Appalachian Folklore & Myths
A lost treasure story in the Cumberlands
For more than two centuries, people in the central and southern Appalachians have told stories about an Englishman named Jonathan Swift who came into the Kentucky wilderness before Daniel Boone, found rich veins of silver, and left his fortune hidden in caves and crevices that no one has ever quite been able to find again. In the usual version, a wounded bear leads Swift to the ore, he and his partners smelt bars and coins in rude frontier furnaces, then he goes blind and loses the way to his mines. Modern tellings still track his supposed routes from Virginia to eastern Kentucky and beyond, and every few years someone steps forward to announce that they have finally located the lost silver.
For Appalachian communities, Swift’s story is more than a simple treasure yarn. Festivals in places like Campton in Wolfe County, where locals hold an annual Swift Silver Mine Festival, mark the legend as part of the region’s cultural landscape. Place names such as Swift Camp Creek and Silvermine Arch keep the story literally on the map, even as geologists insist that the rocks themselves are all wrong for real veins of silver.
What follows is an attempt to peel the legend back to its earliest documentary traces. Those traces say less about a successful eighteenth century mining venture and more about land speculation, frontier fraud, and the power of a good story in the highlands of Kentucky.
The first paper trail: Filson, Breckenridge, and a “certain man named Swift”
The earliest known document that ties an actual man named Swift to a “silver mine” in Kentucky is not a journal, a map, or a frontier memoir. It is a land office entry. On the Virginia frontier, before Kentucky became a state, men claimed tracts by filing entries that described the land and the feature that supposedly made it valuable.
In 1788, surveyor and land speculator John Filson and his associate Robert Breckenridge entered a claim for one thousand acres in what was then Fayette County, Virginia. The wording, preserved today through later transcripts and quotations, is striking. Filson and Breckenridge asked for land about sixty or seventy miles northeast of Martin’s Cabin in Powell’s Valley, “to include a silver mine,” said to have been improved roughly seventeen years earlier “by a certain man named Swift,” who reportedly extracted silver, turned some into dollars, and left both coins and equipment at or near the mine.
Filson was not a neutral reporter. He was already known as an eloquent booster of Kentucky, a biographer of Daniel Boone, and a heavy speculator who was under pressure from creditors in the late 1780s. To place a claim around a legendary silver deposit was to wrap a speculative venture in the glitter of a treasure story. That context has led modern researchers such as Joe Nickell and Harry Enoch to read the Filson entry less as confirmation that Swift’s mine existed and more as evidence that by 1788 people on the ground already knew and used the story of such a mine.
Just a few years later, another entry shows the legend in active use. In April 1791 Eli Cleveland and John Morton entered fourteen hundred eighty three acres on a branch of Red River, describing the tract so as to include an “old camp” with troughs by the branch, “supposed to be Swift’s Old Camp,” together with “a mine said to be formerly occupied by said Swift and others.” That wording, preserved in Lincoln County Entry Book 2, suggests that by the early 1790s Swift’s name and his “old camp” were already a familiar lure for speculative claims.
Even if the mine never existed as a productive operation, the Swift story was already paying out for men who knew how to turn rumor into paper and paper into land.
Organized hunts and the memory of Captain Billy Bush
The land entries are only the beginning. By the 1790s, searching for Swift’s silver had become an organized activity for Kentucky settlers. We know this not from romanticized twentieth century retellings but from the interviews that Presbyterian minister John Dabney Shane conducted with early Kentucky families in the 1840s. Those interviews survive in the Draper Manuscript Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society and form one of the strongest primary bases for any history of the Swift legend.
Shane’s informants from Clark County and surrounding areas recalled parties of men heading toward the knobs and ridges in what is now Powell County to look for the lost mines. Captain William “Billy” Bush, a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent early settler, appears again and again in those accounts. One interviewee told Shane that Bush knew Swift personally, that Swift confided his secret to a small circle of partners, and that Bush helped bring members of Swift’s family out to Kentucky after Swift went blind.
Whatever the exact truth of those memories, they show that by the early nineteenth century people in central Kentucky believed that respectable figures like Bush had spent real time, labor, and money chasing the silver. Julia Ann Tevis, in her 1878 memoir Sixty Years in a School-Room, remembered her great uncle Billy Bush as a man who “spent his later years” pursuing visionary silver mines that forever receded as he drew near them. Her portrait is a family insider’s confirmation that the Swift tale had sunk deep enough roots to shape the remembered character of a Revolutionary officer.
The legend even intersects with one of Kentucky’s enduring mysteries. When Colonel James Harrod disappeared on a hunting and prospecting trip in 1792, his wife later claimed that a man named Bridges lured him into the wilderness on a Swift mine hunt and murdered him for his land. That story is preserved in later histories and reference works and points back again to the way Swift’s supposed silver became entangled with both hope and suspicion on the early frontier.
Furnaces, fieldwork, and what the rocks actually say
Swift’s story is unusual among treasure legends because it has often been anchored to physical remains. In 1823, Tennessee jurist and historian John Haywood wrote of “ancient furnaces” near Clear Creek that he believed might have been used by Swift’s party. That suspicion tied old iron workings or stone structures into the larger narrative and helped convince later readers that the tale had some literal foundation.
As the nineteenth century advanced, Kentucky’s state geologists took an interest in checking some of these claims. In the mid eighteen fifties, David Dale Owen, then state geologist, visited a supposed Swift mine on the northwest side of Log Mountain near Cumberland Ford in what was then Knox County, now Bell County. Guided by explorer Benjamin Herndon, he examined the site and sampled the “ore” that locals believed to be silver bearing. His published report describes only scattered minerals such as zinc and lead and concludes there was no significant silver at the site.
Later writers, including Henry Harvey Fuson in his History of Bell County, Kentucky, folded Owen’s dry conclusions into much richer chapters filled with letters and local recollections about repeated, failed attempts to work “Swift’s” mine on Log Mountain. Emory Hamilton’s 1940 newspaper feature from Middlesboro also gathered Bell County tradition, including skepticism from residents who had heard many claims and seen no silver.
Modern geology has only sharpened the doubt. The Kentucky Geological Survey notes that the Paleozoic sedimentary rocks that underlie eastern Kentucky are not a favorable setting for primary silver or gold deposits at all. After years of field inquiries from treasure hunters in nearly every county in the region, the survey’s investigations have found nothing that supports the existence of a natural silver lode like the one Swift’s story describes.
The rocks of the Cumberland Plateau, in other words, tell a different story from the one in Swift’s journal.
The journals and maps: sources for a legend, not for a mine
Most popular versions of the Swift legend today rely not on land entries or Draper interviews but on supposed copies of Swift’s own journal and associated maps. These documents describe routes from the Virginia settlements to remote Kentucky hollows and include teasing details such as a half moon cliff, “Indian stair steps,” and monument rocks that supposedly mark the way to furnaces and buried silver.
The problem is that none of the known Swift journals can be securely dated to the eighteenth century. Michael Paul Henson, a twentieth century collector and writer, published what he believed to be one of the earliest surviving versions in his 1972 book Lost Silver Mines and Buried Treasures of Kentucky. He dated his manuscript to the late eighteen fifties, which already places it several generations after the events it claims to describe. Later researchers have identified many other journal copies and map variants circulating among treasure hunters, often with conflicting directions and added flourishes.
Joe Nickell, working from multiple versions, has shown that the most elaborated journal text borrows passages almost word for word from nineteenth century Kentucky histories and is filled with Masonic symbolism and moral allegory that would fit a later literary construction far better than a practical mining log from the seventeen sixties. That kind of plagiarism and anachronism has led both Nickell and the Kentucky Geological Survey to conclude that the journals are not authentic eighteenth century records of a mining expedition. They are, however, valuable primary sources for the growth and reshaping of the legend itself in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In that sense, Swift’s journal works the way many Appalachian stories do. Each retelling copies and alters what came before, mixing family lore, published history, and religious or fraternal symbolism into a new text that tells us as much about the storyteller’s time as it does about the supposed events.
From state histories to mountain festivals
By the later nineteenth century, Swift’s Silver Mines had moved from local rumor and land records into the realm of printed state history and national magazine literature. Lewis and Richard Collins included accounts of the mines in their Historical Sketches of Kentucky, and Charles Kerr’s early twentieth century History of Kentucky devoted space to the legend as part of the state’s frontier lore.
Travel writer James Lane Allen helped introduce the story to a wider national audience. In his 1886 Harper’s Magazine piece, “Through the Cumberland Mountains on Horseback,” he presented Swift’s mines as part of the mystique of the Kentucky highlands, one more example of the hidden wealth supposed to lie in their ridges and gaps.
In the twentieth century, county histories and local newspaper series kept the tale alive and anchored it firmly in particular communities. Fuson’s History of Bell County preserved first hand letters from residents who had watched companies raise money on the promise of finally opening Swift’s mines, only to see the ventures fail. Hamilton’s Daily News piece combined earlier geological reports with oral tradition from Bell County. In Wolfe County, local usage attached Swift’s name to creeks, arches, and an annual festival in Campton, placing the legend at the center of civic identity.
At the same time, reference works pulled the story together at a concise, encyclopedia level. The entry “Swift’s Silver Mines” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia offers a sober summary of the main variants and the reasons historians doubt the existence of any real silver deposit, while still recognizing the legend’s importance in the state’s cultural history.
Legend, speculation, and Appalachian place making
So what can we really say about Swift’s Silver Mines after following the paper trail as far back as the late eighteenth century.
The strongest documentary anchors are the land entries of the 1780s and early 1790s, which show that a story about a man named Swift and his silver mine was already in circulation and already useful for speculative purposes in the years just before and after Kentucky statehood. The Draper interviews and related pioneer recollections confirm that central Kentucky settlers spent real effort searching for the mines in the 1790s and that families long remembered those searches as part of their founding stories. Memoirs like that of Julia Ann Tevis give us a human portrait of men such as Captain Billy Bush, who became almost synonymous with the obsession.
On the other side, two centuries of geological work argue strongly against any significant native silver deposit in the rocks of eastern Kentucky. Owen’s nineteenth century fieldwork near Cumberland Ford and later checks by the Kentucky Geological Survey find, at most, minor accessory minerals and no ore that would match Swift’s description of rich silver lodes.
The journals and maps that have shaped most modern treasure hunts appear, on close inspection, to be nineteenth and twentieth century creations that borrow heavily from printed histories, Masonic imagery, and earlier oral tradition. They are crucial sources for understanding how the legend grew, but poor evidence for any actual eighteenth century mining operation.
All of this points toward a conclusion shared by many historians and by the Kentucky Geological Survey. Swift’s Silver Mines are best understood as a powerful piece of Appalachian folklore rooted in early land speculation and frontier rumor rather than as proof of a lost bonanza of precious metal.
Yet that does not make the story trivial. For communities from Clark County to Wolfe and Bell, and for people across the wider Appalachian region, Swift’s story has served as a way to talk about risk and reward, about outsider promises and local skepticism, about the lure of the ridges and the disappointment of ventures that overpromise and underdeliver. The legend has left marks on deeds and courthouse books, on county histories and newspapers, on arches and creeks and festival banners.
Even if no one ever uncovers a true Swift silver lode, the hunt has already left its richest vein in the stories people tell and retell about Appalachia, its past, and its imagined treasures.
Sources and further reading
Kentucky and Virginia land entry books for Fayette and Lincoln Counties, including the 1788 Breckenridge Filson entry for one thousand acres “to include a silver mine” and the 1791 entry by Eli Cleveland and John Morton on Red River, as quoted and discussed by Harry Enoch in “Swift’s Lost Silver Mines.” WinCity Voices
Rev. John Dabney Shane interviews in the Draper Manuscript Collection, Series 11CC and 12CC, Wisconsin Historical Society, containing pioneer recollections of Captain William “Billy” Bush, James Harrod, and organized Swift mine searches in the 1790s. WinCity Voices
John Haywood, The Civil and Political History of Tennessee (Nashville, 1823), with remarks on “ancient furnaces” near Clear Creek that he associated with Swift’s operations. Wikipedia
David Dale Owen, report in Geological Survey of Kentucky, Volume 2, based on fieldwork in Bell County during the mid eighteen fifties, describing a supposed Swift mine site near Log Mountain and finding no significant silver ore. Wikipedia+1
Julia Ann Tevis, Sixty Years in a School-Room (Cincinnati, 1878), which remembers her great uncle Captain Billy Bush and his “visionary” pursuit of silver mines in his later years. WinCity Voices+1
Emory L. Hamilton, “Swift’s Silver Mine,” Daily News (Middlesboro, Kentucky), August 1940, a feature that compiles Bell County traditions about the mine along with earlier printed sources and geological reports. Wikipedia+1
Henry Harvey Fuson, History of Bell County, Kentucky (Hobson Book Press, 1947), especially the long chapter on Swift’s mine with embedded letters and local testimony. Appalachian History
Michael Paul Henson, Lost Silver Mines and Buried Treasures of Kentucky (Louisville, 1972), which reproduces one influential version of a “Swift journal” and associated map, probably from the late nineteenth century, and has in turn been widely used by later treasure hunters. Appalachian History+1
RootsWeb and related transcriptions of various Swift journals and maps, along with Emory Hamilton’s and Grant Jennings Smith’s narrative treatments that show how the legend circulated among researchers and hobbyists in the twentieth century. Wikipedia
Joe Nickell, “Uncovered, The Fabulous Silver Mines of Swift and Filson,” Filson Club History Quarterly 54 (October 1980), which critically examines the land entries, journal texts, and later claims and concludes that the mines are best read as hoax and allegory. WinCity Voices+1
Harry Enoch, “Swift’s Lost Silver Mines,” WinCity Voices, May 2024, a concise and well sourced synthesis that ties together land records, Draper interviews, county histories, and geological evidence. WinCity Voices
John E. Kleber, editor, The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington, 1992), entry “Swift’s Silver Mines,” a standard reference overview of the legend, its variants, and scholarly skepticism. Wikipedia
Kentucky Geological Survey, “Jonathon Swift Silver Mines” (KGS Rocks and Minerals page, updated 2023), which summarizes the legend and explains why the geology of eastern Kentucky makes significant native silver deposits highly unlikely. University of Kentucky
James Lane Allen, “Through the Cumberland Mountains on Horseback,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 73 (June 1886), which embeds the Swift story in a broader local color sketch of the Cumberland region. Wikipedia
Lewis and Richard Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky (revised edition, 1882), and Charles Kerr, editor, History of Kentucky, Volume 1 (Chicago, 1922), both of which include narrative accounts of Swift’s mines that influenced later writers. Wikipedia+1