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.
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. [33] 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. [34] 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! [35]
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.