Thought I'd post the Golden Bull story, the location seems to fit the region the original poster was looking at...
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Read this story years back and for some reason it always caught my eye. This comes from Thomas Penfield's "Treasures of Texas" and while the story is fairly hard to beleive, it has some interesting elements to it and find the story as a whole one worth passing on. Rad it and share your thoughts...
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In February, 1965, the following story came out of Salado, Texas, as a United Press news item and was carried by metropolitan news papers around the country, including the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner of Feb. 23, 1965:
"Treasure hunters armed with dynamite and visions of fantastic riches probed deeply today into a legend shrouded pile of rocks near this central Texas hamlet.
The small band of explorers beleive that deep within the 250-foot high limestone hummock--called a mountain locally--lies a room conceiling diamonds, coins, and bars of gold and silver. Only four feet of rock now seperates the adventurers from a Spanish treasure valued at hundreds of
millions of dollars, they contend.
According to local lore, Spanish Conquistadores mined gold and silver along swift, often troublesome Salado Creek which winds around this jagged heap of rocks. Reportedly they fashioned the ore into bars and hid them.
There are other stories that gold stolen from the Comanches was buried in the hills.
Previous fortune hunters have gouged shafts into the stubborn cliffs without success.
H.D. McCord, Dallas liquor store and restaurant owner, says he personally has contributed more than $40,000 to the project. He is a partner of R.L. Wells, also of Dallas, a construction company owner, and Lee Guerra, a Texas A & M graduate who says he stumbled onto the treasure chamber in
1957, spent two days wandering through a maze of tunnels, and barely escaped.
Guerra, McCord and Wells are partners in the venture, known as Guerra Enterprises. They say a forth partner's identity is a secret.
International Explorers entered the picture a month ago on a percentage basis. Francis E. Richley is reported as saying that Virgil Baker and John Wilson of Dallas, operators of Explorers International, are currently
bankrolling the project.
Much of the legend deals with an Indian named Pablo Juarez, who died several years ago in a Georgetown hospital.
As the story goes, Pablo came to this spot when he was 5 and remained 103 years, living in cave. He was reported seen from time to time with several gold bars.
Guerra said he befriended the Indian and learned of the room in which $36,000,000 in treasure had been hidden.
Acquaintances say Guerra passed a lie detector test affirming the veracity of his account that, after the Indian's death, he found an opening in the river bank, entered the cave and got lost in the maze.
Guerra said he stumbled into a room containing gold and silver bars in neat stacks. Exploring the area with a flashlight, he said he also found a life-sized golden bull with rubbies for eyes embedded in the cavern wall.
I spent considerale time in the room, but I was frightened and panicky, he related. I couldn't think. Guerra said he spent two days wandering in the damp, dark passageways
before finding an exit.
He was dehydrated to a certain extent, and scared to death, said McCord. At that point the gold didn't mean anythign to him. Guerra said that he spent 8 months in the hospital after the ordeal.
Since that time, he said, he had attempted to retrace his way through the tunnels, but found them impassable because of cave-ins.
Obviously this great treasure has never been recovered because a find of such vast size could hardly have been kept secret. All of our effots to contact the principals in the story have failed. If the story is true--and
we're not saying it isn't--it is truly one of America's greatest treasures, but whether it is true or false we leave to your judgement.
