Have you ever heard of the legendary stash of silver dollars hidden in the Ozarks? The legend begins back when the early European settlers first came to North America. When Spanish explorers came up the from the Gulf of Mexico on the Mississippi River in search of precious metals, they found themselves in the upper reaches of the White River. There they found Indians mining silver.
The Spaniards bartered with the Indians and ended up with so much silver that they couldn’t manage to take it all back with them. So the Spaniards turned the silver into ingots by melting it and pouring it into musket barrels. They stashed the precious metal in natural caves around the area with intentions of returning to claim it. Unfortunately, they never did.
In the 1820’s the silver was found by a family who settled in the area by the name Yocum. They decided to slice the round silver ingots into coins and stamped them with their family name. These became the Yocum silver dollars and were supposedly worth more than even the silver dollars minted by the United States government at the time.
Some versions of the legend claim that the Yocham family worked the silver mines themselves and left when they heard rumors that there were promises of gold out in California. A descendant of the family claims that relatives in Kimberling City had the molds of the coins, but no actual proof of the coin has ever surfaced.
One scholar believes that the legendary coin is a fabrication of misinformation. Yocham is a Hungarian name and the story may have originated from the coin the Yocham “Stalard.” This coin was minted in honor of a Hungarian bishop, Bishop Yocham, who became a saint. As stalard is a similar sounding word to dollar. It could be that a Hungarian coin was mistakenly thought to be a dollar and created the legend of the Yocum silver dollar.
Another unfortunate note that discredits this legend is that geological area of the Ozarks does not produce any consumable amounts of silver. What the area does have is “fool’s silver” which is a mineral called galena.
However, there is some remaining speculation that the legend could be true. A man named Mike Brittain, whose ancestors had made a homestead in the Ozarks, had copies of diary pages and a portion of a map. Someone made the map while doing research in the National Archives in Washington D.C. The piece of map indicated a sign, a cave, and a Spanish fort. Mike claimed to have found what remained of the fort’s foundation but not the cave. The last words of the excerpt were from a man who was trying to escape Indians and about the silver coins he found in the cave.
The story is rich and exciting whether the legend proves true or false. It is also interesting to note that United States silver dollars that were minted around the same time as the legend are worth a minimum of $200 these days. So if the legends were to be true, these legendary silver dollars would be worth a hefty sum.
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