I heard this same story, almost, from my grandfather, and he never read any books about it. This is in Johnson County, near Watauga Lake.
Back around 1918, an old Indian (elderly) named White Cloud walked in here from Oklahoma. He stayed with my grandfathers family and took a liking to my grandpa, who was a boy of about 8 back then (born 1910). One day, he took my grandpa up on Dry Run mountain and told him to sit on a big rock, as he wasnt allowed to follow him all the way. The old man was gone a few minutes and came back and announced, "My peoples silver is still there and safe".
I wrote a letter to the Cherokee Nation about 20 years ago and told them about it, but there never was any reply.
In later years, there has been some interest in the land, and it has changed hands. But its snaky up there. Ive seen some pretty big rattlers, so its par for the course for Appalachia.
Let me add (now that I found my glasses), that there have been some antiquities found since them, and one fellow assured me that a very old Spanish helmet was one of the things recovered, as well as a matching breastplate. My grandfathers family was the first Anglo family to ever own the land, via a colonial land grant, and its still in the family today, 10 generations later.
And we didnt put that stuff there. (My kin would have sold it off long ago if they had).
But it must have been there since the time of the very early Spanish arrival. And all of this stuff is just about a mile from where the Chisca used to have a village, before the Spaniards wiped them out around 1568 or so.
I think the story with the silver was that the Spaniards worked the mines for a few years, but the Indians finally rose up and slaughtered most of them and took the silver. And they took the silver and burried it around the former town site in a religious ceremony to commemorate the dead.
And that stache was what White Cloud came to check on. Of course, the story was handed down through the generations of my kin, but we never did mess with the stuff out of respect. Kin is just about everything in Appalachia, right under religion. And we can respect that the Indians were respecting thier dead kin, so we never messed with that treasure.
I wouldnt have said anything about it , except that an outside bunch of developers is a comming in and liable to dig it all up and run off with it. Somebody should do a proper and legal archaeological dig and document the history of it, if the outsiders aint already run off with it.
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