The hostile plains [antikvár]

CHAPTER ONEA Sergeant Of Austin's RangersTHE Spanish silver mine and mission on the San Saba River in Texas was over-run, and destroyed by the Comanche Indians in 1758. Far from civilisation, where no white man had travelled before, or would travel again for years to come, copper-skinned slaves mined the silver that was needed to fight the wars in Europe, refined it, and moulded it into ingots before sending it in condustas over hundreds of leagues of hostile Indian country, across the Rio Grande, to the City of Mexico.The Comanches ended all that. The far outpost of Spanish conquest was wiped out completely, there were no survivors and no records left. In time the location of the silver mine on the San Saba was forgotten. Even when it was being worked its actual location was rather hazy in the minds -of those officials in Mexico, or New Spain as the country was then called, whose job it was to know these things. Sixty-five years later the lost mine existed only as a fabulous legend of riches beyond the comprehension of man's imagination, somewhere out there beyond the known frontier where the great buffalo herds roamed and the red man ruled.Time passed, and history changed. The banner of Royalist Spain no longer waved from the roof of the Palace of Chapultepec. Mexico had gained her independence after nearly three hundred years of Spanish rule and became an empire under the Spanish-Mexican turncoat de Iturbide., As the Emperor Augustin he sat on the throne of Montezuma until he was deposed by a revolution led by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.5