How Dollars Turned into Bumble Bees and Other Legends
This group of legends came to me from an old darkey named Pete Staples. In them may be seen the blended elements of negro, Mexican, and pioneer Texan lore. Pete was brought to Texas from Mississippi before the Civil War. He was raised in the border country among the Mexicans and drove cattle up the trail to Kansas. He married a Mexican woman and lived for some time in Mexico. When he told me these stories in 1922 he was cooking for a Mexican cow camp in Live Oak County. The other hands had “unrolled their blankets” early, and Pete’s tones were confidential as we talked by the burnt-out campfire.
I
“One time there was a white man who had got wind of a lot of Mexican dollars buried down below Roma. He had the place all located, and was so sure of hisself that he brung in an outfit of mules and scrapers to dig away the dirt. He was making a reg’lar tank digging down to that money when a Mexican living down there what I’ve knowed all my life comed along.
“This Mexican, when he come along clost to the tank that the white man was digging, stopped a minute under a mesquite tree to sorter cool off, and when he did he saw a hoe laying down on the ground half covered up in the dirt. He reached down to pick it up and then he saw a whole maleta of coins. A maleta, you know, is a kind of bag made out of hide. This maleta was old and rotten, and when he turned it over with the hoe it broke open and the gold money jest rolled out in the dirt.
“D’reckly, the Mexican went over to where the white man was bossing the teams, and he asked him what he was doing. The white man told him that he was digging up some buried money.
“‘Well, you’s digging where it ain’t no use to dig,’ said the Mexican. ‘The money ain’t there; hit’s over here. If you want to see it, come along and I’ll show it to you.’
“The white man laughed like he didn’t believe what the Mexican was telling him, but he come along. When they got to the mesquite there wa’n’t no money in sight, but there was a hole down at the root of the tree kinder like a badger hole and bumble bees was going in and out making a roaring sound and the dirt was fairly alive with great big bugs, maybe tumble bugs, only they was humming and making a sizzling noise and working around awful like.
“‘Huh, is this what you call money?’ says the white man, stamping down on the tumble bugs. ‘I’ll eat all the gold what they roll up.’
“‘That’s all right,’ says the Mexican. ‘There was dollars of gold and silver too here. But there ain’t now, I admit, ’cause them dollars’s evidently not intinded for you. White man didn’t hide that money and it ain’t meant for white man to find it. No matter how much you dig or where now, you won’t find nothing.’
“Shore enough, the man kept on digging and he didn’t get nothing. One time I asked the Mexican why he didn’t go back and take out the money.
“‘I didn’t want none of it,’ he said. ‘I never put it in the ground. ’Twa’n’t mine any more’n that white man’s.’
“A few days after he saw the money, though, he went back and scratched around in the dirt a little and picked up an old Mexican square dollar. He brung it to Roma and bought some flour and some coffee and some candy, and give some of the candy to my wife. She was living down there and knowed the man well and she’s told me many a time how she et some of the candy that the Mexican bought with that old square Mexican dollar. I always have thought that that money was intinded for him, but you know how some people are, and I can’t say as I blame him for not teching what he hadn’t a right to. If buried money like that is intinded for a human, he’ll come by it jest easy and nach’ral. If it’s not, he won’t come by it, no matter how much he hunts. Even if he did find it and it wa’n’t intinded for him, it ud prove a curse. I’d be afraid of it myself.”
II
“One time over in East Texas two young fellers was going along when they met a man. He looked perfeckly nach’ral, and they was clost to a tree.
“‘Dig there,’ said the man to them, like he knowed that they was looking for something, which they was. ‘Dig there,’ was all he said, and when he said that he pointed to the root of the tree.
“They swung down their grubbing hoes and hadn’t more’n scraped the crust off’n the ground when a great big bulldog come right out of the earth. He jest fairly appeared like out of nowhere, ’cept that he come out of the ground. He was monstrous big and sorter white looking, but he didn’t growl nor nothing. And those fellers never even went back to get their grubbing hoes.”
III
“Something like the same thing happened down at the old Carmel place below Lagarto. You know it’s only about two or three miles north of Casa Blanca, what they tell so much about. I don’t know what the truth is about that Carmel place, but as sure as you’re bawn, things has happened there. Some says that Spanish priests buried money there what they was trying to get back to Mexico with. And Mr. Ed Dubose, once when I was cooking for him and some other gentlemens that was looking for buried money, said that he saw the print of an iron box in a hole close by. The rust was still on the ground all ’round the hole where the box used to be, and they was jest a day late getting down there. Some other feller had beat ’em to it—but it’s a good thing, I speck. There’s an old grave made out of rock and cement at that Carmel place.
“Some says that there’s a mine for silver or gold down there too what the Spanish used to work, but now it’s hid so nobody can’t find it.
“Some says that there was a man drug to death what was traveling through with both saddlebags full of money. He was sleeping on his saddle for a piller and the Mexicans supprised him and roped him and drug him to death. Old Captain Cox used to have a house close down there, you know, and sometimes he’d wake up in the middle of the night hearing what sounded like a wagon rumbling. He’d get up and go to the door and couldn’t hear nothing. Then maybe he’d hear d’reckly sounds like somebody galloping on horses and dragging an old dry cowhide. Sometimes this dragging and rumbling would go on all night so he couldn’t sleep. Some Mexican cotton-pickers that was camped there heard that hide being drug all around their camp one night, and next day they left.
“Old man Miller was always projecking round trying to get his hands on that money. He tried to get his pastor what kept a herd of goats down on the south side of the ranch next to the Carmel place to look out for signs. One time that pastor discovered that he’d lost a big billy goat outen his herd. He set out to look for him, and he tramped around for three days before he comed across ary a track. Then one evening nigh about sundown he saw the old billy goat standing off on one side of a ravine and nibbling grass jest as nach’ral as life. He set out to where the goat was, but when he got there, there wa’n’t nothing but two dead hackberry trees. It was a nach’ral clearing and there wa’n’t no other hackberry trees in a mile. He said he knowed those trees was not there when he started. And he couldn’t find not even a sign of the billy goat, not even a track.”
IV1
“Down there sommers below Realitos there’s an old dug well with six jack loads of Mexican silver in it, and nobody ain’t never going to get it neither. How it come there was this way. Six Mexicans was making for the Rio Grande with it when they was overtaken and killed. But the bandits that killed them was being followed likewise and didn’t have time to get away with the silver. The fight had been right by this old well, and what the bandits did was to shoot the jacks that was not shot already and to pitch dead Mexicans, jacks, silver and all right into the well. In the fight that followed, the bandits was cleared out. The men after them was rangers, I guess. Anyway, one of them found out somehow about the six jack loads of silver.
“Well, when everything had quieted down like, he went and bought the land on which the well was placed and set a bunch of Mexicans to clean it out. Of course, the well had got filled up with dirt and so on from caving in. After they’d dug a while the Mexicans struck bones. They hollered up to the white man that they had struck bones and that all they lacked now was to pull up the goods. The white man, he hollered down to them that they needn’t do any more digging and for them to come on up so as to let him down. Nach’rally, being as they had struck them bones, the Mexicans wasn’t very slow about getting out.
“When the white man got down there, the first thing he done was to grab hold of a corner of an old maleta what he seen sticking out among the bones. He jerked it out and it had the dollars in it all right. Then he looked up and yelled to the Mexicans to pull. He hadn’t more’n got the words outen his mouth when he seen a tall skileton standing alongside the wall of that well. Its feet was close to him and it must have been twenty, maybe forty, feet tall. It reached clear up to the top, and its face away up there was a-looking down at the white man. He couldn’t take his eyes offen it, and all the way up while those Mexicans was a-pulling him slow and jerky he had to look that skileton in the face. He forgot all about that maleta of money and dropped it back, and when he clumb out he was so weak that they had to help him on his horse. They managed to get him home and put him in bed, and that night he died. And there ain’t nobody what I know of as has undertook to get out them six jack loads of silver since.”
Notes
1 This last legend was printed in the Dallas Times-Herald, October 22, 1922, and in other papers over the state about the same time, I having given it to the press in the hope of creating a wider interest in legends.