The Kentucky Cave Wars

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

00:00:11
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B.

00:00:14
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: Not too long ago, I read a novel called Starling House by Alex E.

00:00:21
Speaker 1: Harrow.

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Speaker 2: This is a work of fiction, but it has footnotes that reference local history research from that fictional setting, and then there's also a bibliography that includes some entries that are based on actual published research from the real world that kind of tweaked to fit in with the setting of the book.

00:00:42
Speaker 1: One of those.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: Semi fictional bibliography entries in this novel led to today's episode in kind of a wandering way. The name had been changed, but it was a reference to the story of Floyd Collins, who got trapped in a cave during the Kentucky Cave Wars, and this became a massive news story and a huge local spectacle. So today's episode is on the Kentucky Cave Wars, starting with some of the history of Mammoth Cave. Since Mammoth Cave was central to the Cave Wars, we'll also be talking about Floyd Collins and the role that his story had in the eventual end of the cave Wars.

00:01:26
Speaker 1: Various caves are known as Mammoth Cave, but the one we're talking about is in south central Kentucky, roughly between Nashville, Tennessee, to the southwest and Louisville, Kentucky to the northeast. A connection between the Mammoth Cave system and the flint Ridge System was discovered in nineteen seventy two, and now all of this is known as the Mammoth Cave flint Ridge System. This is the longest known cave system in the world, and we don't know just how big it is. About three hundred and sixty five miles or five hundred eighty seven kilometers of the system has been mapped across five different levels. Today, Mammoth Cave is a National Park which also includes about eighty three square miles or two hundred and fifteen square kilometers of land on the surface. That surface is home to forests and grasslands and rivers. Mammoth Cave is also a World Heritage Site of Biosphere Reserve and an International Dark Sky Park, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety one. The Mammoth Cave System is one of the natural wonders of North America. Its formation dates back millions of years as water hollowed out layers of limestone in the region. There are all kinds of geological formations inside, including stalactites, stalagmites, pillars, flowstone which looks like flowing water that's made of rock, and cave popcorn, which looks like little knobs. The formations really vary from one part of the cave to another, depending on things like how wet or dry that part of the system is. There are also underground rivers and lakes, and all kinds of plant and animal species, many of them adapted to living in darkness, like cave crickets, numerous species of bats, and eyeless, unpigmented cavefish and crayfish.

00:03:21
Speaker 2: There are multiple entrances into this cave system today, some of them naturally occurring and some of them built by humans. This includes an accessible entrance with an elevator which connects to about half a mile of accessible trails. Because of the risk of spreading white nose syndrome, which is a fungal infection affecting bats, visitors who are able have to walk over a decontamination mat when they're leaving the caves, and people's mobility aids have to be decontaminated as well.

00:03:54
Speaker 1: These caves have been known to the region's indigenous peoples for thousands of years. People from the Eastern Woodlands cultures explored at least three levels of the caves and used shells to scrape and collect minerals from the walls. The caves were also used as a burial site, and human remains and funerary items have been found in Mammoth Cave and other caves in the region. Descendants of the first people to explore Mammoth Cave include the Cherokee, the Shawnee, and Chickasaw, who were forcibly removed from this area in the nineteenth century. In more recent years, the National Park Service has worked with indigenous nations that have ancestral connections to these caves to move bodies that used to be on public display to parts of the cave that are inaccessible to the public. There are also a lot of cultural and religious objects still in the cave, and the National Park Service asks visitors who find such objects to leave them alone, but to document their location with a photo that shows nearby landmarks, and also to tell a park ranger, but not to post that photo on social media.

00:05:00
Speaker 2: The first Europeans to see Mammoth Cave arrived in the area at the end of the eighteenth century, although there are varying accounts about exactly who that was and exactly when. The caves are referenced in a land certificate for two hundred acres that was issued to Valentine Simmons on September fourth, seventeen ninety eight. Based on this certificate, by then, settlers knew that this cave system was a source of saltpeter that's mentioned in that document.

00:05:32
Speaker 1: In the early nineteenth.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: Century, Mammoth Cave became a major source of saltpeter, which was mined primarily by enslaved men and was used to make gunpowder. This saltpeter mining operation peaked during the War of eighteen twelve, and the land encompassing the cave entrance really dropped in value pretty dramatically once the war was over and the demand for saltpeter fell off. The term Mammoth Cave first appeared in writing in a Virginia newspaper in eighteen ten, and that was also about the time that visitors to the Cave started publishing accounts of what they experienced there. This was during the Romantic period, in which literature, culture, and art had a big focus on things like natural beauty, sublimity, and emotion. An enormous cave system full of wonders, much of its seemingly undiscovered, fit right in with that mindset. The first formal tour of Mammoth Cave probably took place in eighteen sixteen, and over the decades that followed, this land passed through a series of owners who either ran the cave as a tourist attraction or leased it out to other people to do the same. One of these owners was Franklin Goren, who bought the property for five thousand dollars in eighteen thirty eight. Goren enslaved a seventeen year old boy named Stephen Bishop, who worked for Goren exploring and leading tours of the cave. Gorean also in Bishop's mother and brother, and he leased other men from there enslavers to work as cave guides as well. About a year later, Goren sold the cave and Bishop to doctor John Kron for ten thousand dollars. Kron started building up Mammoth Cave as an attraction, things like expanding a hotel that had already been built there, connecting it to roads in the area, and laying a pipe to a nearby spring to provide fresh water. He purchased additional land, eventually totaling more than sixteen hundred acres over time. He also hosted writers, artists, and performers at the cave, including people like poet and essays Ralph Waldo Emerson and opera singer Jenny Lynde. There were rumors that saltpeter miners in the cave back when that was a thing, had never experienced illness while working there, and from eighteen forty two to eighteen forty three Kron tried to see if the air in the cave could cure tuberculosis. He had huts built inside the cave to house patients, and thirteen people were meant to stay there for a year. But while sea air, mountain air, and other varieties of air were all attempted as tuberculosis treatments in the nineteenth century, tuberculosis is really a bacterial infection, and this effort ended early after three of the patients died.

00:08:26
Speaker 1: During this time, Stephen Bishop continued to work as a cave guide. He explored deeper and deeper into Mammoth Cave, developing an extensive knowledge of the system. His efforts sound grueling, terrifying, dangerous, or all three like. He lay a ladder across a very deep cavern called the Bottomless Pit, which was so deep that torches would disappear before they hit the bottom, so he could crawl over to the other side and explore what was beyond it. At one point he made his way through an underground riverbed filled with silt, going through tighter and tighter spaces until it finally opened out into what he named Great Relief Hall. He found underground rivers and built boats to explore them, and at various points rescued lost or injured visitors. People traveled from all around not just to tour Mammoth Cave, but to tour it specifically with Stephen Bishop as their guide. In eighteen forty two, Bishop drew a map of the cave system from memory, which was then published in the book Rambles in the Mammoth Cave during the year eighteen forty four by a visitor by Andrew Clark bullet. In the book, the map was credited to Steven Bishop, one of the guides. This book was the first travel guide for the cave, and Bishop's map remained in use for at least four decades. We're going to read a hilarious and only somewhat factual list of interesting facts from the beginning of the book before we take a quick break. One accidents of no kind have ever recurred in the Mammoth Cave. Two Visitors going in or coming out of the cave are not liable to contract colds. On the contrary, colds are commonly relieved by a visit in the cave. Three No impure air exists in any part of the cave. Four reptiles of no description have ever been seen in the cave. On the contrary, they as well as quadrupeds, avoid it. Five Combustion is perfect in all parts of the cave. Six Decomposition and consequent putrefaction are unobservable in all parts of the cave. Seven the water of the cave is of the purest kind, and besides fresh water, there are one or two sulfur springs. Eight. There are two hundred and twenty six avenues in the cave, forty seven domes, eight cataracts, and twenty three pits nine. The temperature of the cave is fifty nine degrees fahrenheit and remains so uniformly during summer ten. No sound, not even the loudest peal of thunder, is heard one quarter of a mile in the cave.

00:11:09
Speaker 2: When I read those interesting facts in the book, they made me laugh. Next, we'll get to a development that changed Mammoth Cave significantly and ultimately led to the Cave Wars. We'll do that after a quick sponsor break. Doctor John Kron died in eighteen forty nine, perhaps unsurprisingly of tuberculosis. He had no children, and Mammoth Cave was placed in trust, with nine nieces and nephews forming the Trustees of the Mammoth Cave Estate. The trustees continued to control Mammoth Cave until it eventually became part of the National Park. Under the terms of Kron's will, the people he enslaved would be freed seven years after his death. There are several reports that Stephen Bishop was planning to move to Liberia with his wife Catherine and their son Thomas once he was freed. In eighteen fifty six, Bishop bought some land and sold it at a prophet which may have been meant to pay their way to Liberia, but then he died in eighteen fifty seven at the age of thirty seven, and we do not know what the cause of his death was. He was buried at what's now known as the Old Guide Cemetery, which is also the burial place of the patients who died during the tuberculosis experiment. Stephen's son, Thomas, is believed to have also died at a young age because he vanishes from the historical record, but Charlotte later married another Mammoth Cave guide named Nicholas Bransford. Bransford purchased his own freedom in eighteen sixty three. Members of the Bransford family, whose surname is that of their enslaver and in some cases also their ancestor, worked as guides at Mammoth Cave for generations while enslaved and as freeman in so much of the work of exploring and mapping of Mammoth Cave in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was carried out by enslaved and free black men. Two years after Bishop's death, the completion of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad made it much easier for people from outside the area to get to Mammoth Cave before people nearby could walk or maybe ride a horse, but if they lived farther away, the primary mode of transportation was by carriage or stagecoach, and that was both difficult and expensive. The railroad was faster, cheaper, and a lot more comfortable. Eventually, the Mammoth Cave Railroad Company built a spur to take people from the Louisville and Nashville Line or the LNN directly to the hotel. There was a drop in tourism at Mammoth Cave during the US Civil War, although we know that both United States and Confederate soldiers visited the caves. They signed their names on the walls using pencils in rocks and knives, or by smoking the letters with candle flames. Soldiers were also not at all the only people to write their names on the walls of the caves. A lot of other visitors did as well, and so did guides. There is one cave full of gypsum formations that look like flowers, which Stephen Bishop named Charlotte's Grotto, and it is one of the many places his name appears in the caves. In Charlotte's grotto, he drew a heart and he wrote Stephen Bishop, m Cave Guide, Missus Charlotte Bishop eighteen forty three. Nearby he also wrote, Missus Charlotte Bishop, Flower of Mammoth Cave. Those gypsum formations are so cool looking. Travel to Mammoth Cave got even easier in the early twentieth century when automobiles started to become more widely available. People could drive to southern Kentucky on their own schedule and then explore the area on their own, rather than relying on a train schedule and then trying to figure out transportation once they got to where they were going. And this, along with a construction of more roads and highways in the area directly fed into the cave wars. Mammoth Cave was a huge draw, but this part of Kentucky is full of other caves. Aside from the tourism driven mostly by Mammoth Cave. The way most people supported themselves was through farming, but the soil and climate meant that this was difficult and mostly on a subsistence level. Finding something you could turn into a show cave on your own farmland or on land that you could buy or negotiate permission to be on meant another easier, potentially much more lucrative way to make a living, but this also came with its own difficulties. Even if the cave on your land was truly beautiful and interesting, you wouldn't get many visitors if it was way out of the way or hard to get to. Plus, Mammoth Cave had such an established name that it was hard to compete with, so as people looked for other caves, they were hoping to find one that was connected to the Mammoth Cave system so that they could conduct their own Mammoth Cave tours.

00:16:12
Speaker 1: George Morrison was one of the people who tried to do this. He had arrived in the area in nineteen fifteen and was initially looking for oil. When that didn't work out, he decided to get into the cave business. He bribed one of the workers at Mammoth Cave for their keys so he could get in on his own and explore and try to figure out where he might make an entrance from the surface. He was eventually caught doing this and banned from returning. That did not stop him, though, and eventually he found a place that he thought he could blast into from the surface through a sinkhole on land owned by a man named Perry Cox. This did get him into Mammoth Cave, which he confirmed by finding the signatures of Mammoth Cave guides on the walls, but it turned out that the rights to this part of the system were owned by la In Railroad. This was a temporary setback, though. In nineteen twenty one, Morrison bought two thousand acres of land that did not have those rights issues with the railroad and again blasted his way through a sinkhole. Once again, he found signatures left by guides who would have come in from the original Mammoth Cave entrance. By nineteen twenty two, he was advertising this as the new entrance to Mammoth Cave, and he built a hotel on his land as well. On March fourteenth, nineteen twenty three, some of Morrison's guides found a flow stone formation that would become known as Frozen Niagara. It looked kind of like Niagara Falls, frozen over in the wintertime. Frozen Niagara wasn't something you could get to on the tours from the other Mammoth Cave entrance, so this became a big focus of Morrison's advertising. Unsurprisingly, Morrison's creation of a new Mammoth Cave brought him into conflict with the Mammoth Cave as State, and they wound up in court over in in nineteen twenty six, a judge ordered Morrison to add a disclaimer to all of his advertising materials, stating, quote, we do not show any of that part of the cave, which prior to nineteen oh seven was generally known to the public as Mammoth Cave. That portion of the cave can only be seen through the old entrance. But a year later Morrison was found in contempt for not doing that.

00:18:27
Speaker 2: The Kentucky cave weres also went way beyond the dispute between Mammoth Cave Estate and George Morrison's New Mammoth Cave. By the nineteen twenties, more than twenty caves had opened for visitors in the area, and their owners and their managers went to great lengths to try to bring in as much business as possible. There were so many road signs, a lot of them intentionally deceptive and confusing. They would kind of mention Mammoth Cave, but they would really direct visitors somewhere else, or they would promise that if you just followed the sign you would get some quote genuine visitor information. Cave operators hired people who became known as cave cappers, possibly for the caps that a lot of them wore. Cave cappers waited by the roads and handed out so called official literature and gave people directions to their cave rather than one of the Mammoth Cave entrances. They'd hop onto the running board of the car, trying to get to newcomers before anybody else and convince them of where they needed to go. Or maybe they'd tell people that there had been a collapse or a disease outbreak or some other calamity at Mammoth Cave, but don't worry. They know another cave this is just as good. And then there was the vandalism and the violence, like digging up one another's access roads and destroying other cave operators signs, or covering up somebody else's billboard with your billboard, even vandalizing the cave's themselves. On July eighth, nineteen twenty one, the Owensboro, Kentucky Inquirer reported from Cave City, saying that lem Ferguson, who worked at Mammoth Cave, had shot Clell Lee, who worked at a Great Onyx Cave, in the back during an argument. This paper described these two men as in the taxicab business, which might have been a reference to their driving visitors to each of these caves. There are still plenty of places in Mammoth Cave area, and really anywhere in the world that draws a lot of tourists that advertise visitor information or other services but turn out to be kind of shady at best. But the situation in south central Kentucky in the early twentieth century was extreme. And that's where we get to the story of Floyd Collins, which we're going to talk about after a sponsor break. William Floyd Collins, who went by Floyd, was born in Kentucky on June twentieth, eighteen eighty seven. Starting in his childhood, he explored the land that was part of his family's farm and other farms in the area. He found cave entrances and figured out what was beyond. In nineteen seventeen, the Collins family started operating Great Crystal Cave on their property as a show cave, but this was really too far away from anything else to get.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: A lot of visitors.

00:21:31
Speaker 2: The Collinses took some of the same steps as other cave operators to try to attract business. Among other things, Floyd's brother, Andy Lee Collins, was charged with paying somebody to burn down a competitor's signs. But one of their neighbors, Beasley Doyle, had another cave known as Sand Cave, which was just off Cave City Road, and it was in a great location, a spot that people would pass by on the way to Mammoth Cave. Collins made an agreement with Day, getting permission to explore the cave and construct an entrance, with the two of them splitting the profits if it all worked out. On January thirtieth, nineteen twenty five, Collins was working his way through the cave, trying to find places that would be good for visitors, and he said he found a spot on the other side of several extremely narrow passages where the cave opened up into something much larger, But his lantern started to falter and he decided he needed to turn back. We haven't mentioned this yet, but while the first battery operated flashlights and headlamps and things like that were invented at the end of the nineteenth century. Most of the exploration in these caves was being done with things like torches or candles or kerosene lanterns, And if your light went out, especially if you were deep at all within the cave, you could wind up absolutely disoriented, in complete darkness, absolute like there's no daylight coming in from anywhere at all. Right, you're your eyes can't adjust because there's nothing for them, nothing you couldjust too right, Yeah. With his light fading, Collins tried to hurry back to the surface. He was moving through a very narrow passageway, lying on his back, pushing himself inch by inch with his toes when he knocked his lantern over. I'm stressed just reading this. As he kept trying to push himself along in the dark, he accidentally dislodged a stone weighing about twenty seven pounds that's roughly twelve kilograms, which pinned his ankle.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: This was at a really awkward angle to try to get free, and as he tried to dislodge that stone, more rock crumbled and fell down around him.

00:23:46
Speaker 2: The next day, people realized that Collins hadn't come home, and somebody went out to sand cave to look for him. They found his coat hanging outside. A boy named Jule Estes, who was seventeen, was the only person around who was small enough to get through these very narrow spaces in the cave, and he was able to get in, reached Collins and learn that he was trapped. This spawned a huge rescue effort and a massive news story, attracting crowds of onlookers in what was eventually described as a carnival atmosphere. Crowds grew from hundreds to thousands of people, with local setting up stands to sell refreshments and souvenirs. A remote radio station was set up on site, and Charles Lindberg, not yet a famous pilot, was one of the people on hand to fly photographs from the scene to newspapers in Chicago. Locally, one of the reporters was William Burke Miller, known as Skeets because people said he was no bigger than a mosquito, and he worked for the Louisville Courier Journal. Miller's small stature meant he could squeeze into the cave and interview Collins directly, and he earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. On February second, eight members of the Kentucky National Guard were deployed under the command of two lieutenants to try to excavate the area where Collins was trapped. These men were chosen because they were the smallest ones in their unit. More members of the National Guard came later, both to try to help with the rescue and to try to maintain order among all the spectators and the rescuers, who were often arguing what the best course of action would be to try to rescue Collins. For a while, people were able to get to Collins and deliver food and water. Electric lights were strung into the cave connected to a generator, both to provide light for rescue and to provide a little bit of warmth in the very chilly cave. Rescuers tried to pull Collins out using a harness, but that didn't work. They managed to get a lot of the rubble cleared away from him, but he.

00:25:54
Speaker 1: Was still stuck.

00:25:56
Speaker 2: Then the weather became very wet, and on Wednesday, February fourth, part of the cave's ceiling collapsed, blocking off access to where Collins was trapped. Afterward, one of the National guardsmen was assigned to Floyd's brother, Homer, to try to keep him from going into the cave. They were afraid that he would either get in the way of rescue efforts or become trapped himself, and at that point it was not possible to reach his brother that way. There wasn't anything he could do. By February sixth, so a week after Collins had become trapped, rescuers abandoned the original entrance to sand Cave and started trying to dig a new shaft to get to him. Diggers worked around the clock, and a field hospital was set up to treat minor injuries. The National Red Cross also arrived to feed the rescuers. By the seventh there were fifty members of the National Guard trying to maintain order, and both Homer Collins and Floyd's caving buddy Johnny Gerald had been banned from the scene after repeated arguments about the best plan for saving him. The crowds of spectators were not the only thing that was out of control. This had become the biggest news story in the United States, and the number of reporters continued to swell with journalists arriving from almost every state. Some of their reporting was heavily sensationalized, with a big focus on the disagreements among the rescuers, of which there legitimately were a lot, also accusations that the rescuers were not doing enough to get Collins out of the cave. But some of the reporting was also just false, either reporting on rumors that weren't true or printing stories that were just made up. Because of the ongoing atmosphere of deception and trickery that had long been part of the Cave Wars, there were people who thought this whole thing was some kind of publicity stunt, and that Collins was either hiding somewhere outside the cave completely fine, or that he was already dead. After the Associated Tress reported on the rumors, a military Court of Inquiry was convened at Sand Cave to investigate these allegations. The court ruled that Collins was in the cave on February fourteenth. In my opinion, this was a colossal waste of time and effort.

00:28:18
Speaker 1: By that point.

00:28:18
Speaker 2: By February fourteenth, though, Collins had probably died while rescuers had not been able to get to him. They had been able to hear him, and they had been able to hear him coughing as of the thirteenth, but that was really the last that anybody heard from him. A fifty five foot rescue shaft finally broke through to where he was on February sixteenth, and his body was found at three forty two pm. Doctors who examined the body gave differing estimates for when they thought he had died, but he had probably survived trapped in the cave for a little more than two weeks. Initially, Collins's family didn't want his body removed, and a funeral was held at the mouth of Sand Cave with about five hundred people in attendance. Then their rescue shaft was sealed off. The cave was reopened on April twenty third, nineteen twenty five, and Collins's body was removed, embalmed, and buried on the Crystal Cave property. The Collins family later sold Crystal Cave to doctor Harry Thomas, who exhumed the body, put it in a glass topped coffin, and used it as a tourist attraction. Collins's body was stolen two different times in the late nineteen twenties. The story of Floyd Collins and his attempted rescue were later turned into a number of novels, a musical, and a movie.

00:29:42
Speaker 1: And this whole thing.

00:29:44
Speaker 2: Also became part of a big push to turn the Mammoth Cave area into a national park, something that would at least ideally bring an end to the kind of destruction and trickery and risk that had been part of the cave wars. Tmouth Cave National Park Association formed in nineteen twenty four, and Congress approved the establishment of the national park on May twenty fifth, nineteen twenty six. Actually creating this park was a long process, though The Mammoth Cave National Park Association bought the Mammoth Cave estate property from John Cron's heirs and donated it to the federal government.

00:30:23
Speaker 1: The L and N. Railroad had also bought up a lot of cave rights in the area, controlling them as a subsidiary called Colossal Cavern Company. The railroad donated these rights as well. George Morrison tried to put off selling his new entrance to Mammoth Cave, but he did ultimately do so for two hundred ninety thousand dollars in nineteen thirty two.

00:30:46
Speaker 2: But beyond these big land purchases and donations, the process of turning this area into a national park required the acquisition of more than forty five thousand acres from roughly six hundred landowners. Some of these people willingly sold their land, but others refused. The Kentucky National Park Commission, established in nineteen twenty eight, was endowed with the power of eminent domain, allowing it to condemn property that people did not want to sell. Over the course of acquiring the land for the National Park, more than two thousand people were displaced, and a lot of people thought the compensation they received was not enough and wouldn't allow them to start over somewhere else. This was all particularly difficult for black residents of the area, who faced racism both from community members and under the law when they tried to move somewhere else after being displaced from their land around Mammoth Cave. As this was going on, cave operators from outside the future parkland were still caught up in competition and infighting. Many caves in the area were increasingly damaged, both through operators vandalizing way another's property and mining out pieces of cave formations to sell as souvenirs. Cases were also still making their way through the courts in connection to all of this, like Edwards versus Sims in nineteen twenty eight, which was between LP Sims, who was operating Great Onyx Cave and FP Lee, who thought some of this cave was under property he owned. The Kentucky Court of Appeals ultimately ruled that the owner of the land above it owned the cave, even if the entrance to that part of the cave was not on their land. In nineteen thirty three, the Civilian Conservation Corps arrived in the area to construct facilities that would be needed for this land to become Mammoth Cave National Park. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a new deal, aarrow work relief program meant to help the United States recover from the Great Depression while also improving public lands and parks. The Civilian Conservation Corps work at Mammoth Cave went on until nineteen forty two. The CCC was racially segregated, and the work at Mammoth Cave included CCC Camp five ten, one of Kentucky's three Black CCC units, whose members included descendants of the Bransford family, some of whom had lost their land through eminent domain proceedings. Initially, all of the CCC units at Mammoth Cave were housed at a former country club that had been abandoned for years and had become kind of run down and sad, but the black workers faced ongoing racism and harassment from the white workers. Eventually, the white workers were moved to other campsites in the park, while the black workers were left at this former country club that people found really just not a great place. Over time, though the Core remodeled and revitalized this former country club. They turned it into a CCC camp that was described as very respectable.

00:33:56
Speaker 1: And quite modern. The CCC's efforts at Mammoth Cave included work in the caves and on the land above it. They worked on reforesting the land that had been used as farmland, and also built roads, trails, campgrounds, and other park facilities. They also acted as firefighters, and Camp five ten reportedly spotted and fought more than half the fires at Mammoth Cave during their time there.

00:34:21
Speaker 2: Mammoth Cave National Park was dedicated on July fet nineteen forty one. Although many of the caves that connected to the Mammoth Flint Cave system are now part of the park, there were still multiple other show caves operating in the area after the national park opened. Intense competition among these caves continued for about another two decades, and at that point most of the owners started trying to work with each other in a more collaborative way. According to a local news article from twenty twenty one, there are still eight privately owned show caves in the area. However, even though the Cave Wars ended, you can also still find signs that maybe reference Mammoth Cave but direct you to a more out of the way souvenir shop or something similar, rather than to the actual national park.

00:35:16
Speaker 1: Crystal Cave was one of the caves that became part of Mammoth Cave National Park, and the National Park Service cut off public access to Floyd Collins's coffin in nineteen eighty nine. Members of the Collins family asked for him to be respectfully buried, and now he is buried at Mammoth Cave Baptist Church. And that's the Cave Wars. Do you have some listener mail?

00:35:38
Speaker 2: I do I do it actually maybe has a little bit to do with geology, kind of like today. This is from Vicky, and Vicky wrote about the Lackey Fisser eruption episode. Vicky wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I just listened to your recent episodes on the Lackey Fisser and then the behind the scenes for that episode. I'm a longtime listener and recently came back from a week long vacation in Iceland. I too share your appreciation for Iceland. It's truly spectacular. There was so much information to take in on my trip, and unfortunately I may have missed some important pieces of history and facts that my guide shared with the group over the week, including perhaps the Locky Fisher. So I had a chuckle when, after halfway through most of the episode on the Locky Fisher, I realized that Kirkie Byer Cloister was in fact one of the towns I stayed in. Shout out to the Magma Hotel and that there is a shortened name for this hard to pronounce town, Cloister, So thank you for that. I really struggled with even attempting to pronounce the names of the town's waterfalls and geysers that I visited while there. I could also relate when Tracy mentioned how hard it is to pronounce Icelandic words, even after much practice. Before my trip, I tried to learn some basic Icelandic phrases, but ultimately didn't feel super confident about even attempting to say simple greetings and I Land, despite all the practice I did for the many months leading up to my trip. I hope you'll consider doing future episodes regarding Iceland and in particular the folklore and traditions Tracy. I also want to mention I was super excited when you mentioned the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts in a recent behind the scenes I live in northeast Massachusetts, and during the pandemic, once restrictions had been lifted, I actually took a many vacation to the Berkshires and state a couple of nights in Pittsfield. Vicky goes on to ask when we will be announcing our next podcast trip and sends pictures of a sweet cat called Abby, who Vicky lost about a year ago, and a picture of a cat mural from downtown Reykievic. Yeah, this cat mural from downtown Reykivic is fabulous.

00:37:50
Speaker 1: You accidentally have stumbled upon a thing I wanted to ask you about which I'll do and behind the scenes.

00:37:54
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, so yeah, thank you so much Vicky for these pictures. We have not announced our next podcast trip. We have in fact, not talked about what is happening next, for when or anything like that. I think we've been kind of just focus on the next thing, which is Iceland, and not the thing after that. So thank you so much Vicky for this email. If you would like to send us some notes about this or any other podcast or at history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app and wherever I'll do you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.