The repulsed Indians rallied and made a counter attack. The Spanish were driven back. They retreated slowly, in good order, steadily followed by the Indians. At each attack upon their rear, the Indians became fiercer, bolder, and stronger in numbers. The exhausted Spaniards were losing hope of ever reaching the Rio Grande with their lives, much less their treasure. A month after their assault on the Indian village, they were camped for the night on a little creek not far from what are now called the Santa Anna Mountains in Coleman County. A lookout who had been dispatched in the late afternoon to make observation from the nearest mountain had not returned. At dark all fires were extinguished and the camp waited. Some time before midnight the lookout dashed in to report that a large band of Indians was advancing within a few miles. The commander of the expedition ordered his men to entrench themselves as best they could and to maintain silence. With them was a very strong negro who had acted as a kind of guide. He was well able to dig a hole for the gold, and he was detailed with some of the exhausted Spaniards to hide the treasure. They buried it on top of a hill, under a flat [[80]]rock on which they carved three M’s. It is estimated that pure ore to the value of about ten thousand pesos was buried.
The detail had barely returned to camp when the Indians began their attack. They rushed the camp in overwhelming numbers. Only three prisoners were taken, two Spaniards and the negro guide. The Spaniards were burned at the stake at once. The negro was kept as a slave. He alone lived to tell the tale.
Some years after his capture, broken and crazed from continual cruelty, he escaped into Mexico. There he seemed always thinking of the death of his troop, and the Mexicans shunned him as bad company except when some raider wanted to get his tale of buried gold. He refused many times to guide parties back to it. According to him, there was a curse on the gold for whoever should find it. No one has ever found it, and if it ever was buried in the Santa Anna Mountains, it is buried there yet.
THE HOLE OF GOLD NEAR WICHITA FALLS
By J. Frank Dobie
I am indebted for this legend to Mr. Bob Nutt of Sabinal. Once in the early days a band of men who were going across the Plains to trade in New Mexico were attacked by Indians somewhere near the present town of Wichita Falls. They made a corral of their wagons and fought off the Indians as long as they could, but when night came they were so thinned in numbers and the Indians were so strong that they decided to break for their lives. They broke, and all but one man were speedily overtaken, killed, and scalped.
The man who escaped saved his life by stumbling into a hole that lay concealed near a little ravine. It was a kind of pothole with rounded pebbles at the bottom; among them the man soon noticed what looked like gold. He was in a hole of gold nuggets! He remained there for three days, and during all that time he was sorting the nuggets from the rocks, digging out the gravelly bottom with his bare hands. He said afterward that there must have been a barrel of the nuggets. Finally, when he could no longer hear Indians, he peeped out. Seeing that the way was clear, he bundled up what nuggets he could carry and [[81]]set out for a distant fort. The Indians had burned all the supplies, with the wagons, and on his way to the fort he nearly starved. He had his gun but he was afraid to disclose his whereabouts by shooting at game. At length he grew so weak that he had to throw away all the gold but two or three specimen nuggets. He was hardly conscious of the loss when at last he staggered into the army walls.
It was several years before he could get back into the Wichita country. Meanwhile, day and night, he never ceased to think of the hole of gold nuggets. The country around it was pictured clear in his memory. The exact spot would be located by the irons of the burned wagons. For a long time the man was afraid to tell his secret. At last he returned, but no hill or draw of the region seemed familiar, and he could never come upon the wagon irons or the pothole of nuggets. Some years ago he died in Wichita Falls, leaving his descendants a few nuggets that bore testimony to the truth of his often told tale.