According to authenticated history, the Spanish worked but one mine in what before 1836 was the state of Texas.[2] That was Los Almagres on the San Saba River, opened about 1757. Though the history of the San Saba mission and of the San Saba presidio is clear and sufficiently full, little is known of the history of the mine. It is doubtful if it ever paid much. Certainly, captains and commanders were always urging the Spanish viceroy to equip a large presidio on the San Saba to protect the mines. A certain Captain Villareal, too, is reported to have sent an urgent plea to the viceroy for more troops to protect a mine “two days’ ride from Corpus Christi,” which, he said, had been taken by Indians.[3] But such advice from the Spanish commanders must not be taken too seriously. Many of them were notorious grafters, [[5]]paying their men in goods with enormous profit to themselves, and frequently carrying on their payrolls the names of men whom they had enlisted only to discharge, or whom they had not enlisted at all. Their meat was more men.[4] Yet these old reports have furnished “documentary evidence” to many a treasure hunter.
Santa Anna’s army, although it was well furnished when it crossed over into Texas from Mexico, and although it provided some fair plunder to the Texans at San Jacinto,[5] could not, thinks Dr. E. C. Barker, Professor of American History in the University of Texas, have dropped off any chests of money in Texas. According to Dr. Barker, the Mexican troops in Texas, especially garrison troops, were often poorly paid.
If we turn from the Spanish and Mexicans to the early American colonists of Texas, we find that the prospect of mineral riches had little part in motivating their colonization. Though Stephen F. Austin “denounced” a mine—perhaps coal—on the upper Trinity,[6] and though the Bowie brothers, with a small band of men, staked their lives on the chance of gaining silver ore from the San Saba country,[7] thereby giving basis to the most remarkable of all Texas legends, nevertheless, the pioneer settlers of [[6]]Texas came hither to plough and herd, to trade and labor, not to prospect.[8]
II
If the Spanish, then, occupied Texas for military and not pecuniary reasons, at large expense; if the brief Mexican regime meant nothing more than the maintenance of costly armies; if the original Texas colonists came without a dream of Spanish treasure—whence now among their descendants the amazing wealth of legends about lost mines and secreted treasures pertaining to the Spanish-Mexican eras? The full answer can be found in no one factor, but it can be largely found in the Spanish genius as it expressed itself in America. The answer involves a review of early Spanish wealth in America, real and imaginary, and an understanding of the influence of the Spanish genius upon Anglo-Saxons in the Southwest. The Spanish found immense wealth in America. They became credulous of mythical wealth. Later ages and folk, failing to inherit their wealth, inherited their credulity.
For treasure the Spanish explored and ransacked the whole of one continent and the half of another. And treasure they found. The indeterminate lake of Tezcuco is yet uneasy with the wealth of Montezuma lost in it by the overwhelmed army of Cortez.[9] The ransom of Atahualpa, head Inca of Peru, promised in golden vessels to Pizarro at Andamarca, was to fill a room twenty-two by seventeen feet to a height of nine feet above the floor.[10] And most of that ransom was actually delivered! Quesada did not find El Dorado, but in the country of Bogota he piled up golden booty in a courtyard so high “that a rider on horseback might hide behind it.”[11] For four centuries the silver mines of [[7]]South America have been the richest in the world. What wonder that the Spanish dreamed of wealth wherever the unknown stretched, and that buoyantly they followed their dreams! Led by rumor, they found in some places what they had come to America to find; thus they came to expect to find it wherever rumor pointed. The assertion of a naked Indian led Balboa to gaze first of all Europeans upon the great “South Sea.” An Indian told Pizarro of the vast nations of the Incas and of the fabulous treasures of Cuzco. Indians with their tales of the wealth of the Aztecs and the Muiscas “guided Cortez to the rich capital of Montezuma, and Quesada to the opulent plateau of Cundinamarca.”[12]
What wonder then that Sebastian de Benalcazar listened to a lone Indian tell the tale of the Gilded King, El Dorado,[13] in 1535, and that in that puissant age of energy, exploration, and imagination, the tale was echoed in the camps of soldiers under the Andes, by the hearths of peasants in Navarre, on the smacks of Devonshire fishermen, in the counting-houses of Augsburg bankers, and in the council chamber of Queen Elizabeth as well as in the courts of a century of Spanish monarchs? To seek El Dorado, the conquistadores for a hundred years and more marched and countermarched from one extremity of half of the western hemisphere to the other, spending the lives of tens of thousands of men and the wealth of prodigal treasuries, enduring starvation, fever, cold, thirst, the pests of swamps and the pitilessness of deserts—all with an intrepidity that comes now in our tame “Safety First” age like a stirring cup brewed by the giants. At first a man, El Dorado came to mean a place somewhere in the western part of what is now Colombia, then in any, every direction. At sixty-three Great Raleigh came out of twelve years of imprisonment to fare forth a second time on the quest. And two centuries after he had died the same quest was occupying whole bodies of men; and even yet it is the tale, so it is said, of sanguine souls scattered over all South America.
When the seekers did not find it, always the treasure was [[8]]más allá, on beyond. The search for La Ciudad Encantada de los Cesares,[14] inspired by the fabrication of an Indian, was but the duplication of the sublime and ridiculous El Dorado error. And so was Cabeza de Vaca’s quest for the legended wealth of Florida[15]—a quest that had its ironic conclusion on the other side of the continent in Coronado’s expedition. So, too, were the fabled Palace of Cubanacan in Cuba;[16] the mythical wealth of the mythical Amazons;[17] the Laguna de Oro in New Mexico;[18] the Pueblos del Rey Coronado of the West;[19] the Cerro de la Plata,[20] which was perhaps Los Almagres of Texas;[21] the Concho River, bedded with pearls richer than those of the Indies or of the Gulf of California;[22] the “Peak of Gold,”[23] in either Texas or New Mexico; the nebulous treasures of a Casa del Sol;[24] and the Gran Paytiti, or Gran Moxo,[25] again in South America. Always beyond and beyond, lured by the talk of whatever chance savage, the Spanish quested. Thus the tale of a captive Indian, who wanted to get back eastward, led Coronado from the empty pueblos of the Zuñi in Arizona, whither he had been guided by an ignorant negro in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola, to make his astounding march on eastward all the way to Kansas in quest of the Gran Quivira[26]—a place that never existed, a people that wandered naked at the heels of the drifting buffalo. [[9]]
The imagination of simple-lived folk abhors failure, and the poorest in circumstances are the richest in legend of treasure. A remote disaster becomes a hope for present success. “I have remarked,” says Washington Irving,[27] “that the stories of treasure buried by the Moors which prevail throughout Spain are most current among the poorest people. It is thus kind nature consoles with shadows for the want of substantials.” When Coronado told his men the truth of his barren search, they deserted him unbelieving. Following his expedition in 1542, a mission was established in southeastern New Mexico. For a hundred years explorers continued to search east and west for the Quivira. Finally the poor little mission was destroyed, and then the mixed-blooded descendants of the Spanish fortune hunters came to believe that it had been a rich cathedral in which was hoarded illimitable wealth.[28] The dreamer may die, but the dream of treasure lives on.