“Nemecio Salcedo.
“To the Sir Governor of New Mexico.”
Poor brave, misguided Bernardo de Castro! I wish we might have more of the documents about his venturesome wanderings in quest of the Peak of Gold. He must have gone far out into the wastes of Texas; and at last he, too, yielded up his life, as did countless of his countrymen before him, to that deadliest of yellow fevers. We lose all track of him until Governor Chaves writes from Santa Fé, in 1829, to his superior in the City of Mexico, who had written to ask him about these and other matters. His letter says:
“Most Excellent Sir: In compliance with that which Your Excellency requests in your official letter of the 19th of August last, that I make the necessary verifications upon the mineral reported by the Rev. Father Custodian of these missions, Fray Sevastian Alvares, to be found among the gentile Comanches, I have investigated the matter, and place in the knowledge of Your Excellency that which various of the citizens of this capital—and all of them most veracious—say. They all agree in that it is a fact that Don Bernardo de Castro [the old soldier had evidently won honorable recognition, else a Governor of New Mexico would not speak of him by the respectful title of “Don”] entered this territory with the object of seeking the said mineral; that he made various expeditions with this object, until in one of them he was slain by the heathen Apaches.
“Passing to information received from the travelers to that nation, all agree in the statement that the Comanches offer to sell them pouches filled with a metal which appears fine and of great weight, which they say they get from the neighborhood of the Ash peaks (which are very well known to our people, but not explored or charted, because they are distant from the trails).
“The citizen Pablo Martin has been he who expressed himself most fully. He, knowing that the said Don Bernardo de Castro sought a mineral in the Comanche nation, has procured them to look for the said mineral. The only result was that one Comanche named Paño de Lienso [‘Cloth of Linen’], who made himself his companion, gave him information that beyond the Ash peaks, in some round hills, were stones with much silver, whereof the said Comanche had carried some to the province of San Antonio de Bejar [Texas], where they made buttons for him. He who made the buttons charged the Comanche to bring him a load [of that metal], but he did not do so, because in that time came the war of his people with that province. Other Comanches also have told him [Pablo Martin] that in said spot were stones with silver.
“This is all I have been able to find out as the results of my investigations, the which I place in the knowledge of Your Excellency, that you may put it to the use which you deem best.
“Santa Fee, 30 of 8ber of 1829.
“Chaves.”
And there, so far as we know it now, is the story of the Peak of Gold.