Across eastern Kentucky, and into southwest Virginia and east Tennessee, people have spent more than two centuries hunting for the silver mine of a man called Swift. The legend rests on a journal he supposedly kept of mining trips in the 1760s, years before Daniel Boone reached Kentucky. Copies of it have passed from family to family, maps drawn from it run into the hundreds, and a state historical marker on the courthouse lawn in Campton, Wolfe County, still describes it as an unsolved mystery.
The journal
In its best-known form, the journal is the story of Jonathan Swift, a sea captain turned merchant with ships trading out of Alexandria, Virginia. Beginning on June 21, 1760, by its own dating, he led a company west each season to a remote mine, smelted the ore in a furnace set in a rock shelter, and cast bars and coins that he either took home or buried. Versions quoted locally list the caches: tens of thousands in crowns on a big creek, a prize worth six thousand dollars beside a rock house at the forks of Sandy, and three thousand more hidden in its rocks. Indian raids, a mutiny and a religious change of heart ended the work after 1769. Swift sealed the mine, sailed for England, was imprisoned there, and returned many years later blind and unable to find it. The Campton marker, put up in 1963, summarizes the journal as recording six trips from the coast between 1761 and 1769.
The investigation
The earliest documents refer only to “a certain man named Swift.” In 1788 the surveyor and historian John Filson, Boone’s first biographer, entered a treasury warrant for 1,000 acres that was said to include Swift’s mine, and he disappeared on the frontier soon afterward. The Kentucky Geological Survey points out that Filson seems to have had a personal and financial stake in promoting the mines.
The closest look at the journal itself came from Joe Nickell in The Filson Club History Quarterly in 1980. He found that it circulates in many versions that disagree on dates, routes and even the author: one opens with a birth in Philadelphia in 1712, another, from Tennessee, with a George William Swift born in England in 1689. The fullest text lifts passages from Connelley and Coulter’s History of Kentucky, published in 1922, at one point carrying over a set of quotation marks so that Swift appears to quote himself in mid-sentence, and its closing pages are supposedly written by a man who says he is blind. Nickell traced the signature printed in one edition to a deed copied out by a court clerk, and the Jonathan Swift on that deed to a Boston-born Alexandria merchant who died in 1824, far too late to be the miner. The Pike County Historical Society notes another Alexandria Swift, born in 1764, who would have been a baby during the mining years.
The explanations
Geology argues against any mine. The survey says gold, silver and other precious metals are very unlikely to occur in the Paleozoic rocks at the surface of eastern Kentucky, and that its follow-ups on hundreds of inquiries from every county in the region turned up nothing. Samples brought to Nickell and to forest rangers proved to be pyrite, galena or mica; one gleaming “vein” in Red River Gorge was a scrape of aluminum left by a canoe. An older skeptical theory had Swift as a pirate or counterfeiter using the mountains as a hideout, which Nickell judged to raise more questions than it answers.
His own reading is that the journal never recorded real events at all. Trees marked with a compass, square and trowel, a mine walled up “with masonry,” two stone pillars seen facing east, and a hero who returns blind to look for what was lost all line up, he argued, with the symbols and teachings of Freemasonry, while the latitudes given for the two veins point to chapters of Isaiah full of silver, ships and treasure. On that view the document began as a moral parable and was later taken literally, then put to use in land deals.
Where it stands
Nobody has produced the mine, a cache or a single Swift coin. The search goes on from Red River Gorge to Pine Mountain, Wolfe County holds a festival in the legend’s name, and the marker in Campton still says one of Swift’s camps stood where the courthouse is now. As a record of mining, the journal does not hold up. As Appalachian folklore it is one of the region’s most durable stories.