Five or six miles to the southwest of the San Caja, the Spanish are
believed to have operated a silver mine by the name of Las Chuzas,
called so from its proximity to Las Chuzas Mountains. In later times
Texas pioneers found that Indian bullets lodged in the spokes and
felloes of their wagons were almost pure silver, and the Indians are
supposed to have got their material for bullets from the Chuzas ore.
The Indians would never tell where they got it. While Dubose and a man
named Wallace McNeill were riding the country in quest of the Rock Pens
they found the shaft of the mine at the foot of one of the Chuzas
Mountains. That shaft is said to be lined with silver bars covered over
with clay, but as the men were looking for the “thirty-one mule loads”
and fully expected to find them, they did not investigate the shaft.
Some ten miles away, in the Guidan Pasture, and about six miles from
the Nueces River, is what is known as the Devil’s Water Hole, and there
the smelter is supposed to have been located. Burnt rocks to this day
evidence its existence. In the vicinity of White Creek, in the
foothills below the Devil’s Water Hole, were some other silver mines
that used the same smelter.
Somewhere between the old Las Chuzas Mine and the Nueces River there is
said to be a pile of silver bullion, crude, unformed, in the very hue
and shape of the rocks around. How it came there or why, nobody knows.
It just came there, so the Mexicans still say.
Fifteen or twenty miles beyond the San Caja in a westerly direction on
what is now known as Los Picachos (The Peaks) Ranch, an early settler
named Crier, according to John Murphy, a ranchman of the vicinity,
actually used to operate a silver mine that yielded about twenty
dollars to the ton of ore.