In July, 1807, Christian Schultz, then a young man, started from Pittsburgh down the Ohio in a flatboat. He arrived at “The Cave in the Rock” about October 1, continued his trip to New Orleans, and returned, via ship, to New York. In his Travels on an Inland Voyage, he devotes a few pages to the Cave, saying, among other things:
“It is a very curious cavern.... I could not help observing what a very convenient situation this would be for a hermit, or for a convent of monks.... I have no doubt that it has been the dwelling of some person or persons, as the marks of smoke and likewise some wooden hooks affixed to the walls sufficiently prove. Formerly, perhaps, it was inhabited by Indians; but since, with more probability, by a gang of that banditti, headed by Mason and others, who, a few years ago, infested this part of the country and committed a great number of robberies and murders....”
Fortesque Cuming, an unprejudiced Englishman, wrote in his Tour to the Western Country that the Cave is “one of the finest grottoes or caverns I have ever seen.” This interesting traveler, in January, 1807, proceeded to Maysville, Kentucky, by boat, and from there made horseback trips to central Kentucky and Ohio. Returning to Pittsburgh, he started, on May 7, down the Ohio in a flatboat for New Orleans. From old Bruinsburg, a few miles above Natchez, he visited old Greenville. In this town about three years before, one of the Cave-in-Rock outlaws had been convicted under unusual circumstances and hanged and buried in an unusual manner. When traveling by boat Cuming always carried a few skiffs in order to get ashore more easily. On May 18, 1807, a few minutes after passing the head of Cave-in-Rock Island, he landed at what is known as Cave Spring, a cave-like opening a few hundred yards above Cave-in-Rock from which a strong spring of water constantly flows. This crevice in Cave-in-Rock bluff is about nine feet high, three feet wide, and extends back some forty feet. Cuming at first mistook it for the famous Cave, as has been done by more than one traveler since his day. In his sketch pertaining to his visit to Cave-in-Rock he writes:
“Rowing along shore [below Cave Spring] with the skiff, we were soon undeceived as to that’s being the Rocking Cave, as a third of a mile lower down, one of the finest grottoes or caverns I have ever seen opened suddenly to view, resembling the choir of a large church as we looked directly into it. We landed immediately under it and entered it. It is natural, but it is evidently improved by art in the cutting of an entrance three feet wide through the rock in the very center, leaving a projection on each hand, excavated above to the whole breadth of the cavern, the projections resembling galleries.... It is crowned by large cedars, and black and white oaks, some of which impend over, and several beautiful shrubs and flowers, particularly very rich columbines, are thickly scattered all around the entrance.... Standing on the outside, the appearance of some of the company at the inner end of the cave was truly picturesque, they being diminished on the eye to half their size, and removed to three times their real distance.
“There is a perpendicular rocky bluff just opposite the lower end of Cave Island, about two hundred yards above the Cave, where the river narrows to less than half a mile wide, forming a fine situation for fortification.”
Thomas Nuttall probably was the last distinguished traveler who came down the Ohio in a flatboat and commented on the Cave. In his Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory he states that he and his party left Shawneetown December 14, 1818. After floating a short distance they came up with three other flatboats and, lashing them together, proceeded upon an all-night journey. He further comments: “The river is here very wide and magnificent and chequered with many islands. The banks of Battery Rock, Rock-in-Cave, and other places are bold and rocky with bordering cliffs. The Occidental wilderness appears to here retain its primeval solitude; its gloomy forests are yet unbroken by the hand of man; they are only penetrated by the wandering hunter and the roaming savage.”
The early western travelers already cited, and a number of their contemporaries and followers who saw the Cave, published descriptions or references that agree in the main, but each, in his own way, was evidently more impressed by certain of its various features than were some of the others who visited the place. A few speculated upon it as an Indian temple of prehistoric times. Some commented upon it from a geological standpoint. A number were especially interested in the names they found carved on the walls; some in the trees that grew around the opening. Others dwelt upon it as a rendezvous of outlaws.
For what various purposes the Cave may have been used in prehistoric times by Mound-builders and Indians, or even Cave Dwellers, is a question for archaeologists and ethnologists. There is far less physical evidence to indicate a previous presence of robbers and counterfeiters than there is to prove that the place was inhabited by prehistoric man. A rusty home-made dagger blade and a part of a counterfeiter’s mold are the only relics that point toward the outlaw occupancy. On the other hand, five well-defined mound sites in the level fields above Cave-in-Rock bluff, and the many flint and stone implements picked up during the past century in and near the Cave indicate beyond doubt the former presence of Indians and Mound-builders. In April, 1918, Robert L. Yeakey, while spading his garden on this bluff, unearthed a carved stone image, six inches high and four inches wide, weighing two pounds, six ounces, representing a man in squatting position. The probability that the image is an idol gives strength to the inference that the Cave was used as a temple some time in the prehistoric past.
The mounds are additional evidence to this effect. These were opened many years ago and have since been plowed over often. Each contained, it is said, from five to ten human skeletons. The bodies had been placed in a stone-walled sepulcher that was covered with flags of stone a few inches thick, over which a circular mound of earth was thrown. The fact that each of these mounds contained a number of skeletons, apparently placed there at one time, leads many to the conclusion that a battle, or battles, must have been fought in or near the Cave and that all, or some, of the dead were buried together. Scientists advance a plausible explanation of this: “We know not if these burials indicate famine, pestilence, war, or unholy sacrifice. We can only conjecture that they were not graves of persons who had died a natural death.” Because of the Cave’s temple-like form and its proximity to these old mounds, it appears more probable that they were erected in connection with the ceremony of “unholy sacrifice” than for any of the three other suggested causes.
The Harris description of the Cave, written about 1803, refers to it as “the habitation of the Great Spirit.” Some thirty years later, Edmund Flagg, in The Far West, written after his visit to “Rock-Inn-Cave,” says: “Like all other curiosities of Nature, this cavern was, by the Indian tribes, deemed the residence of a Manito, or spirit, evil or propitious, concerning whom many a wild legend yet lives among their simple-hearted posterity. They never pass the dwelling place of the divinity without discharging their guns (an ordinary mark of respect) or making some other offering propitiatory of his favor.”