Download Guidebook as .pdf (2.2 Mb) - Carolina Geological Society

of the site on U.S. 226, between Spruce Pine and Bakersville. The latter, the county seat,
is six miles northwest of the mine.
EARLIEST DESCRIPTIONS
In 1868, rumors of Spanish silver mines gave General Thomas Lanier Clingman the idea
to sink a shaft on the site of some ancient excavations in Bandana, located 15 mi
upstream from where North Carolina’s Toe River flows into Tennessee and becomes the
Nolichucky River. He hoped to find silver ore there; instead, he found sheets of mica as
large as any he had ever seen (Clingman 1877).
Clingman first visited Bandana in 1867 to investigate reports of ancient silver
mines, according to William H. Holmes. Holmes was Chief of the Bureau of American
Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution from 1902 to 1909. His description of
Clingman’s work at Bandana was included in the earliest and possibly only
comprehensive study of prehistoric Native American mining ever attempted (Holmes
1919) (Figure 1).
When General Clingman visited Bandana, evidence of mining there consisted of a
series of overgrown pits dug into hillsides opposite what is now known as Sink Hole
Creek. The diggings coincided with a band of outcrops of pegmatitic rock stretching a
total distance of about 1,600 ft in a northeast-southwest direction and averaging 8–12 ft
in width. (Pegmatite is an igneous rock, similar to granite in composition, consisting of
uncommonly large crystalline masses of three minerals: feldspar, quartz, and mica.)
Clingman thus became one of the first to record how the Bandana workings looked
centuries after they had been abandoned, and before their disruption by nineteenth- and
twentieth-century mining. On the north side of the creek, on land belonging to a farmer
named William Silvers, Clingman observed a line of excavations that extended some 400
yards uphill onto a ridge crest. A similar but shorter line was visible on the south side,
over the hilltop and about 1,000 feet away. As Clingman described the excavations, it
appeared as though a large number of miners had been at work there for many years
(Clingman, 1877). Although Clingman gave no estimate of the depth of the workings,
Holmes, who saw them in 1913, described the diggings as having reached depths of 30 to
40 ft (Figure 2).
Clingman’s first inclination, believing the stories that had brought him there, was
to credit the men of De Soto’s expedition with the mining. The conquistadors had trekked
through the Carolinas looking for precious metals in 1540. Having studied mineralogy
with Professor Elisha Mitchell at Chapel Hill 35 years previously, Clingman regarded the
waste material lying in piles around the pits at Bandana as resembling “Mexican silver
ore.” Thus, in 1868, he decided to sink a shaft there and had two tunnels dug beneath the
old excavations (Figure 3). Instead of silver, though, Clingman found an abundance of
“large mica of good quality.”
As Clingman observed, the size of the trees then growing on waste material
heaped up around the pits suggested that the work had been done hundreds of years
earlier. In a letter from Asheville, North Carolina, dated April 8, 1873, he speculated: “It
does not seem improbable that a former race of Indians – possibly the ‘Mound-Builder,’
who used copper tools, made these excavations for the purpose of procuring the mica.”
Clingman was not alone in venturing a guess as to the origin of the prehistoric miners at
the Sink Hole. In 1880, W. C. Kerr, State Geologist of North Carolina, wrote as follows
concerning North Carolina’s ancient mica mines: “I have stated elsewhere, several years
285