Prehistory plaque Human activity in Mammoth Cave traces back five thousand years. Several sets of
Native American remains have been recovered from Mammoth Cave, or other nearby caves in the region, in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Most were
mummies, representing examples of intentional burial, with ample evidence of
pre-Columbian funerary practice. An exception to purposeful burial was discovered when in 1935 the remains of an adult male were found under a large boulder. The boulder had shifted and settled onto the victim, a pre-Columbian miner, who had disturbed the rubble supporting it. The remains of the ancient victim were named "Lost John" and exhibited to the public into the 1970s, when they were interred in a secret location in Mammoth Cave for reasons of preservation as well as emerging political sensitivities with respect to the
public display of Native American remains. Research beginning in the late 1950s led by
Patty Jo Watson, of
Washington University in St. Louis has done much to illuminate the lives of the late
Archaic and early
Woodland peoples who explored and exploited caves in the region. Preserved by the constant cave environment, dietary evidence yielded
carbon dates enabling Watson and others to determine the age of the specimens. An analysis of their content, also pioneered by Watson, allows determination of the relative content of plant and meat in the diet of either culture over a period spanning several thousand years. This analysis indicates a timed transition from a
hunter-gatherer culture to
plant domestication and
agriculture. Another technique employed in
archaeological research at Mammoth Cave was "
experimental archaeology" in which modern explorers were sent into the cave using the same technology as that employed by the ancient cultures whose leftover implements lie discarded in many parts of the cave. The goal was to gain insight into the problems faced by the ancient people who explored the cave, by placing the researchers in a similar physical situation. Ancient human remains and artifacts within the caves are protected by various federal and state laws. One of the most basic facts to be determined about a newly discovered artifact is its precise location and situation. Even slightly moving a prehistoric artifact contaminates it from a research perspective. Explorers are properly trained not to disturb archaeological evidence, and some areas of the cave remain out-of-bounds for even seasoned explorers, unless the subject of the trip is archaeological research on that area. Besides the remains that have been discovered in the portion of the cave accessible through the historic entrance of Mammoth Cave, the remains of cane torches used by Native Americans as well as other artifacts such as drawings, gourd fragments, and woven grass moccasin slippers are found in the Salts Cave section of the system in Flint Ridge.
Earliest written history The tract known as the "Pollard Survey" was sold by
indenture on September 10, 1791 in
Philadelphia by William Pollard. of the "Pollard Survey" between the North bank of Bacon Creek and the
Green River were purchased by Thomas Lang Jr., a British-American merchant from
Yorkshire, England, on June 3, 1796, for £4,116/13s/0d (£4,116.65). The land was lost to a local county tax claim during the
War of 1812. Legend has it that the first European to visit Mammoth Cave was either John Houchin or his brother Francis Houchin, in 1797. While hunting, Houchin pursued a wounded bear to the cave's large entrance opening near the Green River. Some Houchin Family tales have John Decatur "Johnny Dick" Houchin as the discoverer of the cave, but this is highly unlikely because Johnny Dick was only 10 years old in 1797 and was unlikely to be out hunting bears at such an age. His father John is the more likely candidate from that branch of the family tree, but the most probable candidate for discoverer of Mammoth Cave is Francis "Frank" Houchin, whose land was much closer to the cave entrance than his brother John's. There is also the argument that their brother Charles Houchin, who was known as a great hunter and trapper, was the man who shot that bear and chased it into the cave. The shadow over Charles's claim is the fact that he was residing in Illinois until 1801. Contrary to this story is Brucker and Watson's
The Longest Cave, which asserts that the cave was "certainly known before that time". Caves in the area were known before the discovery of the entrance to Mammoth Cave. Even Francis Houchin had a cave entrance on his land very near the bend in the Green River known as the Turnhole, which is less than a mile from the main entrance of Mammoth Cave. The land containing this historic entrance was first surveyed and registered in 1798 under the name of Valentine Simon. Simon began exploiting Mammoth Cave for its
saltpeter reserves.
19th century In partnership with Valentine Simon, various other individuals would own the land through the
War of 1812, when Mammoth Cave's saltpeter reserves became significant due to the
Jefferson Embargo Act of 1807 which prohibited all foreign trade. The blockade starved the American military of saltpeter and therefore
gunpowder. As a result, the domestic price of saltpeter rose and production based on nitrates extracted from caves such as Mammoth Cave became more lucrative. In July 1812, the cave was purchased from Simon and other owners by Charles Wilkins and an investor from Philadelphia named Hyman Gratz. Soon the cave was being mined for
calcium nitrate on an industrial scale, utilizing a labor force of 70 slaves to build and operate the soil leaching apparatus, as well as to haul the raw soil from deep in the cave to the central processing site. A half-interest in the cave changed hands for $10,000 (equivalent to over $150,000 in 2020). After the war when prices fell, the workings were abandoned and it became a minor tourist attraction centering on a
Native American mummy discovered nearby. When Wilkins died his estate's executors sold his interest in the cave to Gratz. In the spring of 1838, the cave was sold by the Gratz brothers to Franklin Gorin, who intended to operate Mammoth Cave purely as a tourist attraction, the bottom long having since fallen out of the saltpeter market. Gorin was a slave owner, and used his slaves as tour guides.
Stephen Bishop was one of these slaves and would make a number of important contributions to human knowledge of the cave, becoming one of Mammoth Cave's most celebrated historical figures.
Stephen Bishop was an
African-American slave and a guide to the cave during the 1840s and 1850s, was one of the first people to make extensive
maps of the cave, and named many of the cave's features. Stephen Bishop was introduced to Mammoth Cave in 1838 by Franklin Gorin. Gorin wrote, after Bishop's death: "I placed a guide in the cave – the celebrated and great Stephen, and he aided in making the discoveries. He was the first person who ever crossed the Bottomless Pit, and he, myself and another person whose name I have forgotten were the only persons ever at the bottom of Gorin's Dome to my knowledge." "After Stephen crossed the Bottomless Pit, we discovered all that part of the cave now known beyond that point. Previous to those discoveries, all interest centered in what is known as the 'Old Cave' ... but now many of the points are but little known, although as Stephen was wont to say, they were 'grand, gloomy and peculiar'." In 1839,
John Croghan of
Louisville bought the Mammoth Cave Estate, including Bishop and its other slaves from their previous owner, Franklin Gorin. Croghan briefly ran an ill-fated
tuberculosis hospital in the cave in 1842–43, the vapors of which he believed would cure his patients. A widespread epidemic of the period, tuberculosis would ultimately claim the life of Dr. Croghan in 1849. In 1866, the first photos from within the Mammoth Cave were taken by Charles Waldack, a photographer from Cincinnati, Ohio, using a very dangerous method of flash photography called magnesium flash photography. Throughout the 19th century, the fame of Mammoth Cave would grow so that the cave became an international sensation. At the same time, the cave attracted the attention of 19th century writers such as
Robert Montgomery Bird, the Rev. Robert Davidson, the Rev. Horace Martin, Alexander Clark Bullitt,
Nathaniel Parker Willis (who visited in June 1852),
Bayard Taylor (in May 1855), William Stump Forwood (in spring 1867), the naturalist
John Muir (early September 1867), the Rev. Horace Carter Hovey, and others. As a result of the growing renown of Mammoth Cave, the cave boasted famous visitors such as actor
Edwin Booth (his brother,
John Wilkes Booth,
assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865), singer
Jenny Lind (who visited the cave on April 5, 1851), and violinist
Ole Bull who together gave a concert in one of the caves. Two chambers in the caves have since been known as "Booth's Amphitheatre" and "Ole Bull's Concert Hall".
Early 20th century: The Kentucky Cave Wars The difficulties of farming life in the hardscrabble, poor soil of the cave-country influenced local owners of smaller nearby caves to see opportunities for commercial exploitation, particularly given the success of Mammoth Cave as a tourist attraction. The "Kentucky Cave Wars" was a period of bitter competition between local cave owners for tourist money. Broad tactics of deception were used to lure visitors away from their intended destination to other private show caves. Misleading signs were placed along the roads leading to the Mammoth Cave. A typical strategy during the early days of automobile travel involved representatives (known as "cappers") of other private show caves hopping aboard a tourist's car's running board, and leading the passengers to believe that Mammoth Cave was closed, quarantined, caved in or otherwise inaccessible. In 1906, Mammoth Cave became accessible by
steamboat with the construction of a lock and dam at
Brownsville, Kentucky. In 1908,
Max Kämper, a young German mining engineer, arrived at the cave by way of New York. Kämper had just graduated from technical college and his family had sent him on a trip abroad as a graduation present. Originally intending to spend two weeks at Mammoth Cave, Kämper spent several months. With the assistance of Ed Bishop, a Mammoth Cave Guide, Kämper produced a remarkably accurate instrumental survey of many kilometers of Mammoth Cave, including many new discoveries. Reportedly, Kämper also produced a corresponding survey of the land surface overlying the cave: this information was to be useful in the opening of other entrances to the cave, as soon happened with the Violet City entrance. The Croghan family suppressed the topographic element of Kämper's map, and it is not known to survive today, although the cave map portion of Kämper's work stands as a triumph of accurate cave cartography: not until the early 1960s and the advent of the modern exploration period would these passages be surveyed and mapped with greater accuracy. Kämper returned to Berlin, and from the point of the 1906 construction of the dam at Brownsville, pointing out that this made a full hydrologic study of the cave impossible. Among his precise descriptions of the hydrogeologic setting of Mammoth Cave, Martel offered the speculative conclusion that Mammoth Cave was connected to Salts and
Colossal Caves: this would not be proven correct until 60 years after Martel's visit. In the early 1920s, George Morrison created, via blasting, a number of entrances to Mammoth Cave on land not owned by the Croghan Estate. Absent the data from the Croghan's secretive surveys, performed by Kämper, Bishop, and others, which had not been published in a form suitable for determining the geographic extent of the cave, it was now conclusively shown that the Croghans had been for years exhibiting portions of Mammoth Cave which were not under land they owned. Lawsuits were filed and, for a time, different entrances to the cave were operated in direct competition with each other. In the early 20th century,
Floyd Collins spent ten years exploring the Flint Ridge Cave System (the most important legacy of these explorations was his discovery of Floyd Collins' Crystal Cave and exploration in Salts Cave) before dying at Sand Cave, Kentucky, in 1925. While exploring Sand Cave, he dislodged a rock onto his leg while in a tight crawlway and was unable to be rescued before dying of starvation. Attempts to rescue Collins created a mass
media sensation; the
resulting publicity would draw prominent Kentuckians to initiate a movement which would result in the formation of Mammoth Cave National Park in 1941.
The national park movement (1926–1941) As the last of the Croghan heirs died, advocacy grew among wealthy citizens of Kentucky for the establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park. Private citizens formed the Mammoth Cave National Park Association in 1924. The park was authorized May 25, 1926. Donated funds were used to purchase some farmsteads in the region, while other tracts within the proposed national park boundary were acquired by right of
eminent domain. Unlike national parks in the sparsely populated American West, thousands of people were forced to move to form Mammoth Cave National Park. Eminent domain proceedings were often bitter, with landowners paid what were considered to be inadequate sums. The displacement and resulting acrimony received little notice outside of the affected communities. For legal reasons, the federal government was prohibited from restoring or developing the cleared farmsteads while the private Association held the land: this regulation was evaded by the operation of "a maximum of four"
CCC camps from May 22, 1933 to July 1942. According to the National Park Service, "By May 22, 1936, of land had been acquired and accepted by the Secretary of the Interior. The area was declared a national park on July 1, 1941, when the minimum of (over 600 parcels) had been assembled." Superintendent Hoskins later wrote of a
summer tanager named Pete who arrived at the guide house on or around every April 20, starting in 1938. The bird ate from food held in the hands of the guides, to the delight of visitors, and provided food to his less-tame mate.
Birth of the national park (1941) Mammoth Cave National Park was dedicated on July 1, 1941. The same year saw the incorporation of the
National Speleological Society. R. Taylor Hoskins, the second Acting Superintendent under the old Association, became the first official Superintendent, a position he held until 1951. The New Entrance, closed to visitors since 1941, was reopened on December 26, 1951, becoming the entrance used for the beginning of the Frozen Niagara tour.
The longest cave (1954–1972) By 1954, Mammoth Cave National Park's land holdings encompassed all lands within its outer boundary with the exception of two privately held tracts. One of these, the old Lee Collins farm, had been sold to Harry Thomas of Horse Cave, Kentucky, whose grandson, William "Bill" Austin, operated Collins Crystal Cave as a show cave in direct competition with the national park, which was forced to maintain roads leading to the property. In February 1954, a two-week expedition under the auspices of the
National Speleological Society was organized at the invitation of Austin: this expedition became known as C-3, or the Collins Crystal Cave Expedition. The C-3 expedition drew public interest, first from a photo essay published by Robert Halmi in the July 1954 issue of
True Magazine and later from the publication of a double first-person account of the expedition,
The Caves Beyond: The Story of the Collins Crystal Cave Expedition by Joe Lawrence Jr. (then president of the National Speleological Society) and
Roger Brucker. The expedition proved conclusively that passages in Crystal Cave extended toward Mammoth Cave proper, at least exceeding the Crystal Cave property boundaries. However, this information was closely held by the explorers: it was feared that the National Park Service might forbid exploration were this known. In 1955, Crystal Cave was connected by survey with Unknown Cave, the first connection in the Flint Ridge system. Some of the participants in the C-3 expedition wished to continue their explorations past the conclusion of the C-3 Expedition, and organized as the Flint Ridge Reconnaissance under the guidance of Austin, Jim Dyer, John J. Lehrberger and E. Robert Pohl. This organization was incorporated in 1957 as the
Cave Research Foundation. The organization sought to legitimize the cave explorers' activity through the support of original academic and scientific research. Notable scientists who studied Mammoth Cave during this period include
Patty Jo Watson (see section on
prehistory). In March 1961, the Crystal Cave property was sold to the National Park Service for $285,000. At the same time, the
Great Onyx Cave property, the only other remaining private
inholding, was purchased for $365,000. The Cave Research Foundation was permitted to continue their exploration through a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Park Service. Colossal Cave was connected by survey to Salts Cave in 1960 and in 1961 Colossal-Salts cave was similarly connected to Crystal-Unknown cave, creating a single cave system under much of Flint Ridge. By 1972, the Flint Ridge Cave System had been surveyed to a length of , making it the longest cave in the world.
Flint–Mammoth connection (1972) During the 1960s, Cave Research Foundation (CRF) exploration and mapping teams had found passageways in the Flint Ridge Cave System that penetrated under Houchins Valley and came within of known passages in Mammoth Cave. In 1972, CRF Chief Cartographer John Wilcox pursued an aggressive program to finally connect the caves, fielding several expeditions from the Flint Ridge side as well as exploring leads in Mammoth Cave. On a July 1972 trip, deep in the Flint Ridge Cave System,
Patricia Crowther—with her slight frame of crawled through a narrow canyon later dubbed the "Tight Spot", which acted as a filter for larger cavers. A subsequent trip past the Tight Spot on August 30, 1972, by Wilcox, Crowther, Richard Zopf, and Tom Brucker discovered the name "Pete H" inscribed on the wall of a river passage with an arrow pointing in the direction of Mammoth Cave. The name is believed to have been carved by Warner P. "Pete" Hanson, who was active in exploring the cave in the 1930s. Hanson had been killed in
World War II. The passage was named Hanson's Lost River by the explorers. Finally, on September 9, 1972, a six-person CRF team of Wilcox, Crowther, Zopf, Gary Eller, Stephen Wells, and Cleveland Pinnix (a National Park Service ranger) followed Hanson's Lost River downstream to discover its connection with Echo River in Cascade Hall of Mammoth Cave. With this linking of the Flint Ridge and Mammoth Cave systems, the "Everest of speleology" had been climbed. The integrated cave system contained of surveyed passages and had fourteen entrances.
Recent discoveries Further connections between Mammoth Cave and smaller caves or cave systems have followed, notably to Proctor/Morrison Cave beneath nearby Joppa Ridge in 1979. Proctor Cave was discovered by Jonathan Doyle, a Union Army deserter during the Civil War, and was later owned by the Mammoth Cave Railroad, before being explored by the CRF. Morrison cave was discovered by George Morrison in the 1920s. This connection pushed the frontier of Mammoth exploration southeastward. At the same time, discoveries made outside the park by an independent group called the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition or CKKC resulted in the survey of tens of miles in Roppel Cave east of the park. Discovered in 1976, Roppel Cave was briefly on the list of the nation's longest caves before it was connected to the Proctor/Morrison's section of the Mammoth Cave System on September 10, 1983. The connection was made by two mixed parties of CRF and CKKC explorers. Each party entered through a separate entrance and met in the middle before continuing in the same direction to exit at the opposite entrance. The resulting total surveyed length was near . On March 19, 2005, a connection into the Roppel Cave portion of the system was surveyed from a small cave under Eudora Ridge, adding approximately three miles to the known length of the Mammoth Cave System. The newly found entrance to the cave, now termed the "Hoover Entrance", had been discovered in September 2003, by Alan Canon and James Wells. Incremental discoveries since then have pushed the total to more than . So far, the Fisher Ridge Cave System has been mapped to . Located from the visitors center is Diamond Caverns. On display there is a stagecoach used to ferry visitors from the nearby Bells Tavern train stop in Park City, Kentucky to both Diamond Caverns and Mammoth Cave. ==Climate==