“ ‘I’ll tell you why,’ he says, getting kinder excited, but lowering his voice. ‘It was filled from end to end with gold!’
“ ‘Gold!’ I whistled. ‘So that’s it.’
“ ‘Yes, that’s it,’ he says. ‘Not only that, but I have in my pocket another map giving the exact location of more gold, beginning with the ferry as a center. You see, the wagon that crossed the river carried a chest of money. The three men that were with it went on till they became afraid of being overtaken; then they buried it. They had a quarrel over it, and one of them shot another to shut him up. Then he and my grandfather took down some landmarks on a crude map, and pulled for Mexico. On the way the other Mexican died, leaving my grandfather with the map. He died before he could come back and get the money. My father was killed by bandits; so I was left with the one and original map of the buried treasure. With your help, your knowledge of the country around here, and so forth, we should be able to locate that chest and the cannon easy. Now, I propose to [[89]]give you half of whatever we find. If we don’t find anything, you don’t get anything. What do you say?’
“You-all can easily guess that I jumped right on his offer. He showed me the other map, and I located the landmarks as near as I could on the map; we got our tools together, and started our treasure hunt. We looked for the cannon first, because I knew exactly where it should be. We dredged and dredged and fished and fished for that thing, but never could locate it. You see, it took about a forty-foot jump off into the river and it had had about forty years to settle; so I guess it must have been several feet deep in river mud when we were hunting it. We finally gave up hopes of finding it and went to hunting the chest. The map called for three landmarks all an equal distance apart. The chest was supposed to be buried in the center of the triangle made by these points. We found the first one, a big rock in a funny shape, without any trouble at all. The others were big pine trees, but all the trees in that country had been cut down and rafted down the river since the map was made; so we couldn’t ever find the other two marks. We sighted off places by every tree-stump in that neighborhood and dug down at the points we found, but must not ever have sighted by the right stumps. Anyhow, we hunted gold for about two months and never found a cent of anything. The Mexican finally got discouraged and went home, but I got a copy of his map and have been looking for that money off and on ever since.
“And I guess that’s about all there is to it. If any of you-all want to see where the ferry was and where the cannon was rolled off into the river, we’ll go up there in the morning and look around.”
[1] Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, pp. 114, 391; Cf., also, pp. 90, 414. [↑]
[2] According to Charles M. Skinner, Myths and Legends of Our Own Land, Vol. II, pp. 279–280, the Hessian troops, after the surrender of Burgoyne, packed their plate, pay, and jewels into a howitzer and buried it somewhere near Dalton, Massachusetts. [↑]
[3] I have never heard the details of the legend, though I have heard of it from several sources. Mr. E. G. Littlejohn sends in a legend clipped from the Galveston News of 1909, in which a Spanish prince, besieged by Indians about the year of 1700, cast a great quantity of “gold, silver, and jewels” into Brand Rock Water Hole, of Peña Creek in Dimmit County. [↑]
[4] Wooten’s Comprehensive History of Texas, Vol. I, p. 292; Brown, John Henry, History of Texas, Vol. II, pp. 46, 66, 67. [↑]