A Texas Fable, anyone heard this one?

[henrysmom]

A neighbor of mine, who may well be considered 'out there' has told me a story.

He said in East Texas there have finds of large lead balls, just kind of out in fields. Some were hollowed out and contained gold coins. Some were just lead. He said no one knows who buried them. He didn't have a count of how many have been found or over what time period or even how far apart from one other they were.

Has anyone else ever heard of such a thing?

 

[Produce Guy]

Yeah,I herd about this,but these lead balls were about 4-6ft tall and they used to drag them behind a bulldozer and it would knock down trees.They would chain 3 to 4 of these together and pull them thru the forest.

 

[TheNewCatfish]

Definately. Here around Big Spring Texas it seems everybody has a story about somebody finding cast "iron" balls somewhere. Some believe they are old 1700th century cannon balls. More accurately "Carronade" gun ammunition of the type carried aboard Spanish ships of the period and mounted on swivels on the ships rail. As the theory goes, these guns and ammunition were removed from Spanish ships by explorers and carried overland where they were somtimes lost. The ammunition would be very small and fit in the palm of your hand.

One relative of mine claims she took an iron ball to the local university and was told by an expert she had found a meteor. The expert didn't seem concerned at all the ball in question was perfectly round. He claimed many meteorites are found which are perfectly round. I've also heard from others, these balls are nothing more than "check" balls from early wind mills. Some seem to be too large to fit this description, but who knows. I'm no expert on windmill check balls.

It is also possible these iron balls could have been used anytime between the 16th and 18th century to crush rocks and ore containing precious metals. And i have heard the surface of some of these balls described as being very rough and scarred as though they were used in this manner. The Spanish miners called these balls "Ristras" if i'm correct.

So it's possible your mysterious iron ball "legend" could be attributed to any one of these explainations, or perhaps ALL of them. Good Luck figuring this one out.

 

[TheRandyMan]

Yeah,I herd about this,but these lead balls were about 4-6ft tall and they used to drag them behind a bulldozer and it would knock down trees.They would chain 3 to 4 of these together and pull them thru the forest.

I definitely fell like my leg has been pulled.

Leave Austin much? That place can make ya see things...or so I hear...

 

[Tuberale]

Glad it was just your leg being pulled.

Did this fable have anything to do with a lumberman and a blue ox? Thought he was further north. I do remember something about "...carved the Rio Grand..." though.

 

[TheNewCatfish]

Next week i'm spending several days in Wildhorse Canyon where it is said many of these mysterious iron balls have been recovered. I'll be using a metal detector and covering much of the canyon. If i find one of these iron balls, i intend to take it to the local university and have it identified (If possible). I'll letyou know how it goes by months end.

 

[TheNewCatfish]

Well i didn't find a cannon ball on the WildHorse, but i did have the chance to examine one found by another relic hunter. Took photographs of it. It was perfectly round and weighed exactly 2 pounds. It was 2 and 1/8th inches in diameter. positively "cast" iron. not a rock or meteor. The museum here in town also verified as many as 30 same size cannon balls were recovered at Moss Lake along with a Conquistador's sword and helmet.

Here's where everyone is getting confused, i was also shown meteors by both the relic hunter and the museum. Apparently the area around Big Spring, Texas was also covered by a strewn field of meteors some time in the past. And relic hunters have misidentified meteors as cannon balls and visa versa.

 

[olroy70]

The check valves used in windmills were bronze......... anything that would rust wouldnt work very well in water.
I have several of em. I am from bs, and when I was young, worked in a lumber yard that sold windmill repairs

 

[olroy70]

My brother has found a couple of meterorites north of bs

 

[jas415]

I graduated from HS in Wink in 1960. Off the subject of iron balls a bit but in the middle 50's there was a huge Boy Scout camping area there and each summer there were literally thousands of scouts from all over West Texas camping there. Dont know where it was but it seems to have been on a bunch of hills, but heck, I would bet there are more than a few there. Anyway, that might be a primo spot to detect. 'Course, the gound was so darned hard and solid nothing could sink in!

 

[GhostlyDesigns]

There is a legend of lead balls down in the hill country, the story goes something like this:

Back about 1910 a man in a wagon, pulled by a pair of swayback horses, rode up to a farmhouse in the hill country of Texas. A widow and her grown son lived there. In the yard was a lead ball and the stranger asked about where it came from and if they would be interested in selling it. The woman explained that one of her boys had plowed up in the field years ago. The stranger offered twenty-five dollars for the lead ball, back in those days that was a pile of money. The stranger paid her and then asked for use of their axe from the wood pile. The stranger put the ball in the crook of a piece of fire wood so it would not roll and then went to wailing on the lead ball.

When he cut the ball in two it was full of gold nuggets. The stranger gave half of the nuggets to the widow and her son. It's reported that the nuggets were valued at $7000 (1910 dollars). The stranger told them that there were four lead balls, and the gold in them came from one of the San Saba mines and that the Spaniards had left them. The four balls formed the corners of an exact square four hundred yards to the side. An attempt was made to find the other three balls, but the spot where the one ball had been found had long since been forgotten, so none one of the four corners could be established. The widow and her son could only remember that the ball had been plowed up along one of several washes that ran along one of the edge of their field.

That's what remember of the legend, and when you think about it, the legend doesn't make sense. Why would you mark the corners of a field with lead balls filled with gold? Also the Spaniards didn't use a distance of the yard, it was a vara (about 33 inches).