Legends of Texas

by Unknown

Adding his own information to what he heard from the native people, the stranger gradually let out a tale that ran somewhat as follows. At an early date, when Spanish miners were gathering great quantities of gold in Mexico, a company of them, in search of further treasure, had wandered far to the northwest, taking with them a large store of the precious metal. In their wanderings, directed by some Indian or by their own keen instinct for such things, the Spanish had located the copper mines on the Brazos and had proceeded to work them. In some way they aroused the hostility of the native Indians and were in danger of massacre. They hastily hid their treasure and escaped for their lives. Before leaving they made a plat of the country, carefully noting directions and distances from prominent points of nature. This plat they took with them, but the Indians continued so hostile that they could never return to take away their gold. Amidst the turmoil and dangers of Mexico at that time, the plat was delivered for safe-keeping to a faithful Mexican convert who was attached to the Spanish party. It remained in his hands until the old man, approaching death, delivered it to some friend or to a member of his family as a passport to immense wealth. Thus the plat passed along for two or three generations until Texas fell into the hands of the hated gringos and it became certain that no poor Mexican could ever get possession of the treasure. Finally, for some small favors and a little money, a Mexican turned the plat over to the American who had now come with it and its tale to Haskell County.

Here he organized a small company to assist him in locating and digging up the treasure. The plat was guarded most carefully and its information kept most secret. But the detailed intricacy of that information was very confusing to the possessors of it. The map covered a large territory, including the two branches of the Brazos, Kiowa Peak, and numerous minor features [[75]]of the vicinity. It called for many specified rocks and many marked trees. The rocks had been covered with soil or the markings on them had been weathered away. Most of the trees had perished in fires long years past. An explanation was given to some of the signs, but the meaning of more had to be guessed at.

The search was thorough and long continued, and a deal of money was spent in digging. Most of the prospecting was right along the river, and a Mexican who was herding sheep in the neighborhood began to enter into the counsels of the treasure hunters. He said that the Mexican government knew all about this treasure, that it knew, too, of five or six very rich mines in Texas, some of them the richest in the world, but that it would never reveal these secrets to Americans. He added that certain priests in Mexico could locate this treasure that was being sought on the Brazos.

Thus the Mexican pastor convinced the treasure seekers that he knew something about the matter, and to use his information they made him a partner. As soon as he was made a partner, he announced that if a certain rock was found with a certain letter on it, the picture of which he drew, he could find the gold. Only a few days after this, the party did uncover, about eight or ten inches under the surface of the soil, a rock that they called the “Spider Rock.”

The rock had many curious markings on it, among them the letter H, in curious old Spanish chirography, as the Mexican had called for. He pretended to explain the markings on the rock. He said that the little hill on which the Spider Rock was found was underlaid with the “base rock”; that underneath the “base rock” were buried a great many bodies; and that nineteen steps to the west of the dead bodies would be found buried a large bone of some prehistoric animal. He said that in excavating the diggers would find a kind of wall, as if a trench had been dug and then filled in with a much harder substance.

Fired with hope, the treasure hunters set to digging for the “base rock.” They did find a wall of very firm substance, wider at the top and narrower at the base, as if a trench had been filled in. When they had got down some fifteen or nineteen feet, they were met by such a stench that they could hardly work. They found a great many decayed bodies and many relics of various kinds. Furthermore, at the specified distance, they found the [[76]]bone of the prehistoric animal. It was of about the thickness of a man’s body and very porous.

The Mexican now directed that the diggers go to the bluff a little farther to the west. He said that there they would find under a rock a great bone like the first and other things buried by the Spaniards. The bone was found, and with it were an old-fashioned sword, some copper ornaments thought to be epaulets, some silver ornaments also, about forty-two gold buttons, and a great number of beads.

But here ended the findings. A majority of the relics found were placed in Doctor Terrell’s drug store at Haskell, and were lost in a fire about 1909. The treasure hunting expedition is said to have turned up more than an acre of ground, the depth of the excavations varying from a slight distance to nineteen or twenty feet. The diggers dispersed to their farms, the large man from the border left, and after remaining around a few weeks the Mexican disappeared. Many men think that he knew more than he would tell. Not long after he vanished, a skeleton was found several miles to the east across the river, in the opposite direction from that in which the Mexican had led the Americans. Near the skeleton were two small, heavy copper pots, one shaped oblong somewhat in the form of a canoe, the other round and of the capacity of a gallon and a half, built much stronger than any vessel now made for commerce and capable of holding itself full of the heaviest metal. The popular conclusion is that the Mexican took from these copper vessels at least a part of the vast Spanish treasure. A man in Haskell now is trying to organize an expedition to seek the remaining part of the treasure and to gather more relics.

Nearly every man of that searching party of seventeen years ago was a friend of mine. I wish to give an illustration of the sanguine nature of these treasure seeking folk. At one time the party believed that they were within a foot or two of their treasure, but they feared to uncover it before they had made arrangements to take care of it. They were afraid, so one of them confided to me, to put much of the money in local banks, lest the banks be robbed; they wished, he said, to entrust it to our private vault, where no one would suspect its presence. I agreed to take care of the money and was to be notified a little after midnight. The amount to be deposited was $60,000 in gold. I was never called to open the vault. [[77]]

Regarding the copper mines that the Spanish are said to have worked in this country, I can add little. It is known that a company of wealthy men, principally from Baltimore and Washington, came out near Kiowa Peak in 1872 to locate a copper mine. H. H. McConnell, “Late Sixth U. S. Cavalry,” in a book published in 1889, Five Years a Cavalryman, page 294, gives a concise account of the expedition. It consisted, he says, of about sixty men and was almost luxuriously provided for. Its distinguishing feature was the character of its “bosses,” ranging as they did from a Virginia congressman of ante bellum days to an orientalist named Kellog, and including Professor Roessler, “sometime State Geologist of Texas.” According to McConnell, who was with the party, it did little but travel leisurely and “locate ten or twelve sections of land” near Kiowa Peak. The clue on which it set forth was a report of copper deposits on the Wichita and Brazos rivers made by some prospectors who had been driven back by Indians before the Civil War.