Interior of Cave-in-Rock
showing entire interior of cave and entrance to small upper cave
(From a drawing by J. Bernhard Alberts, made in 1916)
In March, 1766, John Jennings, a Philadelphia merchant, going down the Ohio with a cargo of goods for Fort de Chartres, Illinois, notes in his Journal that he stopped for an hour near “a large rock with a cave in it,” some twenty-five miles below the mouth of the Wabash River. The earliest record of a homeseeking pioneer who came to the Cave-in-Rock country and there began an overland trip into Illinois dates back to about 1780, when Captain Nathaniel Hull, of Massachusetts, appeared at what later became Ford’s Ferry. “He and several other young men,” writes Governor John Reynolds in his Pioneer History of Illinois, “descended the Ohio to a point near Ford’s Ferry on that river [for a while known as Hull’s Landing and later as Robin’s Ferry] and came across by land to Kaskaskia.... At this day the Indians were not hostile as afterwards, so that Hull and party escaped through the wilderness without injury.” Nor had any white man as yet practiced piracy on the lower Ohio.
Victor Collot, a French engineer, is one of the first writers who stopped at the Cave and published a brief description of it. He knew of its existence long before he arrived, for his book, A Journey in America, shows that he had planned to stop at the “Big Cave,” and did so in the summer of 1796 when he went down the river to New Orleans.
A few months later the place was visited by Andrew Ellicott, then on his way to Natchez for the purpose of determining the boundary line between the United States and Spain. An entry in his Journal, dated December 15, 1796, shows he “dined at the Great Cave ... one of the greatest natural curiosities on the river.”
On April 16, 1797, Francis Baily, the English astronomer, stopped there. His Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America contains a few pages on the “Big Cave.” Among other things he says, “its entrance was on a landing-place. It had somewhat the appearance of an immense oven. We entered it and found the sides very damp.... We beheld a number of names cut in the sides of the cave, which in this solitary place, and cut off as we were from society, gave us a degree of pleasure to look over.” Baily apparently heard of no outlaws during his short stay. This probably was due to the fact that his visit was made at a time when the Cave was very damp, as is frequently the case in spring. Had he appeared later, he might not have survived to tell of his interesting travels in America, for during the greater part of the year 1797 the place was occupied by the notorious Mason family.
Perrin du Lac, in his Travels through the two Louisianas, writes that he embarked at Pittsburgh, April 22, 1802, “in a pirogue thirty feet long and three feet broad” and that a few weeks later he stopped at the Cave. He says “it is considered one of the greatest natural curiosities in North America.”
The first detailed description of Cave-in-Rock ever printed, as far as now known, appeared in one of the earliest editions of Zadok Cramer’s The Ohio and Mississippi Navigator and was republished in the appendix of Journal of a Tour, 1805, by Thaddeus M. Harris without credit to Cramer.
Thomas Ashe, an unreliable English traveler, wrote an account of Cave-in-Rock shortly after the Cramer or the so-called Harris description was published, and at a time when reports of some of the early robberies that had been committed there were still in fresh circulation. His book entitled Travels in America performed in 1806, contains a chapter of fabrications headed “Cave in the Rock, Ohio Bank, September, 1806.”