General Santa Anna was going from Laredo to Goliad. While he was fording the Nueces at the old Rock Crossing in the Chalk Bluff Pasture, once a part of the George West Ranch, the Rock Crossing being about twelve miles below the Shiner Crossing, his “pay cart” broke down and a very heavy iron chest filled with gold fell into the river. The river was up; Santa Anna was in great haste to reach Goliad; there was little travel in the country. He decided to leave the chest in the river, so he had it chained to a tree, intending to retrieve it on the way back, for he expected to make short work of subduing the insurgent Texans.
In after years, Pate McNeill, the same man who tied down the maverick heifer in one of the Rock Pens, found a piece of chain tied around an elm tree on the east bank of the river. Still later Dubose found the tree bearing the marks of a chain, but the chain itself was gone. Encouraged by the markings, he, with Stonewall Jackson Wright and Wright’s brother-in-law, Albert Dinn, went to Beeville, about fifty miles distant, and got a four-horse load of tongue-and-groove lumber. They sank a shaft about eighteen feet deep in the middle of the river, a little below the crossing itself, taking into account the push of the water. They were able to wall out the water, but made poor progress with the boiling quicksand.
The first night after the shaft had been started, Stonewall Jackson Wright and Dinn got to arguing as to what disposition should be made of the chest. Wright was in favor of taking it to his ranch, twenty or thirty miles down the country, before opening it. Dinn declared that he would open it at once and that the prize should be divided then and there. The argument waxed so hot that only Dubose’s reminder that they had not yet found the chest prevented a collision.
There is a possibility, some claim, that part of Santa Anna’s army may have passed back over the same route and taken the chest with them. However, there is said to be a Mexican waybill to the treasure. Mr. Whitley of McMullen County says that the chest was buried on the bank under a tree that had a limb extending straight out over the water, and that the chain around the trunk was a piece of log chain from an ox cart. But the tree caved in long ago, the water changed its course, and now there is no sign to go by, though doubtless the chest is somewhere in the vicinity of what is still known as Rock Crossing—a mere name, for it has been decades since a road ran that way.
