The Lost Silver Mine of Kentucky

AQQ

John Swift is the true forefather of our history here . . .

One of the oldest and most persistent legends of the white man's occupation of Kentucky is that of John Swift's silver. Swift was a silver miner who is supposed to have wandered in the Kentucky mountains in about 1760. He left a journal describing his adventures, paramount among which was the discovery of a marvelously rich lode of silver. The journal contained directions for finding this wealth and also a map, but because of Swift's poor knowledge of the country and its landmarks both directions and map have proved meaningless.

And that very meaninglessness has assured the survival and the dispersal of the legend, and of the indefatigable dream that the legend represents. Today, according to Thomas D. Clark, there are still people in the Kentucky mountains 'who had rather seek fortune by searching for nebulous silver than by plowing corn.' And that region is said to be littered with vaguely defined sites where maybe John Swift found and then lost his silver mine. One of those places is the Red River Gorge, and a tributary of the Red is named in commemoration of Swift's passage through that country: Swift Camp Creek.

There could be no better parable of the white man's entrance into Kentucky. For John Swift is the true forefather of our history here, and his progeny have been numerous. The have descended upon this land from the eastward passes and from their mother's wombs with their minds set on the dream of quick riches to be had, if not from a vein of precious metal, then from coal or from logs. Or from the land itself, for those who preferred to plow rather than hunt silver have all too often followed the agricultural method known as 'mining,' by which the growth is taken from the land and nothing given back, until the fields are exhausted like a mined-out seam of coal.

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), p. 13-14.

This is an Archival Quality Quotation

Here is a version, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kywolfe/swift.htm, that claims the story began in 1755, the year Mary Ingles was captured and brought to the Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. If Swift had simply "followed the rivers", like Mary and her companion, he could have found his way out, and back again. Here is the link to an article that gives the story a masonic twist: Joe Nickell, "The Secrets of Oak Island" Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000. The paragraph on Swift's mine is on page 4 of the internet version. Nickell wrote an article on the subject for the Filson Club Historical Quarterly 54 (Oct 1980): 324-345, and the entry in the Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992), p. 863-864.