Jim Bradshaw: Spaniards and the cache of silver

By JIM BRADSHAW
Some years ago, a fellow from the Cecilia area of St. Martin Parish suggested to me that Spaniards had traveled far up the Teche a long time before the history books said any European explorers got to south Louisiana.
He based his argument on a story he’d heard about a farmer plowing up a cache of centuries-old Spanish coins that the alleged explorers left behind.
I’d never heard the story before, and wondered at the time why a bunch of Spaniards, or anyone else, would want to bury a horde of silver on the banks of Bayou Teche, and why they would bring it there in the first place.
Spaniards had traipsed across part of Louisiana during the 1500s, when Hernando DeSoto led an ill-fated expedition looking for a non-existent city filled with gold.
There is even one theory, based almost solely on a description of their battles with mosquitoes, that they followed the Atchafalaya for a while.
But that account is largely discredited, and nobody I know about has offered even a flimsy theory that they followed the Teche.
I put the Cecilia tale into the same mental file as the trove of tales about buried pirate treasure that have circulated since the days of Jean Lafitte, and hadn’t thought of it again until I recently came across stories in several newspapers from 1882.
They claimed that in June of that year a tenant farmer named Lewis Laury was plowing about six miles from Opelousas when “he struck on some obstruction” that “proved to be a ten gallon jar filled with Spanish silver coins of the date of 1779.”
According to the account in the New Orleans Times-Democrat, one of the coins was brought to Opelousas, “and from all appearances had not circulated long, it appearing almost like a new piece.”
The newspaper said people who had seen the entire cache claimed “all of it was of this description and none of it less than a hundred years old.”
That date wouldn’t do much to advance the Spanish in Cecilia theory.
It was a century too late to have anything to do with DeSoto and was well after the French claimed Louisiana, but folks who heard the story in 1882 weren’t interested in history.
Whatever it was and however it got there, ten gallons of silver is ten gallons of silver.
The experts in Opelousas, such as they were, said the cache was worth ten thousand dollars or more.
That would be about $250,000 today — enough to stir imaginations, and more than enough for the owner of the tenant’s land to rush to town and claim his share of the fortune.
That prompted sheriff C. C. Duson and the attorney for the landowner to visit the farmer and “give the matter a thorough investigation,” according to a story in the Lake Charles Commercial.
They concluded, alas, that there was no jar and no cache of old coins, and that it had scared the dickens out of him when the farmer heard the exaggerated tale.
The sheriff said Laury told him he’d found one old coin, only one, and that it was in plain sight, not buried at all.
He didn’t know how the story grew into such wild proportions, but supposed someone had spread it as a joke.
But it was a joke he had not enjoyed at all, he said, “for fear that someone might do him harm to secure a pile of money which he never had.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.