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The Bell County Treasure©
Salado Creek's Lost Spanish Gold
Bell County, Texas • Legend rooted in the 1700s; major searches in 1933 and 1965
A research supplement verifying and updating.
“Bell County's Texas-Sized Treasure Still Up For Grabs!”
by Xanthus Carson, Lost Treasure magazine, March 1978
Research and Verification by T. R. Lewis, M.S.
Salado Creek's Lost Spanish Gold
Bell County, Texas • Legend rooted in the 1700s; major searches in 1933 and 1965
A research supplement verifying and updating.
“Bell County's Texas-Sized Treasure Still Up For Grabs!”
by Xanthus Carson, Lost Treasure magazine, March 1978
Research and Verification by T. R. Lewis, M.S.
Fifty Years of Wondering
I have followed this story for fifty years, turning it over the way you turn over a stone you never quite get around to lifting. More than once, I've pictured what it would take to stand where Guerra stood, to walk that stretch of Salado Creek with modern equipment and the kind of patience the 1933 and 1965 crews ran out of before they could finish the job. Two generations have now passed since the securities board shut the last dig down, and in all that time, no one has come forward with new research, let alone a new excavation, on that land. That silence raises an honest question I can't answer from a desk: did the ranch's owners quietly dig it up themselves somewhere in those sixty years and simply never say so, or is this treasure still sitting exactly where it was left, waiting for someone willing to do the work? I don't know yet which one is true. But I intend to find out, and I'd ask you to do the same. Somewhere between the county courthouse, the historical commission archives, and the ranchland itself is an answer nobody has bothered to chase down in sixty years. If you have a connection to Bell County, a lead on the current landowners, or simply the patience for this kind of digging, in records or in dirt, I want to hear from you.What This Article Is
The article that prompted this research, “Bell County's Texas-Sized Treasure Still Up For Grabs!” by Xanthus Carson, ran in the March 1978 issue of Lost Treasure magazine. It is a real, published piece of treasure-hunting journalism, not an invented story, and it preserves details of two genuine historical episodes: a 1933 excavation on Salado Creek and a much larger, better-documented 1965 expedition that ended when Texas securities regulators intervened. This chapter does not rewrite or replace that article. It verifies what can be independently confirmed, corrects or flags what cannot, adds real geographic and historical context the original article did not include, and brings the story current through 2026.Fifty or more sources were consulted in preparing this chapter, spanning Texas newspaper archives, the Texas State Historical Association's Handbook of Texas, Wikipedia entries cross-checked against primary references, university press books on Texas treasure folklore, peer-reviewed archaeology from the same creek, and long-running treasure-hunting forum threads that independently reproduce period newspaper coverage. Where sources agree, this chapter treats the underlying facts as solid. Where they conflict, or where a claim cannot be verified at all, this chapter says so directly rather than picking the version that makes the best story.
What follows first is the legend itself, told the way it has been passed down and reported since 1933. The chapters after it verify, correct, and add context to that story.
The Legend
Salado Creek runs through a stretch of Bell County ranchland that local people have long believed hides Spanish treasure. The story, as it has been told and retold since the 1930s, begins with Spanish miners who worked the hills along the creek generations before Texas independence, extracting gold and silver and forging it into bars. The Comanche and other Native people of the region eventually drove the miners off the land. Rather than let the treasure fall into anyone else's hands, the story goes, the Spanish sealed the workings and hid the bars inside a cave, diverting creek water into the passage to flood it and keep searchers out.The tale might have stayed buried with the mine if not for an elderly Indian man, a World War I veteran, who was nursed back to health by local ranchers near Prairie Dell after a rattlesnake bite. In gratitude, and breaking with what he described as tribal tradition, he told his rescuers what his own ancestors had passed down: the location of the old Spanish mine and the cave where the treasure had been sealed a century earlier, after the Spanish miners were driven off. He pointed them to a limestone formation known locally as Comanche Cave, on a hill above Salado Creek near a landmark called Blue Spring, about two and a half miles west of Prairie Dell.
A Temple organizer named T. J. Nelson gathered a crew on the strength of that account, and digging began in June 1933, in the depths of the Depression, when men were willing to work for a dollar or two a day on the promise of a share of whatever came out of the ground. The diggers struck a wall of plastered rock, exactly the kind of deliberate construction a search crew hopes to find. Behind it came a rush of water, said to have been channeled into the workings on purpose, just as the old man had described, to punish anyone who came looking. The crew believed a second such wall stood between them and the chamber itself. They never reached it. The money to keep digging ran out first, and the 1933 search ended with the treasure, if it was ever there, still sealed behind the second wall.
The story went quiet for more than thirty years, until a Texas A&M graduate named Les Guerra picked it up again in the early 1960s. Guerra said he had spent years patiently drawing out an elderly local man named Pablo Juarez, who told him he had first come to Salado Creek at the age of five and had lived there for the next 103 years. Juarez eventually described a treasure chamber holding stacked bars of gold and silver. When Juarez died in a Georgetown hospital, Guerra said, he went looking on his own. He found an opening on the creek bank, followed it into a maze of tunnels, and spent seven hours lost underground before the passage opened into a chamber some twenty feet by forty feet. Inside, he said, two neat stacks of gold and silver ingots rose nine or ten feet high and set into the chamber wall was a life-sized golden bull's head with eyes made of ruby.
Guerra said the experience left him lost and disoriented underground for more than forty-eight hours without food, and that he spent eight months afterward recovering in a hospital from a lung infection and the shock of the ordeal. When he tried to find his way back to the chamber, he said, cave-ins had closed the route he'd taken. Unable to fund a recovery effort alone, he partnered with Dallas businessmen to organize a full excavation, and by February 1965 the story had drawn national wire coverage: a crew working with dynamite, reportedly only four feet of rock from a chamber some believed held a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars, on a limestone rise so large local people simply called it a mountain. Diggers believed themselves within twenty feet of the treasure when Texas securities regulators stepped in to examine how the venture had been financed, and the digging stopped there. No recovery was ever reported. The treasure, if the legend is true, is still there.
The Country Along Salado Creek
Salado Creek, the setting for this legend, is a tributary of the Lampasas River that forms near Jarrell in Williamson County and flows northeast through Bell County before joining the Lampasas near its confluence with the Leon River, a run of less than twenty miles. It should not be confused with the larger, better-known Salado Creek that runs through San Antonio in Bexar County, more than seventy-five miles to the south; the two waterways share a name and nothing else. The Bell County creek is spring-fed, flowing through the Balcones Fault Zone, where water under artesian pressure reaches the surface through faults in the Cretaceous Edwards limestone. The Salado Springs, a set of five spring groups including Robertson Springs, Big Boiling Spring, and the Elm, Benedict, and Anderson springs downstream, have supplied water to this stretch of Texas for thousands of years and gave the town of Salado its name; salado is Spanish for salty, though the springs themselves are not saline.The town of Salado sits on Interstate 35 in south-central Bell County, nine miles south of the county seat at Belton and nine miles north of Jarrell. It incorporated in 1867 for the specific purpose of building a bridge across the creek, later dissolved its incorporation, and voted to reincorporate in 2000; its population was 2,394 at the 2020 census. Prairie Dell, the small community named repeatedly in the original 1978 article as the search's anchor point, is an unincorporated community on Interstate 35 about thirteen miles south of Belton, with a peak recorded population of 134 in 1904 and just twelve residents by the 2000 census. A real, mapped landmark helps confirm the search corridor's general location: the historic Warwick Ranch cemetery is documented as lying three miles west of Prairie Dell, south of Salado Creek, and one mile west of a gate on Kuykendall Branch Road, a description that lines up closely with the original article's placement of the 1933 dig site “about two and one-half miles west of Prairie Dell.”
This stretch of Bell County holds a remarkable, thoroughly documented piece of history that has nothing to do with lost Spanish gold and everything to do with how old human presence in Texas is. The Debra L. Friedkin archaeological site, on Buttermilk Creek near Salado, produced more than 15,500 stone artifacts that Texas A&M University archaeologist Michael R. Waters and colleagues dated to between 13,200 and 15,500 years old, published in the journal Science in March 2011. If the dating holds up to continued scrutiny, it represents some of the oldest confirmed evidence of human occupation anywhere in the Americas, older than the Clovis culture long assumed to represent the first Texans. Whatever else is buried in the ground around Salado, this much is certain and peer-reviewed: people have been living along this creek for at least fifteen thousand years.
Not the Bowie Mine
The original 1978 article repeatedly connects the Bell County treasure to the Lost Bowie Mine, and it reports that a Temple newspaper in 1933 quoted University of Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie as saying the treasure, believed by some to be the Bowie mine, did exist. This connection needs to be examined carefully, because the documented history of the actual Lost Bowie Mine legend places it more than a hundred miles away from Bell County, in a completely different part of the state.The real, extensively documented Lost San Saba Mine, also called the Lost Bowie Mine, is centered on the old Spanish presidio and mission near present-day Menard, Texas, in the Menard-San Saba-Llano triangle of the Texas Hill Country. Spanish officials heard rumors of silver deposits on the San Saba River as early as 1753, sent an official prospecting expedition under Bernardo de Miranda y Flores in 1756, and established a presidio and mission on the river the following year, both abandoned by the late 1760s after repeated attacks. James Bowie and his brother Rezin, together with nine other men, left San Antonio in 1831 specifically to search for this mine, fought a notable battle with Native raiders in the area, and never found workable silver. J. Frank Dobie's 1930 book Coronado's Children, his most famous work of Texas folklore, opens with a chapter titled “The Lost San Saba Mine” devoted entirely to this Menard-area legend. Historian Herbert E. Bolton later identified the actual Spanish diggings that inspired the legend, called Los Almagres, at a site more than seventy miles from the San Saba presidio itself, in what is now Llano County.
None of this documented history places the Bowie mine legend anywhere near Salado Creek or Prairie Dell. The 1978 article itself preserves a contemporary voice pushing back on the Bell County claim: Dr. Alexander Dienst, described as another scholar of note, is quoted as asserting in 1933 that the Bowie mine had not been found and that it was located west of San Antonio rather than in Bell County, with other researchers of the period supporting his view. A treasure-hunting researcher on the TreasureNet forum, discussing this same Bell County story decades later, independently reached the same conclusion, writing that the Bell County treasure is “probably NOT the Bowie mine nor the San Saba mine.” The Bell County legend is highly likely its own distinct, local tradition, and invoking Bowie's name and Dobie's reputation, whether by 1933 newspapermen or by later re-tellers, added drama and borrowed credibility rather than reflecting an actual documented connection.
The 1933 Search, Verified
The Temple Daily Telegram broke the story on its front page on June 16, 1933, the earliest confirmed print account the original 1978 article identifies, and Temple Telegram reporter Ted Mayborn covered the dig closely as it unfolded. Buck Pope, one of the 1933 treasure hunters, was among those who had nursed the injured informant back to health and who recorded his account for the record. T. J. Nelson organized the crew of local investors and workers on the strength of that account.The Bell County dig site is sometimes referred to today as the Josie Adams Mine, a name that appears in the 1978 article but that this research could not independently trace to any source beyond that article and material clearly derived from it, meaning the name's origin remains unconfirmed. Blue Spring, the landmark named in the original article as the nearest point of reference to the 1933 dig site, could not be independently located in any modern gazetteer, geographic names database, or hydrological survey consulted for this chapter, and the same limitation applies to Comanche Cave itself; both appear to be local or historical names that have not survived into present-day official use.
The 1965 Guerra Expedition, Verified
Guerra's name is sometimes recorded as Lee Guerra or Eliza Guerra across different period sources. Unable to fund a recovery on his own, he partnered with H. D. McCord, a Dallas liquor store and restaurant owner who told reporters he had personally contributed more than $40,000, and R. L. Wells, a Dallas construction company owner; the three operated as Guerra Enterprises, with a fourth partner whose identity was reportedly kept secret. A separate firm, referred to in different period sources as both International Explorers and Explorers International, joined the venture on a percentage basis a month before the February 1965 press coverage began, reportedly bankrolled by Dallas men Virgil Baker and John Wilson. Francis Ritchey, identified as International Explorers' field superintendent, contracted heavy equipment to grade two and a half miles of road to the site and build a small airstrip for the venture's officials. A third named firm, called Minerals Specialties in the original 1978 article and Mineral Separations in a period Associated Press account reproduced within it, was also involved, though which name is correct, or whether both existed as separate entities, could not be confirmed.Acquaintances told a Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter that Guerra had passed a polygraph examination affirming his account, though no independent record of that test, its administrator, or its results have been located for this chapter, and a claim of this kind cannot be verified from a secondhand mention alone.
What the Newspapers Reported
The 1965 dig drew genuine national wire coverage, which is the strongest evidence that this was a real, publicly witnessed event rather than a story invented after the fact. A United Press item datelined Salado, Texas, and carried by papers nationwide, including the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner on February 23, 1965, described treasure hunters using dynamite to probe a “legend shrouded pile of rocks,” a limestone formation locals called a mountain, some 250 feet high, with the crew reportedly only four feet of rock away from a chamber they believed held a Spanish treasure worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The wire report specifically attributed the treasure to Spanish conquistadores who had mined gold and silver along Salado Creek and hidden it in bar form, alongside separate stories that gold taken from the Comanche had also been buried in the same hills.Local coverage from the Belton Journal, written by reporter Berneta Peeples and quoted at length in the 1978 article, captured the scene as it unraveled in real time during the last week of February 1965: the excavation area closed to the public, a rumor that a scuba diving crew had found gold triggering enough of a stampede toward the site that a newsman was nearly shot by a company guard checking out the story, and diggers reportedly believing themselves within twenty feet of a fortune. Peeples's account also placed the Bell County story in a wider context, noting that local residents counted more than one hundred separate buried-treasure legends across the county, including tales tied to a Belton yard, a marked tree, a Dutchman's mine near Three Forks, and forty jack-loads of Spanish gold said to be buried on a rise called the Knobs west of Rogers.
The Securities Board Steps In
The venture ended not because the treasure was found or because the money ran out, but because Texas financial regulators intervened. The Texas State Securities Board, created in 1957 to enforce the Texas Securities Act and still operates today, is charged with investigating unregistered securities sales and fraud in connection with investment offerings. On March 19, 1965, the Associated Press reported from Houston that several members of the Salado Creek expedition had been subpoenaed to appear before the State Securities Board in Austin to explain how the venture's financing had been structured. The AP report specifically named Guerra Enterprises, Inc., International Explorers, Inc., and a third corporation (recorded, again, under two different names in the sources available) as the entities under scrutiny and noted that at least one of the three had been selling investment assignments that reportedly promised a 25-to-1 return if the treasure was recovered, the kind of promised payout that draws direct regulatory attention under securities law. Securities Commissioner William King declined to comment on the specifics, citing the ongoing investigation.A separate, independent account posted years later on the TreasureNet forum by a poster who described researching the story locally states that the 1965 search produced indictments for fraud, in addition to the subpoenas documented in the 1978 article's own excerpt. This chapter treats the subpoenas as confirmed, since they are documented in a contemporaneous Associated Press report reproduced within the original article, and treats the claim of indictments as plausible but not independently verified, since no court record or additional press account of an actual indictment has been located. Whichever way the legal proceedings concluded, the practical result is not in dispute: excavation stopped, the corporations described in the AP report do not appear to have resumed digging, and the treasure, if it exists, was never recovered.
