I
The buried treasure legends of Cooke County, so far as I have been able to investigate, center around two localities. The first legend with its variants is current in the Cross Timbers and relates to that part of the county immediately northwest of Burns City, extending to within a few miles of Gainesville. An outcropping of the legend persists also in the Cross Timbers near Dexter. The descendants of the first settlers, some of whom still live in the country, tell of many hunts for buried treasure made by different people who were guided by maps or oral directions furnished by Mexicans.
Marks of fish, turtles, serpents, and other easily drawn animals were once found on trees and stones; but no master mind, such as reveals itself in Poe’s “Gold Bug,” came to deduce their true meaning. So the treasure has never been found, although an effort was made to locate it quite recently. Most of these marks have long since been removed or destroyed; however, it has been the writer’s fortune to see the outline of a crudely cut fish upon the side of a large boulder, probably the only mark of its kind left in the county.
It may interest Texas readers to know that in support of the claim that this part of what is now Cooke County was visited by Spanish explorers, there now repose in the Cooke County museum, which is a part of the county library, a one-pound brass cannon ball, picked up one mile northwest of Burns City, and a brass spear-head, found in a gravel drift near Dexter. Brass cannon balls went out of date long before Americans ever reached this part of Texas; and, as an old Texas ranger has pointed out, the only metal that the Indians used for their spear and arrow heads was iron—not brass.