 13,000 results).
One page, however, had a suprisingly different attribution:
A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go.What is Life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night. It is a breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
-Haggard, Sir (Henry) Rider
Dying words of the African chief Umbopa in King Solomon’s Mines. John Peter Turner in The North-West Mounted Police (1950) credited them to Crowfoot (c.1830^1890), chief of the Blackfoot Indians, who died in his teepee overlooking the Bow River, Alberta, 25 Apr1890, and this attribution gained popular acceptance.
African chief Umbopa? What the heck? Continue reading Teasing out History
