Summer 2010 SE - Part Seven - The Fortunate Slaves of Mammoth Cave

Blue lines on the maps are the planned route. Red lines are deviations.

"I never tried to abandon creeds or code of civilization; they went away of their own accord...
without leaving any consciousness of loss." John Muir

7. The Fortunate Slaves of Mammoth Cave.

Mammoth Cave is indeed mammoth. I had expected to have nothing to say about it. But earlier in the day I went on what is officially called the ‘slavery tour’.

On this tour there were 3 tourists including me and two rangers, all of us White. The tour narrative is essentially the story of Stephen Bishop, the most famous of the unknown number of slaves who worked both the saltpeter mine and later at the tourist hotel circa 1850. Of the others who actually worked the mine and those who worked the tobacco plantations and were leased to work at the hotel during the season, almost nothing is told, except that working here was “better than being sold down the river” and “there is not one documented case of a slave running away.” Let’s just say the ‘slavery tour’ story needs some work.

From the start, the ranger-guide attempted to make as little of Bishop as possible, emphasizing his role as a tour guide and minimizing – not even referring to - his role as an explorer. No mention was made of his 1842 underground map, attributed to him and published in 1844. Bishop’s map of Mammoth Cave doubled the knowledge on existing maps in one year. At Bishop's gravesite, Ranger R. remarked that much of the information about this slave was murky. “Just look at the image of him on the marker. Did he really look like that? And his gravestone is a military gravestone, he certainly wasn’t in the military.”

“He looks quite mulatto” I remarked.

“Well yes,” coughed Ranger R, he was of mixed race, his father was almost certainly a Lowery, the master of his mother. Oh, a child of rape, no doubt; just a minor detail. The Wikipedia entry notes that he was also part Native American, and it explains the military headstone. The banker James Ross Mellon had promised Bishop’s widow to fund a marker for his grave. When the engraver got the money, he took an already made tombstone of a civil war victim, ground out the name and replaced it with Bishop’s. This information is readily available and documented.

I went back to Ranger R. and called him out on it, point by point. "It seems Bishop was something more than a tour guide. " To which he replied unconvincingly, “Thank you for pointing out that information.” Everyone except my guide seems to regard Stephen Bishop as an explorer, and a remarkable man.There is no doubt that Ranger R. is a tour guide.

The cave tour itself is well worth the $12. I went in the company of 100 chattering tourists with my camera and Merton’s The Way of Chuang Tzu tucked behind me. We wind down 340 feet below the surface and are enveloped by shale. There is me and there is the rock all around; something passes between us. Some fine day this will not be the case, there will be no ‘between’.

At one point in the tour, they routinely turn off the lights to plunge the tourists into lightlessness to demonstrate what it was like for early explorers who may have lost their lanterns. In the darkness, the tour guide keeps talking, the tourists ooh and aah, and no one has the understanding to stop talking and listen to the Earth. Thirty seconds of silence would produce an awe to last all these lifetimes, maybe more.

“So nature and the living meet together in the void
Like the closing of the bird’s beak
After its song.” ~ Chuang Tzu

I did not see the young buck today until he appeared with three doe in the open field near the cave hotel.