The lost Swift Silver Mine

The great lost-mine legend of Appalachia, hunted since the 1760s

Swift's silver mine may be the oldest recorded legend in Kentucky, and the hills around Wolfe County, the Red River Gorge and Natural Bridge have long been favourite places to look for it. The story rests on a journal said to have been kept by an Englishman named Jonathan, or John, Swift, who claimed to have come into Kentucky ahead of Daniel Boone, in 1760, on a series of mining expeditions.

In the journal a wounded bear led Swift to a vein of silver ore in a cave, and for the next nine years he came back each year, carrying out silver bars and minted coins; in one telling, he was counterfeiting English crowns out of resentment toward the king. An 1886 article in Harper's listed what he claimed to have buried: thirty thousand dollars and crowns on a large creek, fifteen thousand near some marked trees, six thousand by the fork of a white oak, three thousand in a rock house. Then came Indian attacks and a mutiny, and Swift walled up the cave. By the time he returned he had gone blind, and his cryptic directions could not lead him back.

The hunt has outlived him by two centuries. In 1788 John Filson, Daniel Boone's biographer, claimed a tract of land said to hold a silver mine worked by "a certain man named Swift," though the Kentucky Geological Survey notes that Filson seems to have had a personal and financial interest in promoting it. The pioneer James Harrod, founder of Harrodsburg, went into the wilderness in 1792, reputedly after the mine, and never came back. In 1854 the state geologist David Dale Owen examined a reputed site in Bell County and found only sparse zinc and lead minerals. Campton, the Wolfe County seat, holds a Swift Silver Mine festival every year, and a historical marker there points to one of his supposed camps.

The doubters have the rocks on their side. The Kentucky Geological Survey says precious metals are very unlikely to occur naturally in the Paleozoic rocks of eastern Kentucky, and its investigations of hundreds of claims from every county in the region found nothing to back the legend. The writer Joe Nickell found many versions of the journal; the best known lifts passages from a history of Kentucky written after its supposed date and is full of Masonic and moral allusions. No proof exists that a silver-mining Swift ever lived. The searching goes on all the same.