Gold: The Legend in Black

The following is an excerpt from chapter one of Gregory Dowd's latest book, Groundless: Rumors, Legends, and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier. Check back with us every Thursday in the month of November for more Groundless excerpts highlighting word-of-mouth tales from Early America.

The great lake disappeared.  Nestled within the southern Appalachians, for more than a century it anchored vibrant Indian communities, where men and women wore ornaments of gold, silver, and pearls, easily found in a nearby stream that fell from the highlands and drained toward the Atlantic. By the seventeenth century, when England planted permanent colonies along the southeastern North American coast, steel-clad Spanish conquerors had already subdued these Indians of the Appalachians, forcing them to extract precious ores in Iberia’s expansive and cruel quest for empire. Someday, many English said, they or their descendants would get their hands on those riches. The enormous lake, greater in surface area than Lake Champlain or any of the Finger Lakes of the Northeast, but perhaps not so large as either Florida’s great Lake Okeechobee or the truly Great Lakes of the U.S.-Canadian borderlands, vanished before the age of the American Revolution. But the dreams of gold and the stories of Spain did not disappear with it. The lake drained away harmlessly to nature, harmlessly to man. The dreams of gold, by contrast, destroyed many a life. First a rumor, then a legend, the lake survives where it always and only truly existed: in imaginative texts and skillfully executed sixteenth-  and seventeenth- century maps, tinted with gold, described in Latin, and often associated, vaguely, with Spain.  The dreams of gold opened the colonization of North America, and they open this book. At the book’s close, they come true.

Early English colonists and later American citizens long recalled the sixteenth century as a Spanish era, characterized by quests for riches and abuses of Indians. The stories generally focused on the West Indies, Mexico, and Peru, but their range extended surprisingly northward and westward beyond Florida and into the southern Appalachian Mountains and Lower Mississippi Valley. Told increasingly during the Elizabethan era and still with fierce conviction after the Glorious Revolution, recurring rumors and early legends of Spain and gold cast both negative judgments and a jealous eye on real and imagined Spanish conquests, abandoned Spanish enterprises, and discovered but neglected unmined treasures lying beneath Indian Country. The stories concerned the highly symbolic substance, gold (along with other precious metals), and they had an allure that exceeded national vanity and religious bigotry; they promised great wealth in its most fundamental form. This chapter follows these stories about Native Americans, great interior treasures, and— often— Spain, into the eighteenth century; the book’s conclusion will pursue the stories from the Revolution into the Jacksonian era of American Indian removal.

The stories of Spanish activity in the North American Southeast fit into a larger body that gained notoriety in the twentieth century as the Black Legend. The modern title, La Leyenda Negra, coined by Spanish nationalists in the late nineteenth century, aptly captures a critique of British and Anglo- American prejudice. An amalgam of stories and images rather than a single narrative, the Black Legend descended generationally from the Elizabethan era well into the period of professional historical writing. It held, as the late David Weber put it, “that Spaniards  were unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian.” Historians since the mid- twentieth century have generally scorned it as a thin, sanctifying concoction—poison to any professional history.  In the Tudor and Stuart eras, however, when Catholic Spain and Protestant England often stood at odds, readers might easily accept Richard Hakluyt’s ordinary accusation that Spaniards possessed “fame-thirsty and gold-thirsty minds.” English writers deplored Spanish cruelty as they argued for England’s maritime expansion. The stories spoke beyond cruelty, they spoke to riches, and Spain’s dazzling rise to world authority impressed readers with fabulous tales of gold. Stories of Spain in America justified and enticed the English westward enterprise.