Recalling the end of her doctoral program at the University of Chicago, Randolph-Macon College Spanish Professor Kimberly Borchard, Ph.D., says two things helped her decompress while writing her dissertation. One was learning to play the banjo. The other was exploring the origins of a mythical gold-laden realm called Apalache, located somewhere within what we understand today to be the Appalachian Mountains.

Herself a native of Appalachia, Dr. Borchard continued to be drawn back to the myth of the Appalachian El Dorado long after she joined RMC in 2009. She published her preliminary research in West Virginia History while on Rashkind Sabbatical Endowment in 2017, and in 2021 she extended that research into a full-length book, Appalachia as Contested Borderland of the Early Modern Atlantic, 1528-1715 (ACMRS Press, 2021). According to the publisher, Dr. Borchard’s book “explores the European obsession with Appalachian mineral resources from 1528 to 1715, reframing Appalachian history within the fields of Latin American, early American, and Atlantic history.”

Dr. Borchard took some time to answer questions about her book and retrace the alluring myth of Apalache.

Where did you first encounter the story of Apalache as this magical place of El Dorado-esque riches?

While researching my doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, I kept coming across references to a place called Apalache in 16th century accounts of shipwrecks and the disastrously failed exploratory incursions into Florida and the North American southeast. According to those early accounts, there was an unlimited amount of gold and fabulous wealth in Apalache. My hometown is Athens, Ohio, which is part of Appalachia, so I was instantly drawn to the disconnect between common stereotypes of Appalachia—that it’s a place of poverty populated with overwhelmingly white, Anglo-Saxon people—and these centuries-old accounts that consistently associate it with indigenous people living in boundless wealth.

How did you start researching that aspect of Appalachian history?

It was a distraction from my dissertation at the time, but this was a topic that both fit within the purview of my research interests and fascinated me personally. I went to the Oxford English Dictionary to see when the word “Appalachia” was first used and found that the first mention of Appalachia, while spelled differently than it is now, was by a German physician and explorer named John Lederer. He immigrated to Virginia in 1668 and was sponsored by Sir William Berkeley, then governor of Virginia, to find a passage west to the Indian Ocean through the mountains. Like most European explorers, he greatly underestimated the size of North America, believing the West Coast was only a few days’ travel west from Virginia. Obviously he failed in reaching the Indian Ocean, although he did become the first European to see the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

When he returned from his trek into the mountains, he claimed that natives told him of bearded men mining precious metals out of the mountains. He assumed the men were Spaniards, and wrote that he didn’t try to find their mines because he feared being enslaved by them. So my research started with Lederer writing about these Appalachian mines in 1672 and working backwards from there to locate the story’s origin.

How far back were you able to trace the myth?

French explorers founded a Huguenot colony called Fort Caroline in Florida somewhere near modern day Jacksonville in the 1560s. During their inland incursions, they claimed that indigenous people told them there was a fortune of gold and silver to be found in this mountain realm called Apalatcy or Appalesse. Most of the settlers at Fort Caroline were eventually massacred by the Spanish in 1565, but one of the inhabitants, an artist named Jacques Le Moyne, managed to escape. He took with him illustrations of indigenous life as he saw it—one of which was the map published on the cover of my book. It depicts mountains to the north surrounding a giant lake. The legend reads: “Appalachian mountains, in which gold, silver, and copper are found,” and “In the lake the natives discover silver flakes.” So the myth of precious metals in the mountains specifically goes back to at least the 1560s.

Was there any truth to the rumors? That is, was there really gold to be mined in Appalachia?

Spanish Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who was responsible for the attack on Fort Caroline, wrote in a letter that the French Protestants had learned from local natives that there was silver in the mountains. He quoted the natives’ estimate for where those mountains were located as “a hundred leagues to the north-northwest of Santa Elena.” One hundred leagues is approximately 346 miles, and you only need Google Maps to see how remarkably close that estimate is to where the Appalachian Mountains actually are. So the rumor that there were mountains located to the north was true on a very precise level.

Whether or not gold and riches were found there is another story. Gold has since been discovered in parts of the Appalachians, but nothing that was being mined in indigenous or colonial economies, especially not at the massive scale recounted in these early accounts.

If European explorers never found the rumored Appalachian riches, why did they continue to put their lives on the line to find it?

The first quests to locate the mythical Apalache came on the tail of the conquest of colonial Mexico, home to enormous wealth and incredibly sophisticated societies, as well as the conquest of colonial Peru, from which invaders also extracted unfathomable riches. A precedent was there. And 16th century theories of climate maintained that geography mirrored itself, so that if mines in Peru were located at X degrees south of the equator, you would find an identical landscape that same distance to the north. So these different European empires were looking northward for another road to riches, and each empire was paranoid that another was already extracting tons of gold or silver from Apalache. They felt compelled to find it before another empire did. That paranoia fueled much of the rush inland to explore and settle what is now the United States.

Why do you think this aspect of Appalachian and early American history has been so underexamined?

Historiography is very often written at the service of nationalistic interests, and the story of Apalache falls between the cracks of multiple empires. Spanish and Latin American historiography stopped paying attention to Apalache after the Spanish economy changed and the empire couldn’t continue to attempt (and fail) to hold all of North America. The French also picked up on, and attempted to profit from, those rumors until they were kicked out of Florida. Then the Spanish made the claims again, but they weren’t able to hold North America for long after. The myth passed from one nation of explorers to the next, morphing from one language to another—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Latin, and English—over the course of nearly 200 years. There just aren’t that many people who both love Appalachia as much as I do and work in all of those languages to follow the story through time.

What can we learn today from the relentless pursuit of Apalache by empires of the past?

The historical record clearly demonstrates the destructive power of rumor, paranoia, and delusion. So many people died, so many cultures were destroyed, by people looking for Appalachian gold mines, silver mines, diamond mines. It’s incredible how persistent these explorers were, for as long as they were, despite the fact that nobody found anything close to gold mines during that period in that area. All of it was based on hearsay and greed. In the era of “fake news,” we should be cognizant of how false claims and rumors can lead to widespread personal, cultural, and environmental destruction.