The great lost-mine legend of Appalachia, hunted since the 1760s
In the 1760s a man named John Swift wrote of rich silver mines he worked in the eastern Kentucky mountains, smelting the ore in secret and burying loads of it when trouble came, then losing the way back forever. His journal, real or forged, has sent two and a half centuries of hunters into the Red River Gorge and the Cumberland hills after Swift’s silver. Nobody has ever proven it, and nobody has ever quite let it go.
The eastern Kentucky mountains, toward the Red River Gorge
See it on the map
Other places on the map within a couple of hours of here.
