Bowie laid his plans carefully. He at once began to cultivate the friendship of the Lipans. He sent back East for a fine rifle plated with silver. When it came he presented it to old Chief Xolic. A powwow was held and Bowie was invited to join the tribe. Formally, by the San Pedro Springs, he was adopted into it. Now followed months of life with the savages. Bowie was expert at shooting the buffalo; he was foremost in fighting against the enemies of the Lipans; some say that he married the chief’s daughter. He became so thoroughly a Lipan and was so useful a warrior that his adopted brothers finally showed him the source of their precious mineral. He had expected much but he had hardly expected to see millions. The sight seemed to overthrow all caution and judgment. Almost immediately he deserted the Indians and returned to San Antonio to raise a force for seizing the treasure.
He was between two fires. He did not want too large a body of men to share with; he must have a considerable body to force the Indians. He took some time in arranging the campaign. [[18]]Meanwhile old Chief Xolic died, and a young warrior named Tresmanos succeeded to his position. Soon afterwards he came with his people to San Antonio on their annual bartering trip. There he saw Bowie, accused him of treachery, and came near being killed for his insolence. The time was at hand for Bowie to start on his campaign. Thirty-four men had promised to accompany him. In actuality, only ten put in their appearance, among whom were his brother Rezin P. Bowie and a negro slave. The fewness of numbers, however, did not deter him. He was determined to reach the site of the mineral—whether smelted bullion or natural veins of crude ore legend does not agree—and to establish a stockade there and proceed with exploitation.
Some distance north of San Antonio in the hills he met a friendly band of Indians who warned him that Tresmanos was on the warpath against him and his rumored invasion. Bowie pressed on. November 21, 1831, near Calf Creek, in what is now McCulloch County, the little party was attacked at sunrise by 164 Indians. The Texans had one man killed and two wounded and all their horses lost; the Indians, according to their own subsequent report, had eighty men killed besides a great number wounded. In 1905, Hunter described the remains of the barricade hastily constructed by the Bowie party as being “still traceable,” and added that the barricade “would be almost intact but for the hand of the impious treasure seeker.”
It is generally said that the battle of Calf Creek marked Bowie’s last attempt to get to the San Saba Mine, and that the remaining few years of his life were taken up with the duties of a patriot. According to one legend current in the San Saba country, on the word of Mr. Carlos Ashley, a native, Bowie was seeking the San Saba treasure in order to finance the Texas army. This is the patriotic theme also of a Texas novel in which Bowie is the hero: William O. Stoddard’s The Lost Gold of the Montezumas—A Story of the Alamo. Mr. Matt Bradley, editor and publisher of Border Wars of Texas, says that only three months before Bowie fell in the Alamo he was trying again to reach the riches of which he alone among white men knew the secret.[18] Some years ago a man named Longworth, who is now in Kansas, paid a Mexican in San Antonio $500 for a document purporting to have been taken [[19]]off Bowie’s body by a Mexican lieutenant who entered the Alamo immediately after the last defender had been silenced. The Mexican who sold the document claimed that lieutenant as a paternal ancestor. He swore that it gave directions to the mine, but somehow Longworth could not follow them.
Thus we see that, in fact, Bowie had nothing more to do with the mine than to hunt it. But because he was its greatest hunter and because he is presumed to have found it, his name has come to be linked with it. However, this linking is of a comparatively recent time. I doubt if the name “Bowie Mine” was used at all until after the Civil War. All the earlier histories and books of travel that mention the mines—and they are many—refer to them as the San Saba Mines. “Bowie Mine” is a popular coinage of the last half century, and now the legend of the mine is living to no small extent by virtue of the legend of the man.
III
We have seen that the San Saba presidio was fifty miles or more away from the mines it is supposed to have protected. Not all lost mine hunters, by any means, have agreed with Dr. Bolton in locating the mine, or mines, on Honey Creek. It has been located now on the Llano, now on the San Saba, up and down, across and beyond. Many hunters assert that numerous mines were scattered over a wide belt extending in a general way from the Colorado westward along the courses of the Llano and San Saba to the Nueces canyon, El Cañon, as the Spanish called it.[19] A vast part of the bullion buried in Texas legends is supposed to have come from the mines in this area.
Some of the early Texas writers credulous of mineral deposits in the state have had an immense influence on hunters for the San Saba Mines, who are often readers of old and out of the way books. These hunters argue that as the early writers were nearer the sources of history than their skeptical successors, they must be more reliable.
An article from the now stilled pen of John Warren Hunter recently appeared in the Frontier Times (Bandera, Texas), detailing [[20]]a few of the enterprises that have been undertaken to recover the San Saba Mine. I quote from the article:[20]