Melungeon Mine

1. Nobody has ever solved the mystery of where the Melungeons came from. Some said they were descendants from shipwrecked Portuguese sailors or from Walter Raleigh? lost colony on Roanoke Island or ancient Phoenicians who arrived centuries ahead of Columbus. In any case, they were a separate race when first discovered by John Sevier in 1784. Originally they occupied several areas in Eastern Tennessee, especially the Clinch River Valley section. But gradually the arriving white settlers pushed them up into the higher elevations, primarily the areas of Newman? Ridge, 24,000 feet above the Clinch River in Hancock County. To survive at this elevation, they were forced to turn to activities outside the law such as moonshining and counterfeiting.

The Melungeons counterfeited both gold and silver coins, and it is said that their gold coins contained more pure gold than those which were issued by the U.S. Mint. Naturally, a lot of attention has been given to the source of this gold; but so far, it has not been discovered. Suspicions focus on the area around Newman? Ridge. In 1795, the Melungeons were thought to be getting their silver from a secret mine along Straight Creek in Clairborne County, but the exact location of their source of silver has never come to light.

Shults' silver

2. There are several stories of lost silver mines in Sevier County, the least ambiguous of which is the story of Perry Shults·Silver Mine at Porters Flats and the Little Pidgeon River. Shults, who reportedly discovered a rich mine in the mid-1800s, lived in a log house on Webbs Creek just off present day Highway 73 east of Pattman Center. He was always known to have ?ilver dollars in his pocket,·and took mysterious twice-a-year trips into the mountains by diverse and secret routes. Since it was well known that Shults·overwhelming interest in life was mining, everyone sort of assumed that Perry had found a rich ledge · but no one ever discovered where.

Other Sevier County lost ledges include an Indian silver mine hidden in the hills northwest of Gatlinburg and a secret gold mine just outside the bounds of the Great Smokey Mountain National Park in the same vicinity.

Jones cave mine

3. In 1908 a committee of elderly Indians approached Arthur Jones, owner of a farm near Jones·Cave with a proposal to share the proceeds from a secret silver mine. The Indians had a map drawn on deerskin which allegedly led to a hidden mine and a cache of already-mined silver somewhere on Jones·property. The map showed three hills with passing streams. The mine was thought to be in the area where the streams converged and the silver cache under a nearby rock. But no such landmarks could be found and, after a time, the search was called off.

Indian mines

4. In Loudon County a series of rich silver ledges are re- ported to lie in the vicinity of Old Fort Loudon and the Little Tennessee River. James Adair? History of Tennessee states that the Indians had a mine five miles west of Chota on the south bank of the Little Tennessee and that counterfeiters found a rich ledge in the hills that was used to manufacture a large number of bogus silver dollars. Since counterfeiters are invariably surface miners, this report especially bears further investigation, as it is unlikely they followed the vein very deeply into the earth.

The Indians allegedly had a number of gold mines as well. Several of these are said to be located in the Bald Mountains around Big Butte in Greene County. An Indian gold ledge in Polk County was supposedly located along the North Carolina line. A man named Delosia reportedly discovered a surface vein in this area that was so rich that gold could be mined with an axe, but he could not find his way to the site a second time. It is assumed that Delosia stumbled on to the Indians·ledge, but there is no way to tell for sure, and there may be several veins in the neighborhood.

Leffew's mine

5. In Rhea County a man named Leffew had a rich silver mine in a canyon somewhere in the mountains around Sheffield in the 1870s. Leffew? sole employee was shot to death on a lonely mountain road and Leffew was found hanging at Piney Creek Gorge a short time later. Big Rock, Piney Creek Canyon, the canyons of the tributaries of Piney Creek, Duskin Creek, or the area north of Singing Fork Creek have all emerged as possible locations for the now-lost mine.

Golden Circle cache

6. I normally shy away from Golden Circle treasure sto- ries because so much of what has been written about this shadowy group is unverifiable. The Knights of the Golden Circle came into existence as an organization in the early 1850s. Its original purpose was to support filibustering with the intention of adding rich, pro-slave territory from Central America to the United States to counterbalance the growing power of the northern states.

With the advent of the Civil War, the western and midwestern lodges evolved into a powerful Copperhead organization. According to one usually reliable writer, the KGC boasted over 18,000 members in California alone. The southern lodges were soon enveloped in such a thick fog of secrecy that it is still a matter of dispute as to who held the power ·or even who was actually a member.

Prominent Tennessean, William Walker, was a high ranking Golden Circle member; William Clark Quantrill, in spite of what he told his men, was not highly connected. The Quantrill? Raiders·connection to the Golden Circle came in the form of Captain Rufus Inghram, who left Quantrill after the butchery at Lawrence, Kan. and organized some stage coach robberies in California with disastrous results.

Whether or not Frank and Jesse James were anything more than peripheral members is a question that has tempted wiser men than I to make rash judgments. Membership in the so-called Inner Circle, would seem to explain so much that is a mystery about the James Gang, but in all the years of painstaking investigation that has been undertaken on this subject, no authentic link has ever been proven. James D. Horan, to whom the Pinkertons first opened their extensive files on the James Gang, presents no evidence of it. But as Horan himself admitted, ?ne of the most fascinating questions about the career of Jesse James is: What did he do with the money he stole?·

One tantalizingly simple answer to this question has it that the money was added to a vast Golden Circle cache hidden in a secret cave in the hills 11 miles south of Nashville, Tenn. Rumors of this huge treasure hoard have persisted in the area even to this day, but hard evidence is sketchy at best. The James Gang? link to this story seems very tenuous. Frank and Jesse did live in Tennessee as simple farmers under assumed names while the whole world searched for them. Frank would later state, ? lived four years on one farm in Tennessee and worked as hard as any man ever worked.·But he made no mention of hiding treasure there, as he reportedly admitted doing further west.

If the rumors of a Golden Circle cache south of Nashville (near Brentwood) are true, then it would explain so much that has never been explained. But whether these stories truly explain the mystery or were cleverly concocted to fit the facts, wiser men than I shall have to determine.

Moonshine Caches

7. In Over-ton County in 1878, a detachment of Revenuers fought a two-day engagement against an army of 100s of moonshiners nine miles north of Cookeville in the Cumberland Mountains. Eventually, a truce was arranged, and the Revenuers were forced to withdraw ·but they vowed to return. Later, Campbell Morgan, the leader of the moonshiners was captured in a gun battle at his fortress still in Jackson County, Tenn. During these violent times, numerous caches were made and lost in the Cumberland Mountains.

By the early 1900s, the action had shifted to the little town of Cosby in Cocke County where ?he sugar comes in dry and goes out shaken.·During Prohibition, the sugar came in by the train load, and the frequent use of dynamite as a means of communication to signal the next hill over that the Revenuers were on their way led to several cases of suspected caches owing to the deadly mixture of alcohol and explosives.

SOURCES:

Gray, Wood, The Hidden Civil War, Viking Press, 1942.

Horan, James D., Desperate Men, G.P. Putnam Sons, 1949.

Peatie, Roderick, The Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge, Vanguard Press, 1943.

Terry, Thomas P. U.S. Treasure Atlas, Specialty Pub., 1985.