The Lost Silver Mine of Bear Hollow.... the rest of the story!  by Tom Maringer

 I started working as a field instructor here at ONSC in September of 2002 and was instantly captivated by the wonderful people, the trails, the program, and the location here in lovely Bear Hollow. My background is in geology, having received my B.S. at Michagan Technological University specializing in hard-rock mining.  I'm also a craftsman in metal, with a shop in Springdale where I make fantasy coins as a hobby and small business.  So... it was with great interest and surprise that I heard some of the staff repeating to the 5th graders a story that was gleaned from a book by W.C. Jameson entitled:  Buried Treasures of the Ozarks: Legends of Lost Gold, Hidden Silver, and Forgotten Caches.  The particular story told of a pair of counterfeiters who had been caught making silver dollars from silver they mined here in the hollow in 1936... silver dollars that had a higher silver content than US government dollars. The story was frequently told while up at the bluff shelter across the hollow from the Science Center buildings.... a place local lore refers to as "Counterfeit Cave". My jaw dropped open with incredulity at this story. I expressed my sincere reservations as to whether the story could be true, and I determined to seek whether there was any factual basis to it. The following is a brief summary of those researches to date.

 My first step was to take Dr. Robert Lafferty, a professional archaeologist up to the bluff shelter. He agreed that a fairly major prospect pit had been blasted and dug there at some point in the past, and expressed the opinion that careful excavations might determine a time frame for that work. It appears that something on the order of  30 to 50 cubic meters of rock were mined and moved for some purpose. Drill hole blast scars are still visible on the back wall. What is still unknown is the purpose of those diggings... what were they looking for?

 Next I visited the Madison County Historical Society, where Joy Russell was most helpful in pointing me to available resources. The "story" held that a counterfeiting trial was held in Huntsville in 1936. The Historical Society has microfiche copies of all the Madison County Daily Record newspapers throughout that period! I sat down with a few reels and began to look through headlines. Coinsidering the small news that made the headlines in those days, I trust that something as exciting as a counterfeiting case would make the grade... but there was nothing between mid 1935 and mid 1937 where I bracketed my search. So... it was now clear that at least the dates in the "story" were wrong, if there was any truth at all.

 Next came a most interesting discovery... in a copy of  The History of Madision County by Goodspeed, published in 1889, there was a reference to "great excitement caused by the discovery of silver in Bear Hollow, in Piney Township, in Northeastern Madison County". There can be no doubt that the Bear Hollow referred to is in fact the same Bear Hollow where the ONSC now resides... but silver? Goodspeeds goes on to say that there was an influx of miners and that "claims were staked and recorded" but that the "miners expectations were not realized". From perusing the professional geological literature I can state with a high degree of confidence that in all the long history of Northern Arkansas there has never been a single CONFIRMED documented instance of silver having been found! I stress "confirmed" because as it turns out there are many unconfirmed instances! Goodspeed also mentiond a counterfeiting case in the Bear Hollow area, involving a time frame at about the start of the Civil War and a man named "Elliott".  I checked the 1850 and 1860 census listings, but found no Elliotts in this part of the county. If he existed at all he may have been a squatter, a drifter... or using a fake name.

 I decided to check into the counterfeiting angle... and in "Counterfeiting in America" by Lynn Glaser I found a most interesting reference to the fact that the Secret Service had to contend with different methods of counterfeiting that were popular in different parts of the country in the heyday of the craft from the 1830s to the 1880s. In the east the counterfeiters would concentrate on paper money, printing fakes or altering bills to raise their value. In the west the most popular method was drilling, whereby gold coins would be drilled out and hollowed to remove a significant part of their instrinsic value. In the south and midwest the conterfeiting of coin in base metals was preferred, particularly the popular half-dollar pieces. The reference to "base metals" here is interesting, because the specific metals are not identified by name in the book. Any cheap or common metal like copper, tin, brass, lead, iron, or zinc can be considered as "base"... but in researching the extant counterfeit coins in collections (yes... there are collectors who specialize in collecting counterfeits!) the dominant metal chosen by the counterfeiters was zinc.

 Zinc is a silvery blue-grey metal with a relatively low melting point (419.5°C) and boiling point (907°C) and a density of about 7.1g cm-3 . It is cheap, easily smelted, and easily cast. Its chief industrial use is as an alloying additive to copper to make the metal known as "brass".  It is also the primary ingredient in "pot-metal" used to make automobile door-handles and all manner of other cheap metal goods.  When fresh it has a bright metallic lustre very similar to silver, and even forms a greyish oxide skin similar to silver tarnish. It is also found in the rocks of Northern Arkansas in considerable amounts, such that commercial zinc mines operated just a few dozens of miles east and north of Bear Hollow in the period around World War I.  Notably, there is one early reference that tells of Indians telling settlers about an old "silver mine" near the confluence of Rush Creek and the Buffalo River. Today this location is known as the Rush Creek zinc mine.

 So.... the evidence begins to accumulate indicating that any counterfeiting activity in this area was most likely done using zinc as the metal, and that silver and zinc were sometimes confused. (remember that the price of zinc is about $0.60/lb while the price of silver is more like $7/oz.) But that does not answer the question of where the zinc was coming from?

 We may have almost literally stumbled upon the answer to that question while taking a group of kids through Keizor Cave (aka Keysor Cave), a phreatic fissure cave mearby on public property. The cave follows a fissure in an almost straight line some 250 meters or so, trending in a generally south-south-east direction. While poking about some unusual piles of rocks in the cave I came across several loose thumb-sized nodules of a mineral that at-first appeared sphalerite, the sulphide ore of zinc (ZnS). On more detailed analysis the material proved to be goethite pseudomorphs after pyrite... not a zinc mineral at all. Yet we do know that zinc minerals are found in the area, not more than a dozen minles away. A second look at the Keizor Cave site revealed a large amount of charred wood remains... possibly from torches... and rocks piled in a way that does not look to be the result of natural processes. In other words, it is distinctly possible that humans were entering the cave at some point in the past, moving a lot of rocks, and looking for something! Since zinc can be easily mistaken for silver by people unfamiliar with the specific properties of those metals, it is therefore possible that people were searching for sphalerite, thinking it was silver! Could this in fact be the "lost silver mine of Bear Hollow"? We may never be able to conclusively "prove" this to be the case, but the idea has the "ring" of truth that the coins made here certainly did not!

 Dr Lafferty assisted us in taking 4 samples of the charred wood from Ryan's cave in order to have carbon-14 analyses done on them. The samples were taken in conjunction with the mapping expedition we led there during the Cave Ecology session this summer, so it was an educational opportunity for the kids as well as a real research activity. We currently await grant funding to actually have those samples processed (about $250 per). Still enigmatic is the meaning of  the prospect pit at Counterfeit Cave less than a mile away.... what were they looking for? Could this be related to the supposed silver mining rush of 1886 that Goodspeed referred to? Are there more such pits scattered about the hills? We've found a few over in Rockhouse Creek just a couple miles away, but again, further research and exploration may shed light on the question! With funding and a cohesive research plan we could conceivably excavate some discrete sites and shine some light on these mysteries.

 While it was fascinating to have a bona-fide "legend" centered in our own back yard, it seems infinitely more interesting to find out that there may actually be some facts behind the much-elaborated legend. We can imagine a couple of hill boys out here in the 1850s tossing some strange looking rocks into their campfire, and then exclaiming... "hey Jeb.... looky there... we got us a silver mine!"

   August 2003