May, 7, 2009 - We have so many stories of lost mines and buried treasure, that it’s a wonder someone isn’t digging up Spanish and frontier gold every other week or so. Texas is home to enough such stories to fill many volumes.
Maybe tales of buried loot and vast deposits of gold or silver just waiting to be mined are so popular because they turn a lot of us into treasure hunters. For some people, the very idea of finding a treasure is almost as valuable as the elusive treasure they seek. In looking for the treasure, they find a certain happiness, a journey that is its own reward.
The best example of that breed might be Ike and Jud Pancake, a father and son who each spent the better part of their lives looking for a lost Bowie mine and an inestimable fortune they truly believed was right there on Horseshoe Mountain in Coryell County. The little community of Pancake was named for John R. Pancake, an early settler and the community’s first postmaster.
The quest began when father Ike Pancake and his son Jud found a rock inscribed with Jim Bowie’s name and the date 1832. Once Ike and Jud began looking for the mine, they couldn’t stop. Maybe they would have abandoned the search if they hadn’t found a mine, but they found several old mines and a string of reported finds that were more significant in an archaeological sense than a financial one. Rather, the finds might have proven significant if they had been preserved, which they weren’t.
The Pancakes found a slab of flint engraved with a peculiar diagram. The chief engineer of Valencia Mines near Mexico City determined the slab to be an engineer’s map from ancient Mexico. The Pancakes used the map to find the mine shafts, and they kept digging. A lot of what they found indicated that people had been digging in that mountain for a very long time.
One of their more unusual finds was a large black stone in the shape of a human heart, which nobody paid a lot of attention to when it was found. Eventually, it ended up in the possession of Frank E. Simmons, a Coryell County treasure hunter and historian. He wrote about the black stone in the Coryell County News, which drew the attention of a man from Mexico who made his way to Pancake to see the black heart.
The man got Simmons’ attention right away when he told him where the stone had been found, and added that some human remains were found along with the rock. Then he told Simmons a remarkable story that spanned centuries and included the black heart as a symbol of his people’s divine guidance and survival. He was stunned when he saw that the stone had been broken, which meant that his people were also broken, never to be reunited.
An author’s note at the end of Simmons’ account tells us that Simmons lost the black heart, that it just sort of disappeared from a bucket where he kept it and other large artifacts.
Other artifacts from the mine disappeared in a similar fashion. The Bowie rock that started it all got lost somewhere along the way, along with a silver bar that Jud Pancake found. Writer Ed Syers visited Jud Pancake in the 1960s. Jud told Syers that having those things wasn’t as important to him as finding them.
“That silver that I let my friends take? Fellow told me I was a damn fool because I’d never see it again,” Pancake said. “He couldn’t understand I don’t care. I already had my fun finding it.”
More than a few people made light of the Pancake’s quest, but a mining company was intrigued enough to look into the possibility of mining Horseshoe Mountain. They eventually determined it would cost more to work the mine than it would pay in dividends.
It’s safe to assume that some people think the Pancakes wasted a world of time looking for buried treasure, but Syers wasn’t one of them.
“If Ike had a dream, it was a happy one,” Syers wrote in his book “Off The Beaten Path.” “He was beset by neither stroke, coronary or ulcers. He had nothing but friends. He loved his family and that love was returned. Maybe he even figured that anticipation beats realization all hollow.”
Syers was probably thinking about the Pancakes when he wrote, “I have met many unhappy millionaires, but no unhappy treasure hunters.”
