Country Lifestyle
The House a Treasure Built
By Judy Wade
Oro! Spanish gold! Many have sought it, but few have found it. U. S. (Sherman) Joines is one of the rare exceptions.
The story begins in 1759 when Colonel Parilla, a Spanish army officer, led his troops to what is now known as Spanish Fort, Texas, to a village of Taovayah Indians on the Red River. He was sent to punish the Indians for the devastation of the San Saba, Texas, mission, taking treasure with him. He found not the typical Indian village but a fort occupied with from 2,000 to 6,000 Indians armed with muskets. The Spanish were soundly defeated and the survivors retreated to a cave across the river in what is now Oklahoma, taking their brass cannon and treasure with them. When they tried to leave the cave, they were murdered by the Indians.
In the 1880s, five men were chasing two panthers they had tracked from Mud Creek. Pursued by the men’s dogs, one of the panthers ran into a rocky crevasse. The hunters began removing stones to allow the dogs to get to the panther and discovered the entrance to a large cave. Sherman Joines was one of the men.
To their surprise, the men discovered a brass cannon, pack saddles, swords, blunderbusses, coats of mail, some Spanish books and treasure—about $25,000 worth of Spanish gold and silver coins, three silver ingots and two gold crucifixes. No mention was made of what happened to the panther.
Years later, Joines returned and bought the land where the cave sat. In 1896, they completed a house on the site—all paid for with his portion of the treasure. The house, made of sandstone hauled for some distance from Mud Creek by wagons, took five years to build. The exterior walls were 24 inches thick, and the interior walls were 18 inches thick. The ceilings were 12 feet tall. The house was lighted by coal oil chandeliers that could be pulled down to be lit. The house sits on a hill overlooking Red River, about a mile and a half to the south.
Joines later moved to Ardmore, Okla., to pursue other businesses, and Elijah Jackson Bouldin purchased the house and land. He eventually left it all to his grandson, Loyd Monroe Jackson, who had moved there with his father in 1933 when he was 14. He married Dorothy Morris in 1940, and after serving in World War II, he and his wife established the –J Ranch, modernized the house and raised two daughters, Lana (Jackson) Wade and Fran (Jackson) Riley.
When the new bride moved there, there was no electricity, no telephone, no bathrooms and no running water inside. Individual gas stoves heated the rooms before central heat and air were installed. Lana recalls leaving a glass of milk on her bedside table and finding it frozen the next morning.
Two bathrooms were added and the ceilings were lowered to nine feet. It was still a long way from town—15 miles south of Ringling and a half mile off the highway. The nearest neighbor was one and one half miles away.
“I got on the bus to go to school at 6 a.m. and got off at 6 p.m.,” Lana recalls. “I was the first one on and the last one off.”
In 1996, the Jackson family hosted a 100th birthday party for the house with over 300 people attending.
Loyd and Dorothy have both passed away, and the ranch is now in the hands of the daughters and their husbands, Charles Wade and Dale Riley.
“Don’t go there looking for the cave or more treasure,” Fran advised. “We looked for it and looked for it. Geologists came in with backhoes to dig for it because they thought they knew exactly where it was, and they couldn’t find it.”
Some historians doubt the story Joines told. Did the Spaniards really leave the treasure in the cave? Did the hunters find it? Whether or not the story is true, the 120-year-old stone ranch house with its thick walls is a landmark in Jefferson County.
The Riley’s late son, Caleb, wrote about the house for a class assignment when he was about ten. He ended his story this way: “Today U. S. Joines’ old house stands vacant, but the memories live on.”
This story was originally published in the September 2016 issue of Oklahoma Farm & Ranch.