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.
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. [10] 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. [11] 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.” [12] 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.” [13]
What wonder then that Sebastian de Benalcazar listened to a lone Indian
tell the tale of the Gilded King, El Dorado, [14] in 1535, and that in
that puissant age of energy, exploration, and imagination, the tale was
echoed in the camps of soldiers under the Andes, by the hearths of
peasants in Navarre, on the smacks of Devonshire fishermen, in the
counting-houses of Augsburg bankers, and in the council chamber of
Queen Elizabeth as well as in the courts of a century of Spanish
monarchs? To seek El Dorado, the conquistadores for a hundred years and
more marched and countermarched from one extremity of half of the
western hemisphere to the other, spending the lives of tens of
thousands of men and the wealth of prodigal treasuries, enduring
starvation, fever, cold, thirst, the pests of swamps and the
pitilessness of deserts—all with an intrepidity that comes now in our
tame “Safety First” age like a stirring cup brewed by the giants. At
first a man, El Dorado came to mean a place somewhere in the western
part of what is now Colombia, then in any, every direction. At
sixty-three Great Raleigh came out of twelve years of imprisonment to
fare forth a second time on the quest. And two centuries after he had
died the same quest was occupying whole bodies of men; and even yet it
is the tale, so it is said, of sanguine souls scattered over all South
America.
When the seekers did not find it, always the treasure was más allá, on
beyond. The search for La Ciudad Encantada de los Cesares, [15]
inspired by the fabrication of an Indian, was but the duplication of
the sublime and ridiculous El Dorado error. And so was Cabeza de Vaca’s
quest for the legended wealth of Florida [16]—a quest that had its
ironic conclusion on the other side of the continent in Coronado’s
expedition. So, too, were the fabled Palace of Cubanacan in Cuba; [17]
the mythical wealth of the mythical Amazons; [18] the Laguna de Oro in
New Mexico; [19] the Pueblos del Rey Coronado of the West; [20] the
Cerro de la Plata, [21] which was perhaps Los Almagres of Texas; [22]
the Concho River, bedded with pearls richer than those of the Indies or
of the Gulf of California; [23] the “Peak of Gold,” [24] in either
Texas or New Mexico; the nebulous treasures of a Casa del Sol; [25] and
the Gran Paytiti, or Gran Moxo, [26] again in South America. Always
beyond and beyond, lured by the talk of whatever chance savage, the
Spanish quested. Thus the tale of a captive Indian, who wanted to get
back eastward, led Coronado from the empty pueblos of the Zuñi in
Arizona, whither he had been guided by an ignorant negro in search of
the Seven Cities of Cibola, to make his astounding march on eastward
all the way to Kansas in quest of the Gran Quivira [27]—a place that
never existed, a people that wandered naked at the heels of the
drifting buffalo.
The imagination of simple-lived folk abhors failure, and the poorest in
circumstances are the richest in legend of treasure. A remote disaster
becomes a hope for present success. “I have remarked,” says Washington
Irving, [28] “that the stories of treasure buried by the Moors which
prevail throughout Spain are most current among the poorest people. It
is thus kind nature consoles with shadows for the want of
substantials.” When Coronado told his men the truth of his barren
search, they deserted him unbelieving. Following his expedition in
1542, a mission was established in southeastern New Mexico. For a
hundred years explorers continued to search east and west for the
Quivira. Finally the poor little mission was destroyed, and then the
mixed-blooded descendants of the Spanish fortune hunters came to
believe that it had been a rich cathedral in which was hoarded
illimitable wealth. [29] The dreamer may die, but the dream of treasure
lives on.
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.