Legends of Buried Treasure and Lost Mines
An Inquiry into the Sources of Treasure Legends of Texas
By J. Frank Dobie
I
However many legends of other kinds there may be, the buried treasure or lost mine legend is the typical legend of Texas. Just how representative it is, is demonstrated by the varied examples in this section of “Legends of Buried Treasure and Lost Mines.” The McMullen County group well illustrates how numerous are the legends. The group is by no means unique in either number or variety. Pertaining to the country up the Colorado and its western tributaries, there are literally hundreds of lost treasure legends. Scarcely fewer legends cluster around the old Fort Stockton-Fort Lancaster country, around the Victoria-Refugio-Goliad country, around the Big Bend country, and along certain sections of the Red River country. In lumber mills of East Texas buried treasure is the frequent subject of tale and speculation. The Nacogdoches country, the San Jacinto country, the San Augustine country, the country all along the Brazos from head to mouth, to mention only a few other localities, are replete with buried treasure legends. Moreover, instead of diminishing in number, these legends are constantly increasing.
The people who tell these legends represent many standards and strata of life, but the ultimate source of their legendary gold and their tales is common—Mexican or Spanish. In some of the legends the pioneer Texan, the Indian, or the negro plays a part, but in nearly all the Spaniard and the Mexican enter as both actors and transmitters. The native Texan frequently makes no distinction between “Spaniard” and “Mexican”; the wealth of legend, however, is generally Spanish. And that wealth would fade the actual riches of Potosi into paltriness. Now, how comes it that illimitable wealth is so popularly ascribed to the long Spanish dominion in Texas and to the brief Mexican occupation that intervened between the downfall of Spanish sovereignty and the achievement of Texas independence? Were the Spanish great gainers in Texas? Did Santa Anna’s armies mark their trail with gold?
The facts are that the Spanish in Texas were always hard up, that the occupation of the territory was a financial loss, that Texas was occupied as a buffer,1 first against the French in Louisiana and then against the United States, with but little attempt at mineral exploitation and always with a drain on the treasury. The Spanish soldiers and settlers often led a wretched existence, even on occasions having to root in the ground for starches and to hunt wild berries for sugars. According to Mrs. Mattie Austin Hatcher, one old San Antonio Mexican did write that the Spanish soldiers there were rolling in wealth. “They will spend a hundred reales for a dinner,” said he, “as easily as we spend a centavo for a glass of beer.” But he was a revolutionist inflamed with hatred of Spanish tyranny. So far as we know from the records—and again I quote Mrs. Hatcher for authority—only one cargo of money ever came to Texas from south of the Rio Grande; that was during the Mexican Revolution, in 1811. An expedition of revolutionists set forth from Coahuila to San Antonio, seeking escape to the United States. They had with them a considerable amount of bullion and money belonging to the revolutionary party. They were caught in Texas and hanged, and nobody knows what became of their wealth.
According to authenticated history, the Spanish worked but one mine in what before 1836 was the state of Texas.2 That was Los Almagres on the San Saba River, opened about 1757. Though the history of the San Saba mission and of the San Saba presidio is clear and sufficiently full, little is known of the history of the mine. It is doubtful if it ever paid much. Certainly, captains and commanders were always urging the Spanish viceroy to equip a large presidio on the San Saba to protect the mines. A certain Captain Villareal, too, is reported to have sent an urgent plea to the viceroy for more troops to protect a mine “two days’ ride from Corpus Christi,” which, he said, had been taken by Indians.3 But such advice from the Spanish commanders must not be taken too seriously. Many of them were notorious grafters, paying their men in goods with enormous profit to themselves, and frequently carrying on their payrolls the names of men whom they had enlisted only to discharge, or whom they had not enlisted at all. Their meat was more men.4 Yet these old reports have furnished “documentary evidence” to many a treasure hunter.
Santa Anna’s army, although it was well furnished when it crossed over into Texas from Mexico, and although it provided some fair plunder to the Texans at San Jacinto,5 could not, thinks Dr. E. C. Barker, Professor of American History in the University of Texas, have dropped off any chests of money in Texas. According to Dr. Barker, the Mexican troops in Texas, especially garrison troops, were often poorly paid.
If we turn from the Spanish and Mexicans to the early American colonists of Texas, we find that the prospect of mineral riches had little part in motivating their colonization. Though Stephen F. Austin “denounced” a mine—perhaps coal—on the upper Trinity,6 and though the Bowie brothers, with a small band of men, staked their lives on the chance of gaining silver ore from the San Saba country,7 thereby giving basis to the most remarkable of all Texas legends, nevertheless, the pioneer settlers of Texas came hither to plough and herd, to trade and labor, not to prospect.8
II
If the Spanish, then, occupied Texas for military and not pecuniary reasons, at large expense; if the brief Mexican regime meant nothing more than the maintenance of costly armies; if the original Texas colonists came without a dream of Spanish treasure—whence now among their descendants the amazing wealth of legends about lost mines and secreted treasures pertaining to the Spanish-Mexican eras? The full answer can be found in no one factor, but it can be largely found in the Spanish genius as it expressed itself in America. The answer involves a review of early Spanish wealth in America, real and imaginary, and an understanding of the influence of the Spanish genius upon Anglo-Saxons in the Southwest. The Spanish found immense wealth in America. They became credulous of mythical wealth. Later ages and folk, failing to inherit their wealth, inherited their credulity.
For treasure the Spanish explored and ransacked the whole of one continent and the half of another. And treasure they found. The indeterminate lake of Tezcuco is yet uneasy with the wealth of Montezuma lost in it by the overwhelmed army of Cortez.9 The ransom of Atahualpa, head Inca of Peru, promised in golden vessels to Pizarro at Andamarca, was to fill a room twenty-two by seventeen feet to a height of nine feet above the floor.10 And most of that ransom was actually delivered! Quesada did not find El Dorado, but in the country of Bogota he piled up golden booty in a courtyard so high “that a rider on horseback might hide behind it.”11 For four centuries the silver mines of South America have been the richest in the world. What wonder that the Spanish dreamed of wealth wherever the unknown stretched, and that buoyantly they followed their dreams! Led by rumor, they found in some places what they had come to America to find; thus they came to expect to find it wherever rumor pointed. The assertion of a naked Indian led Balboa to gaze first of all Europeans upon the great “South Sea.” An Indian told Pizarro of the vast nations of the Incas and of the fabulous treasures of Cuzco. Indians with their tales of the wealth of the Aztecs and the Muiscas “guided Cortez to the rich capital of Montezuma, and Quesada to the opulent plateau of Cundinamarca.”12
What wonder then that Sebastian de Benalcazar listened to a lone Indian tell the tale of the Gilded King, El Dorado,13 in 1535, and that in that puissant age of energy, exploration, and imagination, the tale was echoed in the camps of soldiers under the Andes, by the hearths of peasants in Navarre, on the smacks of Devonshire fishermen, in the counting-houses of Augsburg bankers, and in the council chamber of Queen Elizabeth as well as in the courts of a century of Spanish monarchs? To seek El Dorado, the conquistadores for a hundred years and more marched and countermarched from one extremity of half of the western hemisphere to the other, spending the lives of tens of thousands of men and the wealth of prodigal treasuries, enduring starvation, fever, cold, thirst, the pests of swamps and the pitilessness of deserts—all with an intrepidity that comes now in our tame “Safety First” age like a stirring cup brewed by the giants. At first a man, El Dorado came to mean a place somewhere in the western part of what is now Colombia, then in any, every direction. At sixty-three Great Raleigh came out of twelve years of imprisonment to fare forth a second time on the quest. And two centuries after he had died the same quest was occupying whole bodies of men; and even yet it is the tale, so it is said, of sanguine souls scattered over all South America.
When the seekers did not find it, always the treasure was más allá, on beyond. The search for La Ciudad Encantada de los Cesares,14 inspired by the fabrication of an Indian, was but the duplication of the sublime and ridiculous El Dorado error. And so was Cabeza de Vaca’s quest for the legended wealth of Florida15—a quest that had its ironic conclusion on the other side of the continent in Coronado’s expedition. So, too, were the fabled Palace of Cubanacan in Cuba;16 the mythical wealth of the mythical Amazons;17 the Laguna de Oro in New Mexico;18 the Pueblos del Rey Coronado of the West;19 the Cerro de la Plata,20 which was perhaps Los Almagres of Texas;21 the Concho River, bedded with pearls richer than those of the Indies or of the Gulf of California;22 the “Peak of Gold,”23 in either Texas or New Mexico; the nebulous treasures of a Casa del Sol;24 and the Gran Paytiti, or Gran Moxo,25 again in South America. Always beyond and beyond, lured by the talk of whatever chance savage, the Spanish quested. Thus the tale of a captive Indian, who wanted to get back eastward, led Coronado from the empty pueblos of the Zuñi in Arizona, whither he had been guided by an ignorant negro in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, to make his astounding march on eastward all the way to Kansas in quest of the Gran Quivira26—a place that never existed, a people that wandered naked at the heels of the drifting buffalo.
The imagination of simple-lived folk abhors failure, and the poorest in circumstances are the richest in legend of treasure. A remote disaster becomes a hope for present success. “I have remarked,” says Washington Irving,27 “that the stories of treasure buried by the Moors which prevail throughout Spain are most current among the poorest people. It is thus kind nature consoles with shadows for the want of substantials.” When Coronado told his men the truth of his barren search, they deserted him unbelieving. Following his expedition in 1542, a mission was established in southeastern New Mexico. For a hundred years explorers continued to search east and west for the Quivira. Finally the poor little mission was destroyed, and then the mixed-blooded descendants of the Spanish fortune hunters came to believe that it had been a rich cathedral in which was hoarded illimitable wealth.28 The dreamer may die, but the dream of treasure lives on.
When the Texas pioneers inherited the Spanish sitios and porciones of land, the leagues and labors, marked off by varas and pasos, they inherited too from the Spaniard and his Mexican successor something of the lure of ungained treasure. The imagination that images a cave in the Llano hills filled with five hundred jack loads of silver bullion is hardly so audacious as that which pictured the Seven Cities shining with their jeweled portals in the sun and peopled mostly by goldsmiths; but it is the same imagination, different only in degree, tempered by race and by temporal environment. The maletas of doubloons, the chests and stuffed cannon of Mexican army money, the caves bursting with Spanish bullion and plundered jewels—the very stuff of Texas treasure legends—are directly derived from the Spanish who made the multiform story of El Dorado immortal. I do not mean to say that the treasure legend is peculiar to the Spanish-tempered Southwest; I do mean to assert that the treasure legends of this Southwest are peculiarly of Spanish origin. It would, indeed, be interesting to contrast the treasure legends of the world before the Spanish discovered American wealth with those that have taken form since.
III
One cannot neglect the immense effect on the imaginations of North America made by the discovery of gold in California and later in Alaska. Snively’s wild goose expedition up the Rio Grande in 186729 could hardly have been supported by the settlers of Texas before ’49. There is evidence to show that popular interest in, and therefore legends of, Texas lost mines blazed up synchronically with the California gold excitement of 1848–1850. In 1849 Charles W. Webber published a novel that makes much of the San Saba tradition.30 In the early fifties, Texas newspapers carried items on “Gold” as well as on “Cotton,” etc., and there was a mining rush up the Colorado and its western tributaries.31 The time afforded occasion for the revival of Spanish-Mexican and Indian traditions concerning Spanish mining operations in Texas. Note should be made of the fact that the majority of Texas buried treasure legends presuppose rich mines.
IV
Two kindred qualities of man, hope and credulity, remain to be considered among the sources of treasure legend in Texas. These qualities are not coördinate with the historical forces; rather, they have been acted upon by the historical forces. Yet they have a certain localized source like the legends themselves. For as the tradition of modern treasure goes back to El Dorado, so the Mexicans who lure Americans into the quest of treasure are direct descendants of the Indians who lured the early Spanish. These Indians often pointed the eager Spanish on beyond in order to get rid of them; so the modern Mexican frequently inspires credulity in American treasure hunters in order to gain a small reward.
There seems to be a more or less regular traffic in charts—platas—to buried treasure. One Mexican paid for medicine at a drug store with his chart and story; another got pasturage for his burros at the same price; a third parted with his directive legend, which he believed in, to a white man for befriending him in sickness. Some of the platas purporting to be a century old are written with pencil on the cheapest of modern paper. The late John Warren Hunter asserted that at one time the chart business was a regular industry in San Antonio.32 Only recently a man was indicted in Fort Worth for fraudulently obtaining money on pretense of organizing an expedition to seek $5,000,000 in gold nuggets in a cave in Mexico.33 How the nuggets got in the cave involved a long story around an Indian, General Custer, Jesse James, and Pancho Villa. It was a good story!34
However, it would be grossly wronging the chief purveyors of treasure charts and legends to ascribe their action even primarily to avarice. It is as easy to promise gold as it is to promise rain, and in a country in which neither is plentiful the Mexican shows his desire to please by predicting both. Many a treasure legend has originated in motives as innocent as those of Uncle Remus.
V
Where there is so much smoke there must be some fire, many people familiar with the great body of treasure legend will say. I have no disposition to refute the argument. According to legend, much money has been found. I myself know of a few small finds. I know of eight hundred Mexican dollars having been found under a mesquite tree in Atascosa County many years ago; I know of about four hundred dollars in Mexican coin that were rooted up by hogs in Frio County forty years ago. Doubtless other actual finds over the country could be recorded. Whatever the facts, few men of imagination can listen to the enthusiasm of the true treasure hunter without becoming infected with his glamour.
After all, one need not patronize or pity these modern seekers of El Dorado. The law of compensation always works. At least they have kept alive that “knack of hoping” that made Oliver Goldsmith so charming. They have something in them as precious perhaps as the “ditches of footnotes” that authorize this treatise on them. They have dreamed something of the dream of Great Raleigh; and when one has known them as I have known them, he comes to respect something rightly simple and sincere in their lives, as there is, indeed, something rightly simple and sincere in their legends.
In some towns and back in certain unproductive hill districts of Southwest Texas, a considerable number of people live to hunt treasure. With them treasure hunting is a high passion. Others—and among them mingle people of some means—“dig” occasionally. However, few ranch and farm people of the Southwest make a practice of hunting lost treasure, and the majority even laugh at folk who do; yet most of them sometimes tell these legends, and nearly every man, under the sanguine spell of realistic circumstance, has at some time or another taken stock in one or two of them. Thus the legends in a large way, not easily defined, express the genius of the people to whose soil they pertain.
Don Pedro de Terreros, banker and wealthy mine owner of Mexico, who advanced the money for the establishment of the Mission of San Saba, may not have been so altruistic as Bancroft, Dr. Dunn, and Dr. Bolton have all implied. The government must bear the cost of military protection for the mission. With government protection and Indian labor, the mines at San Saba, which Miranda had in his famous reports made so promising, would richly pay any individual working them. Don Pedro had an interest in the mines. The Terreros records, if extant, might throw a great deal of light on the subject.
An unfounded but popular view to the contrary is offered by Captain Marryat, who says: “The dismemberment of Texas from Mexico was affected by the reports of extensive gold mines, diamonds, etc., which were to be found there.”—Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet in California, Sonora, and Western Texas, Leipzig, 1843, p. 147.
Dr. Bolton points out that the Spanish searched in Texas for “the Kingdom of Gran Quivira, where ‘everyone had their ordinary dishes made of wrought plate, and the jugs and bowls were of gold’”; also “for the Seven Hills of the Aijados, or Aixaos, where gold was so plentiful that ‘the natives not knowing any of the other metals, make of it everything they need, such as vessels and the tips of arrows and lances.’”—“The Spanish Occupation of Texas, 1519–1690,” by Herbert E. Bolton, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. XVI, pp. 1–2.
Notes
1 See Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, p. 4. I am indebted also to Mrs. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Archivist in History at the University of Texas, for information in her unpublished (1923) book on The Opening of Texas to Foreign Settlement, particularly Chaps. II and V.
2 Brewster County, in which mines were worked, was not in the old Mexican state of Texas and Coahuila.
3 Sutherland, Mary A., The Story of Corpus Christi, Houston, 1916, pp. 2–3. Mrs. Sutherland does not give her authority.
4 Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, p. 9; Priestley, H. I., José de Galvez (University of California Publications in History, 1916), p. 288. According to Priestley, some presidios were established by the Spanish in America to protect the special interests of large landholders.
5 About $11 around for each man in the Texas army, besides $3000 that was voted to the Texas navy. There was $11,000 in specie in Santa Anna’s military chest. His “finery and silver” were auctioned off at $1600 and his rich saddle at $800. See “An Account of the Battle of San Jacinto,” by J. Washington Winters, Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, Vol. VI, pp. 139–144; “Memoirs of Major George Bernard Erath,” by Lucy A. Erath, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, pp. 266–269.
6 Austin Papers in University of Texas archives. Information given by Mrs. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Archivist.
7 See “The Legend of the San Saba, or Bowie, Mine.”
8 Dr. Barker, in treating of “Land Speculation as a Cause of the Texas Revolution,” Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, Vol. X, p. 76 ff., ignores all idea that reputed mineral riches had anything to do with the land speculation.
9 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Book V, Chapter III. I am aware of the fact that some historians question the loss of any great treasure.
10 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Philadelphia, 1874, I, pp. 420–422; 453 ff. Also, Bandelier, A. F., The Gilded Man, p. 19.
11 Bandelier, p. 26.
12 Zahm, J. A. (H. J. Mozans), Through South America’s Southland, New York, 1916, p. 361.
13 For full accounts of the El Dorado history and legends, see Adolphe F. Bandelier’s The Gilded Man, New York, 1893, and Z. A. Zahm’s (H. J. Mozans) The Quest of El Dorado, New York, 1917. Both are readable and distinguish well between history and legend. Bandelier is the more scholarly of the two writers.
14 Zahm, J. A. (Mozans), Through South America’s Southland, pp. 353–362.
15 Bandelier, The Gilded Man, “The Seven Cities,” p. 125 ff.
16 Skinner, Chas. M., Myths and Legends of Our New Possessions, Philadelphia, 1902, p. 103.
17 Bandelier, The Gilded Man, “The Amazons,” p. 113 ff.
18 Bolton, H. E. (Editor), Spanish Explorations in the Southwest, New York, 1916, pp. 130, 156, 184, 186.
19 Ibid., p. 130.
20 Ibid., pp. 283–284.
21 Bancroft identifies the “mountain of silver” with “the famous iron mountain near the city of Durango.”—History of the North Mexican States and Texas, I, p. 100.
22 Bolton, Spanish Explorations, pp. 313–317.
23 Lummis, Chas. F., The Enchanted Burro, p. 161 ff.
24 Zahm, J. A., The Quest of El Dorado, p. 6.
25 Ibid., pp. 197–200.
26 Bandelier, The Gilded Man, “Quivira,” p. 223 ff.
27 The Alhambra, “The Journey.”
28 Bandelier, The Gilded Man, p. 223 ff.
29 See “The Snively Legend,” infra.
30 Webber, Chas. W., The Gold Mines of the Gila, New York, 1849, especially pages 189–191 and 196–197. Webber concludes the book with an actual proposal to readers to join him in an expedition after the treasure. He had been a ranger with Jack Hays a short time and he claims to have gotten his information about the San Saba deposits from the talk of men in camp. Use is made of the same legendary material in Webber’s Old Hicks the Guide, 1848.
31 Galveston Weekly Journal, May 13, June 6, June 16, 1853.
32 “The Hunt for the Bowie Mine in Menard,” in Frontier Times, Bandera, Texas, October, 1923, pp. 24–26. The article is full of concrete evidence not to be questioned.
33 San Antonio Express, October 21, 1923, p. 1.
34 For good satire on Texan credulity in Mexican mines, see On A Mexican Mustang Through Texas, by Alex E. Sweet and J. Armory Knox, Rand, McNally and Co., New York, 1892, pp. 439–452.