Kentucke's Frontiers

2. Colonial Kentucke

2. Colonial Kentucke In the winter of 1760, Jonathan Swift, a veteran of Braddock’s doomed campaign into western Pennsylvania, led a caravan of packhorses and entrepreneurs into the Big Sandy region. They originally set out northwestward from Alexandria, Virginia, to Fort Pitt and then descended the Ohio River to the Kanawha River, crossing into the mountains until they came upon the Big Sandy River. Their destination was several “silver mines” that Swift had identified on a previous excursion. A furnace was constructed , and a company of fifteen investors was assembled. Over the next decade, these men mined in the Kentucke mountains and operated a fleet of ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Whether their treasures came from Appalachian caches or piracy against Spanish ships would be widely debated, but by 1769, when he returned to the Upper Yadkin River valley in North Carolina, Swift was rumored to be a wealthy man, although neither he nor his companions brought much wealth with them as they returned east. The proximity of their operations to a well-­ traveled branch of the Great Warrior’s Path ostensibly forced the miners to hide their stores in pockets throughout the Appalachians. By 1790, when the company met for the last time to gather silver from its mountain storehouses, only seven of the investors remained. The party assembled at the Great Cave, a mysterious • Colonial Kentucke • 33 location where they had stored their silver. But during the night, Swift turned on his companions, stabbing each of them to death as they slept. The only thing that prohibited the murderer from taking all of the silver for himself was that he lost his eyesight, possibly in a gouge-­ and-­ bite struggle with one of his victims, although legend would have it that Providence had intervened. Speculation over the Swift mines ran rampant and would continue to spark imaginations for another century. In 1800, local residents hired the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket to lead them to the mines. In the 1760s, Blue Jacket had lived in a Shawnee village that had arisen, probably as a respite for traveling warriors, at the confluence of Big Mud Lick and Little Mud Lick Creeks, tributaries of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. Given his earlier proximity to the enterprises, the Shawnee chief claimed to know the location of the mines, but the party wandered for weeks without success. Blue Jacket blamed his failure on poor eyesight. But the legend did not subside, among either white pioneers or the Shawnees. In 1870, a Shawnee showed up near Little Mud Lick Creek with maps leading to the mines. Again, it was a futile enterprise. In the 1760s, however, the story of Swift’s silver mines was particularly pertinent. It was a morality tale denouncing the avarice of an increasingly materialistic colonial Ameri­ can society. In a decade in which imaginations about the trans-­ Appalachian West soared, sometimes beyond reason, many people of lesser status had to believe that what Kentucke and America offered could not be monopolized by only a few. Ancient peoples, pristine forests , and silver mines—rumors abounded, most fueled by only a few adventurers, some of whom made it their business to spark interest in the West on behalf of the land companies they represented . And with the Proclamation Line of 1763 in effect, most colonials wholeheartedly embraced the tales since very few were willing to go westward to find the truth for themselves. Imaginations Amidst French and British struggles over trade and military domi­ nance in the Ohio River valley in the mid-­ eighteenth century there was a contest over bones. Nine years before Celeron de Bien­ Kentucke’s Frontiers 34 • ville had led his military expedition across the region, another French military force had departed Québec for the southern Mississippi River valley, where the English-­ allied Chicka­ saws threatened French authority. Led by Charles Le Moyne, the Baron de Longueuil, an army of nearly 140 French soldiers joined by 320 Abena­ kis canoed down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, taking re­ spite at the Big Bone Lick. Several Abenakis gathered fossils that somehow survived the expedition’s journey down the Mississippi River and subsequent defeat to the Chicka­ saws. By the late 1740s, the relics found their way to Paris, where Count George Buffon, the great French naturalist, placed them on display; and that is where Louis Daubenton, another naturalist who specialized in quadrupeds, found...