The Rock Pens
Excepting the Bowie Mine and the Nigger Gold Mine, no other purported lost treasure in Southwest Texas has caused so much discussion or enticed so many seekers as that of the “Rock Pens.” These “Pens” are variously placed in Live Oak, La Salle, and McMullen counties, generally in McMullen. The “way-bill” quoted below was given me by Mr. E. M. Dubose of Mathis, Texas, who has spent months, perhaps years, in trying to follow out its directions. Many of the details as I give them are also due to him, but the legend has been so familiar to me from my childhood up that I can hardly say to whom I owe it.
The story is that thirty-one mule loads of silver bullion, together with various fine images and other precious articles, were being brought from the mountains of Mexico by Texas bandits who had made a great robbery. They had crossed the Rio Grande in safety and were proceeding north to their rendezvous at San Antonio when they found that the Indians were closing in on them in the rough country west or south—for the river often changes its course—of the Nueces. They knew that an attack was imminent, and they picked the best place they could find in which to make their stand. It was by a small ravine in which [[29]]was a spring of water, and here they threw up some crude breastworks in the form of two rock pens. In one of the pens they buried the bullion, and then, in order to hide all signs of their secret work, they ran the mules around and around over the disturbed earth. The fight soon followed, and in it all of the Texans but one are supposed to have been killed. He, Daniel Dunham, on his deathbed in Austin, fifty-one years ago, dictated the following “way-bill.”
Austin Texas
April 17th 1873About six or seven miles below the Laredo Crossing, on the west side of the Nueces River near the hills, there is or was a tree in the prairie. Due west from that tree at the foot of the hills at the mouth of a ravine there is a large rock and under the rock, there was a small spring of water coming from under the rock, due east from that rock there is a rock pen or rocks laid around like a pen and due east a few yards there is another pen of rocks, in that pen is the spoils of thirty one mule loads.
[Signed] DANIEL DUNHAM
This remarkable document was at his death, which occurred during the eighties, in the possession of a man named X. He had shown it to his sons a few times, but there was an accompanying paper that he had never shown. This accompanying paper he destroyed shortly before his death, or else his wife destroyed it immediately thereafter. One of his own sons conjectured, and certain circumstances have led others to conjecture, that X himself was one of the Texas bandits who invaded the Mexican mines and robbed a rich Mexican church. It is known that X held the way-bill as peculiarly veracious but that he had an overwhelming feeling against undertaking to follow out its directions.
Whether any attempts to find the Rock Pens were made before his death I do not know. A fact is that not long after his death an expedition, of which one of his sons was a member, set out to find the pens. Other “gold hunters” are known to have gone on the search. Therefore it must be that there were other directions in existence than those left by X. Men yet living claim to have seen the pens years and years ago before they knew that there was any significance to them, but though various old rock heaps [[30]]have been found since, none has ever been found to answer to Daniel Dunham’s description.
The Laredo Crossing mentioned in the way-bill is supposed to be the Nueces crossing on the old San Antonio-Laredo road. That is generally conceded to be on the Henry Shiner Ranch in McMullen County. Nearly all the land in that part of the country is still in large pastures. Much of it is rough, the San Caja, Las Chuzas, and other so-called mountains being in the vicinity. Where it was once open, the country during the last fifty years has grown up in brush so that no man can be sure the pens do not exist until thousands and thousands of acres of uneven land covered with prickly pear, mesquite, black chaparral, “gran haney,” and other thorned brush have been combed. The rocks were never piled high. They have been scattered, perhaps covered over with soil washed down from the hillside. In time of drouth it is a desolate country, and many a tale tells of early travelers perishing in it of thirst. Before the advent of the automobile one treasure-seeking expedition lived for days on jack rabbit meat, so remote were they in that region from supplies.
Sixty or seventy years ago Pate McNeill was coming from Tilden, or Dog Town as it was then called, down to Lagarto with his young wife. They were in a buggy, leading a horse, saddled. Somewhere in the Shiner country they saw a fine looking maverick cow. McNeill got out of the buggy, jumped on his horse, and took after her. When he had roped her and tied her, he looked around and saw that he was right in a kind of pen of rocks. At that time he did not know that great riches appertained to rock pens; so he calmly ran his famous brand of P A T E on the cow and went on down the country. Years later when the story of the Rock Pens came out, he went back and tried to locate the rocks, but the country had changed so much with brush and “washes” that he could never find anything.
“Uncle” Ben Adkins, a veteran of Beeville who guarded the western frontier during the Civil War days to keep cow thieves from driving cattle off to California, tells of a hunter who once stumbled into the pens and thought that he was in a deserted goat camp. Like others, he did not know at the time how close he was to millions.