Note 32 — AN INQUIRY INTO THE SOURCES OF TREASURE LEGENDS OF TEXAS

There seems to be a more or less regular traffic in charts—platas—to buried treasure. One Mexican paid for medicine at a drug store with his chart and story; another got pasturage for his burros at the same price; a third parted with his directive legend, which he believed in, to a white man for befriending him in sickness. Some of the platas purporting to be a century old are written with pencil on the cheapest of modern paper. The late John Warren Hunter asserted that at one time the chart business was a regular industry in San Antonio.32 Only recently a man was indicted in Fort Worth for fraudulently obtaining money on pretense of organizing an expedition to seek $5,000,000 in gold nuggets in a cave in Mexico.33 How the nuggets got in the cave involved a long story around an Indian, General Custer, Jesse James, and Pancho Villa. It was a good story!34