"Over the Border-Land": Race and Authority in Mammoth Cave

In his account of a visit to the Mammoth Cave in south-central Kentucky, published in the travelogue Health Trip to the Tropics (1853), Nathaniel Parker Willis struggles to describe the interior of the cave:

I have no intention of giving you a detailed description of the cave. In the language of Appleton's Guide-Book, 'it is said to contain 226 avenues, 47 domes, numerous rivers, 8 cataracts, and 23 pits,' and [my tour guide] Stephen estimates the aggregate length of the different corridors that branch off at the sides… at several hundred miles.…Every eighth of a mile has some miracle which it would take a newspaper column to describe.…I think I shall try, mainly, to convey to you the impression which the visit to the cave made upon me.

Willis was not the first tourist who strained to accurately depict this popular antebellum attraction. Two years before him, another tourist wrote in a letter to a friend, "I have described many things in my life, with, I believe, some force and capacity, but were you to offer me the world, I could not…describe what I have seen in the monarch of caves." Many tourists could describe the site only through metaphor and simile, defining sections of the cave as "rocks…like the mighty waves of the Red Sea" or a chamber "resembling a cathedral choir." Throughout his travelogue, Willis consistently refers to the guidebook genre for more accurate, authoritative details. Where firsthand experience failed in the nineteenth century, the guidebook was always there to provide codified descriptions.¹

Developed as a saltpeter mine early in the nineteenth century, Mammoth Cave was opened to tourists after the War of 1812. While the initial visitors were primarily Kentucky locals, tourists journeying along the American Grand Tour increasingly traveled south as part of their trip, adding Mammoth Cave to their itineraries. By the 1830s, the cave had a sizeable tourist infrastructure that accommodated this influx of new travelers. It boasted stagecoach routes from nearby cities, a spacious hotel, nearby taverns, and guided tours. Along with this physical infrastructure, print culture publicized the cave. Authors and artists from the North and the South published travelogues, fiction, poetry, and sketches describing their experiences. In these texts, authors constantly expressed inability to describe the site accurately. What was so difficult to explain? What made this site more obscure than any other?²

By November 1856, when this illustration was published in Ballou's Pictorial, a Boston periodical, Mammoth Cave had become an emblematic image of Kentucky. filson historical society

These tourists' difficulties demonstrate that Mammoth Cave fit within the aesthetic used to describe many other antebellum tourist sites. Part of the antebellum formula for describing a sublime site like Mammoth Cave was the declaration of one's inability to express that very sublimity. For example, antebellum tourists often depicted Niagara Falls as a site impossible to describe accurately because of its overwhelming grandeur. As Catherine Sedgwick wrote in her children's book about a journey to the falls, "we hope our young readers do not think us so presumptuous as to attempt to give them a description of the Falls of Niagara; one of the sublimest spectacles with which this fair earth is embellished." Similarly, John Croghan, the one-time proprietor of Mammoth Cave, wrote of the site in 1841, "No language can convey an idea of the sublimity of this spot." Like Niagara Falls and other such locations, Mammoth Cave offered tourists an encounter with the profound, the stupefying.³

Yet while the sublimity of Mammoth Cave was typical, Willis's and others' struggles to describe the site also reveal something unique. As a tourist attraction existing completely underground, shrouded in darkness, Mammoth Cave resisted the comparatively easy aesthetic codification of other tourist sites. Rather than a dramatic waterfall or sweeping panoramic vista, it was defined by its nothingness, its emptiness. Authors described it as a space of "hole[s]" and "slippery abysses," a site of "thick darkness." An unsettling area of disorienting shadow...