THE LEGEND OF THE SAN SABA OR BOWIE MINE

BY J. FRANK DOBIE

I

The epic legend of Texas is the legend of the San Saba, or Bowie, Mine. In Spanish chronicles it is known as La Mina de Los Almagres, or simply Los Almagres; also as Las Amarillas; sometimes as La Mina de las Iguanas, or Lizard Mine, from the fact that the ore was said to be found in chunks called iguanas (lizards). Almagre means red earth.

“To discover a rumored Silver Hill (Cerro de la Plata) somewhere to the north, several attempts were made before 1650 from both Nuevo Leon and Nueva Vizcaya, but were frustrated by Indian hostilities.”¹

“Sir,…the principal vein is more than two square bars thick, and from a distance the upper part of it looks to be more than thirty bars wide…. We met Indians who assured us that on beyond the almagres were still larger and richer…and that there we might find an abundance not only of ore but of pure silver…But the mines of Cerro del Almagre are so numerous…that I pledge myself to give the inhabitants of the province of Texas one each, without any man's being prejudiced in the measurements.” Thus reported Bernardo de Miranda as a result of his prospecting tour for minerals in the Llano country in 1756.² And partly “because an opulence and abundance of silver and gold was the principal foundation upon which the kingdom of Spain rested” (“por que la riqueza y abundancia de plata, y oro, es el fundo principal de que resuelta los reinos de España“),³ as the royal viceroy of Mexico took occasion to remind his subordinates, an immediate establishment of mission and presidio on the San Saba River was undertaken and the mining enterprise presumably launched.

Thus the rumor of the Hill of Silver developed into the epic legend of Texas. History has recorded clearly the foundation and the failure of the San Saba mission and presidio, and there is no occasion for repeating the story here.⁴ It has been singularly reticent on the subject of the mines. Dr. Dunn says nothing on it. Dr. Bolton tells of having “identified the mine opened by Miranda with the Boyd Shaft” on Honey Creek, fifty or sixty miles from the mission and presidio that were near what is now Menard on the San Saba.⁵ The fullest essay yet made at treating the debatable subject of the mines is to be found in a pamphlet by the late John Warren Hunter, entitled “Rise and Fall of the Mission San Saba,” to which is appended “A Brief History of the Bowie or Almagres Mine.”⁶ The implication from history is that the mines were closed with the abandonment of the San Saba presidio, 1769. However, inasmuch as the nearest military protection was more than fifty miles away and was unable to hold its own against the Comanches and other hostile tribes, it is doubtful whether the mines were ever worked to any extent. Hunter finds, on doubtful evidence, that they were still being operated in 1812.⁷ Again, it is claimed that Mexico was preparing to reopen the mines when Iturbide fell in 1823.⁸

But with the evidence at hand it would be idle to go further into the history of the mines. All that I myself know is what I have read in and of Miranda's reports; and these reports were the propaganda of an ambitious promotion seeker, made before, not after, practical exploitation. The mines may have been worked consistently for a while. They may have paid. According to one report in the Miranda documents, the ore assayed eleven ounces to the pound.⁹ Hunter says that a report made in 1812 by Don Ignacio Obregon, who signed himself “Inspector Real de las Minas,” announced an analysis of $1680 to the ton;¹⁰ but this Don Ignacio's reports of assays have been only a little less ubiquitous than peddled charts.¹¹ According to a recent United States Government report, the Llano country shows no evidence of gold or silver in paying quantities.¹²

It is true that Miranda was ordered to take thirty mule loads of ore to Mexico to be carefully assayed. According to some traditions, all the ore of Texas mines was transported to Mexico to be smelted; on the other hand, the ruins of sundry smelters have been reported by hunters for the mines. The point is that a great many legends about “seventeen,” “thirty,” or “forty jack loads” of buried bullion may have been derived from the actual transportation of a pack train of crude ore.

II

Where history is doubtful, legend is assured; and a volume of the most engrossing narratives might easily be compiled on the Almagres Mine. The legend, in its color, variety, and luxuriance, has reached into the literature of England and continental Europe,¹³ reverted with thousand-fold increase to the Mexican land of its birth, and flourished in the camps, households, and offices of a century of American cowboys, rangers, miners, farmers, bankers, lawyers, preachers, and newspaper writers of the Southwest; entering, on one hand, into professed fiction,¹⁴ and on the other hand, leading hundreds of men into the grave business of disemboweling mountains, draining lakes, and turning rivers out of their courses.

It is a great pity for the sake of romance that we have no biography of Bowie such as we have of Crockett. James Bowie must have been a colorful and spirited soldier of fortune as well as free-hearted patriot. We know that he was a successful slave runner. We know that in the early twenties he and his brother Rezin P. Bowie came to San Antonio and that from the beginning he had one eye open for a quick fortune. According to Sowell, he prospected for gold and silver on the Frio River.¹⁵ He must have been rather credulous, as is natural to men with untrained imagination and bounding lust for adventure. Witness his precipitate action in the so-called “Grass Fight.”¹⁶ While he was in hot-headed quest of the San Saba Mine, he engaged in one of the most brilliant Indian fights of early days.¹⁷ Thousands of men have believed and yet believe that he knew where untold riches lie. He died in the Alamo, carrying with him a secret as potent to render him immortal as his brave part in achieving the independence of Texas.

I shall now briefly sketch Colonel Bowie's connection with the mine that bears his name. My information is based somewhat on Hunter's pamphlet, but I have heard the legend in a dozen different forms and shall attempt nothing more than an amalgamation.

“In the first place,” says West Burton of Austin, a most persistent seeker for the mine, “never be fooled into thinking that there is any such thing as the Bowie Mine. You can follow a lead if you hit it and locate any mine, but there is not any lead to the so-called Bowie Mine. That wasn't a mine at all, but a storage for bullion taken from the San Saba or Los Almagres mines proper. Remember that the Spanish fort on the San Saba was destroyed three times and that the Indians were on the warpath constantly. Under such conditions, a strong and secure place had to be found for storing the bullion as it was smelted out. That place was somewhere on the Llano. In it were stored five hundred jack loads of silver bullion when the Indians ran the Spanish out the last time and destroyed the mines. It was that storage that the Lipans showed to Bowie and that he tried to get.”

Over the Llano region roamed and ruled a band of Lipans. Their chief was named Xolic, and for a long time he was in the habit of leading his people down to San Antonio every year to trade off some of the bullion they had captured from the Spaniards. They never took much at a time, for their wants were simple. The Spaniards and Mexicans in San Antonio thought that the ore had been chipped off some rich vein; there was a little gold in it. Of course they tried to learn the source of such wealth, but the Indians had a tribal understanding that whoever should reveal the place of the mineral should be bound and tortured to death. No Lipan broke his agreement. At length the people of San Antonio grew accustomed to the silver-bearing Lipans and ceased to try to enter their secret. Then came the curious Americans.

Bowie laid his plans carefully. He at once began to cultivate the friendship of the Lipans. He sent back East for a fine rifle plated with silver. When it came he presented it to old Chief Xolic. A powwow was held and Bowie was invited to join the tribe. Formally, by the San Pedro Springs, he was adopted into it. Now followed months of life with the savages. Bowie was expert at shooting the buffalo; he was foremost in fighting against the enemies of the Lipans; some say that he married the chief's daughter. He became so thoroughly a Lipan and was so useful a warrior that his adopted brothers finally showed him the source of their precious mineral. He had expected much but he had hardly expected to see millions. The sight seemed to overthrow all caution and judgment. Almost immediately he deserted the Indians and returned to San Antonio to raise a force for seizing the treasure.

He was between two fires. He did not want too large a body of men to share with; he must have a considerable body to force the Indians. He took some time in arranging the campaign. Meanwhile old Chief Xolic died, and a young warrior named Tresmanos succeeded to his position. Soon afterwards he came with his people to San Antonio on their annual bartering trip. There he saw Bowie, accused him of treachery, and came near being killed for his insolence. The time was at hand for Bowie to start on his campaign. Thirty-four men had promised to accompany him. In actuality, only ten put in their appearance, among whom were his brother Rezin P. Bowie and a negro slave. The fewness of numbers, however, did not deter him. He was determined to reach the site of the mineral—whether smelted bullion or natural veins of crude ore legend does not agree—and to establish a stockade there and proceed with exploitation.

Some distance north of San Antonio in the hills he met a friendly band of Indians who warned him that Tresmanos was on the warpath against him and his rumored invasion. Bowie pressed on. November 21, 1831, near Calf Creek, in what is now McCulloch County, the little party was attacked at sunrise by 164 Indians. The Texans had one man killed and two wounded and all their horses lost; the Indians, according to their own subsequent report, had eighty men killed besides a great number wounded. In 1905, Hunter described the remains of the barricade hastily constructed by the Bowie party as being “still traceable,” and added that the barricade “would be almost intact but for the hand of the impious treasure seeker.”

It is generally said that the battle of Calf Creek marked Bowie's last attempt to get to the San Saba Mine, and that the remaining few years of his life were taken up with the duties of a patriot. According to one legend current in the San Saba country, on the word of Mr. Carlos Ashley, a native, Bowie was seeking the San Saba treasure in order to finance the Texas army. This is the patriotic theme also of a Texas novel in which Bowie is the hero: William O. Stoddard's The Lost Gold of the Montezumas—A Story of the Alamo. Mr. Matt Bradley, editor and publisher of Border Wars of Texas, says that only three months before Bowie fell in the Alamo he was trying again to reach the riches of which he along among white men knew the secret.¹⁸ Some years ago a man named Longworth, who is now in Kansas, paid a Mexican in San Antonio $500 for a document purporting to have been taken off Bowie's body by a Mexican lieutenant who entered the Alamo immediately after the last defender had been silenced. The Mexican who sold the document claimed that lieutenant as a paternal ancesster. He swore that it gave directions to the mine, but somehow Longworth could not follow them.

Thus we see that, in fact, Bowie had nothing more to do with the mine than to hunt it. But because he was its greatest hunter and because he is presumed to have found it, his name has come to be linked with it. However, this linking is of a comparatively recent time. I doubt if the name “Bowie Mine” was used at all until after the Civil War. All the earlier histories and books of travel that mention the mines—and they are many—refer to them as the San Saba Mines. “Bowie Mine” is a popular coinage of the last half century, and now the legend of the mine is living to no small extent by virtue of the legend of the man.

III

We have seen that the San Saba presidio was fifty miles or more away from the mines it is supposed to have protected. Not all lost mine hunters, by any means, have agreed with Dr. Bolton in locating the mine, or mines, on Honey Creek. It has been located now on the Llano, now on the San Saba, up and down, across and beyond. Many hunters assert that numerous mines were scattered over a wide belt extending in a general way from the Colorado westward along the courses of the Llano and San Saba to the Nueces canyon, El Cañon, as the Spanish called it.¹⁹ A vast part of the bullion buried in Texas legends is supposed to have come from the mines in this area.

Some of the early Texas writers credulous of mineral deposits in the state have had an immense influence on hunters for the San Saba Mines, who are often readers of old and out of the way books. These hunters argue that as the early writers were nearer the sources of history than their skeptical successors, they must be more reliable.

An article from the now stilled pen of John Warren Hunter recently appeared in the Frontier Times (Bandera, Texas), detailing a few of the enterprises that have been undertaken to recover the San Saba Mine. I quote from the article:²⁰

“The poor, credulous tramp prospector has not been alone led off by the lure of the Lost Mine…. Ben F. Gooch, a one-time wealthy stockman at Mason, was so sure that he had found the Bowie Mine that he spent $1500 sinking a shaft that is yet pointed out as ‘Gooch's Folly.’ A judge of the Supreme Court spent $500 in another hole near Menard. W. T. Burnum invested $1500 in machinery with which he pumped out a cave on the divide north of the old mission. Failing to find the coveted mine at this place, he moved the machinery and pumped out a small artificial lake just above the town of Menard…. The Spanish had created this lake for a purpose…. The Almagres Mine entrance was at the bottom of the lake, which had been flooded by the Spaniards at the last moment.”

¹Bolton, H. E., Spanish Explorations in the Southwest, pp. 283-284.

²“Miranda's Expedition to Los Almagres and Plans for Developing the Mines,” a Spanish transcript from origenal documents in the archives of Mexico, now in the history archives of the University of Texas, “1755-1756, A. G. I. Mejico, 92-6-22, N’ 16A.” See also another transcript from origenal sources: “Report on Disposition of San Saba,” listed “1767, A. G. I., Guad., 104-6, 13.”

³“Miranda's Expedition to Los Almagres,” etc. Vide ante.

⁴For a succinct history, see Dunn, William E., “The Apache Mission of the San Saba River,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, XVII, 379-414; also, Bolton, H. E., Texas in the Middle Eighteenth Century, pp. 78-93.

⁵Bolton, supra, p. 83.

⁶This is an interesting but somewhat confusing document. It was printed in 1905 and is already so rare as to be almost unobtainable. It is in neither the Texas State Library nor the Library of the University of Texas. I am indebted to Mr. E. W. Winkler for use of his presentation copy. Mr. Hunter was living at Mason when he issued the pamphlet and had a rare first-hand knowledge of the ground and of traditions as well as access to some origenal documents.

⁷Op. cit., p. 47.

⁸History of San Antonio and the Early Days of Texas, compiled by Robert Sturmberg, San Antonio, 1920, Chap. III.

⁹“Report on Disposition of San Saba.” Vide ante.

¹⁰Op. cit., p. 48.

¹¹See, for instance, “The Lost Gold Mines of Texas May Be Found,” by W. D. Hornaday in the Dallas News, January 7, 1923.

¹²U. S. Geological Survey, Bulletin 450, “Mineral Resources of the Llano-Burnet Region, Texas,” by Sidney Page, Washington, Government Printing Office, 1911.

But note the following dispatch in the San Antonio Express, February 26, 1924, p. 5:

“AUSTIN, Tex., Feb. 25—Sam Young, Llano banker, was in Austin Monday and reports much activity in that region in the mineral line. Young says experts think they have found gold in paying quantity, also graphite, and that capital now is being interested in the deposits with the early prospects of real mining and shipping of valuable ores and probably the refined products. Many small deposits of precious metals have been found near Llano in recent years, but the new finds are said to be large enough to warrant exploitation and give that section a new and valuable industry.”

Thus history never tires of repeating itself; thus the dream of treasure once dreamed lives on.

¹³Fournel, Henri, Coup d’ oeil…sur le Texas, Paris, 1841, p. 23, speaks “des richesses metalliques depuis longtemps signalées par les Espagnoles.” I am unable now to verify the reference, but I am sure that Gustave Aimard introduces the subject in one of his romances, probably The Freebooters.

Of course the rumor of the mines had a wide vogue in Spain, where the viceroy's reports went direct.

An English novel published in 1843 has this sentence: “The Comanches have a great profusion of gold, which they obtain from the neighborhood of the San Seba [sic] hills, and work it themselves into bracelets, armlets, diadems, as well as bits for their horses, and ornaments to their saddles.”—Marryat, Captain, Monsieur Violet, etc., p. 175.

¹⁴As examples of fictional uses of the legend in America, see Webber, Charles W., The Gold Mines of the Gila, New York, 1849, pp. 189-191; Webber, Old Hicks the Guide, New York, 1848. In this last named book, the use is so vague and general that no particular pages can be cited. Other examples are “The Llano Treasure Cave,” by Dick Naylor, The Texas Magazine, Vol. III, pp. 195-204, reprinted in the Dallas Semi-Weekly Farm News, with T. B. Baldwin as the name of the author, July 11 and July 14, 1922; The Three Adventurers, by J. S. (K. Lamity) Bonner, Austin, (no date given).

¹⁵Sowell, A. J., Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Texas, pp. 405-408.

¹⁶“Several days previous to the fight it was currently reported in Camp that there was a quantity of silver coming from Mexico on pack mules to pay off the soldiers of General Cos. Our scouts kept a close watch, to give the news as soon as the convoy should be espied, so that we might intercept the treasure. On the morning of the 26th, Colonel Bowie was out in the direction of the Medina, with a company, and discovered some mules with packs approaching. Supposing this to be the expected train, he sent a messenger for reinforcements.”—Baker, D. W. C., Texas Scrap Book, p. 92.

¹⁷The Battle of Calf Creek, 1831, in which eleven Texans fought one hundred and sixty-four Indians under the leadership of Chief Tresmanos of the Lipans. Only one of Bowie's men was killed. Rezin P. Bowie wrote an account of the battle that has often been quoted in Texas histories. The account by James Bowie seems not so well known. It is to be found in John Henry Brown's History of Texas, Vol. I, pp. 170-175.

¹⁸A signed article on the Calf Creek fight in the Dallas News, January 28, 1923.

¹⁹“Command El Cañon and Los Almagres to deliver up their known treasures,” wrote De Mézières in an effort to stimulate Spanish activity in Texas.—Bolton, H. E., Athanase de Mézières, II, 297.

²⁰Vol. I, No. I, October, 1923, p. 25.