"Coronado's Children"
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Some lands are taken by military invasion; others, by slow infiltration, in which, over time, the people of one country trickle into another and settle down. Such is the history of European settlement in the American southwest.
In 1540, one of these, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, set out from Mexico to find the mythical "Seven Cities of Gold." He never found them, but he was the first European to see the Grand Canyon, and travel as far north as Kansas.
In 1930, one of my favorite historians of the southwest, Texan professor J. Frank Dobie, wrote a book called "Coronado's Children," about the many treasure hunters who entered the southwest in the gold-hungry spirit of Coronado.
In one story, he tells of Maximilian's Gold. History tells us that in 1864, Emperor Napoleon III, nephew of the famous Napoleon, had placed Maximilian, younger brother of the emperor of Austria, on the throne of Mexico. But in 1867 Maximilian was deposed--and executed by a firing squad.
This is where legend takes over. Notice that this was two years after the American Civil War. As Dobie tells it, six former Confederate soldiers were traveling south into Mexico after the war when they met a wagon train going north. The leader of the train, an Austrian, told them he had a cargo of flour, and hired the men to guide him and his companions north to San Antonio.
Suspicious of the secrecy around the wagons' contents, one of the Confederates investigated and discovered that the wagons were filled with--not flour, but gold!
So one night, the "guards" turned on the party and killed every member. In searching through the wagons they discovered that the leader of the wagon train was an officer of Maximilian, and was taking the gold for shipment out of Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast back to Austria.
The robbers, knowing it was not safe to take all the loot with them, took just a few coins and buried the rest among some rocks. Subsequently, five were killed by Indians, and one fell ill. Before dying, he left a map to a lawyer and the doctor who tended him.
Naturally, the landscape had changed enough that the two "heirs" to Maximilian's fortune were never able to find it.