Evening Star Newspaper, June 21, 1931, Page 71

PART 7. THE LURE OF By J. FRANK DOBIE, Author of “Coronado’s Children” and “A Va- quero of the Brush Country.” OR a long time I have known thaf Coronado’s children—the children of hope and faith whose treasures are laid down very deep in the earth, in- deed, rather than up in heaven—were 7 many, but until my book of tales about lost mines and buried treasures got abroad, I did not know how many. Already I have the leads to enough new stories and have become acquainted with enough characters to make another book. Of course more of them write than come in person, but they write in a way that many professional writers might well take & l'esson from; they write with directness. The visitor who interested me most perhaps had something to skow, and after seeing it I do not wonder that he has for more than 25 years been puzzled. His name is Belt and he is a railrocd man. About 1903, as he tells the story, he and his father were séiting a steel trap for coons on the Neches River, in East Texas, very near . the crossing of the old Spanish rcad that ran from San Antonio to New Orleans. They were chaining the trap to a tree when one of them noticed somethirg peculiar showing through a slit in the wood. The older man always car- ried a hand ax with him when he was out in . the woods, and he chopped into the tree. With " a few strokes he extracted the brass model of 2 human hand. I have it in my possession now. The hand is clenched and it is an ex- * quisite piece of work. The wrist of which the hand is a part runs off to a point, so that the artifact has the appearance of a spike; and as a spike it had evidenlty been driven into the tree. It measures 4! inches from tip to tip. UCH a find naturally aroused in the father and son a great deal of curiosity. The piney woods along the Neches River are full of stories about Spanish treasure, but generally the markers called for by charts are missing. Here was a unique and extraordinary marker. . But what did it mark? ‘Well, old man Belt did not have much to do; - he had never been a slave to work; and so he began to investigate. For 15 years he did little but roam the woods, ax in hand, investigating every tree that showed a knot, a hole in s trunk, or any other peculiarity. Sometimes if a tree had “a kind of likely look,” whether il showed any particular feature or not, he cut . into it. One day he extracted from a tree a small copper knife about 3 inches long. It _ would make a beautiful paper cutter in any library. The knife was imbedded so as to point toward the tree that had started all the investigation. Belt now began working on an imaginary line running through the tree that had held the brass hand ard the tree containing the copper knife. A mile or so out on this line he discovered in another tree a copper peg, or spike, scme 4 inches long, pointed toward the hand. He found two other copper pegs, each smaller by an inch, but both imbedded in such a way as to establish the line he had been working on. The last peg cut out was nearly six miles from the tree on the river. This certainly was interssting, but what did the line lead to? A Thinking that perhaps there might be an- other line, Belt now applied his investigation to arother quarter. He found a second knife, shaped a little differently from the first, its point curved like that of a skinning knife. On the line established by it and the brass hand he found three of the little copper pegs already de- scribed. This second line made with the first Sundy Star ‘ Magasine WASHINGTON, D. C, JUNE 2] -193L. An Author Who Has Made a Specialty of Delving Into “Treasure Stories’’ Tells Interesting Tales That Have Reached His Ears—Hope and - Faith of Coronado’s Children. an angle so wide that the extreme pegs of the two were 10 or 11 miles apart. Every article found was in a hardwood tree—trees old and slow of growth. Fifteen years had now been passed in dig- ging out probably two pounds of metal. Bell still did not know what the things meant. He had grown to be an old man, and with the puzzle still unsolved he died. One knife has been lost. I have the other articles. Some of them have undecipherable marks on them. I wish particularly that I could make out the faint scratchings on the blade of the knife. Before the elder Belt passed from the scene his son had investigated considerably for him- self, but with a growing family to support he could not devote much time to the matter. However, several years ago he enlisted the imagination and money of a doctor. This doctor spent about $10,000 in sending Belt to the Smithsonian Institution and other places likely to supply expert information, in biring men to dig, having surveys run, etc. The doc- tor died. Now Belt has another doctor backing him. ‘The whole country knows about the prass hand and the interest the Belts have had in it. “I can’t go to the little town of Silsbee, my home town, on the Neches River,” said Belt, “and strike out into the woods without being shadowed. I'm not like those treasure hunters who always know the treasure is there. I do know some mighty curious markers were there —and I know where every one of them came from. What did they mark?” I wish I could answer. NOTHER parcel of metal I have acquired is of a nature entirely different. A stranger sent it to me “in the hopes that I could find something with it.” It consists of four alum- inum tubes, 8 inches long, with a two-pronged fork in one end of each. Two of the tubes, gilded gold, are “pesitives”; the other two, gilded silver, are “necgatives.” It takes two persons to operate them so that the forked end of each in either hand so that the forked end of each “needle” will engage lightly with the forks of the “negatives” held by the second person. If there is any valuable mineral in the vicinity, the “needles” thus paired will swing to it. I have had offers of various other kinds of ' instruments. One man who has perfected what he calls an “Electric Gold Smeller” wants me to go with him to dig up some chests at St. Augustine, Fla., where the pirate Laitte, despite the claims of other regions, was buried. Another man representing a “salvage company” in Chicago has “developed new methods of metal detection by radio” and proposes an excursion after Spanish gold buried near the old Tumacarori mission in Arizona. A man in Louisiana offers me 10 per cent of all the sales he makes to prospects that I may furnish him. His machine is con- structed “on the radio principle” and is guar- anteed to locate $500 buried 4 feet under- ground. A man from Dallas claims that he does not need any machine at all, but possesses the happy faculty of dreaming his way to a treas- ure—provided he can slecp near it. He wants me to help him make down his bed near any treasure that I know the general location of, but have not been able to locate exactly. “Several years ago,” this man narrates as proof of his dreaming powers, “while lying down and restly idly, I went into a doze and, like a moving picture, saw a long, straight stretch of railroad, a section house beside it, some trees and a pile of ties. The next day I was at a town where the one store was also depot and post office. I walked down the track a ways, happened to look down, and there lying at my feet was a $5 bill. Then, glancing about me, I saw a pile of new railroad ties, trees back of them, section house and other details pictured in my dreams.” This dreamer reminds me of a little story communicated by a friendly reader of Wis- consin. A neighbor of his, a man 83 years old, was directed in a dream to go to a small town in Colorado, the name of which he had never before heard. There, under a certain tree, he would find buried 207 pouches containing $272,000. This was an interesting dream, but he regarded it just as a dream. The next night he dreamed again the same dream, all the de- tails ider:tical. On the third night the dream came again to the old man, but with the addi- tional information that a bright star would lead him to the unknown town in Colorado. Waking from the vivid monition, he could not resist the temptation to go to the window of his bed room and -look for the star. It was there shining brilliantly in the southwest. The next morning he told-his family of the thrice-repeated vision, remarking that if he were a younger man he believed he would go treasure hunting. Some weeks passed and the episode had been forgotten. Then one day a member of the family read an obscure item in a newspaper reportlng’,thu two men had just unearthed at the root of a tree in the little town of Colorado $272,000. Generally, however, my communicants ex- press themselves as being powerless to get at the riches of which they are so sure.- A man near Camden, Ala., has a bed of nuggets on his farm. He also has some beech trees bearing 'nggég. Features 20 PAGES. TREASURE “The attack by the Apaches lasted two or three days before the last man went down.” Illustrated by Stockton Mulford. marks supposed to have been put there by Indians. Is there any way of reading the marks so that they will guide to the nuggets? CALIFORNIAN announces that he has re- ‘cently discovered a Spanish mine that had been lost for 120 years. “We found the tunnel,” he says, “full of poison gas and great stalactites of pure arsenic were hanging from the zoof. ‘There were the skeletons of five men. Then came the location of 16 different veins of bonanza ore assaying from $800 to $31,000 a ton.” Yet, not satisfied to stay and work this glorious find, the Californian wants a little information on one of the lost mines of Mexico. The great lodes of tradition like the San Saba mine, the gold left hidden by old Ben Sublett out in the Guadalupe Mountains and Yuma's gold of the desert—lodes that form the chief themes of “Coronado’s Children"—come in for additional tales and comment. Charles H. Shamel, an elderly gentleman now living in Taylorville, Ill., tells how in 1889 he was engaged by Prof. Comstock to help make & geological survey of the San Saba, Tex., region, “One evening,” he recalls, “while the teamster and cook were away, Prof. Comstock took out of his pocket a piece of rock half the size of & man’s fist and showed me embedded in it & nugget of pure gold about as big as a radish seed. He told me to keep my mouth shut, but to keep my eyes open for such specimens while tracing outcrop lines. The rock was a piece of what geologists call float and had probably been carried away from the mineralized vein by a flood. So far as I know the gold-bearing ledge has never been discovered. “I myself might have found it, but soom after being put on the watch for it I wrenched my back and was disabled. That was one.of the great disappointments of my life, for get- ting to prospect in a mineral region with ex- penses paid and a salary besides, was as good as the job of a Government hunter for preda- tory animals, who is paid to do what many a sportsman spends hundreds of dollars to get a taste of.” : And here is another geologist, from El Paso. He once went with a friend of Old Ben Sub- lett’s to a sink in the Guadalupe Mountains, where queer Old Ben got his gold. He offers to take me there again. I'm going. Then maybe I can answer the man from Washing- ton who says that if I will tell him where Sublett crossed the Pecos River he can work the rest of the trail out alone. I hear that the Guadalupe Mountains are “lousy” with prospec- tors these days. As an illustration of the can- tankerousness that made Old Ben refuse, even on his death bed, to disclose the whereabouts of his gold.mine they say he ordered his body to be buried naked. He wanted to go out of the world in the same garb he wore when he came into it. And thus he went, Yuma and thus frustrated development of the mine. But maybe that is not true. A dyed-in- the-wool prospector from New Mexico who has twice been in bonanza and expects to find the Lost Adams Diggings yet, is coming tp see me. He writes: “Ramon, chief of the Papagoes an now 110 years old,. has been my friend for years. Once he directed me a vein which I took $16,000 worth of self has more gold than the Hindu is in 1,116 mule skins buried somewhere the Arizona-Mexico border, an