AN INQUIRY INTO THE SOURCES OF TREASURE LEGENDS OF TEXAS
Reading edition
By J. Frank Dobie
I
However many legends of other kinds there may be, the buried treasure or lost mine legend is the typical legend of Texas. Just how representative it is, is demonstrated by the varied examples in this section of “Legends of Buried Treasure and Lost Mines.” The McMullen County group well illustrates how numerous are the legends. The group is by no means unique in either number or variety. Pertaining to the country up the Colorado and its western tributaries, there are literally hundreds of lost treasure legends. Scarcely fewer legends cluster around the old Fort Stockton-Fort Lancaster country, around the Victoria-Refugio-Goliad country, around the Big Bend country, and along certain sections of the Red River country. In lumber mills of East Texas buried treasure is the frequent subject of tale and speculation. The Nacogdoches country, the San Jacinto country, the San Augustine country, the country all along the Brazos from head to mouth, to mention only a few other localities, are replete with buried treasure legends. Moreover, instead of diminishing in number, these legends are constantly increasing.
The people who tell these legends represent many standards and strata of life, but the ultimate source of their legendary gold and their tales is common—Mexican or Spanish. In some of the legends the pioneer Texan, the Indian, or the negro plays a part, but in nearly all the Spaniard and the Mexican enter as both actors and transmitters. The native Texan frequently makes no distinction between “Spaniard” and “Mexican”; the wealth of legend, however, is generally Spanish. And that wealth would fade the actual riches of Potosi into paltriness. Now, how comes it that illimitable wealth is so popularly ascribed to the long Spanish dominion in Texas and to the brief Mexican occupation that intervened between the downfall of Spanish sovereignty and the achievement of Texas independence? Were the Spanish great gainers in Texas? Did Santa Anna’s armies mark their trail with gold?
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.
When the Texas pioneers inherited the Spanish sitios and porciones of land, the leagues and labors, marked off by varas and pasos, they inherited too from the Spaniard and his Mexican successor something of the lure of ungained treasure. The imagination that images a cave in the Llano hills filled with five hundred jack loads of silver bullion is hardly so audacious as that which pictured the Seven Cities shining with their jeweled portals in the sun and peopled mostly by goldsmiths; but it is the same imagination, different only in degree, tempered by race and by temporal environment. The maletas of doubloons, the chests and stuffed cannon of Mexican army money, the caves bursting with Spanish bullion and plundered jewels—the very stuff of Texas treasure legends—are directly derived from the Spanish who made the multiform story of El Dorado immortal. I do not mean to say that the treasure legend is peculiar to the Spanish-tempered Southwest; I do mean to assert that the treasure legends of this Southwest are peculiarly of Spanish origin. It would, indeed, be interesting to contrast the treasure legends of the world before the Spanish discovered American wealth with those that have taken form since.
III
IV
Two kindred qualities of man, hope and credulity, remain to be considered among the sources of treasure legend in Texas. These qualities are not coördinate with the historical forces; rather, they have been acted upon by the historical forces. Yet they have a certain localized source like the legends themselves. For as the tradition of modern treasure goes back to El Dorado, so the Mexicans who lure Americans into the quest of treasure are direct descendants of the Indians who lured the early Spanish. These Indians often pointed the eager Spanish on beyond in order to get rid of them; so the modern Mexican frequently inspires credulity in American treasure hunters in order to gain a small reward.
However, it would be grossly wronging the chief purveyors of treasure charts and legends to ascribe their action even primarily to avarice. It is as easy to promise gold as it is to promise rain, and in a country in which neither is plentiful the Mexican shows his desire to please by predicting both. Many a treasure legend has originated in motives as innocent as those of Uncle Remus.
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 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.