Cave Life of Kentucky. Mainly in the Mammoth Cave Region

Bailey, Vernon; Bailey, Florence; Giovannoli, Leonard

Mammoth Cave has long been the best known cave in North America, with a historic record of importance and interest as well as a prehistoric record as yet unread. In 1797 it was used as a landmark in land surveys and it may have been known at even an earlier date. When found in 1809 by a white hunter named Houchens it had long been the home of native peoples as well as of wild animals, for the hunter found it by tracing a wounded bear into its depths and it still shows the remains of camp fires and the accompanying refuse of people who inhabited its extensive galleries before white men came to settle that part of the country. With credit to their intelligence and enterprise, the early settlers soon discovered that the floors of some of the first large rooms of the cave were covered with bat guano mixed with earth, salts, and other minerals rich in saltpeter, from which gunpowder could be manufactured. To these hunters and Indian fighters of our early frontier no other single substance could have been more useful or important. Even gold could not have won the country for us without the smoky, smelly old black powder that played such an important part in winning the West and holding the East. Our younger generations do not even know the look or smell of this vile, black powder, but in the early history of our country its possession by the whites gave supremacy to the few against the great number of natives, who were without knowledge of death-dealing explosives. Soon Mammoth Cave became a busy center for the mining of saltpeter. The old vats where the rich earth was leached may still be seen, scattered along the sides of the cave for half a mile back from the entrance, and the old wooden pipes or logs bored out with two-inch augers and fitted end in end for carrying the spring water back to the vats, and another line through which the solution was pumped back to, the evaporating tanks near the entrance are still sound and many of them are in place. Now the works that produced powder for our early wars have been long abandoned. Better powders have been invented and our saltpeter supply now comes from coal, oil, or the air, or from the rich deposits of South America, and is used mainly for fertilizer. Wheel tracks of the ox carts used in hauling in supplies and hauling out niter-laden earth, as well as the deep tracks of the oxen, still show plainly in the old road that runs back on the floor of the cave for half a mile, and the walls are heavily coated with carbon from the smoke of camp fires, lights, and torches used in the mining operations of those early days. Even farther back the walls were smoked from Indian fires, as shown by numerous beds of ashes and charcoal, charred embers, and cave torches found along the great hallways of the cave, where occasionally are found pieces of old straw sandals, moccasins, pottery, gourds, and other implements of primitive life. Apparently no real study of the early human life of Mammoth Cave has been made nor of the still more evident human occupation of other caves, such as Old Salts Cave, Haunted Cave, Dixon Cave, and Long Cave of the general vicinity. These open refuges in the bowels of the earth, affording always shelter, comfortable temperatures, and safe retreats, were evidently occupied by the early races, and when fully explored by competent ethnologists may yet help to carry American history 'back through prehistoric ages.

Cave Life of Kentucky. Mainly in the Mammoth Cave Region

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