Mystery of the Spider Rocks

In 1902, a man named David M. Arnold rode into the town of Haskell and inquired as to the whereabouts of the town’s druggist, Caleb Terrell. Terrell had in his possession a treasure map he’d taken as payment for treating an elderly Hispanic man some years previous and Arnold wanted to see that map because he too had a treasure map. His map had a puzzling array of lines and symbols drawn on sheepskin. Combine the two maps, Arnold told Terrell, and they would find a vast treasure— Coronado’s mythical stash of gold from the seven cities of Cibola. 

And so the saga began.

Arnold, partially financed by Terrell, hired half a dozen local landowners to help him look for the treasure. The problem, of course, was their inability to decipher the map’s hieroglyphics. They operated on guesses and hunches until a Mexican sheepherder showed up and said he could read the map. 

The sheepherder, identified only as Fernandez in some accounts and not at all in others, told the men the map led not to the treasure, but to stone tablets that would show them where the gold was buried. They were digging in the wrong place, he said and pointed them to a place near the confluence of the Salt Fork and Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos River. 

Amazingly, that was exactly where the men found the first of three tablets they would call Spider Rocks because each one contained a series of concentric circles that made it look a spider’s web. The stone was about 16 inches square and a couple of inches thick and covered with both Roman and Arabic numbers along with an ancient Mexican version of the letter “H” and a bunch of circles, rectangles and strange figures. 

Not far from where they found the first rock, they found a mass grave, which Fernandez had predicted. He said the skeletons were native slaves, buried there so their spirits could guard the treasure. Arnold believed something else— that Fernandez was tricking them, leading them away from the treasure so he could keep it for himself.  Fernandez left, never to be seen again. The men found a decomposed body not far from the site a couple of weeks later—  Fernandez, they assumed. 

The local ranchers Arnold had recruited to help him find the treasure decided they had better things to do than look for a treasure they were pretty sure did not exist. Arnold continued on his own, and two years later he found a second tablet on a farm near Baird. The second tablet looked a whole lot like the first, except the first stone had eight circles in its “web” and this second one had four. 

Arnold kept finding artifacts— copper amulets shaped like daggers and leaves, and crowns inscribed with symbols similar to the ones on the tablets— but no treasure. He left most of the artifacts with Terrell, who kept them at his drug store. Arnold hired a “seer” to help him find the gold, but the seer foresaw bad things happening to anybody and everybody who looked for the gold. Sure enough, Terrell died bankrupt in 1909 after spending most of his money with Arnold, who, unbelievably, found a third spider rock near Rotan in Fisher County, this one with two circles in its web.

But Arnold’s quest was over. Fire destroyed Terrell’s drug store and for a long time historians believed the artifacts were lost in the fire. The story caught the attention of J. Frank Dobie, who recounted much of it under the title “Lost Copper Mines and Spanish Gold” in Legends of Texas: Lost Mines and Buried Treasure. The land in an area running north from Abilene to Kiowa Peak near Aspermont and along the Salt Fork of the Brazos River to Rotan and Baird, is pockmarked with holes left over from many hundreds of searches. 

The British television series Myth Hunters featured the mystery of the spider rocks in one of its episodes. The show featured Duane Hale and Steve Wilson, historians who have compiled the most extensive and reliable information about the spider rocks. Wilson details the history and ongoing quests in his book, Spider Rock Treasure: A Texas Mystery of Lost Spanish Gold.

We don’t know the location of the first two spider rocks. The third one turned up in Waco several years ago, pulling double duty as an artifact and door stop.