Swift’s Lost Silver Mines

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:

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:

“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.