|
Archeologists
call cultural material found out of historical context “anomalous
artifacts.” But when ancient Chinese coins are dug up at an old
frontier fort in West Texas, words like “mysterious” or “bizarre”
seem more appropriate.
The coins from the Orient turned up in Coke
County at the site of Fort
Chadbourne, a cavalry post established in October 1852 to help
protect the frontier from hostile Indians. Five years later the
post became a stopping point on the Overland mail route. Soldiers
stayed at the hilltop fort with its commanding view of the surrounding
prairie until the beginning of the Civil War in 1861 and returned
for a short time in 1868.
Less than a decade after the last soldiers marched off, Thomas and
Lucinda Odom bought the abandoned fort as well as the property around
it and founded a ranch that has been in the same family since then.
Now owned by descendant Garland Richards and his wife Lana, the
fort is considered one of the most pristine military archeological
sites in the West. More than 20,000 military artifacts, from buttons
to weapons, have been found there over the years.
Among
the thousands of artifacts are four well-worn Chinese coins, each
with a square hole punched in their center. Two were minted during
the Ching Dynasty, which began in 1644. One of the coins dates from
1736 to 1795 and the other from 1875 to 1908. Very interesting,
but Texas isn’t anywhere near Asia.
Though the discovery of the older coins could lead the more imaginative
to conjure up the possibility of an unknown Chinese expedition to
the New World, an archeological report prepared by Richards and
San Angelo avocational archeologist Bill Yeates in 2005 concludes
the coins “were probably brought [to Chadbourne] during the ranching
period and had nothing to do with the time the fort was active.”
Not to mention not being remnants of a Colonial-era visit by Chinese.
Most likely, someone who passed through Fort
Chadbourne carried the coins as a curiosity. Who knows? The
Butterfield stage went to San Diego, CA. Maybe someone got them
there and, on his or her way back east, gave them to a kid who eventually
lost them.
Two early Spanish coins also are among the Fort Chadbourne artifact
collection. Well-worn, they too probably were lost from someone’s
pocket or purse. Turns out that silver Spanish coins were legal
tender in the U.S. until 1857.
A final set of anomalous artifacts found at the fort are six Republic
of Texas-era military buttons. Soldiers of that area are not
known to have been at the future site of the fort, but an early
1840s Indian-fighting expedition under Col. John Henry Moore that
traveled up the Colorado River could have stopped there for water.
After federal troops left the fort following Texas’ secession from
the Union, state militia and regular Confederate States of America
soldiers occupied the fort at various times. Some of them may have
been wearing uniforms with Republic of Texas surplus buttons.
A third possibility, which based on a couple of letters found at
the Center for American History in Austin seems the most plausible
in the opinion of Richards and Yeates, is that a character by the
name of LeGrand Capers purchased the “Texas buttons” as he called
them for trade with the Indians. Capers, who is known to have spent
some time at Chadbourne,
traded with the Indians for skins and may have been a collector
of Indian attire.
As Richards and Yeates conclude, “Every artifact has a story. None
of them are really anomalous; we just do not know their story.”
|
HOME
