The Lost Bowie Silver Mine: What Texas Records Actually Document

The essentials

• James Bowie was born about April 10, 1796 in Kentucky and died at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, per the Handbook of Texas.
• The mine Bowie was searching for is a real place with a real name in the Spanish colonial record: Los Almagres, opened as a shaft by Bernardo de Miranda y Flores in 1756 in what is now Llano County, Texas.
• Miranda's assay was never confirmed. A three-pound ore sample sent to Mexico City in 1756 was ruled too small to test, and the mine was never officially opened.
• Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas, better known as Presidio de San Saba, was founded in April 1757 near present-day Menard to protect Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba, per the National Register of Historic Places.
• The mission was destroyed on March 16, 1758 by a large Comanche and Wichita force, and the presidio was permanently abandoned by 1770.
• Bowie left San Antonio with his brother Rezin and nine others on November 2, 1831, financed by the wealthy Veramendi family of San Antonio, per the Handbook of Texas.
• Bowie's party learned of a large Indian war party on November 19, camped in an oak grove about six miles from the ruined presidio, and fought a 13 hour battle now called the Bowie Indian Fight or Calf Creek Fight.
• Los Almagres was inspected by United States Geological Survey personnel in 1909 and described as unproductive, per the Handbook of Texas entry on the mine.
• No Texas institution, including the Texas Historical Commission, the Texas General Land Office, or the Bullock Texas State History Museum, recognizes any recovered Bowie silver cache in San Saba County or anywhere else in the state.

On this page

• Who James Bowie actually was
• The Los Almagres legend before Bowie
• The 1756 Miranda expedition and the real mine
• The Presidio de San Saba and the 1758 attack
• Why the slag heap moved the legend to San Saba
• The 1831 Bowie expedition from San Antonio
• The fight of November 21, 1831
• The 1895 gatepost hoax at Menard
• The geology problem: limestone country
• The 1909 United States Geological Survey visit
• What the record does NOT show
• Legality of searching for the Bowie mine today
• Where to see verified San Saba era material
• Lost Bowie silver mine Texas FAQ

Who James Bowie actually was

James Bowie was a Kentucky-born frontiersman and land speculator who moved to Louisiana as a child and to Mexican Texas as an adult. The Handbook of Texas, published by the Texas State Historical Association, gives his likely birth as April 10, 1796, near Terrapin Creek in Logan County (now Simpson County), Kentucky.

Before Texas, Bowie made money in the southern Louisiana slave trade, buying enslaved people from Jean Lafitte's Galveston operation and reselling them upriver. He and his brother Rezin also invested in Louisiana land and, near Thibodaux, ran the Arcadia sugar plantation with the first steam-powered sugar mill in the state.

Bowie arrived in Texas in early 1830, took the oath of allegiance to Mexico on February 20, 1830, and settled in San Antonio de Bexar. On April 25, 1831, he married Ursula de Veramendi, daughter of the powerful Juan Martin de Veramendi. That marriage placed Bowie inside one of the wealthiest families in Mexican Texas.

The Handbook is direct about what Bowie did with that access. He speculated in Mexican land grants and borrowed heavily. He also, in the Handbook's phrasing, apparently became fascinated by tales of the lost Los Almagres Mine, said to be west of San Antonio near the ruin of Santa Cruz de San Saba Mission. He is the specific historical figure the treasure legend later attached itself to. He is not a folk-hero prospector.

The Los Almagres legend before Bowie

Bowie did not invent the lost mine story. He inherited it. When he arrived in San Antonio in 1830, the tale of a rich Spanish silver mine in the Hill Country had already been in Spanish colonial paperwork for seventy-five years. It had also just started appearing on Anglo American maps.

The Handbook of Texas entry on Los Almagres Mine traces the modern name back to 1753. That summer, Lt. Juan Galvan led an expedition through the Central Mineral Region searching for a site to build an Apache mission. Local Apaches told him about a cerro de almagre, a hill of red ocher, that suggested mineral-bearing ore.

Small unofficial visits followed in August 1753, without any real strike. The provincial governor, Jacinto de Barrios y Jauregui, worried that unauthorized prospecting with Apache guides would provoke the Comanches, so he organized an official expedition under Bernardo de Miranda y Flores.

The 1756 Miranda expedition and the real mine

Miranda left San Antonio on February 17, 1756 with twenty-three soldiers and citizens, per the Handbook of Texas. They located the cerro de almagre in what is now Llano County, opened a shaft, and reported "a tremendous stratum of ore." They named the mine San Jose del Alcazar.

Miranda's language was extravagant. He wrote that the veins were so abundant he could guarantee "a mine to each of the inhabitants of the province of Texas." That claim traveled well and was quoted for the next two centuries. It was never verified.

The technical follow-up was blunt. A three-pound ore sample was sent to the viceroy in Mexico City. The assayer ruled that the sample was too small to analyze reliably and suggested thirty mule loads of ore should be sent to Mazapil, then a major Mexican mining district, for a real test. Miranda applied for a subsidy to extract those thirty cargas and asked for a presidio at the site to protect his workers. His bid was refused.

The presidio captain at San Saba, Diego Ortiz Parrilla, later smelted ore samples at his own post and reported a yield of one and a half ounces of silver from seventy-five pounds of ore. That figure moved through the Spanish colonial paperwork for decades and eventually into Anglo American map lore, though no independent verification of Parrilla's assay survives.

The Presidio de San Saba and the 1758 attack

The Presidio de San Saba is the physical anchor of the entire lost-mine legend. Its official name was Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas. It was founded in April 1757 near present-day Menard in what is now Menard County, Texas, per the National Register of Historic Places listing.

The mission it was built to protect was Mission Santa Cruz de San Saba, located about three miles downstream on the San Saba River. Franciscan priests wanted physical distance from the soldiers, since they were trying to convert the Lipan Apaches and worried about garrison influence. The plan collapsed within a year.

On March 16, 1758, an estimated two thousand Comanche and Wichita warriors attacked the mission. The presidio sent a small relief force. It was driven back. Two of the three resident priests were killed. The mission was burned. A large Spanish punitive expedition in 1759 was defeated with heavy losses. The presidio itself was abandoned in 1768, briefly reoccupied in 1770, and then permanently abandoned.

What survived on the ground was a ruined stone fort on the bank of the San Saba River, near an old Spanish smelter slag heap. A portion of the presidio was rebuilt as a Works Progress Administration project for the Texas Centennial in 1936. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 25, 1972, as reference number 72001369, and designated Texas State Antiquities Landmark 473 on May 28, 1981.

Why the slag heap moved the legend to San Saba

The Los Almagres mine was in Llano County, roughly seventy miles from the presidio. This is the single most important geographic fact in the whole story, and it is the one the popular retellings usually miss.

The Handbook of Texas explains the drift. Ortiz Parrilla's smelter left a visible slag heap on the bank of the San Saba River when the presidio was abandoned. Later Anglo American visitors saw the slag, saw the ruined fort, and jumped to the conclusion that the mine itself must be nearby. The mine was not. The slag was byproduct from the small samples Parrilla smelted, hauled up the river from the Llano County shaft.

By the 1820s, Stephen F. Austin had heard the legend from Erasmo Seguin. He heard it again in Mexico City, and in 1829 the mythical "lost" silver mine of San Saba began appearing on Austin's own maps. In 1830, mapmaker Henry S. Tanner borrowed Austin's placement for his widely distributed Texas map, and the wrong location was locked into Anglo American cartography.

Austin then reused the legend in an 1831 promotional pamphlet, understanding that a rumored silver mine helped attract immigrants. The Handbook comments dryly that the annual Menard festival called Jim Bowie Days follows the same promotional pattern that Austin used.

The 1831 Bowie expedition from San Antonio

By late 1831, Bowie was married into the Veramendi family and living in San Antonio. Per the Handbook of Texas biographical entry, he obtained permission from Mexican authorities for an expedition into Indian country. The Veramendis financed it.

On November 2, 1831, Bowie left San Antonio with his brother Rezin and nine others. Their target was the region around the ruined presidio at San Saba. On November 19, they learned that a large Indian war party was following them. They then made camp about six miles from San Saba in an oak grove and prepared to be attacked.

Two things about this expedition matter. First, Bowie was a wealthy speculator with government paperwork, not a lone prospector. Second, he was looking for a mine that was not in the region he searched. He was following Austin's 1829 map placement, which was already wrong.

The fight of November 21, 1831

An attempt to parley with the approaching Indians failed. The fight opened and lasted about thirteen hours. The Bowie party reported forty of the attackers killed and thirty wounded. Bowie lost one man killed and several wounded, per the Handbook of Texas entry on Bowie.

This engagement is commonly called the Bowie Indian Fight, or the Calf Creek Fight, after a small tributary of the San Saba River in the same area. The Bowie party then withdrew back to San Antonio. They found no mine. They did not return.

The 1831 expedition is the seed of the Bowie mine branch of the legend. Before that year, Anglo American sources spoke of the lost San Saba mine. After Bowie's dramatic fight and his 1836 death at the Alamo, the same imagined mine was retitled the lost Bowie mine. His expedition had found nothing and had never claimed to.

The 1895 gatepost hoax at Menard

The Handbook of Texas notes one small, revealing detail. After 1895, "some prankster (presumably) appended the word mine to the Bowie name on the presidio's stone gatepost at Menard." That inscription is a nineteenth century addition, not a Spanish colonial or Mexican era mark.

The gatepost carving is the physical origin of a lot of the twentieth century tourist claim that the presidio itself was somehow the site of "Bowie's mine." It is graffiti. Every institutional source, including the Handbook and the National Register documentation, treats it that way.

The presidio's real history is more interesting than the graffiti. It is one of the northernmost Spanish frontier forts. It is the site of a documented pivotal Comanche and Wichita victory over Spanish colonial power. It is also one of the few Spanish stone structures still visible on the Texas landscape.

The geology problem: limestone country

The Los Almagres shaft is in Llano County, which sits inside the Llano Uplift. That is an exposed dome of Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rock, and it is the one part of Central Texas where minor metallic mineralization actually exists.

The area where the legend was misplaced, the San Saba River near Menard, is not part of the Llano Uplift. It sits on the Edwards Plateau, a thick sequence of Cretaceous marine limestones with almost no metallic ore potential. The Handbook of Texas puts it plainly: the treasure hunt has gone on "in a region of non-mineral-bearing limestone."

This is the geological reason no serious silver strike has ever been recorded in San Saba County. Limestone country does not host large native silver veins.

Even in the Llano Uplift itself, where minor silver, gold, and copper occurrences exist, no producing precious-metal mine has ever operated. The United States Geological Survey and the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin have mapped the region in detail. Neither reports commercial silver production in either county.

The 1909 United States Geological Survey visit

The lost-mine legend was serious enough in the early twentieth century to trigger a professional investigation. The Handbook of Texas records that in 1909, United States Geological Survey personnel visited the original Los Almagres shaft. They added it to a geologic map of Llano County and described the mine as unproductive.

The USGS visit followed years of academic work by Herbert E. Bolton, the University of California historian who obtained a copy of Miranda's original 1756 journal from a Mexican archive. Bolton, guided by that journal, traced the route to what had become known as the Boyd shaft on Honey Creek. Bolton and J. Farley of Dallas identified this as the real Los Almagres. Farley then formed the Los Almagres Mining Company to try to work it commercially.

The Farley company did not succeed. The USGS geologists who followed found no economic ore body. The Handbook concludes that Bolton's claim to have located the historical mine "has not deterred the romantics," and that "fortunes and lives have been wasted in chasing the chimera."

What the record does NOT show

The negative case is as important as the positive one. Several claims that circulate in popular writing about Bowie's mine have no institutional record behind them.

There is no state record of Bowie ever filing on a mineral discovery in Texas. Under the laws of Coahuila y Tejas, a real strike would have generated paperwork. The Handbook biographical entry, which follows Bowie's land deals in exhaustive detail, mentions no mining claim.

There is no assay report from any Bowie-linked ore sample. Ortiz Parrilla's 1756 smelter yield is the closest thing to a real number, and it applies to the Llano County shaft, not to any Bowie discovery. The Handbook entry on Bowie contains no reference to a mine he actually located or worked.

There is no verified silver cache from any Bowie-linked site in the collections of the Texas Historical Commission, the Texas General Land Office, or the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The Menard County Historical Society and the presidio interpretive site treat the "Bowie mine" claim as folk legend, not as historical inventory.

Absence of proof is not proof of absence, and the coastal analog is useful. Landscapes change, records burn, and small deposits could in principle be missed. What we can say is different. In almost two centuries of prospecting, hobbyist digging, and one professional USGS survey, no productive silver mine has been documented in San Saba County or the nearby part of Menard County.

Legality of searching for the Bowie mine today

The lost Bowie mine legend still draws private treasure hunters into Central Texas. Anyone considering that kind of trip should understand the current legal framework.

The Antiquities Code of Texas is codified as Title 9, Chapter 191 of the Texas Natural Resources Code. Per the Texas Historical Commission, it was enacted in 1969 and recodified in 1977 under Senate Bill 1207.

Archeological work on land owned or controlled by the State of Texas, or on land inside a designated State Antiquities Landmark, requires a permit issued by the Texas Historical Commission. Presidio de San Saba is Texas State Antiquities Landmark 473. Recreational treasure salvage on state land is not a permittable activity.

Most of the San Saba and Menard County countryside is privately owned. Ranch land access requires the landowner's permission. Entering fenced private land without permission is criminal trespass under Texas Penal Code Chapter 30. Digging on private land without a written agreement can also raise issues under state trespass and property law, even if the surface access is authorized.

Federal land in the search area is limited but not zero. Where it applies, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 governs artifacts on federal land, and unpermitted excavation is a federal offense.

A serious research project would need several things at once. It would need a professional principal investigator, a state permit for any state land or landmark, written landowner agreements for private land, and coordination with the Texas General Land Office where beds of navigable rivers are involved.

Where to see verified San Saba era material

The presidio ruins themselves are the primary public site. The reconstructed portion sits near Menard. Interpretive material on the 1757 founding, the 1758 mission attack, and the 1936 Works Progress Administration restoration is available through the Texas Historical Commission and the Menard County Historical Society.

The Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin holds material from the broader Spanish colonial period in Texas and covers the San Saba episode as part of its permanent narrative. Its website is the current authoritative starting point for temporary exhibits related to the eighteenth century Spanish frontier.

For the Bowie side of the story, the Alamo in San Antonio is the obvious anchor. Bowie died there on March 6, 1836. The Alamo collection, now managed by the Texas General Land Office, includes documents and artifacts from Bowie's Texas years, though not from the 1831 expedition itself. Rezin Bowie's own later published account, and the Handbook of Texas biographical entries, remain the two best entry points to the documented, non-mythologized Bowie record.

Lost Bowie silver mine Texas FAQ

Sources

1. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association. Bowie, James. Source for Bowie's birth about April 10, 1796 in Kentucky, his 1830 arrival in Texas, his April 25, 1831 marriage to Ursula de Veramendi, his fascination with the "lost" Los Almagres Mine near the ruin of Santa Cruz de San Saba Mission, his November 2, 1831 departure from San Antonio with brother Rezin and nine others financed by the Veramendis, the 13 hour fight after camping six miles from San Saba, casualty figures of one killed and several wounded on the Bowie side and forty killed and thirty wounded on the Indian side, and Bowie's death at the Alamo on March 6, 1836. tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bowie-james. Checked August 2026.
2. Handbook of Texas Online, Texas State Historical Association. Los Almagres Mine. Source for the 1753 Galvan expedition, the February 17, 1756 Miranda y Flores expedition with 23 soldiers and citizens, the Llano County location, the naming of San Jose del Alcazar, the three-pound ore sample judged too small to assay in Mexico City, Diego Ortiz Parrilla's smelter yield of 1.5 ounces of silver from 75 pounds of ore, the 1829 appearance of the mine on Austin's map, the 1830 Tanner map reproduction, Austin's 1831 promotional pamphlet, the post-1895 gatepost carving at Menard, the 1909 USGS visit that described the mine as unproductive, and the observation that later searches ran "in a region of non-mineral-bearing limestone." tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/los-almagres-mine. Checked August 2026.
3. National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service. Listing 72001369, Presidio San Luis de las Amarillas, Menard County, Texas. Source for the April 1757 founding date near present-day Menard, the mission destruction by an estimated 2,000 Comanche and Wichita on March 16, 1758, the 1768 abandonment and brief 1770 reoccupation, the Works Progress Administration reconstruction for the 1936 Texas Centennial, and the addition to the National Register on August 25, 1972. npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/NRIS/72001369. Checked August 2026.
4. Texas Historical Commission. Antiquities Code of Texas, State Project Review. Source for the Code's 1969 enactment, its 1977 recodification under Senate Bill 1207, its location at Title 9, Chapter 191 of the Texas Natural Resources Code, the State Antiquities Landmark program including designation of Presidio de San Saba as landmark 473 on May 28, 1981, and the requirement that archeological permits on state land be issued only to professional archeologists meeting the principal investigator definition. thc.texas.gov/preserve/projects-and-programs/state-antiquities-landmarks. Checked August 2026.
5. Texas Natural Resources Code, Chapter 191, Antiquities Code of Texas. Statutory basis for state jurisdiction over archeological sites on state-owned land, permit requirements for State Antiquities Landmarks, and the prohibition on recreational treasure salvage on state land. statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/NR/htm/NR.191.htm. Checked August 2026.
6. United States Geological Survey, Mineral Resources Data System. Regional records for Llano and San Saba counties, Texas. Source for the absence of any recorded commercial silver production in either county, consistent with the 1909 USGS field visit that described the Los Almagres shaft as unproductive. mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds. Checked August 2026.
7. Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin. Geologic Atlas of Texas, Llano and Brownwood sheets. Source for the identification of the Llano Uplift as an exposed dome of Precambrian igneous and metamorphic rock with minor metallic mineralization, and for the mapping of the San Saba River area near Menard as part of the Edwards Plateau limestone sequence. beg.utexas.edu/publications/geologic-atlas-of-texas. Checked August 2026.
8. Texas General Land Office. The Alamo. Institutional steward of the Alamo site in San Antonio and of related documents and artifacts from the Bowie period in Texas. thealamo.org. Checked August 2026.

By the Harry’s Coins Editorial team. Last reviewed August 2026.