Five or six miles to the southwest of San Caja, the Spanish are believed to have operated a silver mine by the name of Las Chuzas, so called because of its proximity to the Las Chuzas Mountains. In later times Texas pioneers found that Indian bullets lodged in the spokes and felloes of their wagons were almost pure silver, and the Indians are supposed to have obtained the material for their bullets from the Chuzas ore. The Indians would never tell where they got it. While Dubose and a man named Wallace McNeill were riding the country in search of the Rock Pens, they found the shaft of the mine at the foot of one of the Chuzas Mountains. That shaft is said to be lined with silver bars covered over with clay, but, as the men were looking for the “thirty-one mule loads” and fully expected to find them, they did not investigate the shaft.
Some ten miles away, in the Guidan Pasture, and about six miles from the Nueces River, is what is known as the Devil’s Water Hole, and there the smelter is supposed to have been located. Burnt rocks to this day are said to bear witness to its existence. In the vicinity of White Creek, in the foothills below the Devil’s Water Hole, were some other silver mines that used the same smelter.
Somewhere between the old Las Chuzas Mine and the Nueces River there is said to be a pile of silver bullion, crude and unformed, in the very hue and shape of the rocks around it. How it came there, or why, nobody knows. It just came there, so the Mexicans still say.
Fifteen or twenty miles beyond San Caja in a westerly direction, on what is now known as Los Picachos (The Peaks) Ranch, an early settler named Crier, according to John Murphy, a ranchman of the vicinity, actually used to operate a silver mine that yielded about twenty dollars to the ton of ore.
