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Lafitte’s Treasure Vault
Legends of Lafitte’s treasure in Louisiana often come down the Texas coast and become Texan by adoption. In the Abbeville [[185]]country, Louisiana, there is a legend, handed down from the last century, to the effect that Lafitte and his pirate crew, having run a schooner up into White Lake (Louisiana coast) through a bayou which has long since been filled and grown over with marsh grass, at some spot along the shore built a brick vault in which they stored a vast amount of their ill-gotten treasure.
About the year 1908 a man named C—— claimed to have stumbled upon the vault while hunting alligators. He further claimed to have torn away, though with much difficulty, portions of the brick work, revealing untold wealth in gold coin, the hidden treasure of Lafitte.
Numbers of persons to whom this story was told became interested in making a search for the treasure. Owing to the swampy condition of the country and the inaccessibility of the spot where the vault was located, C—— advised the digging of a small canal as the best means of reaching it. This idea was adopted, money was advanced for the purpose, some five or six thousand dollars, and the digging of the canal was begun. After weeks of toil, of chopping through dense canebrakes, and of floundering through the swamp mud, the party reached a lone cypress tree that was supposed to stand sentinel over the crypt. The treasure could not be found.
Disappointed in their quest and disgusted at their own credulity, the treasure seekers caused the arrest of C—— on the charge of having taken their money under false pretenses; C—— claimed as the reason for their failure that he had lost his bearings. Who knows?—Adapted from a story in the Galveston News, October 27, 1908.