By far the most widespread and generally known legend of Cooke County
and vicinity deals with the Red River front; i.e., that part of it
extending from Spanish Fort Bend on the west nearly to Preston Bend on
the east, thus extending into both Montague and Grayson counties.
Mr. Pete Davidson, who came to Cooke County about 1856 to live with his
two uncles, Captain Rowland of the Texas Rangers, and Doctor Davidson,
proprietor of the first station west of Gainesville for the Overland
Stage Route, his station having been located on Blocker Creek, relates
that he made his first trip to Spanish Fort in 1857. “At that time,” he
says, “the earthworks were still plainly discernible and would hide a
cow or horse from observation from the outside. Good-sized trees were
then growing from the top of the earthworks, showing that a long time
had elapsed since they were thrown up. The country was still virgin
prairie, and every once in a while you could see the bleached bones of
a human skeleton, showing that some sort of battle had been fought
there; but some of the skeletons were so small that they must have been
of women or children who were among either the Indians or the soldiers
of the fort.” Just before his death in 1922, Mr. Davidson told me that
he had recently made a trip to Spanish Fort Bend, though not to the
fort itself, with a man who was seeking to trace the locations on an
old Mexican map that called for a tree on a bluff where the river
touched and turned south. This tree, so the man claimed, was the
location of the long sought buried treasure; and, indeed, the old
Mexican map and the lone tree on a bluff skirted by the water are
essentials of all the Red River legends of buried treasure.
For years an old fellow dug for treasure on the Oklahoma side, just
across from Sivill’s Bend where the river turns south to make in a
twenty-mile sweep the biggest bend in its whole course. West of Dexter,
near Walnut Bend, tradition calls for another location of similar
marks, but here the treasure is said to be buried on the Texas side.