A VISIT
TO
THE MAMMOTH CAVE OF KENTUCKY.
Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, May 20, 1849.
We left the City of Rooks, as Nashville is called, on Thursday morning
at half-past four, and travelled ninety miles to our place of
destination for the night, which occupied 19 hours. The stages in this
part of the country lose a great deal of time needlessly by stopping for
meals a great deal oftener than people require them. During our ride we
had breakfast at 21 miles from Nashville, at a place called Tyree
Springs, and that was acceptable enough; but before it was well digested
we had to stop for dinner, and then again for supper, in three hours
more; and as the people in this last hotel, which was at a pretty little
town called Bowling Green, did not wish to be at the trouble of making
one supper for their own boarders and another for the coach travellers,
we were compelled to “bide their time” though not any of us wanted
supper at all, and here we lost an hour and a half. In our journey we
were interested in the day time by the great variety of wild flowers we
saw, and after dark by the crowds of fire-flies in the air, in the
trees, in the fields. We reached Bell’s,[1] where we were to stay for
the night, at half-past 11, where we might have had another meal, but we
did not like. Bell, a civil old fellow, is famed for making a kind of
Atholl brose, of old peach brandy and honey, which we had a tasting of,
and then went to bed; but Mr Bell’s brose I shall never taste again, for
although it is pleasant enough to taste, yet I could not get the
disagreeable flavour of the peach brandy out of my mouth the whole of
the next day. After a capital breakfast, Bell sent us in a four horse
stage to the Mammoth Cave, a distance of eight miles, over one of the
roughest roads I ever encountered; but what we have seen in this
wonderful place amply compensates for any trouble or difficulty we may
have undergone. I am really quite at a loss how to begin to give you the
least idea of the place, for it is almost beyond description; at all
events I feel quite sure that any kind of description given in writing,
by any mortal man, cannot afford to a stranger the smallest notion of
the wondrousness, the sublimity, the awfulness of this cave—this
stupendous work of Nature. First let me tell you, however, that it
contains 226 avenues; at least that number has been discovered, for
there are more than that; forty-seven domes, eight cataracts, pits
innumerable, and eight rivers, only three of which have been explored.
It was first discovered by the whites in 1802, and during the last war
with England immense quantities of saltpetre were made in it, the
remains of the utensils for the manufacture of which are still to be
seen at a short distance from the entrance, and even the marks of the
hoofs of the oxen the miners used can be traced in the ground. It is
only about ten years since the curious began to visit the cave, and
every year the visitors increase in number, and they must continue to do
so as the wonders of the place become more talked of. About the end of
June is the time for crowds coming, and there is ample accommodation for
more than two hundred people in a very comfortable hotel, with an
obliging and intelligent host, named Mosher. There is no other visitor
here at present but ourselves. Having given you so much preliminary, I
shall endeavour to give you an inkling of what we saw during our