What the Cherokee Told Judge James Parks About the Axe Under Ducktown — Documented in 1895

#History #Ancient
In the winter of 1892, ninety-one feet down in the great open pit at Isabella, in the Ducktown copper basin of Tennessee, a gossan digger named Wiley Kimsey drove his pick into the floor and heard the rock ring like a bell. What came out of the rust was the blade of an axe: rounded scales lying over one another like the feathers of a wing, a collar carved with square spirals, a handle no rope could measure, and at its end an empty cage. The company’s assayer from Cornwall measured it at thirty-one feet four inches and assayed it at ninety-nine point six percent copper. London answered in three words. Eleven days later, the hollow was filled in.

Three years later, twenty miles away on the Valley River, an old Cherokee man who had never seen it told a Ducktown judge where it lay, which way its blade was facing, and who had left it there. He said you would hear it before you saw it.

This film sets the records side by side: an assay book with one line struck through, a judge’s letter filed under the wrong state, a geology student’s notebook from 1911, and a smelter ledger with an empty assay column. It gives the ordinary explanation its full weight too. Which record do you find harder to set aside?

This documentary examines historical records, archaeological research, and Indigenous oral traditions. It presents documented findings alongside long-standing questions that remain open. Where accounts differ, both are presented. Nothing here is offered as a settled conclusion.

By https://www.youtube.com/@erasedtime1