When people used to day-dream about a fortune, the money didn’t come a winning lottery ticket or a trip to a casino. The riches would come from finding the treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. Tales of him burying or hiding his gold circulated around Orange County for more than a century.
“It is asserted by old settlers that Lafitte and his men used to come up the Sabine River as far as where Orange now stands and hide in the forests while hunting parties were scouring the Gulf of Mexico for him,” The Orange Daily Tribune wrote on April 12, 1904.
“The legend of Lafitte in the Sabine River area is to a great extent a matter of hearsay and folktale. Facts have been added in telling and others have been left out,” a reporter for the Orange Leader wrote in the August 13, 1965, edition after a couple of diving searches for a ship.
Back in 1904, the Daily Tribune reported on a stump with a chain growing inside after an oak tree was cut down “on the premises of Capt. Bolen on Fourth Street.” The tree, at least five feet in diameter, had a log chain almost in the center of the stump.
“How did the chain get there?” the reporter questions. An obvious answer from the public was the “chain was put there by Jean Lafitte or his men as a mark or indication that treasure of some kind was buried,” the story said.
And how old was the tree. The reporter turned to Capt. R.E. Russell, who said “he well remembers the time when a number of large trees in this city were switches, for instance the large oak in the vacant lot in front of the Rouss racket store.”
(A racket store sold a wide variety of inexpensive goods. A future generation knew the kind of store more as a “five and dime.” The story did not give the address of the racket store.)
R.E. Russell wrote a paper of remembrances in 1911 that survives to this day. Local historians refer to it as “The Russell Diary,” though it wasn’t kept day-to-day. Russell reported he moved to Orange in January of 1854; so on the day the Orange Daily Tribune talked to him about the size of the tree, he would have lived in town for 50 years.
A newspaper clipping from a 1955 newspaper clipping led to another speculation about lost Lafitte treasure. Someone walking in the woods in the Echo area found a boat anchor inside a growing tree. The anchor appeared to have been placed in limbs which grew around it. Two ends of the anchor were pointing out of the limbs.
The tale was that the anchor was like a compass to point the way to the buried treasure. No other directors were given or any indication of how far away the treasure might be.
Jean Lafitte is a historical man with records showing he sailed the Gulf of Mexico for years between New Orleans and Galveston, which would put him in the vicinity of Sabine Lake, a short sail from the Sabine River and the Neches River. Britannica.com estimates he was born about 1780 and died about 1825, though pirates don’t leave birth and death certificates on file.
He and his pirate band famously helped Andrew Jackson beat the British Army during the Battle of New Orleans in December 1814-January 1815. President James Madison pardoned Lafitte and he promised not to attack American ships.
The late historian and physician Dr. Howard Williams reports in his two books that one of Lafitte’s pirates had a slave camp in what is now north Orange County along the Sabine River. The United States banned the importation of slaves in 1807, but pirates would smuggle them in from other countries so the captured people could be sold in America.
The Bowie brothers, including Jim, who died at the Alamo, and Reazin, reportedly bought and traded slaves at the camp.
The late Louis Dugas Jr., a lawyer, former state representative and local historian reported in 1965 that he had researched Lafitte and could find only one record that one of Lafitte’s ships was ever chased up the Sabine was in 1819 and the ship was captured by the U.S. authorities
Dugas said the pirate let a man named Brown into his gang under the condition that if he ever caused trouble, Lafitte would hang him. Brown waylaid an American ship near Sabine Pass, which violated Lafitte’s agreement not to attack U.S. ships. Brown and the ship’s crew managed to escape into the marshes or swamps and later made their way to Galveston Island, where Lafitte set up a commune of about 1,000.
Dugas told the paper when Brown knocked on Lafitte’s door, the pirate hanged him on the spot.
Dugas doubted Lafitte himself ever came into the Sabine. “He was too smart to go back up into a river where he could not get out,” he said.
Stories in 1965 reported a legend that native Indians saw a 45-foot sloop with two masts and 10 men sail up the Sabine.
Tales of a sunken pirate ship in the Sabine survived through decades. “Viene Granger said his father dived and removed valuables from the ship,” the paper reported in 1965.
A man named Eustis Dunn, who was 86 in 1965, said he had searched for the ship two miles north of Nibblett’s Bluff in 1933. Dunn “insists the stories handed down are true,” the paper wrote.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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