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The Llano
escarpment Chapter I Levantamiento del Llano - The Llano Escarpment
It took a billion years to form the granite that outcropped in the Llano Uplift, a billion years of chaotic volcanic vomit and noxious fumes, the earth’s very core boiling to the surface, to cool and harden and solidify, to cool and harden and solidify again, and again to finally settle down to a quieter, wetter and cooler millennium of rains and sunshine while sandy, limeaceous sediments flowed around the igneous formations of a new earth. And yet millenniums more as the now aging young earth squeezed itself, shifted itself, twisting its thousand feet of blanketed layers of sand and lime and ancient sea beds to rise, retreat, and rise again a hundred times, to form the escarpment on the Texas landscape. Eons of blazing sun and rains and floods and vegetation etched away the landscape a millimeter at a time while ground waters percolated through the baking and compacting limestone to reach harder, less-permeable sub-soil surfaces, leaching lime into cavities and cavities into caverns and caverns into underground streams and lakes and springs. Yet deep in the conflux of limestone
and granite, unimaginable pressures generating unimaginable heat formed
crystalline matrices into Galena and Quartz, Topaz and Lead and Silver,
Feldspar, Copper, Agate and Jasper, Molybdenum, Tin, and a myriad of other
creations to later be uncovered as streams and floods cut into these
formations exposing them to a Texas
sun. Chapter II Mi Ciudad Natal - MenardI hadn’t been back to this little dry, dusty town in over forty years, some places I vaguely remember, others I remember as if it was yesterday morning. Surprisingly I remember the schools and my school experience vaguely other than a coupl’a fights in the school library and a spot or two of playground softball when baseball was not something that was easily attempted by a 90-pound skinny youth who had not yet learned that there were differences between boys and girls other than girls were a pain in the ass. Places, some still exist, others have gone long by. The Busy Bee Grocery Store, where my mother shopped once a week and charged it all to be paid at the end of the month. In my youthful eyes, the world was fed by this lush food bonanza that contained fresh-cut meats, barbequed goat, candies of all sorts though chocolate was rare because of the World War II war effort, and of course fresh vegetables and fruits in big wooden crates stacked along narrow aisles. As long as I can remember, she never missed making a payment on the last day of the month, regardless. Next Door was my father’s pool parlor, a cavernous dark space with a walnut and mahogany bar and brass foot railing and brass spittoons scattered here and yon and two huge longhorn steer heads with six-foot horns over a long mirror at the back of the bar. Long-neck bottles of beer in returnable bottles sold for twenty-five cents, wine ten cents a glass, Cokes, Nehi and Dr. pepper, five cents. Salted Tom’s roasted peanuts were always on the bar for the taking. Along the wall parallel to the bar were a half-dozen black slate-top tables with chairs for four, a set of yellow-white ivory dominoes with black dots and a stick of white chalk to mark the scores on the chalkboard top at each table. Until one’s eyes adjusted to the low light inside, one could see only round green blobs of light shining from shaded single bulbs hanging over each of a dozen green felt-covered pool tables. But one could hear the clicking of pool balls, a groan from some disgruntled player who’d "scratched" his cue ball, and laughs from his opponents, or the loud "whap" of a domino against the slate top as a player slammed one into place in the criss-cross of the game, or hear the rat-a-tat-tat of those ivory dominoes as they were being shuffled for a new game. As your eyes adjusted you would likely find some lanky Levi-clad cowman sighting along a tapered cue stick, a chew of tobacco the size of a golf ball tucked in his cheek, his jowls unshaven and a dog-eared sweat-stained Stetson hat perched at the back of his close-cropped head. Hanging from thin wires strung the width of the cavern-like brick-walled space were a variety of signs posting the costs per game, rules of play and etiquette, and one particular sign that was enigmatic to me for I knew not its meaning and was too afraid to ask my father, a short, burly, muscular man with a peculiar sense of humor and very little patience. The sign said simply, "No profanity allowed!" Lining both left and right walls, from the bar back to the rear wall were chairs of an unusual height padded in soft brown leather, chairs designed for those who had the necessity to sit and arise innumerable times during the course of a game of pool or billiards, chairs so high that I had to climb the chair rungs to sit, and sitting in one of those made me feel as if I was sitting in the throne of some king of the netherworld ... an exaltation. The white-washed walls were lined with green and white and red neon signs of every description advertising the varieties of beers and wines and packaged peanuts that my father daily dispensed to the crowd of men that lined the bar or scurried around the billiard and pool tables. "Lone Star," "Budweiser," "Falstaff," "Tom’s Peanuts," "Virginia Dare," they blazed into the dusky dim of the parlor. Seldom did I see a woman in the place, except for my mother who visited infrequently and only for a short time, or some wife looking to drag a husband home. Up the street was The Menard Variety, a store of similar size and shape as the Menard Recreation Center, my father’s establishment, a Variety that truly fit its name. One could find, in that unique little store, bolts of cloth and sewing paraphernalia, woven baskets, toys of every description, candies, chewing tobacco, books, comics, workman’s boots and farmers coveralls, zinc-coated wash tubs and bathtubs. All a man or woman or child needed, wanted or coveted in those years of the early 1940s. Across the street, back from the town’s American Legion Park with its hundreds of pecan trees spreading shading over small benches where old men played dominoes and checkers, and the Menard Irrigation Company canal that sliced the park in half, lay the county’s court house of pink granite and columns that seemed to reach the sky, and "Court House" spelled as "Covrt Hovse," the date 1872 deeply etched in marble above huge brass-trimmed doors. To the right, on the corner, was the pride of the town, the Bevan’s Hotel, a 4-story yellow-brick complex of hotel, barbershop, restaurant, drug store and ice-cream parlor all with highly polished and waxed gray-granite floors that reflected the lights from overhead crystal chandeliers in the hotel lobby, lights that gave supreme elegance. Scattered in the lobby were red leather chaise-lounges for the comfort of guests who usually were hunters, or traveling salesmen, or soldiers destined for Europe or the Pacific, coming to Menard for a little "rest, recuperation and relaxation," particularly during the extravagant dances held in the hotel’s ballroom that covered the entire fourth floor. At the far end of town was a favorite place, Murchison Dry Goods, still with it’s hitchin’ post out front though automobiles had long replaced the horse and buggy. Old man Murchison was the delight of every youngster in town for he always had a kind word to say and some nic-nac to give away, usually peppermint. Here too was a plethora of west-Texas trivia from Three-X Beaver Stetson wide-brimmed hats to made-to-order custom high-heeled cowboy boots, silver spurs, rugged denim pants and denim shirts. At the other end of town, closer to the banks of the San Sabá River, was the last remaining wood-frame boarding house, once called the Australian Hotel, by the 1940s considerably run-down but still with ginger-bread facade, a wide porch with waist-high balustrades running the length of the structure, and the "hangin"’ tree fifty yards to the rear toward the river. The hangin’ tree, it was said, was a centuries-old oak from which "the last man in Menard that was hung to death for stealin’ a horse." Saturday nights were a true "Saturday Night" when everyone from the poorest to the richest, Black, White or "Meskin" as Mexican was pronounced in that west Texas cowtown, came in from a hard week to "neighbor" and to catch up with what’d happened during the week. Wives usually milled about in the Variety or sat in the parked automobiles with other wives while the men hit the pool hall or stood around on the street spittin’ chawin’ tobacco, the children hard at play across the main street in the park. Periodically someone would get out of hand, either angry over a parcel of land or drunk, or both, and it happened frequently. But when it did it was usually quelled in short fashion by the deputy sheriff, Henry Bates, a squat, muscular man who wore his shirt sleeves rolled up to his bulging biceps regardless of the temperature or climate. He carried a Colt .44 on his hip, western-style, and always carried the heavy end of a sawed-off pool cue, donated by my father, as an "attitude-adjuster." He invariably "adjusted" a few hard heads every Saturday. Only twice in my young life do I recall things really going awry. Once a rather well-to-do rancher by the name of Wilkerson and another named Jenkins got into a hot argument over Jenkin’s wife and both pulled out six-shooters and blazed away. "It was a good thing both were drunk," my father said later. "Neither of them could hit the side of a barn they were so soused." But our black 1936 Ford, with a bullet hole in the back, forever afterward carried the results of that scuffle. The only other time was not on the main street but in one of the back alleys just off the main drag, in the "rough part of town," where two saloons were virtually back-to-back. A fellow by the name of Andrew Johnson and another whose name I can’t recall, finally ended a long-standing feud when Johnson shot the other fellow between the eyes. No one could recall what the feud was all about. Outside the town, about two miles as the crow flies, on the banks of the San Sabá, lay the mission Santa Cruz del San Sabá, and a few miles distant, a Spanish fort, the ruins of Real Presidio De San Sabá, established in 1751 to protect the mission. Short-lived, the mission experienced increasing hostility from Lipan Apache and Comanche Indians while the Presidio commander constantly urged the Spanish missionaries to abandon their efforts, but when they continually refused, on March 16, 1758, a strong force of Comanche and other Indians overran the mission, killed any occupants and burned the buildings. Only a few escaped. A small relief force of soldiers from the Presidio were so fiercely attacked they were unable to prevent mission destruction. In the following years, Indian depredations became so severe that supply columns and other activities outside the Presidio came to a virtual standstill until it was abandoned in 1769, left to rot in the harsh Texas climate. The pole and thatched roofs were first to go, eaten by termites and decay from hot sun and infrequent rains. Then the red clay mud mortar leached and washed from the joints between two-foot limestone block quarried from the San Sabá valley hillside a mile or so away, across the river. In the mid to early 1930s, the old Mission was partially reconstructed using building materials from the original structure while much of the old local limestone building blocks had long-since been removed to build settler’s homes in Menardville a couple of miles east. The reconstructed mission, used as a museum until the late thirties, had also gone into disarray by the late 40s, its roof again collapsing and portions of the newly cemented walls collapsing. Only a turret, the arched entryway into the mission’s courtyard, and a few of the outer perimeter walls remained. Only stone rubble remained. The grounds surrounding the old mission became a golf course. What relics remained, remained in the soils of the landscape, buried under a foot or more of topsoil and golf course grass, some plowed under by adjacent farmers in adjacent hay fields and cow dung, other absconded by relic hunters. When I was old enough to read, I happened across a copy of J. Frank Dobie’s book, Coronado’s Children from the county library, a one-room library in the county court house. Dobie, a writer of the southwest, particularly of the west Texas southwest, reeled off story after story of Menard and the Llano and of San Sabá, of the Lipan Apache, and of the Las Almagres Mine, or as was called in his book, "The Lost Bowie Mine." My mind gripped Dobie’s stories with the hands of one totally engrossed in his tales of treasure, seeing, as if I was there, the glitter of gleaming silver bars stacked one atop another in the flickering light of a miner’s acetylene head lamp. A wall of treasure, the skeleton of a Spanish Conquistador still in his gleaming peaked helmet, his broad sword at his side, a Spanish Padre in aging and rotted gown with bible in a fleshless hand. In my mind’s eye it was all-too real, a drawing of will toward a distant past. By the time I was thirteen I’d scoured every hill top, every stream and river bed, every arroyo and gully, every nook and cranny, every crack in every boulder, every cave and tunnel and ruin that I could reach on my Western Auto bicycle or by foot. I was a barely-teenage 1940's James Bowie if not in body, at least in mind. An inscription carved in the limestone of the arched gateway into the Mission San Sabá read "BOWIE MINE 1832", something that inflamed my mind though many claimed the inscription originally read "BOWIE CON SU TROPA 1829," an inscription translated to English, "Bowie with its troops 1829" carved sometime between 1895 and 1910. It was said that the inscription had been altered by some unidentified vandal. But whether fake or real, it stirred my imagination to a fever pitch. By the time I reached my sixteenth birthday, anyone who entered the Menard Recreation Hall asking about directions to some ruin or cave or old mine shaft, my father sent them to me with a roughly-scribbled note and I was off with some stranger guiding them through the scrub oak and Mesquite and prickly pear looking for some carving in a rock or piece of flint in the forks of some tree, chasing his dream and mine. At graduation from high school, and seventeen, the Korean war was going strong. With the blessing of my parents I enlisted in the Air Force and was "out of pocket" for the next four years, four years that gradually replaced my enthusiasm for lost treasure with the more real-world things of an Air Force aviation mechanic and the pretty young girls of a post-war Germany and Italy. By 1957 I was enrolled in college as a geology major and working summers with the Texas Soil Conservation Service as a geologist trainee helping to place conservation dams at flood plains throughout Texas until marriage, two young children and a bout with cancer terminated both my enthusiasm for the Lost Bowie Mine and my sought-after goal in geology. Teaching, I had determined, would be my career choice, particularly because the training in the Air Force had given me an "up" in the credits I needed for an early graduation, so teacher I became. At first it was high school science and mathematics and then, eventually, as an occupational trainer and developer of training curriculum and an early enthusiast of computers in the classroom. Menard and James and Rezin Bowie and the Las Almagres were quietly shoved far back into the deepest recesses of my mind until one evening many years later, something happened that reshaped my goals and my thinking.
Chapter III El Hallazgo - The Find While in Mexico City developing a training program for a large international hotel chain, I spent days working with hotel personnel in developing their specialized curriculum for hotel workers, and evenings trying the many varied restaurants in that marvelous city, weekends visiting the ruins of Aztec and Toltec ruins, and in general being the "turista" that I had become. On a particularly pleasant evening, walking the crowded streets of Mexico City, stopping at various bazaars, I found a shop with highly unusual artifacts of the ancient civilizations of Mexico, many of which, I’m certain, were fake since the Mexican Government did not allow the sale, purchase or exporting of Mexican artifacts. But there, on a dust-laden shelf lay a worn, peeling leather-bound book with yellowed-brown pages, laying ever-so neatly in a fitted cedar box with brass hinges and hasp. It’s title, in Spanish but with a name that brought to the surface those years as a youth in Texas, "La Expedición de Miranda en Tejas y la Colina Roja Mina," I gingerly opened its fragile pages. Inside, in Spanish, which I could sparingly read, were references to "La plata," silver, "Rio de San Sabá," "Rio de Las Chanas" and "los cerro de almagre," "San Sabá and the Llano River and the red ocher soil of part of Menard and Llano Counties," I mumbled aloud. "Qué?" The store clerk asked. "Nada," I answered,"es nada, it is nothing." According to official records and some oft-told tales, Bernardo de Miranda y Flores, a Spanish military officer, left San Antonio with twenty_three soldiers and citizens on February 17, 1756. After locating the cerro de almagre, Miranda's men dug a shaft and found "a tremendous stratum of ore." They named the mine San José del Alcazar. So abundant were the ore veins, Miranda reported, that he guaranteed "a mine to each of the inhabitants of the province of Texas." Following Miranda's return to San Antonio on March 10 of 1776, Jacinto de Barrios y Jauregui, the Governor, sent a three_pound ore sample to the viceroy in Mexico City for assay, but the sample was deemed too small for accurate analysis. The assayer suggested that thirty mule loads of the material be sent to Mazapil for further testing. Some say that Miranda did indeed obtain his thirty mule loads of silver but on the way to San Antonio was attacked by marauding Lipan Apache and had to bury the trove. Others say that he never obtain the funding to excavate the thirty mule-loads of ore and thus abandoned the site. However, The San Sabá San Luis de las Amarillas Presidio captain, Diego Ortiz Parrilla, sought permission to move his garrison to Los Almagres to work the mine, obtained ore samples and smelted them at his post at the San Sabá River presidio. He calculated a yield of one and a half ounces of silver from seventy_five pounds of ore. Closing the book and placing it back into its sheltering box, I asked the store keeper what he was asking for the find, "Cuánto es él?" "No es mucho dinero," he said, grinning, "100 dólares de Americano," he said. "Demasiado, too much," I said in my rough Tex-Mex Spanish, which eventually cost me $40 American. Fake or real, I thought, it was a bargain if only as a coffee-table item. "Is this the real thing? Está esto verdadera la cosa?" I asked. "Sí señor, es fue encontrado en un monasterio aquí en Ciudad de México," he answered. "Hace muchos años," he said. "Many years ago, in a monastery in Mexico City?" I responded. "Is that the truth? Está eso la verdad?" "Sí, es la verdad. En Ciudad de México. En un monasterio," he said, insistent that he was telling me God’s honest truth. "Es verdad del dios." I spent another month in Mexico working with the hotel staff, asking an English-speaking hotel executive to translate portions of the old book on evenings when we both could find time and weren’t enmeshed with hotel training needs. "No más que un paseo del día del one_hald del campo, encima del poco cala llamado el amarrar, preparamos un foso largo en los bancos cerca clara azul del agua," he read, explaining that it read that about a half-day ride from their camp they dug a trench in the bank of the creek they called ‘the moor,’ ‘Las Moras’ and that they found silver and lead ore that weighed heavy on the back of the pack horses, "y eso encontraron la plata y el mineral de plomo que pesaron pesado en la parte posteriora de los caballos de paquete.’" "Las Moras? Silver?" I said, One of the many little streams I’d scurried up and down as a kid. I remembered it as a slow running spring-fed creek, often only a trickle, but with sporadic ponds of clear blue water unlike the brown water of the San Sabá, and steeply rising limestone cliffs on both sides about ten miles from the old presidio. I could, in my mind’s eye of childhood memories, remember seeing deep scouring gouges along some of the rock face of Las Moras creek. As intrigued though I was, I had to concentrate on what I was in Mexico for -- hotel training. Finally, in September, I completed my curriculum study for the hotel and headed back to my office in San Marcos to prepare the necessary training documents. Four months passed before I
completed all of the documentation the hotel chain needed, I’d accepted
several more assignments, my wife passed away a year later from a terrible
bout with pneumonia that totally devastated me. Everything was so hectic
and so estranged by then that I consciously lost interest in the
manuscript and again put Los Almagres out of my mind. There simply were
too many day-to-day things that strayed my interest and
attention.
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