General Santa Anna was going from Laredo to Goliad. [56] While he was
fording the Nueces at the old Rock Crossing in the Chalk Bluff Pasture,
once a part of the George West Ranch, the Rock Crossing being about
twelve miles below the Shiner Crossing, his “pay cart” broke down and a
very heavy iron chest filled with gold fell into the river. The river
was up; Santa Anna was in great haste to reach Goliad; there was little
travel in the country. He decided to leave the chest in the river; so
he had it chained to a tree, intending to get it on the way back, for
he expected to make short work of subduing the insurgent Texans.
In after years, Pate McNeill, the same man that tied down the maverick
heifer in one of the Rock Pens, found a piece of chain tied around an
elm tree on the east bank of the river. Still later Dubose found the
tree bearing the marks of a chain, but the chain itself was gone.
Encouraged by the markings, he, with Stonewall Jackson Wright and
Wright’s brother-in-law, Albert Dinn, went to Beeville, about fifty
miles distant, and got a four-horse load of tongue-and-groove lumber.
They sank a shaft about eighteen feet deep in the middle of the river,
a little below the crossing itself, accounting for the push of water.
They were able to wall out the water but made poor way with the boiling
quicksand.
The first night after the shaft had been started, Stonewall Jackson
Wright and Dinn got to arguing as to what disposition should be made of
the chest. Wright was in favor of taking it to his ranch, twenty or
thirty miles down the country, before opening it. Dinn declared that he
would open it at once and that the prize should be divided then and
there. The argument waxed so hot that only Dubose’s reminder that they
had not yet found the chest prevented a collision.
There is a possibility, some claim, that a part of Santa Anna’s army
may have passed back over the same route and have taken the chest with
them. However, there is in existence a Mexican way-bill to the
treasure. Mr. Whitley of McMullen County says that the chest was buried
on the bank under a tree that had a limb straight out over the water,
and that the chain around the tree trunk was a piece of log chain from
an ox cart. But the tree caved in long ago, the water changed its
course, and now there is no sign to go by, though doubtless the chest
is somewhere in the vicinity of what is still known as Rock Crossing, a
mere name, for it has been decades since a road ran that way.