The Shawnee Silver Mines of Kentucky
According to a journal left by one John Swift, a British sailor in Alexandria, Virginia, a party of men including himself and a former captive of the Shawnee in Kentucky named George Mundy crossed “…Big Sandy Creek near its headwaters, and continuing west for a considerable distance we located three of the mines. We located the other mines by traveling southwest along a great ridge until we came to a large river thence north to a very large and rocky creek. Thence to the mines.” Until 1769 Swift and his partners mined silver, encountering enough difficulties with the Shawnee that several loads of it had to be buried nearby.
In September 1769 Swift and Mundy buried “between 22 and 30 thousand English crowns” and marked the site by carving their names as well as those of the rest of their party on “…a large beech tree.” An English crown of the time was one ounce of silver. Swift returned to England where he soon found himself incarcerated for airing his views in support of the rebellious natives of Boston and Williamsburg, according to one version of the story. He remained in prison through the Revolution, and when he returned to America he was nearly blind. He was unable to relocate the mines, though he left behind his journal and a map drawn from memory.
One problem with relying on the journal of John Swift is that there is more than one, and they are all different. Another appeared in the name of Jonathan Swift. While some parts of the story, such as burying large amounts of silver in different locations are similar, others are completely different, with no mention of George Mundy. According to the journal, the silver was struck into coins, both English and Spanish, and returned to the Appalachian hills in kegs, where they were buried or hidden in caves. Swift’s profession as a sailor made the movement of the silver and subsequent coins easier.
Although the tale, and others, have generated derision among skeptics, coins dated prior to 1769 keep turning up in the region, and Swift’s mines have been searched for in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, and even in Pennsylvania. In the late 1980s several coins, all dating prior to 1760 were found in a cavern in eastern Kentucky. A carving of a cornstalk appeared on the cave wall. In Swift’s account, Mundy had originally been taken to the cave while a prisoner of Chief Cornstalk of the Shawnee, to be used to carry the mined silver.
There were also reports of furnaces, for the smelting of silver, being discovered during a survey of the region in the 1850s. The survey described the furnaces as “ancient” though there was little other description. Other hunters for Swift’s mine have discovered boulders in the area with the initials JS carved into them, with other cryptic signs, apparently hundreds of years old. Interestingly, Jonathan Swift was convicted in Alexandria in the late 1700s for counterfeiting English currency, producing coins which contained more and purer silver than genuine. Where he got the silver is anybody’s guess.