Legends of Lafitte’s treasure in Louisiana often come down the Texas
coast and become Texan by adoption. In the Abbeville country,
Louisiana, there is a legend, handed down from the last century, to the
effect that Lafitte and his pirate crew, having run a schooner up into
White Lake (Louisiana coast) through a bayou which has long since been
filled and grown over with marsh grass, at some spot along the shore
built a brick vault in which they stored a vast amount of their
ill-gotten treasure.
About the year 1908 a man named C—— claimed to have stumbled upon the
vault while hunting alligators. He further claimed to have torn away,
though with much difficulty, portions of the brick work, revealing
untold wealth in gold coin, the hidden treasure of Lafitte.
Numbers of persons to whom this story was told became interested in
making a search for the treasure. Owing to the swampy condition of the
country and the inaccessibility of the spot where the vault was
located, C—— advised the digging of a small canal as the best means of
reaching it. This idea was adopted, money was advanced for the purpose,
some five or six thousand dollars, and the digging of the canal was
begun. After weeks of toil, of chopping through dense canebrakes, and
of floundering through the swamp mud, the party reached a lone cypress
tree that was supposed to stand sentinel over the crypt. The treasure
could not be found.
Disappointed in their quest and disgusted at their own credulity, the
treasure seekers caused the arrest of C—— on the charge of having taken
their money under false pretenses; C—— claimed as the reason for their
failure that he had lost his bearings. Who knows?—Adapted from a story
in the Galveston News, October 27, 1908.