IV
Pirates and Their Sacks of Gold
This story appeared many years ago in the Galveston Daily News as a “special” from Corpus Christi.
“One morning far back in the receding past, just as the sun was casting his first golden beams of light over the lovely prairie, then robed in the sublimity of wild solitude, Lafitte and ten or fifteen of his buccaneers called at the humble home of an old lady and her husband who then lived on Kellar, or Cox, Creek in what is now embraced in Jackson County. Here these pirates got their breakfast and then handed the old people $1000, in which sum were found coins from the then leading commercial governments of the world. During their stay at this house the pirates made frequent references to the hot pursuit of English or American war vessels. After they had dispatched the morning meal, they shouldered what purported to be sacks of gold and departed, going toward the head of Cox Creek, presumably to bury or secrete their ill-gotten treasure. After a few hours they passed back by this house, going in the direction of Cox Bay. They were never seen or heard of again by the old people who supplied them with breakfast.”
In the article from which the above excerpt is made, it is stated that some years ago certain respectable citizens of Corpus Christi who had enlisted the services of a lad with an “affinity” for gold made an extensive search for the supposed hidden treasure. The expedition was a failure, but the leader was confident that somewhere between Cox Bay and the mouth of the Lavaca River large sums of the pirates’ coins would some day be found, and intimated that they would be fished out of Swan Lake.