V
Where there is so much smoke there must be some fire, many people familiar with the great body of treasure legend will say. I have no disposition to refute the argument. According to legend, much money has been found. I myself know of a few small finds. I know of eight hundred Mexican dollars having been found under a mesquite tree in Atascosa County many years ago; I know of about four hundred dollars in Mexican coin that were rooted up by hogs in Frio County forty years ago. Doubtless other actual finds over the country could be recorded. Whatever the facts, few men of imagination can listen to the enthusiasm of the true treasure hunter without becoming infected with his glamour.
After all, one need not patronize or pity these modern seekers of El Dorado. The law of compensation always works. At least [[12]]they have kept alive that “knack of hoping” that made Oliver Goldsmith so charming. They have something in them as precious perhaps as the “ditches of footnotes” that authorize this treatise on them. They have dreamed something of the dream of Great Raleigh; and when one has known them as I have known them, he comes to respect something rightly simple and sincere in their lives, as there is, indeed, something rightly simple and sincere in their legends.
In some towns and back in certain unproductive hill districts of Southwest Texas, a considerable number of people live to hunt treasure. With them treasure hunting is a high passion. Others—and among them mingle people of some means—“dig” occasionally. However, few ranch and farm people of the Southwest make a practice of hunting lost treasure, and the majority even laugh at folk who do; yet most of them sometimes tell these legends, and nearly every man, under the sanguine spell of realistic circumstance, has at some time or another taken stock in one or two of them. Thus the legends in a large way, not easily defined, express the genius of the people to whose soil they pertain.
[1] See Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, p. 4. I am indebted also to Mrs. Mattie Austin Hatcher, Archivist in History at the University of Texas, for information in her unpublished (1923) book on The Opening of Texas to Foreign Settlement, particularly Chaps. II and V. [↑]
[2] Brewster County, in which mines were worked, was not in the old Mexican state of Texas and Coahuila. [↑]
[3] Sutherland, Mary A., The Story of Corpus Christi, Houston, 1916, pp. 2–3. Mrs. Sutherland does not give her authority. [↑]
[4] Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, p. 9; Priestley, H. I., José de Galvez (University of California Publications in History, 1916), p. 288. According to Priestley, some presidios were established by the Spanish in America to protect the special interests of large landholders.
Don Pedro de Terreros, banker and wealthy mine owner of Mexico, who advanced the money for the establishment of the Mission of San Saba, may not have been so altruistic as Bancroft, Dr. Dunn, and Dr. Bolton have all implied. The government must bear the cost of military protection for the mission. With government protection and Indian labor, the mines at San Saba, which Miranda had in his famous reports made so promising, would richly pay any individual working them. Don Pedro had an interest in the mines. The Terreros records, if extant, might throw a great deal of light on the subject. [↑]