Note 18 — THE LEGEND OF THE SAN SABA OR BOWIE MINE

It is generally said that the battle of Calf Creek marked Bowie’s last attempt to get to the San Saba Mine, and that the remaining few years of his life were taken up with the duties of a patriot. According to one legend current in the San Saba country, on the word of Mr. Carlos Ashley, a native, Bowie was seeking the San Saba treasure in order to finance the Texas army. This is the patriotic theme also of a Texas novel in which Bowie is the hero: William O. Stoddard’s The Lost Gold of the Montezumas—A Story of the Alamo. Mr. Matt Bradley, editor and publisher of Border Wars of Texas, says that only three months before Bowie fell in the Alamo he was trying again to reach the riches of which he alone among white men knew the secret.18 Some years ago a man named Longworth, who is now in Kansas, paid a Mexican in San Antonio $500 for a document purporting to have been taken off Bowie’s body by a Mexican lieutenant who entered the Alamo immediately after the last defender had been silenced. The Mexican who sold the document claimed that lieutenant as a paternal ancestor. He swore that it gave directions to the mine, but somehow Longworth could not follow them.