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On January 30th, 1925, Floyd Collins entered Sand Cave.
He was one of the most decorated and experienced cavers of his era.
And he was looking to connect this cave, Sand Cave, with… the big one.
Mammoth Cave.
A connection to Mammoth Cave would bring fame and fortune.
It would allow Floyd and his partners to run a successful cave business, safe in the knowledge
that they’d be running tours in the world famous Mammoth Cave.
Except, Floyd never returned to the surface that day.
While exiting the cave, he dislodged a loose pile of rocks, one of which pinned his left
leg and trapped him in Sand Cave.
It was the next day before anyone realized Floyd was missing, but even after he was found,
the passage was too tight and too narrow to make a quick rescue.
For two days locals tried to extract Collins from the cave, but to no avail.
Word spread quickly.
Local correspondents flocked to the scene, drawing the attention of regional outlets,
and before long Floyd Collins’ entrapment was a national story.
Rescue efforts, however, remained futile.
Some plans involved pulling Floyd to the surface with a rope, others widening the passage,
while the most ambitious of all called for a completely new shaft to be drilled.
Nothing worked.
Floyd Collins was pronounced dead on February 16th, 1925, eighteen days after first becoming
trapped in Sand Cave.
The media frenzy that surrounded the Sand Cave Tragedy helped bring national attention
to Kentucky Cave Country and was a major factor in the creation of Mammoth Cave National Park.
But, it wasn’t the only factor.
I mean, Floyd Collins wasn’t exactly crawling around in these caves for his health.
He was in a competition.
A competition for money and power and influence.
He was in a competition… for caves.
This competition would, at times, become heated.
It would become manipulative.
It would become downright farcical.
But this competition is critical to understanding how Mammoth Cave National Park came to be.
This is the story of the Kentucky Cave Wars.
[montage?]
Alright, there are many ways to tackle the topic of the Cave Wars, but I think the best
way to understand it is to talk about how accessible Cave Country was at various points
in its history.
Accessibility was driven by what transportation technology was available at the time.
The more accessible the caves became, the more people came to visit them.
That meant more money was being made and more competition was playing out between rival
cave owners.
That spurred more development with even more tourism and even more money.
It was a vicious cycle.
So let’s dive into it.
The first way people arrived at the cave was simply by walking.
Like, between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago walking.
Archeological discoveries dated to the late Archaic and early Woodland Periods have been
discovered in Mammoth Cave.
These discoveries include woven sandals, petroglyphs, cane torches, and even mummified remains.
These were the first humans to step foot in Mammoth Cave.
But, fast forward a few thousand years and European settlers “discover” the cave
came in 1797.
It was probably someone in the Houchin family, either Francis or John.
But, either way, there’s not a lot of tourism happening at this time.
Mammoth Cave isn’t a destination yet.
Cave ownership changes hands several times and it's actually used as a saltpeter mine
during the War of 1812.
But after the war, the saltpeter market collapses and this is when Mammoth Cave starts to offer
tours - a fateful decision that still has historical reverberations to this day.
Mammoth Cave offered its first formal tour in 1816.
A hotel was developed on site and from here the owners of the cave really start to lean
into the tourism business.
In 1839, a doctor by the name of John Croghan bought the property.
He inherited the hotel, but vastly improved it and ensured that those visitors who came
to see the cave had proper accommodations.
This was a very lucrative investment.
See, at this time, in this area of the country, rural Kentucky, you really only had one option
to make a living: farming.
But the soils were thin and rocky and farming was HARD, so when the opportunity arose to
make a living offering cave tours, it was kind of a no-brainer.
And, conducting those tours and basically making this entire business possible were
enslaved African Americans.
Not only were they guiding tours, but they were exploring the cave.
They were leading expeditions and discovering more and more of Mammoth Cave all the time.
Take Stephen Bishop for example.
He’s probably the most famous explorer in the history of Mammoth Cave.
He was the first person to cross the Bottomless Pit and find the underground rivers.
He more than doubled the known length of the cave through his discoveries and created a
map of the cave entirely from memory.
People came to Mammoth Cave specifically to have tours conducted by him.
That’s how good he was.
But he wasn’t alone.
Nick and Mat Bransford also led tours and guided expeditions in the cave.
In fact, the Bransford family has a LONG legacy of guiding in Mammoth Cave.
At one point, in 1930, eight Bransfords were guiding in Mammoth Cave simultaneously.
It was through the exploits of these legendary explorers that Mammoth Cave’s reputation
continued to grow.
Their abilities as guides and explorers attracted more people to Mammoth Cave and word began
to spread that something BIG lay beneath the hills of South Central Kentucky.
Oh, and by this time people aren’t walking anymore.
They had stagecoaches.
You know, like, wagons.
Still not super accessible, but it brought more people to the cave than walking.
John Croghan also died in 1849 and his cousin, Senator Joseph Rogers Underwood, who managed
the cave after him, left in 1869.
This is where things start to get interesting.
Because a couple things happen in the mid- to late-nineteenth century that really start
to set the Cave Wars in motion.
For one thing, after Underwood stopped managing the Mammoth Cave Estate, it was left to John
Croghan’s heirs and a Board of Trustees to take up the mantle.
It was a mess, frankly.
There were a lot of heirs, and those heirs had children and spouses and extended family
and they were all jockeying for control of the estate.
There was infighting, they split into factions, people got sued.
Like I said, it was a mess (and foreshadowed the bitterness that would soon envelop this
region).
But, regardless, the effect of this infighting was basically to weaken Mammoth Cave.
There was a lack of organization and investment and management of the Cave… wasn’t the
best.
Now, don't get me wrong - Mammoth Cave was still the big draw in the area.
It was world famous.
People were still coming to see it.
It’s just, the poor management opened the door ever so slightly for the competition.
Which was now much stiffer, thanks a whole lot to a new transportation revolution.
I’m talking, of course, about the railroad.
These things were popping up all over the country, especially in the East, and making
more places more accessible than ever before.
Cave Country was no exception.
The new Louisville and Nashville Railroad was completed in 1859 and ran within just
a few miles of the Cave entrance.
In 1886, a spur line was completed directly to Mammoth Cave itself.
The effect was obvious: more visitors than ever now had the ability to visit Mammoth
Cave.
But people had seen how lucrative cave tourism could be.
They had the bug.
And they wanted a piece of the pie.
Soon, every piece of land not owned by the Mammoth Cave Estate was being scoured for
developable caves.
As you can imagine, the caves weren’t exactly treated with respect.
People were looking to make a buck.
They removed artifacts from caves, disturbed the fragile geologic formations, and did pretty
much anything they could to attract visitors.
The result was a cacophony of tourists and cave developers and marketing ploys.
Visitors wanted to see caves and the people of cave country were prepared to give it to
them, by whatever means necessary.
So, this is the scene as we enter the early twentieth century, when the Kentucky Cave
Wars were at their height.
At one point, more than 20 caves were in operation, all competing, all battling it out for visitors
and doing whatever was necessary to earn their almighty dollars.
And one man embodies this competition more than any other: George.
Morrison.
He first came to Cave Country in 1915 looking for oil.
But he was notoriously bad at finding oil.
I mean, they didn’t call him “Dry Hole George” for nothing.
What he was good at though, was cave development.
He knew more than anybody in Cave Country that Mammoth Cave was the big draw.
If you could somehow find an entrance to Mammoth Cave and start offering tours from there without
needing to go through the Mammoth Cave Estate, your cave business would be very successful
indeed.
The only problem was… nobody had yet managed to find an entrance to Mammoth Cave outside
of the Estate.
Most people, up to this point, were looking for entrances from the outside in, but George
Morrison wanted to look from the inside out.
He wanted to enter Mammoth Cave, follow the passages until he was sure he was beyond the
Estate’s borders, then create an entrance and start offering tours.
Boom, profit.
Except, you know, the Mammoth Cave Estate was privately owned.
You couldn’t just walk up there and start exploring the cave.
Especially when your exploration would directly threaten the business being operated from
within it.
No worries.
Nothing a little bribery and trespassing couldn’t solve.
He bribed one of Mammoth Cave’s guides for a copy of their key and illegally entered
Mammoth Cave, determined to find those passages out of the reach of the Estate.
But George Morrison wasn’t a subtle man.
His efforts attracted attention and he was eventually caught and arrested for trespassing.
No matter.
George had a man on the inside.
He learned of a secret entrance to the Cave created decades earlier.
They used this entrance to find passageways that ran close to the surface and eventually
created their own entrance to Mammoth Cave.
Except, the property they were blasting holes into was controlled by the Louisville and
Nashville Railroad, who put a stop to their tomfoolery at once.
Thwarted once again, George Morrison left Cave Country in 1916…
Only to come back, of course.
In 1921.
This time with a more, shall we say, legitimate course of action.
Money.
Greenbacks.
Cold hard cash.
That’s right.
George Morrison returned to Cave Country with an army of investors and he set about buying
up all the property he could near or adjacent to the Mammoth Cave Estate.
With this property under his control, no one could stop him from blasting holes wherever
he wanted.
Not long after his return, in 1922, George Morrison created the new entrance to Mammoth
Cave.
He was operating tours there by May of that year.
And just as he thought, business boomed.
Because he was in the Mammoth Cave, George could advertise his tours as taking place
in the Mammoth Cave.
You know, the thing wanted to see.
But, as I’m sure you’ve learned by now, George Morrison wasn’t exactly beyond, uh,
unscrupulous tactics when it came to profiting off Mammoth Cave.
In fact, the tactics he employed became synonymous with the Cave Wars themselves.
They included sabotage, subterfuge, misinformation, and downright lying.
Now, by this time, people are driving to Mammoth Cave.
More people are coming to Cave Country than ever.
The automobile had busted the door wide open for cave tourism.
So, all along the highways leading into the area, individual cave owners employed people
called “cappers.”
To traveling tourists, these cappers appeared as normal, everyday purveyors of official
cave information.
I mean, their roadside stands were labeled “Official Cave Information.”
Surely, they couldn’t be lying.
But alas, they were lying.
They would tell people things like “Sorry, Mammoth Cave is being sold today, you can
visit our cave though.”
Or “Mammoth Cave has collapsed, come see our cave instead!”
And this was just the tip of the iceberg.
The roadways were littered with signs, all of them manipulative or downright libelous,
and all of them designed to confuse travelers and point them in the direction of their respective
caves.
Developers employed fake policemen, disrupted each other's tours, and of course took their
battles to the courts.
All of these tactics were designed to foment confusion and exasperation from visitors,
enticing them to visit one rival cave over the other.
While this may have been a successful tactic for making money, the visitors and the caves
themselves were the ones who suffered.
The battle for fame and fortune during the Cave Wars turned this bucolic area and it’s
famed geologic wonders into a battleground.
It was toxic, it was destructive, it turned neighbors and friends against each other,
and it cost people their lives.
Which brings us back… to Floyd Collins.
His death, and the media attention it garnered, were but a small glimpse into the circumstances
that put him there in the first place.
Floyd was a victim of the Cave Wars.
This frenzy and furor, this heightened and pressurized environment where people were
pushing and pushing to develop caves, beyond what was possible or safe - this is what killed
Floyd Collins.
The push for short term gain and profit over the longevity of the very resource they were
exploiting and the people that were exploiting it.
But his death was not to be in vain.
The national attention his death attracted gave a shot in the arm to the nascent Mammoth
Cave National Park movement.
On May 25th, 1926, just over a year after Floyd’s death, Calvin Coolidge signed the
bill authorizing Mammoth Cave National Park.
It would take until 1941 for the Park to become fully established and the Cave Wars would
continue to linger into the 1960s, but never again would they reach the devastating heights
of the 1920s.
The air of competition and exploitation had shifted to one of preservation and exploration.
Mammoth Cave is now a place where researchers channel the legacy of men like Stephen Bishop
by exploring ever deeper into the world’s longest cave, where visitors come to marvel
and explore without being heckled or harassed, and where the precious geologic resources
of the cave are protected in perpetuity, for future generations to come.
Thanks so much for watching!
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Goodbye.