Legends of Texas Page: 7
279 p. : ill., maps, ports. ; 24 cm.View a full description of this book.
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Legends of Buried Treasure and Lost Mines
South America have been the richest in the world. What wonder
that the Spanish dreamed of wealth wherever the unknown
stretched, and that buoyantly they followed their dreams! Led
by rumor, they found in some places what they had come to
America to find; thus they came to expect to find it wherever
rumor pointed. The assertion of a naked Indian led Balboa to
gaze first of all Europeans upon the great "South Sea." An
Indian told Pizarro of the vast nations of the Incas and of the
fabulous treasures of Cuzco. Indians with their tales of the
wealth of the Aztecs and the Muiscas "guided Cortez to the rich
capital of Montezuma, and Quesada to the opulent plateau of
Cundinamarca."'2
What wonder then that Sebastian de Benalcazar listened to a
lone Indian tell the tale of the Gilded King, El Dorado,13 in 1535,
and that in that puissant age of energy, exploration, and imag-
ination, the tale was echoed in the camps of soldiers under the
Andes, by the hearths of peasants in Navarre, on the smacks of
Devonshire fishermen, in the counting-houses of Augsburg bankers,
and in the council chamber of Queen Elizabeth as well as in the
courts of a century of Spanish monarchs? To seek El Dorado,
the conquistadores for a hundred years and more marched and
countermarched from one extremity of half of the western hemi-
sphere to the other, spending the lives of tens of thousands of
men and the wealth of prodigal treasuries, enduring starvation,
fever, cold, thirst, the pests of swamps and the pitilessness of
deserts-all with an intrepidity that comes now in our tame
"Safety First" age like a stirring cup brewed by the giants. At
first a man, El Dorado came to mean a place somewhere in the
western part of what is now Colombia, then in any, every direc-
tion. At sixty-three Great Raleigh came out of twelve years of
imprisonment to fare forth a second time on the quest. And two
centuries after he had died the same quest was occupying whole
bodies of men; and even yet it is the tale, so it is said, of sanguine
souls scattered over all South America.
When the seekers did not find it, always the treasure was
'2Zahm, J. A. (H. J. Mozans), Through South America's Southland, New
York, 1916, p. 361.
13For full accounts of the El Dorado history and legends, see Adolphe F.
Bandelier's The Gilded Man, New York, 1893, and Z. A. Zahm's (H. J.
Mozans) The Quest of El Dorado, New York, 1917. Both are readable and
distinguish well between history and legend. Bandelier is the more scholarly
of the two writers.7
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Legends of Texas (Book)
Collection of popular Texas legends, including tales about buried treasure, the supernatural, pirates, origins of Texas flowers, and other miscellaneous legends. The index begins on page 271.
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Dobie, J. Frank (James Frank), 1888-1964. Legends of Texas, book, 1984; Dallas, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc67651/m1/21/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Press.