# A story about Matagorda Treasure



## Luco (Sep 21, 2006)

I have always had a fascination with history. I was the Ag Science teacher for a while down in Palacios TX. I fished almost every day while I was down there. I became a part of the community and heard many stories about what weird stuff the shrimpers would pull up in there nets, as with many stories from the older generation about strange things that they discovered in their youth. One story sticks out in my mind and I would like to share it with all of you. 

One morning I was drinking coffee with an elderly gentlemen swapping fishing lies. He told me that when he was a child, I am assuming some time in the early 1920's his father and him went fishing on the island near Pass Cavio after a hurricane the fishing wasn't that great so as most kids do found something to pass the time so he began skipping little black stones in the water. Once his father got fed up with not catching any fish they packed up the boat and returned to the mainland. When he got home he noticed that he still had a few of the stones in his pocket and threw them on the ledge of brick next to the house where the lived. The boy returned to school and gave the stones no more thought. A week or so passed and the boy noticed that the one of the stones was split open. Upon examination it wasn't a stone at all but a tar like substance with a gold coin inside, as with the other three. After he showed his father they returned to Matagorda Island and returned to the spot where they were fishing and no more could be found.

The gentlemen had a theory that the coins were dipped in something to escape detection from looters or to smuggle the currency through Mexican or French customs but never made it. He also told me that there were literally thousands of those stones littered all over the beach.

I just wanted to share this with all Ya'll 2coolers out there. If you know anything about this or other stories like this one I would love to hear about it.

Thanks, Luco 

UVA UVAM VIVENDO VARIA FIT


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## Tight Knot (Sep 8, 2004)

I believe there is buried treasure off Black Jack point as well as the mouth of Mission bay. There were alot of pirates in this area. Great story.
Tight Knot


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## Leemo (Nov 16, 2006)

I use to oyster the bays for yrs. in Palacios and Matagorda, one winter the night before the opening I had a strange dream, in my dream while oystering a good "spot" we were making the last sack getting ready to quit for the day and on the very last dump of the dredge I captured a heavy black wooden box, when the box hit the table a seagull flew down on top of the box and told me not to open the box till' I got back to the dock, when I got back to the dock and opened the box it was full of Spanish Gold coins, well the next day I got on the boat and wondered about my dream, I did'nt tell anyone about it, on the last dump of the dredge low and behold I caught a black wooden box, my heart started pounded, could my dream really have come true? we opened the box and sure enough, it was full of























BS, just like the rest of the story!


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## finfinder951 (May 17, 2005)

Thanks for the good story! I believe there is a tremendous amount of treasure that lies undiscovered along the Texas coast. I have wondered if Jean Lafite (SP?) buried some along Clear Creek and where it might be.


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## muzzleloader (May 21, 2004)

Link to just one story of Padre Island gold:

http://www.texasescapes.com/MurrayMontgomeryLoneStarDiary/Lost-Treasure-of-Padre-Island.htm

There are many more.


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## Pocketfisherman (May 30, 2005)

I spoke to the father of a friend who grew up in POC. My friend was a crew boat captain, his father a shrimper. Back in the late 60's they were dragging Matagorda bay and came up with cannonballs in their net after Hurricane Carla. When the LaSalle was discovered in Matagorda bay, he said that was the spot where they'd snagged the cannonballs. No Gold stories though.

Just wanted to add, my friends initials are J.H., and he passed a way a few years ago after moving down around Rockport. The crew boat he ran was one of two identical 65' boats that were moored in POC. Has anyone else heard similar stories of their finds?


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## SpeckReds (Sep 10, 2005)

I have a friend that brought home a funny looking brick from a trip along the Colorado river many years ago (30). It sat next to his fire place for about 20 years until another guy that was visiting asked him where he got that blocked of Silver. He said that what? 
They took a knife and carved on it a little and sure enough it was a 12lb or so block of Silver.
This old man said there was a whole pile of these bricks. After so many years he could not remember exaclty where he had found them. All those years he just thought it was a heavy funny looking brick.


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## Tankfxr (Dec 26, 2007)

Im sure there is plenty of that stuff around. There are many shipwrecks in Pass Cavallo
would be neat to go over to decros or the pass side of the J hook and see what can be found.


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## Slightly Dangerous (May 21, 2004)

My Stepdad worked on an archeological project that was sifting through the dirt banks from where the Victoria Turning Basin was built. They were primarily looking for Karankawa Indian artifacts and found plenty, especially near San Antonio Bay. However, they also found many Spanish artifacts such as cutlasses, metal plate and other stuff. No gold was found but silver coins, crosses and chain remnants were often uncovered. I think that the real treasure along the coast would be in the safe that disappeared when a hurricane destroyed Indianola and it's only bank. That was a thriving seaport back in the day.


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## Tankfxr (Dec 26, 2007)

[/QUOTE]Just wanted to add, my friends initials are J.H., and he passed a way a few years ago after moving down around Rockport. The crew boat he ran was one of two identical 65' boats that were moored in POC. Has anyone else heard similar stories of their finds?[/QUOTE]My dad used to run one of those crew boats. And the man we are buying our house from owns one of them in POC. Should be closing tomorrow and we cant wait.


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## SpecklFinAddict (Dec 19, 2004)

Get this book, Texas Treasure Coast, by Tom Townsend. I looked it up on Amazon and it's a little pricey for a small paperback , but some very good info and a must if you like treasure storie's.

Finfinder...it even talks about J. Lafitte and Clear Creek.


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## Pocketfisherman (May 30, 2005)

Tankfxr said:


> Im sure there is plenty of that stuff around. There are many shipwrecks in Pass Cavallo
> would be neat to go over to decros or the pass side of the J hook and see what can be found.


200 years ago, Pass Cavallo was well to the south of where it is now. The J-Hook did not form until the Ship Channel was put in. Before that, the inside of the Jhook was the pass. Back in the pirate days is was likely right around where the Matagorda light stands today.


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## Freshwaterman (May 21, 2004)

Spanish silver coins were so common in early Texas that these coins were accepted as legal currency. It was not until the late 1850s that US coined currancy arrived in Texas to replace these coins now very worn with age. These old Spanish coins held more value for Texans than paper dollars In Texas, these pieces of 8 were commonly called Spanish dollars. Gold coins were very rare. My great - great grandfather sold some land in 1852 for_ "400 Spanish Dollars" _near our old family farm near Fayetteville, Texas.

Note that a Spanish piece of eight will crust up with hard black silver sulfate when exposed to seawater for a long time. Under this black will be a yellow silver carbonate film that leads folks to mistake a silver coin for a gold one. Old Spanish Gold coins do not oxidize like silver they stay gold and are soft (18 to 20 carat gold in these coins).

Very little old gold has been found at wrecks and old sites in Texas - silver coinage is far more common. Old Mexico was rich in silver and far less in gold. the huge silver mines around Zacatecas produced thousands of tons of silver for teh Spanish on teh backs of native indian slaves.

_"Because Mexican ore, while plentiful, was fairly low-quality, huge amounts of rock had to be extracted from the silver mountains for the silver yield to remain high. Early on (late 16th century), pacified Purépechans from Michoacán were imported to meet the labor needs of the northern mines. The mining method used was simple: follow the silver. Narrow twisting tunnels followed the veins deep into the mountain--as deep as fifteen hundred feet . The tunnels were dark, fetid and extremely dangerous. With two-hundred pounds on their back, Indians carried the ore through skinny passageways on their hands and knees, up dangerous narrow ladders, across swinging rope bridges suspended high above chasms so deep there could be no rescue if they fell--for at least twelve hours every day. Death came often; perhaps, it was welcome."_


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## MustangOrange (Jul 26, 2005)

I know that Spanish doubloons used to be found along the Mansfield Cut after storms - three Spanish ships sunk off there in the late 1500's. It's pretty well documented and they found a lot of the treasure in the 50's/60's (what wasn't salvaged by the Spanish) from two of the ships and the third site, I believe, was destroyed when they first dredged the cut.


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## KJON (May 1, 2006)

Found a couple of brick shaped objects one evening on McFaddin Beach, kinda looked like adobe, we threw them on the fire. No sure what they were but we ate everything in the camp and sang "in a gada da vida" the rest of the night!


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## John Galt (Aug 6, 2006)

finfinder951 said:


> Thanks for the good story! I believe there is a tremendous amount of treasure that lies undiscovered along the Texas coast. I have wondered if Jean Lafite (SP?) buried some along Clear Creek and where it might be.


I just finished reading "The Sea Hunters II" by Clive Cussler. Good read...

He said while he was looking for La Belle in Matagorda, they found the wrecks of two British Navy frigates that had been chasing Lafitte (frigates ran aground, Lafitte's smaller ship made it over the bar). Said that almost getting caught scared Lafitte into giving up piracy and re-settling in (South Carolina?) as a respectable businessman.


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## SpecklFinAddict (Dec 19, 2004)

John Galt said:


> I just finished reading "The Sea Hunters II" by Clive Cussler. Good read...
> 
> He said while he was looking for La Belle in Matagorda, they found the wrecks of two British Navy frigates that had been chasing Lafitte (frigates ran aground, Lafitte's smaller ship made it over the bar). Said that almost getting caught scared Lafitte into giving up piracy and re-settling in (South Carolina?) as a respectable businessman.


In Texas Treasure Coast Tom Townsend tells of Lafitte supposedly taking his treasure up the Clear Creek channel and burying it before fleeing from Galveston.
Some very interesting reads on all types of stories around Galveston Bay and all along the Texas coast.
I'll have to check Cussler's book there...NUMA rocks!


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## Freshwaterman (May 21, 2004)

John Galt said:


> I just finished reading "The Sea Hunters II" by Clive Cussler. Good read...
> 
> He said while he was looking for La Belle in Matagorda, they found the wrecks of two British Navy frigates that had been chasing Lafitte (frigates ran aground, Lafitte's smaller ship made it over the bar). Said that almost getting caught scared Lafitte into giving up piracy and re-settling in (South Carolina?) as a respectable businessman.


In early 1821, the U.S. Navy ran Lafitte out of Galveston, according to _French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld_. While leaving, Lafitte burned his compound. Thus, despite the great heights to which Lafitte rose, began his decline. He left with three vessels, but two of them deserted him a few days later when he refused to attack a convoy of Spanish merchantmen. *From that point on, Lafitte's power and influence reached a low ebb, and he became a petty pirate and thief. He established a base on Mujeres Island (**Isla Mujeres** ) off the coast of **Yucatán**, but it was just a small collection of squalid huts.*

Herbert Asbury recounts his death in _The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld._ *In 1826, Lafitte entered the little Indian village of Teljas, on the mainland, and died of fever after a few days' illness in a native hut. He was 47*


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## chicapesca (Jun 7, 2004)

Pocketfisherman said:


> 200 years ago, Pass Cavallo was well to the south of where it is now. The J-Hook did not form until the Ship Channel was put in. Before that, the inside of the Jhook was the pass. Back in the pirate days is was likely right around where the Matagorda light stands today.


That's what I was thinking PF. I know when we were kids, Pass Cavallo went all the way to the Fish Pond entrance.


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## Jerry-rigged (May 21, 2004)

My dad had a good "Pirates treasure" story I heard him tell a few times. Dad grew up around Edna in the late '40s and '50s. His dad was a sometimes farmer, sometimes busnesman.

Ok, here is my dad's story, as he told me -



daddy said:


> when I was a kid, one of my running buddie's dad had a big farm, he grew corn, maze, cotton, whatever. The farm had been in the family for generations. Their biggest field had a huge, old oak in the middle of it. They had been plowing around it for years, and using it as a shade for lunch breaks. Anyway one summer the tree gets struck by lightning - it split and died. So my buddy's dad rounds up some friends, some saws, and some tractors, and they head out and start clearing that tree. they spent all day cutting it up and hauling it off, till they had just the stump - it was huge 4-5' around - this was an old tree. They ended up hitching up a few tractors up to it to pull it out of the ground. When they finnaly pulled the stump up, the root-ball was full of gold coins, and in the bottom of the hole was more gold and the remains of a chest... Best they could figgure was that it was buried pirate gold, in the middle of what was then balled-arse prarie, marked with a oak sapling...


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## rockhound76 (Feb 22, 2007)

Silver will often look like "black rocks" as the surface reacts with sea water, oxidizes a layer, then forms an accretion around it. I've never heard of gold doing this, as it's inert, but I have no doubts that there are a lot of shipwrecks in the area.

OOPS: Just read Flakman's post. He has a better, more detailed answer.


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## Tankfxr (Dec 26, 2007)

chicapesca said:


> That's what I was thinking PF. I know when we were kids, Pass Cavallo went all the way to the Fish Pond entrance.


I know it has changed just since i have been around. Have been told about it going all the way to the fish pond but i am too young to have seen it. I was doing some reading and research earlier and i read something that basicly said the shape and "design" of it have changed but the location of it has not changed considerably in more then 200 yrs. It also said that Pass Cavallo has beein in existance for more then 2600 yrs. Just some interesting stuff. Also just looking at some stuff there are some magnetic anomalies (spelling) within close proximity of the present day pass. Also did some work with Ralph Wilbanks who is the man who works for NUMA . He is also the man who eventually found the CSS Hunley the confederate submarine in S. Carolina i believe. He was telling me about some of the stuff that he found in or near the pass and he is the one who showed me magnetic anomalies from some research that he did.


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## Pocketfisherman (May 30, 2005)

This is a pretty interesting read with a chart and description of the old shoreline.
http://txspace.tamu.edu/bitstream/handle/1969.1/586/etd-tamu-2004A-ANTH-Borgens-1.pdf);jsessionid=FD8D456A5567E592D81644EFB466C7CB?sequence=1


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## John Galt (Aug 6, 2006)

FlatoutFishin said:


> In Texas Treasure Coast Tom Townsend tells of Lafitte supposedly taking his treasure up the Clear Creek channel and burying it before fleeing from Galveston.
> Some very interesting reads on all types of stories around Galveston Bay and all along the Texas coast.
> I'll have to check Cussler's book there...NUMA rocks!


NUMA has done a lot of work around here. That book also talks about the effort to find the Tiwin Sisters cannons used at San Jacinto (confiscated by the Yanks and destroyed by some Confederates). He mentions looking for the Zavala, flagship of the Republic of Texas Navy (in a parking lot in Galveston) and the coastal defense guns in what is now the San Luis Resort in Galveston.

Not mentioned but interesting, there is a Civil War blockade runner called the Denbigh that was sunk near the Galveston jetties. It is visible at extreme low tide with a Norther.

http://nautarch.tamu.edu/PROJECTS/denbigh/trip01.htm


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## chicapesca (Jun 7, 2004)

Thanks PF, that is most interesting!


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## haparks (Apr 12, 2006)

had to bump so i can read when i get home


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## SpecklFinAddict (Dec 19, 2004)

John Galt said:


> NUMA has done a lot of work around here. That book also talks about the effort to find the Tiwin Sisters cannons used at San Jacinto (confiscated by the Yanks and destroyed by some Confederates). He mentions looking for the Zavala, flagship of the Republic of Texas Navy (in a parking lot in Galveston) and the coastal defense guns in what is now the San Luis Resort in Galveston.
> 
> Not mentioned but interesting, there is a Civil War blockade runner called the Denbigh that was sunk near the Galveston jetties. It is visible at extreme low tide with a Norther.
> 
> http://nautarch.tamu.edu/PROJECTS/denbigh/trip01.htm


I read the first book by Cussler and it described the drilling in the paking lot at Galveston, didn't know he had II edition. I'll look it up. Thanks


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## surffan (Oct 5, 2004)

John Galt said:


> NUMA has done a lot of work around here. That book also talks about the effort to find the Tiwin Sisters cannons used at San Jacinto (confiscated by the Yanks and destroyed by some Confederates). He mentions looking for the Zavala, flagship of the Republic of Texas Navy (in a parking lot in Galveston) and the coastal defense guns in what is now the San Luis Resort in Galveston.
> 
> Not mentioned but interesting, there is a Civil War blockade runner called the Denbigh that was sunk near the Galveston jetties. It is visible at extreme low tide with a Norther.
> 
> http://nautarch.tamu.edu/PROJECTS/denbigh/trip01.htm


I think a few posts up someone was talking about dreams. I have had dreams about finding the Twin Sisters. National Treasure here I come.


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## 1hunglower (Sep 2, 2004)

I think there is some old ship from the Civil war up in the Lavaca River that could be seen on low tides above 616 Bridge.


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## John Galt (Aug 6, 2006)

surffan said:


> I think a few posts up someone was talking about dreams. I have had dreams about finding the Twin Sisters. National Treasure here I come.


Cussler tried to find the Sisters in the Lynchburg area...he did not realize how muich metal there is buried in that area.


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## jb3667 (Jan 12, 2006)

I grew up on Clear Creek and we spent a lot of time in the water, boating and swimming. One day a bunch of us kids were having a mudfight and one of my neighbors found an old black coin in the mud. He took it home and his dad cleaned it up, it was an old spanish coin. We went back and looked for more many times but we never found any.


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## haparks (Apr 12, 2006)

with all the exploring i have done over the years above and below water all i found were anceint indian morter and pestals and one big comunal one


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## CCRanch (Jul 8, 2006)

I was always told one of Jean Lafite's ships sank in Lake Miller off the Trinity River. Supposedly he hid his ships there. The government tried to pump the silt out to get to the ship, but it just kept filling back up as fast as they could pump it out. The lake is about 3 foot deep except where they pumped it out it was around 8 foot deep. Used to be great fishing in the hole, but it finally silted in.


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## Red3Fish (Jun 4, 2004)

*Saluria...*

I have an old layout of the township of Saluria, at the corner of Saluria bayou and the bay. There used to be a long pier there (where the old Coast Guard station was) and a railroad that run up to Saluria from the mainland side. My stupid scanner is out of commission, or I would post it. The map also shows an island in the middle of Pass Cavallo. A hurricane in 1836 wiped it out, and they never rebuilt.

I have fished POC since the early 60's, and the shoreline used to run nearly straight up from the coast guard station right out to the gulf. And it was a deep pass....like about 20' deep as I remember. There was (and still kinda is) a pretty deep cut that went into Mule Slue, but it was a lot deeper then, and Mule slue was a lot deeper....it has filled in a lot in the past 50 yrs. In the 60's, where the island shows on the map, we used to call it the "middle grounds", a series of very shallow sandbars on more or less the east side of the pass. Used to be a LOT of BIG sharks out there to steal nearly every trout you hooked! LOL I am more scared of stingerees than sharks, but have had some 12'+ put me back in the boat when fishing the middle grounds! At low tide sometimes the middle grounds were out of the water and once saw a 12' or14' shark chasing mullet slide completely out of the water and drydock himself on a sandbar...few flips later was back in the water.

There were some old rusty parts from a paddle wheeler at the back end of Devils Elbow Lake...went and saw it in the early 90's. Prolly not much left now. Always wanted to take a metal detector back there and check it out...I have one but doesn't work in wet sand...need a special one.

Later
R3F


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## Tall Steve (Jun 22, 2004)

I did not read all of the previous replys so forgive me if this was pointed out.

Gold does not change in salt water. Or any where for that matter. Had the man said it was silver coins than it would be 100% possible. But when you find gold it looks like gold. Sorry for being critical, just making an observation.

But I to enjoy a good treasure Story.


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