The Lost Nigger Gold Mine is a fanciful mine in the fables of the United States. As per the legend, in 1887 four siblings in Dryden, Texas Frank, Jim, John, and Lee Reagan enlisted an unskilled Seminole man named William Kelly to help with chip away at their farm. Kelly was known as Nigger Bill (nigger being a term for a multiracial individual in the slang of the Big Bend region) and has been recognized as a cook furthermore as a stallion wrangler; at the season of his business by the Reagans, he was just 14. One day while at the farm, Kelly declared that he had found a gold mine, and was welcomed with taunts and sneers. The following day he again attempted to tell the Reagans regarding the mine, going as far as showing them a chunk of gold metal, yet got another cussing out for his trouble.

By this time kelly got fired for his troubles so off he went to San Antonio, where he knew a white assayer, and requesting that he inspect the mineral. Now this is where the stories kind of clash: One record expresses that he came back to Dryden, where the Reagans got a letter tended to him that affirmed the gold was massively significant, and afterward executed him and dumped his body in the Rio Grande. alternate expresses that, soon after returning, he obtained a steed and fled. Whatever the case, Reagans committed their lives to endeavoring to discover the min. One report from 1930 says that the three Reagans had still not abandoned their search. As well as the Reagans, numerous different outfitters and prospectors set out looking for the mine; the legend has it that, while a few voyagers did find it, they generally passed on before they could make a benefit or go on the information.

One of the more genuine inquiries was actuated by William Broderick Cloete, a British mine proprietor who believed in the story so much that he offered Lock Campbell, a Texan man, the costs of $10,000 on the off chance that he would support a campaign to discover it. On July 19, 1899, Campbell and four other men consented to an arrangement to look for it, and one of the men later guaranteed to have found it in the Ladrones Mountains in New Mexico, yet this was never confirmed. In 1909, an Oklahoman named Wattenberg went to Alpine, Texas, with a guide that he asserted demonstrated the mine to be in Mexico itself; a pioneer named John Young went so far as to go into association with Wattenberg and secure a mining license from Porfirio Díaz, just to put in years vainly attempting to discover it. These disappointments have prompted verbal confrontations regarding what happened to the mine. Youthful himself accepted that it had been deliberately covered up by miners taking after Kelly; another hypothesis is that the gold was not really gold mineral, but rather bits of refined gold left by the Spanish. A third hypothesis is that the gold was dropped by a gathering of Mexicans escaping the rurales, why should constrained desert it on the grounds that it was easing them off. Another is that, as the gold mine was purportedly in a gulch, rock could have washed down and concealed it from view.