Few things stir the imagination more than tales of lost treasure and indescribable quantities of gold, silver, or rare jewels. This helps explain why Jonathan Swift’s lost silver mines still excite treasure hunters in Kentucky today. Although the legend is now more than two centuries old, interest in the lost mines has barely dimmed over time. Scores of adventurers still actively pursue the elusive prize.
A short version of the story goes this way. A Jonathan (or John) Swift came into Kentucky with several companions in 1760—well before Daniel Boone—and discovered a number of rich silver mines. They carried loads of silver back to Virginia, returning periodically for more. They set up furnaces to smelt the metal and form it into silver bars and coins. Years later, Swift, who had gone blind, was unable to find his mines. There are many, many variations on the basic story.
Supposed copies of Swift’s journal and maps have been in circulation for years. The journal gives detailed but practically useless directions for finding the mines and furnaces:
“The furnace that I built is on the left hand side of a long rocky branch that heads southwest and flows northeast in a very remote place in the west. There is a very large rockhouse that faces the east, a hundred yards above the rockhouse the furnace is in. You can stand at the furnace and facing the east you can see two monument rocks—one 25 feet high and one 15 feet high.”
Versions of Swift’s map, such as the one pictured here, are similarly unhelpful.
In spite of geologists’ claims that large silver deposits do not occur in Kentucky, strong interest in the subject persists to this day. While researching this article, I did a Google search for “Swift’s silver mine” that returned nearly 700,000 hits. “Swift Silver Mine” even has a Facebook page. You can find modern-day treasure hunters posting all over the Internet.
One of the most surprising findings to me was how early the search for Swift’s mines began. Companies of men from central Kentucky were going out on organized hunts before we achieved statehood. In February 1792, Col. James Harrod, founder of Kentucky’s first permanent settlement, joined a group looking for the silver mines. Harrod did not return and was never heard from again. (His wife accused James Bridges of murdering him.)
Rev. John Dabney Shane interviewed many of the old central Kentucky pioneers in the 1840s. One of them told Shane that Capt. Billy Bush knew Swift personally and had Swift’s confidence.
“Bush was the principal one to get out Swift’s family [to Kentucky]. That was after Swift had gone blind. He with James Young, James Bridges, and Michael Stoner were the original party, each to share equally. These were the first persons to go after Swift had revealed the particulars to them. Each was sworn not to disclose the directions while he lived.”
Billy Bush continued his pursuit of the mines into his old age. Writing about her great-uncle, Julia Ann Tevis stated, “He spent his later years in the visionary pursuit of silver mines, which he never found. Like the mirage of the desert they eluded his grasp, forever and forever vanishing as the spot was neared.”
Many of the pioneers interviewed by Reverend Shane told of their own adventures or spoke of others who had searched for the lost mines. The list of names in these accounts reads like a Who’s Who of early families in Clark County:
William Bush
Samuel Tribble
James Wade
Septimus Scholl
William Risk
Jesse Daniel
William Calmes
Nancy Goff
Samuel Gibson
Richard French
William Barrow
Thomas Burrus
John Martin
Peter Daniel
William Eubank
Jacob Embree
Maples Hardwick
John Johnson
Thomas Lackey
Aaron Crosthwaite
James Jackson
William Hanks
Micajah Clark
Martin Johnston
William McMillan
John Bush
John Bruner
Elijah Crosthwaite
Zachariah Field
James McMillan
John McClure
The pioneers also spoke of certain Shawnee Indians who, on several occasions, were said to have passed through the county into the knobs of present-day Powell County and returned with bags of silver. Several enterprising souls in the Indian Old Fields area cooked up various means to bilk investors by claiming they had found the Indians’ source of silver ore. One such scheme involved dropping a piece of ore into a small forge that had been liberally salted with silver dollars.
* * *
Nationally-known history detective and skeptic researcher, Joe Nickell of Wolfe County, investigated these legends. He claims there is no credible evidence that Swift’s silver mines ever existed. Nickell suggests that, initially, it was a hoax perpetrated by John Filson to promote his land sales. According to Nickell, the first historical record of Swift with a “silver mine” may be Filson’s 1788 land claim (referred to as an “entry”) in Fayette County:
“Robert Breckenridge and John Filson as Tenants in Common Enters 1000 acres of land...about Sixty or Seventy miles North Eastwardly from Martins Cabbins in powells Valley to Include a silver mine which was Improved about 17 years ago by a Certain man named Swift. At said mine the said Swift Reports he has extracted from the oar a Considerable quantity of Silver, some of which he made into Dollars and left at or near the mine, together with the apperatus for making the same.”
This entry was made at a time when Filson was being harassed by creditors. He disappeared later that year while trying to establish a town at present-day Cincinnati. After Filson’s death, Nickell points to another scoundrel, Eli Cleveland, who composed his own version of this fiction to spring on an unsuspecting public:
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“April 1791. Eli Cleveland and John Morton enters 1483 acres of land...on a branch of Red River to Include an Old Camp in the Center where there is some old troughs at said Camp by the branch side. The said Camp is a place difficult of access Supposed to be Swift’s Old Camp and others including a mine said to be occupied formerly by said Swift and others.”
Soon after this, other swindlers joined in the game. For example, an illicit trade developed selling “true copies” of Swift’s journals and maps.
Neither historical evidence nor geologists’ expert opinions has managed to stop the search for the lost mines or the outpouring of books on the subject. The Red River Gorge remains a prime location for today’s treasure hunters. Landmarks in Wolfe County are named Silvermine Arch and Swift Camp Creek (where Swift supposedly got hurt and lay sick for a time). Campton has an annual Swift Silver Mine Festival on Labor Day weekend. Not to be outdone, there are enthusiasts out there touting the case for the lost mines being located in Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia or Alabama.
Sources
Thomas D. Clark, The Kentucky (Lexington, KY, 1942), pp. 30–41; Charles Kerr, editor, History of Kentucky, Vol. 1 (Chicago, IL, 1922), pp. 110–133; Joe Nickell, “Uncovered—The Fabulous Silver Mines of Swift and Filson,” Filson Club History Quarterly (1980) 54:325; Lincoln County Entry Book 2:299; Warren H. Anderson, Rocks and Minerals of Kentucky (Lexington, KY, 1994), p. 50; Robert H. Ruchhoft, Kentucky’s Land of the Arches (Cincinnati, OH, 1976), p. 20; Michael S. Steely, Swift’s Silver Mines and Related Appalachian Treasures (Johnson City, TN, 1995), p. viii; Julia Ann Tevis, Sixty Years in a School-Room, (1878), p. 289; Harry G. Enoch, Captain Billy Bush and the Bush Settlement (Winchester, KY, 2015), pp. 117–122; Draper MSS 11CC 53, 89–90, 98, 12CC 41, 43–44, 125, 203, 211; Clark County Chronicles, Winchester Sun, April 10, 1924; Swift’s Map was taken from Joe Nickell’s article in Filson Club History Quarterly, October 1980.
