The people who have looked for Hendricks Lake treasure since the 50s have spent a lot of money and hired a researcher in Spain to see if the Santa Rosa actually existed, all kinds of things, Pinkerton said. A lookout for alligators and venomous snakes is The legend has taken many twists over the years. On his visits to Hendricks Lake with his son, they got a hit and brought a diver along to search the bottom. they might find something, a storm rolls in. In 2011, Michigan-based treasure hunters Kevin Dykstra and Frederick Monroe found a shipwreck as they were searching for the $2 million in gold that, according to local legend, fell from a. The earliest mention of the treasure legend of Hendricks Lake that Pinkerton could find was in 1884. Markers are dropped, and divers are sent down. Please post photos and a general area if you have . I havent found anything to suggest that a centuries-worth of stories about buried treasure have any credence. So where is it? We are a community-supported, non-profit organization and we humbly ask for your support because the careful and accurate recording of our history has never been more important. An electrical engineer and MIT grad who before coming to Hendricks Lake to look for treasure had found the Union navys ironclad Tecumseh in Mobile Bay. It led all the way back to an 1884 account where the guy who was the son of the founder of Tatum, Texas in East Texas decided he was going to drain the lake. Pictured from left, Gary Pinkerton, Brackson McKnight and Christian Roper. The open-endedness and lack of conclusion is what attracts Roper to the story today. A nearby lake fed by the Sabine River also caught their attention, since the silver might have been transported there by the current. Its slated to be released in May on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Tubi. endobj Maybe they can help them in their search from the insights learned from their own pursuit of the Money Pit. According to a story by Mary Roger of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the silver was indeed robbed from a galleon by Laffite and his mean in the early 19th century. accessed March 05, 2023, In 1965, led a team of Iowans in some aborted, but ambitious, attempts at the treasure. There is a legend surrounding a supposed lost treasure in East Texas, one that filmmaker Christian B. Roper and his team have been researching for a documentary production, Sunken Silver. . At one point, while wandering the beaches of Padre Island, he came across a bunch of Spanish coins. In 1925, W.E. Just let me know if you find anything so I can break the story first. &m;vH}p,$[%7?7hm'm&@A2Ef8IR%%p.Bs.H'QKR 5 ]sHT. Fort Worth Daily Gazette, October 3, 1884. Abilene Reporter-News, June 24, 1958. February 2023 Reader Quiz: What Did You Learn? Paul Uncle Fox Tatum, son of the founder of Tatum, Texas, carried out the first documented attempt to recover the treasure in 1884. the new book is available in paperback. An historian named Herbert Bolton, using the original journals of the Mexicans from the eighteenth century, found what is now known as the Boyd shaft on Honey Creek. If information about one of the last searchers had been documented and publicized it would likely have discouraged further similar attempts in the future. A dirt contractor who learned about the legend when helping another man drill holes on the edge of the lake. More than once the crane almost toppled into the water. According to reports, the total bounty would be worth more than $1.36 million today. Hendricks is an oxbow lake near where Rusk, Harrison, and Panola coun ties meet a few miles north ofTatum,Texas. Dallas Morning News, August 1, 1965. As of May 2022, she resides in Austin and does media relations for TCEQ. 148 0 obj One particularly famous legend is that of Jean Lafittes treasure. In Gretna in 1960, across the river from New Orleans, a large number of gold coins were found in an area frequented by Lafitte and his men .According to another story, Laffite buried a large cache on an unnamed island in Lake Borgne. But to this day, treasure hunters are unswayed. The film will center around local lore of a lost treasure of $2 million in silver ingots said to have been stolen by French pirate Jean Laffite and hidden by smugglers in Hendricks Lake, a. Many of them are wandering through the beaches and backlands with nothing more than metal detectors. Host Mattie Blake and local movie maker Christian B. Roper (see Sunken Silver) led a team conducting underwater searching. a must to have. The location was later widely believed to be Hendricks Lake, an oxbow lake formation on the south side of the Sabine River. It featured Pirate Treasures. This lake has its dangers, of course. <>stream It is now thought that the money is on the southernmost tip of Padre Island. Visibility is nil, so it is a touchy situation. Not a treasure hunter, but a character who built an amphibious tractor he called the Watt-a-Bug which he drove into Hendricks Lake. Adams was a Rusk County backwoodsman who wears an old slouch felt hat, bib overalls, and a denim jacket, buttoned at the throat even in hot weather, and a favorite character of columnist Frank X. Tolbert for many of his Tolberts Texas articles over the years. Cush Reeves. 0000003902 00000 n We need your support because we are a non-profit organization that relies upon contributions from our community in order to record and preserve the history of our state. endobj As Laffite and his men raced through East Texas with the wagons, Spanish. The Lost Treasure of Hendricks Lake The infamous pirate of the Gulf Jean Lafitte took a $2 million fortune in silver from a Spanish galleon and supposedly buried it in the Sabine River near the East Texas town of Sabine. He also noted there were a handful of other treasure legends that were nearly the same but with a different location or body of water and no specific piece of evidence regarding the Hendricks Lake silver on which he can hang his hat., When asked what he hopes Sunken Silver will accomplish, he answered just to tell the story.. Michael Siepker, Fisheries Biologist; 563-382-8324; Michael.Siepker@dnr.iowa.gov Marc Waterlander, Conservation Officer; 319-240-6662; Marc.Waterlander@dnr.iowa.gov Iowa-Caught Fish Are Safe to Eat, In Almost All Cases In 1969 an MIT graduate with a degree in electrical engineering and a patent for an underwater device for locating metals motored along the surface of Hendricks Lake in an eight-foot fiberglass boat towing his electronics. Despite intense efforts at dredging, detecting, diving, and dynamiting for Hendricks Lake treasure, the only thing that was reportedly found in the lake was the rim of an old wagon wheel. A brig named Santa Rosa plundered in Matagorda Bay in 1816. While en route through East Texas, the smugglers received word the Spanish army was closing in and, in an effort to hide the treasure, dumped the loot in a local lake. hill on the Lakes side, the scans show some promising images. It was a cloudy evening with low visibility, and Laffite attempted to capture what appeared to be two Spanish merchant vessels. In the final battle of the War of 1812, Lafitte and his comrades helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British. And You Thought Feral Hogs Were Bad. Fearing an ambush by Native Americans, they then decided to hide the treasure by pushing it into the muddy waters of the Sabine River. Although they attended different universities, Roper reconnected with high school friends Brackston McKnight and Ryan Travis and the three now work together on the project. There will be people still in town who will remember Barnie Waldrop, Pinkerton said. He had heard about the Trace from his dad as a portion of it runs through family land. She was then forgotten for nearly 300 years. (All you English teachers out there, stop making fun of me for using the what is now known as phrase two sentences in a row.) 153 0 obj No matter the lack of proof for a lot of these things, it just makes sense in your mind for a story like this to take place here.. The Lost San Saba Silver Mine This lost mine, with its rich vein of silver, has been what one treasure hunter writer has called the Holy Grail of Texas treasure seekers. In 1756 a Mexican official traveling through Texas learned from Indians of an exposed strain of pure silver that ran through a certain hill in Central Texas. More maps appeared showing various locations of a lost silver mine. Alternate versions of that story have been documented since the 1880s, with variations including that the silver was from Santa Anna and the battle of San Jacinto and that the treasure was in a different location nearby. I titled it True Believers because Im way more interested in the people who believe this stuff than the possibility that there might actually be something, Pinkerton said. True West Magazine article on Jean Lafitte. But alas, nothing came of it. Over the years, Hendricks Lake near Tatum has been a place where many people have visited in search of a legendary treasure that was supposedly left at the site by Pirate Jean LaFitte. Pinkerton is hoping to publish his book some time in the new year and is interested in finding more people with first and second hand accounts of the treasure hunting. LAKE CHIEMSEE, GOLDEN CAULDRON In Bavaria, in southern Germany, Lake Chiemsee has been the focus of many divers ever since a Nazi-themed gold cauldron, worth more than $560,000, was found there in . https://www.tshaonline.org, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/hendricks-lake. The first episode premiered on Tuesday November 17 at 10PM EST on the History Channel. The Cherokees started getting their butts kicked. They are convinced that booty galore is waiting to be found, J. Barto Arnold, the former marine archaeologist for the Texas Historical Commission, told me. A man named Nathan Smith thinks he's found the remnants of a sunken ship from an 1822 hurricane north of Corpus Christi - thanks to Google Earth. 0000007400 00000 n xXMsFWLU9C*ZYWNUX=@$(" (~ J>iyAy/eJ%.%c~(~s9yLrMw3iQSM?FOgmvw[s[j3Hr'YyX~mvvN39 Kc7YcqZYo)~}u3 ? Omoa was the site of the largest Spanish fort in Central America, a fort constructed to safeguard the Spanish silver shipments from the mines of Tegucigalpa in Honduras. Is there anything better than the tale of someone discovering a hidden clue, figuring out an obscure reference, finding the final piece of the puzzle, and then discovering a fantastic stash of gold or silver? Roper himself had first heard the legend when he was a young boy and has returned to it intermittently throughout his life. That's . Texas, I learned, is full of buried treasureor, to be a bit more accurate, full of stories about buried treasures that no one has been able to find. He shows Rick and Marty the 1957 When I found out theres essentially a documentary, a great one right here in East Texas waiting to be put out there, I was just excited to try to do everything I could to make that happen, he commented. Thats the one thing we all agree on about Sunken Silver, is that legend is a very powerful thing.. 3 talking about this. In the 1950s, the Sabine River and the nearby lake (Hendrick's Lake) experienced a new onslaught of treasure seekers when the story of Laffite's silver was published by the True West magazine. endobj Gary Pinkerton, True Believers: Treasure Hunters at Hendricks Lake, East Texas Historical Journal 47 (2009). (Image credit: Pictorial Press Ltd./Alamy) British . click photo for more. The Lost Padre Mine Somewhere in the Franklin Mountains overlooking the Rio Grande River in El Paso County is the Lost Padre Mine.
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