This group of legends came to me from an old darkey named Pete Staples.
In them may be seen the blended elements of negro, Mexican, and pioneer
Texan lore. Pete was brought to Texas from Mississippi before the Civil
War. He was raised in the border country among the Mexicans and drove
cattle up the trail to Kansas. He married a Mexican woman and lived for
some time in Mexico. When he told me these stories in 1922 he was
cooking for a Mexican cow camp in Live Oak County. The other hands had
“unrolled their blankets” early, and Pete’s tones were confidential as
we talked by the burnt-out campfire.
I
“One time there was a white man who had got wind of a lot of Mexican
dollars buried down below Roma. He had the place all located, and was
so sure of hisself that he brung in an outfit of mules and scrapers to
dig away the dirt. He was making a reg’lar tank digging down to that
money when a Mexican living down there what I’ve knowed all my life
comed along.
“This Mexican, when he come along clost to the tank that the white man
was digging, stopped a minute under a mesquite tree to sorter cool off,
and when he did he saw a hoe laying down on the ground half covered up
in the dirt. He reached down to pick it up and then he saw a whole
maleta of coins. A maleta, you know, is a kind of bag made out of hide.
This maleta was old and rotten, and when he turned it over with the hoe
it broke open and the gold money jest rolled out in the dirt.
“D’reckly, the Mexican went over to where the white man was bossing the
teams, and he asked him what he was doing. The white man told him that
he was digging up some buried money.
“‘Well, you’s digging where it ain’t no use to dig,’ said the Mexican.
‘The money ain’t there; hit’s over here. If you want to see it, come
along and I’ll show it to you.’
“The white man laughed like he didn’t believe what the Mexican was
telling him, but he come along. When they got to the mesquite there
wa’n’t no money in sight, but there was a hole down at the root of the
tree kinder like a badger hole and bumble bees was going in and out
making a roaring sound and the dirt was fairly alive with great big
bugs, maybe tumble bugs, only they was humming and making a sizzling
noise and working around awful like.
“‘Huh, is this what you call money?’ says the white man, stamping down
on the tumble bugs. ‘I’ll eat all the gold what they roll up.’
“‘That’s all right,’ says the Mexican. ‘There was dollars of gold and
silver too here. But there ain’t now, I admit, ’cause them dollars’s
evidently not intinded for you. White man didn’t hide that money and it
ain’t meant for white man to find it. No matter how much you dig or
where now, you won’t find nothing.’
“Shore enough, the man kept on digging and he didn’t get nothing. One
time I asked the Mexican why he didn’t go back and take out the money.
“‘I didn’t want none of it,’ he said. ‘I never put it in the ground.
’Twa’n’t mine any more’n that white man’s.’
“A few days after he saw the money, though, he went back and scratched
around in the dirt a little and picked up an old Mexican square dollar.
He brung it to Roma and bought some flour and some coffee and some
candy, and give some of the candy to my wife. She was living down there
and knowed the man well and she’s told me many a time how she et some
of the candy that the Mexican bought with that old square Mexican
dollar. I always have thought that that money was intinded for him, but
you know how some people are, and I can’t say as I blame him for not
teching what he hadn’t a right to. If buried money like that is
intinded for a human, he’ll come by it jest easy and nach’ral. If it’s
not, he won’t come by it, no matter how much he hunts. Even if he did
find it and it wa’n’t intinded for him, it ud prove a curse. I’d be
afraid of it myself.”