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
