All someone would have needed would have been a sharp knife point, and taking their time to make the carving. The carving is also in a very protected place. Not even the wind would have been able to hit the sandstone it's carved in. There is another carving next to the SWIFT carving that I also photographed. When I tried to paint the lines of that carving in with a small artist paintbrush the sandstone was so brittle that a part of it fell away. I've put all of my research together and I sent it to the Lagina Brothers, but I've not heard from them. They probably have their hands full with their current endeavor. I am a big fan of Josh Gates, so I'm going to go see him in person. I'm planning to give him the information and see if he's interested in it. He does a good job telling a story, and he might even find something. One of the things about the Swift legend is that he gives all of his directions to the mines and buried treasure from the furnace he built. The problem is there is no furnace to go from because he tore it down when he left out in 1769. You have to find three landmarks and then triangulate the location of the furnace. The landmarks being; the remarkable rocks, the monument rocks, and the hanging rock. Other carvings, a rattlesnake, horseshoes, a date, the initials JS, a Templar Cross, along with other landmarks close by also help validate the location. I was also told by a landowner that there is a small bottom close to where the furnace was located and was used to grow corn. His father's farm joined this land and he worked the field as a young man. He told me that their was glass in it, much like you would find at an iron furnace. The owner of the land where the furnace was located told me that someone had "salted" the creek that runs through his families farm with silver ore. I suspect that what they were finding was silver slag that was dumped by Swift's men into the creek. I also found a pile of buried "hot rocks" with my metal detector near this location.
