to her posthumous efforts.

By the early nineteenth century European caves were
big tourist attractions, but hardly anyone visited the Mammoth,
“wonder of the world” or not. Nor was it then especially large,
as the name was a leftover from the miners, who boasted of mammoth yields
of guano. In 1838, Stephen Bishop's owner bought up the Cave. Stephen,
as (being a slave) he was invariably called, was by any standards a
remarkable man: self-educated in Latin and Greek, he became famous as
the “chief ruler” of his underground realm. He explored and
named much of the layout in his spare time, doubling the known map in
a year. The distinctive flavour of the Cave's names – half homespun American,
half classical – started with Stephen: the
River Styx, the Snowball Room, Little Bat Avenue, the Giant Dome. Stephen
found strangeblind fish, snakes, silent crickets, the remains of cave
bears (savage, playful creatures, five feet long and four high, which
became extinct at the end of the last Ice Age), centuries-old Indian
gypsum workings and ever more cave. His 1842 map, drafted entirely from
memory, was still in use forty years later.

After a brief period of misguided philanthropy in which
the caves were used as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, tourism
took over. By the twentieth century nearby caves were being hotly seized
and legal title endlessly challenged. The neighbouring chain, across
Houchins Valley in the Flint Ridge, opened the Great Onyx Cave in 1912.
By the 1920s, the Kentucky Cave Wars were in full swing. Rival owners
diverted tourists with fake policemen, employed stooges to heckle each
other's guided tours, burned down ticket huts, put out libellous and
forged