The Black Hills Illustrated credited this line to Bill Nye in 1904, eight years after he died — and called it his “paraphrase” rather than his invention, naming no source. Quote Investigator traces the joke to unsigned filler in the Detroit Free Press of 9 November 1881, fifteen years before Nye’s death, and concludes the originator was anonymous. Mark Twain, the name most often attached today, has no better claim.
“A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top” not Bill Nye, and not Mark Twain. The joke first appears as unsigned newspaper filler in the Detroit Free Press, 9 November 1881. Bill Nye's name was attached in 1904, eight years after his death, by a mining book that called it his "paraphrase" and named no source; Mark Twain was first credited in 1896. Quote Investigator concludes the originator was anonymous. Source: quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Bill Nye. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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In context
Evoking the themes of truth, doubt and success. Theme: "A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The 1904 book that pinned it on Bill Nye
Work
The Black Hills Illustrated
Chapter
“Looking Backward 56 Years: Broad Thoughts in Condensed Form,” by Major A. J. Simmons, M. E.
Published
1904 · edited by George P. Baldwin under the auspices of the Black Hills Mining Men’s Association
Status
Posthumous credit — Nye died in February 1896, and the book names no source
This system of financiering was worked to such a degree that Bill Nye’s paraphrase of an early-day “gold mine,” “a hole in the ground, the owner whereof is a d—d liar,” came to be the popular accepted definition — and even at this late enlightened period there are instances where Mr. Nye’s theory of mines would find ample verification.
1904 · the earliest Bill Nye credit
Read in the Internet Archive’s scan of the book. Note the word the author actually uses: paraphrase. Even the source that names Nye is saying he reworded a saying that was already the “popular accepted definition” — and it was, having run in newspapers since 1881.
1881 — The earliest instance Quote Investigator can locate ↗ is an unsigned squib in the Detroit Free Press of 9 November 1881: “A mine is a hole in the ground. The discoverer of it is a natural liar.” No author, no speaker — newspaper filler, reprinted from New Haven to Chicago within a month.
1892–1903 — The joke starts collecting owners. A Mr. Walkup of Evanston, Illinois gets it in 1892; Mark Twain is first credited by a Marshall, Michigan paper in March 1896; the humorist Eli Perkins is credited at the American Mining Congress in September 1903 — all three traced by Quote Investigator ↗.
1904 — Bill Nye’s turn. The Black Hills Illustrated calls the line “Bill Nye’s paraphrase”; the sentence is readable in the Internet Archive’s scanned full text ↗. Nye had been dead eight years, and the book cites nothing.
1907 and after — The World’s Work prints the “liar at the top” shape in January 1907 and files it as an anonymous old adage, per Quote Investigator ↗. The Twain version only hardened in 1935, in The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond, p. 97 — where, twainquotes.com records ↗, there is “no other authentic record that Mark Twain made this statement.”
The saying has no identified author, so there is no copyright to trace: it entered print in 1881 as unsigned newspaper filler and was still being called an anonymous “old adage” in 1907. The period printings quoted here — the 1881 Detroit Free Press squib and the 1904 Black Hills Illustrated passage — are long out of copyright in the United States, but that is a fact about those particular publications, not a clearance for the modern one-line version, whose origin nobody has been able to fix.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Four names, none of them documented
This is a joke with an unusually crowded ownership history. Between 1892 and 1935 at least four different people were handed it in print, and the record supports none of them.
✕
The credit on this pageBill Nye (Edgar Wilson Nye, 1850–1896) Posthumous
The only period source naming Nye is The Black Hills Illustrated of 1904, eight years after his death, and it describes the line as “Bill Nye’s paraphrase” of an early-day gold mine ↗ — conceding that he was reworking something already in circulation. Dan Plazak, who wrote a university-press history of mining fraud under this very title, reports that he could not find the saying in Nye’s writings ↗.
The 1880s and 1900s were the golden age of the American mining share — and of the American mining swindle. A promoter with a photograph of a shaft, a handful of glittering ore samples and a printing press could sell stock in a hole that had never produced an ounce. The joke about the liar at the top was not a witticism about geology; it was consumer advice, passed hand to hand by people who had learned the hard way, and it worked precisely because nobody had to have said it first.
But a good line will not stay anonymous for long. Within a decade of its first appearance the quip had been handed to a Mr. Walkup of Evanston, then to Mark Twain, then to the humorist Eli Perkins, then to Bill Nye, then to an unnamed man in Atchison, Kansas — and by 1907 a national magazine was printing the modern wording and calling it, simply, an old adage. Attribution drifts toward fame, and in the 1890s American humour had exactly three famous names to drift toward.
“A mine is a hole in the ground. The discoverer of it is a natural liar.”
How the wording drifted
The sentence people quote today is not the sentence anyone printed. The 1881 original is three clauses long and puts the discoverer at fault. By 1892 it has compressed to “a mine is a hole in the ground and the owner is a liar.” By 1903 the owner has become a possessive — “a hole in the ground owned by a liar” — and only in January 1907 does The World’s Work print the version with the liar standing at the top.
The familiar modern one-liner welds the 1903 opening onto the 1907 ending. It reads beautifully, which is exactly why it travels — but it is a composite, and no period publication located so far contains it as a single sentence.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1850–1896 · American humorist, lecturer & founding editor of the Laramie Boomerang
Edgar Wilson Nye, who wrote as Bill Nye, was one of the best-known American humorists of the 1880s and 1890s — a Wyoming justice of the peace and postmaster who founded the Laramie Boomerang, then made a national name with Bill Nye’s Comic History of the United States and the lecture circuit he shared with the poet James Whitcomb Riley. He died in February 1896, aged 45. He was exactly the kind of famous frontier wit a stray mining joke would drift toward — but the one credit that names him was printed eight years after his funeral, and the historian who went looking could not find the line anywhere in Nye’s own writing.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Earliest documented printing
Earliest documented as unsigned filler in “Currency,” Detroit Free Press, November 9, 1881, p. 3. Credited to Bill Nye in George P. Baldwin, ed., The Black Hills Illustrated (Philadelphia: Baldwin Syndicate, under the auspices of the Black Hills Mining Men’s Association, 1904), p. 31 — eight years after Nye’s death. Chronology and page references per Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top,” July 19, 2015.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A Gold Mine Is a Hole in the Ground with a Liar at the Top’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-gold-mine-is-a-hole-in-the-ground-with-a-liar-at-the-top/