GregBrick.org

 A Subterranean Anthology from the West Saint Paul Times

Copyright 2009 by Greg Brick

Old newspapers are a neglected gold mine of information containing an abundance of cave articles that have never been evaluated by cave historians. Based on my own experience researching Minnesota caves, I estimate that only one tenth of the relevant articles for this state are known. States elsewhere may have been more thoroughly researched. Of course, the story is quite different where the newspapers have adequate finding aids. The New York Times, for example, has a full electronic index covering the entire span of publication, making cave research easy and pleasurable. Most finding aids, however, are imperfect at best.

Then there are the sorts of scrapbooks you find at libraries, containing gleanings from several newspapers. You rarely know the conditions under which a scrapbook was originally compiled, however. What you get is determined by the idiosyncrasies of the compilers. Did they skip a few years? You never know.

Now for the blunt force approach: if you have reason to suspect that a particular newspaper will yield significant cave coverage, you may have to sit down at the microfilm reader and just tough it out. Some newspapers are easier and more fun to scan on microfilm than others. What makes the pre-twentieth century papers so tedious is the dense fine print and lack of photos or white space. Personally, after sitting at the microfilm reader for several hours I begin to suffer from “microfilm vertigo,” a sort of dizziness from watching the pages scroll past endlessly, leading thereafter to “microfilm migraine.” The countless variations of stories about murders, suicides, and advertisements for patent medicines becomes wearisome—not to mention those annoying microfilm “hairs” that conceal the lettering. It helps, in this regard, if you have interests in addition to caves, to carry you through the dry patches, as the cave articles often occur in clusters. Compensating for this is that early papers have fewer pages per issue and are often weeklies. Not to mention that if you do happen to find something really old, it could revolutionize the interpretation of a cave or region. Being able to see the whole newspaper then allows you to get background social history and make correlations with major events of the day, something not possible with scrapbooks, for example.

When scanning microfilms there’s also the question of your “resolution.” Are you just picking out the major headlines and going at such a pace that you’d only catch major photo spreads dealing with caves, or have you descended into the realm of fine print—no matter what section of the paper it occurs in?

On the other hand, it’s pertinent to ask what is the value of newspaper clippings at all? So often they contain grotesque errors and outright nonsense. Most people are familiar with the experience of seeing something for one’s self, then reading the next day’s coverage of that same event. “That’s not how it happened” is a common response. Likewise, if you’ve ever been misquoted by a reporter, it will have instilled a praiseworthy caution in your future interpretations of newsprint. In some cases, the coverage is so inaccurate that its only value is to serve as a lead, or starting point, for other, more trustworthy forms of documentation. Yet in other cases the clippings are all you have to go on. Russ Gurnee (1983) summed it up by saying, “Historical research using newspapers is an imperfect art at best. Many of the caves described never existed except in the mind and imagination of the person who told the tale…. Some of the caves exist, but are not recognizable because of the embellishments of the author.”

Now for a specific case. I spent several days going through the West Saint Paul Times (published from 1887 to 1938) on microfilm at the Minnesota History Center. Initially, I had hoped to document the early history of the cave-rich Mushroom Valley, once part of West St. Paul, Minnesota. I found little enough about that particular subject but there was a serendipitous wealth of entertaining references to caves elsewhere around the world. This bore out the experiences of another researcher, who wrote, “there is no rational way to locate all early newspaper accounts of a specific cave. They have to be discovered by mistake—in the course of looking for something else” (Sprague, 1973).

Selected clippings, some of them abridged, but with the original wording retained, are presented in chronological order below. Even though the coverage includes exchange material from other newspapers, it provides a good example of how obscure papers have something to contribute to spelean history. Beware, while some of the articles are factual, others are of the “News of the Weird” variety. So take a seat at the microfilm reader—the speleohistorian’s “microscope”!

REFERENCES

Russell Gurnee, 1983. Cave Clippings of the Nineteenth Century. Closter, NJ: R. H. Gurnee, Inc.

Stewart Seely Sprague, 1973. Newspapers: A Fugitive Source for Spelean History. Journal of Spelean History 6 (4): 107-110.

 

HOT SPRINGS OF COLORADO (October 13, 1888)

 

… Near the entrance to the canyon of the Grand, is a natural cave of hot vapor, called the sweating cave, having accommodations for stripping and dressing. This is a short order Turkish bath. The person to be sweated strips in an apartment and then passes through a narrow way in the rocks into the natural cavern at the base of the mountain, and the door is shut upon him, making the cavern tight. A small aperture at the top lets in a faint light through a glass. The heat and vapor are made by hot sulpho-saline springs in the bottom of the cavern. A floor is laid over these to stand on. A spring in a basin at the side of the cavern offers for a dash. Here the sweater stands in the hot air as long as he can—say ten or fifteen minutes, sweating for all a sweat is worth.—Cincinnati Commercial Gazette.

 

FLORIDA UNDERGROUND (December 7, 1889)

 

“Talking about adventures in strange places,” said J. S. M. Hodge, of Jonesville, as he settled himself down in a three legged chair in the office, “one year ago I had an experience that I shall not soon forget or repeat. In my neighborhood there are numbers of natural wells. These wells are round, and the walls are of rock. Some of these wells are very deep and others have no bottom.

            “One year ago my neighbor, Henry Turner, lost a calf, and after searching for it a week he decided that it had fallen in one of these unused wells and came to me for assistance. I told him that the calf was dead, but consented to go down the well. Descending to the depth of about forty feet I came to what I supposed was the bottom. Becoming accustomed to the darkness, I discovered a long, horizontal cave in the rock. The lost calf had a bell, and after listening I heard the tinkling far off in the distance. Moreover it appeared to be partly submerged in water. The hunt was growing exciting, but I could not enter that dark hole, peopled with snakes by the imagination, by myself. Calling to the top, I asked that another man come down with a lantern. My brother came down, and we started on our journey through the earth. We had to crawl, for the crevice was not more than three feet high. We had proceeded about 100 yards when suddenly we came to a large cavern, which could not be measured in the darkness. Just before us was a body of water into which the calf had fallen. We managed to throw a rope around it and pull it up, and then we got out of there with all possible haste. I had no inclination to explore further, and I shudder when I think of the possible danger that surrounded us in the earth.”

            These natural wells are among the wonders unexplained. It is believed by many that in ages past the ground sunk in, leaving these round holes in the solid rock. Mr. Hodge used the water from one of these wells for drinking. It is sixty feet deep, and the water is cold, clear and pure.—Gainesville Record.

 

SIBERIA HAS A SALT LAKE (September 2, 1893)

 

Evaporation Has Formed a Roof Under Which Travelers May Sail

 

At the first view it was a vast snow plain, surrounded by fields of ripening wheat, says a writer in the Geographical Magazine. The great salt lake at Obdorsk is nine miles wide and seventeen miles long, yet, except in a few places, it is solidly roofed over with a deposit of salt, which is getting thicker and thicker every year. Our guide, who is an old man, said that he could remember when the salt crystals first began to form upon the surface of the water. Year by year, owing to the evaporation of the water, the crystals became more numerous, and then caked together, until this great roof formed. In 1878 the water beneath this salt crystal roof found an underground outlet into the river Obi. This lowered the lake’s surface about three feet, leaving that distance between the water and the roof. Looking down through one of the openings made for the purpose in the roof, we saw a low-sided small boat. Our guide put us one at a time into the boat. We lay flat on our backs and looked up at the curiously beautiful salt ceiling overhead. We propelled the boat by pushing with our hands against the irregularities of the roof. The guide held a long rope attached to the boat to prevent our going too far and getting lost, a thing he said, it was easy to do.

            It was like a palace of enchantment, with the sun shining down through the salt crystals, the colors were so rich and wonderful. Many springs surround this lake. Their water flows over the roof and evaporates there, and thus continually adds to the thickness. After many years the springs will probably become choked with their own deposits, and then the whole will gradually become covered with earth, and so a great salt mine will be formed—a treasure for the Siberians hundreds of years to come.

 

A WONDERFUL CAVE (March 24, 1894)

 

The Thin Man Was an Easy Winner With This Story

 

“Speaking of caves,” said the thin man, with a large moth [sic] and ears that jutted far out over his shoulders, “I seen a cave once that beat any cave I ever heard of.”

            The drummer, who had himself told a very fair cave story, or at least one that he thought was very fair, nodded to the thin man not to wait, but to go on with his narrative.

            “It was in a range of mountains rising sharp out of the level,” continued the thin man, earnestly, and opened in the face of a cliff, pretty much as you have seen doors opening into rock spring houses. We had camped near the place, and we fixed torches and proceeded to go on an exploring expedition. Just before getting to the opening, that is about a quarter of a mile away, I noticed a couple of cattle going in, and thought it was mighty strange, and we went ahead fast to see what it meant. When we got well inside and had our torches burning, we found the finest white roof over our heads I ever seen, but no cattle. It was like polished crystal and only about six feet high. The place spread out big very close to the entrance, and while the roof was nearly white everywhere, the sides were mostly rocky and brown. Running off from the main roof [sic] of the cave was dozens of rooms or halls, and into a number of them we went for long distances, finding the roof always white and shiny and the walls dark and rocky. About a mile in we run into another big room, and in that we found the two cattle we had saw come in, and there were forty or fifty more, all of them licking away the walls in front, which here were not rocky, but white. We were in a narrow place and far enough away from the cattle not to scare them, and we hustled out of there in a hurry, for we didn’t want a stampede and a walkover for the cattle. Them cattle in there made us study a while when we got out to a safe place, and I chipped off a piece of what I thought was white quartz, but it was salt, and about as nice salt as I ever seen. Then we studied over that cave some more.

            “ ‘By gum, Bill,’ said I to my pardner, ‘this is a salt cave, and them cattle are here for salt.’

            “Bill was a college graduate, and knowed a good deal.

            “ ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I know it, and I know from the geological formation that this ain’t a natural cave, but an artificial one, and has been licked under this mountain and run off into all these rooms and halls, miles and miles of them, by countless cattle in countless years coming here to salt themselves. Don’t you see that the roof is only high enough to be out of reach of their tongues, and how slick they have licked it, and how they’ve kept going ahead where the rock doesn’t cut the salt out as it does on the sides of the cave?’

            “ ‘By gum, Bill,’ said I, ‘you’re right; but how many years do you calculate it took to do the job?’”

            The thin man gazed around on his audience inquiringly.

            “That was a poser for Bill,” resumed the thin man, “and if any of you gentlemen can answer it I’ll be obliged to you.”

            In the midst of a profound silence the drummer got up and walked out on the platform for more air, and the thin man waited for somebody to answer his question.—Detroit Free Press.

 

NATURAL ICEMAKING (January 19, 1895)

 

An Iowa Cave Where Ice Freezes Throughout the Summer

 

On the northeastern bank of the upper Iowa river, opposite the city of Decorah, Iowa, is a remarkable cave. During the warmer days of summer ice is formed on its sides and floor. The rest of the year, even when it is freezing outside, no ice is formed in the cave. During a visit to this cave last July the temperature was 31 degrees. The walls were covered with frost and there was probably half a ton of ice in the cave. In a few places where the water was slowly dripping icicles were being formed. From the entrance to the ice the distance was about ninety feet. The entrance was veiled with a cloud of mist. There was no perceptible current of air in the cave…. When this cave was discovered it was said to have been used by an Indian chief for a cold storage, in which he placed hot-headed warriors of nations to which he was hostile and, divesting them of their clothing, let them perish from the cold.—Milwaukee Journal.

 

A LOST RIVER IN GEORGIA (December 7, 1895)

 

Quite an interesting phenomenon is to be seen in connection with one of the big streams, the Ocilla creek, in Thomas county. After traversing in a southerly direction the central portion of the county, and supplying two large mills and cotton gins, Hancock’s and Eason’s, the latter four miles below the former, with water power and forming a large fish pond above each of these mills, it then, one mile below Eason’s mill, in the midst of the pine ridges, disappears into subterranean channels by which hordes of alligators, fish and turtles find exit to parts unknown. This place is known as Cone’s sink, and is one of the finest fishing grounds in Southern Georgia. It presents the appearance of beautiful connecting lakes for a distance through the inviting forests, and is a favorite resort for fishermen and those seeking recreation. The sinks are about four miles west of Boston.—Valdosta Times.

 

A SMUGGLERS’ CAVE (March 21, 1896)

 

A romantic smugglers’ cave has been found at St. Margaret’s, Dover. While a field was being plowed the ground gave way and disclosed a subterranean chamber, which is supposed to have belonged to a famous smuggler living in a neighboring wood at the beginning of this century. This part of the coast was a regular happy hunting ground for smugglers at that time.

 

FOUND THE CAVERN OF A MISER (July 11, 1896)

 

A party of boys were out berrying at the south side, near Hartford, recently, when, crossing a rock woodland, they came upon a small cavern between two hills. The mouth of this cavern was so small that they were obliged to crawl in on their hands and knees. When once inside it was found large enough to hold ten men. On looking around they found an old frying pan and kettle almost eaten up with rust, and also an old chair. After further investigation they found in the dirt two old Spanish coins bearing the dates of 1675 and 1690, and also another ancient coin, the date not distinguishable. This cavern was once inhabited by one John Frothingham, a miser, some forty years ago, who died there. All trace of the cavern in the woods had been lost until found by the boys.—Hartford Courant.

 

A WINDY WELL (February 13, 1897)

 

Arizona possesses some of the greatest natural wonders in the world, not the least of which is this phenomenon of a current of air issuing from or going into the bowels of the earth through sundry natural and artificial openings made in the earth’s crust…. Just the cause of this phenomenon no one has yet been able to determine, but it is supposed that there is an underground opening between the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, which cleaves the earth for more than a mile in depth, and the Sycamore Canyon, some eighty miles to the south of it…

 

WELLS AS BAROMETERS (June 26, 1897)

 

Facts were presented at a recent meeting of the Science club of the university of Wisconsin which tend to show that the surface of the ground water in a well is much more responsive to atmospheric changes than is the barometer; and in stormy weather, according to Prof. F. H. King, “the movements of the water surface are so complex and so short a period that a rapidly moving chronograph is required to separate them.” So, too, the rate of discharge of water from springs changes very greatly with variations in the pressure of the atmosphere. These facts suggest the scientific reasons for the use, which has sometimes been made in popular weather lore, of springs and wells in predicting storms.

 

WESTERN ICE CAVES (April 16, 1898)

 

At the foot of Cow Mountain, in Colorado, the most remarkable caverns have been found. There is a series of chambers of various sizes, the roofs hung with enormous icicles. The water from which these were frozen must have been very pure, as in some of the cases the reflection and refraction of light is truly wonderful, the glitter suggesting the finest diamonds. The chambers are connected by narrow alleyways, and at a point distant from the entrance there is a passage extremely narrow and inclined. This leads to a cavern some three hundred feet in extent, containing enormous quantities of ice, which has frozen in all sorts of quaint and grotesque figures. In the middle of this cavern there is a lake sixty-five feet long. It is quite deep, and the water is as clear as crystal and cold almost beyond belief. The lake appears to have no outlet, but there must be one, as the water never rises above a certain level. An effort is to be made to make a show place of this cavern and turn the vicinity to account as a pleasure resort. Certainly as a natural curiosity the place is well worth a visit.

 

A CURIOUS SALAMANDER (December 23, 1899)

 

Mr. Blackford writes from Washington, D.C., to Nature, of Aug. 24, giving an account of some strange discoveries in Texas. The United States fish commission bored an artesian well at its station, near San Marcos, Tex., and soon after the well was opened a number of living animals began coming up with the water. Four kinds of crustacea and a blind salamander, all of them new to science, were obtained. Two living specimens of the blind salamander were shipped by mail to the head office of the fish commission in Washington, where they excited great interest. Mr. Blackford believes that there is some great cavern or subterranean lake communicating with the artesian well.

 

BLIND FISH FROM MAMMOTH CAVE (November 24, 1900)

 

For the first time some blind fish from the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky have reached England alive and been placed in the London Zoological Gardens.

 

CAVE’S WAR SUPPLIES (February 23, 1901)

 

It has been averred that but for the saltpeter furnished by the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky and by some smaller limestone caverns, the United States would have been unable successfully to wage the war of 1812. Even during the civil war these cave supplies of saltpeter were largely utilized for making gunpowder. Recently the question of the origin of cave saltpeter has been discussed anew in the Journal of Geology, and W. H. Hess, dissenting from the view that the saltpeter deposits are due to the formation of guano by bats, holds that they have originated from the evaporation of water which, as it percolated through the roof of the cavern, absorbed nitrates from the soil.

 

BELONG TO PREHISTORIC RACE (November 26, 1904)

 

El Paso, Tex., Nov. 25—Miners have broken into a cavern containing two dozen mummies near Silver City, N. Mex. Buried with the mummies were stone weapons and instruments showing that they belonged to a prehistoric race. The persons were about five feet in height. Their legs were small and their arms long. The cave is about 100 feet below the surface of the earth.

 

NEW RIVAL FOR BIG CAVE (October 28, 1905)

 

Subterranean Channel Has Been Discovered in Barren County, Ky.

 

Louisville, Ky., Oct 27.—An immense subterranean channel, which promises to surpass in size and beauty the famous Mammoth cave, has been discovered near Glasgow Junction, Barren county. One arm already has been explored for a distance of seven miles. Further progress was stopped by a wide and swift river. It was not possible to tell the magnitude of this stream. The investigations have been conducted by Dr. Hazen and John Thompson. They are now engaged in building a boat with which to ferry the river.