Note 9 — AN INQUIRY INTO THE SOURCES OF TREASURE LEGENDS OF TEXAS

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 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