A SWINDLING MANAGEMENT.
You cannot do the cave in much less than four days, owing to the determination of the coach-driver and the keeper of the hotel to delay tourists as much as possible. I still recall my first experience, and the second and third have not been in any essential respect dissimilar. The train reached Cave City at twelve o’clock, but the vehicle that was to convey me to the vast cavern would not leave for more than two hours, this arrangement being entered into by interested parties to secure each passenger for dinner at the railway station inn.
The conveyance takes its departure very leisurely, and before you are fairly inside or outside, as the case may be, you are obliged to pay not only your fare to the cave, but your fare back, even if you have no intention of returning for a month. This ruffles most people, and impregnates them with the notion that the astuteness of negotiations in that neighborhood is not far removed from swindling—a notion apt to be strengthened as they go on. Arriving at the Mammoth Cave Hotel, a great, rambling, ill-kept, uncomfortable collection of frame buildings, of the kind of which travellers in the South cannot be ignorant, you are informed that you are too late to enter the cave on that day.
There are two routes—the long, and short; the former extending nine miles from the mouth of the cavern, and the latter three miles. The day following you can do either of these, but if you want to do both you must remain two days. There is no need of this, since a strong man, accustomed to exercise, can make the double subterranean journey in ten or twelve hours without difficulty. Were he to do so, however, the rustic Boniface would lose the price of one day’s board; and hence the tourist must be put to serious inconvenience and delay for merely mercenary reasons. Men frequently offer to pay twice or thrice the rate of the day’s board for the privilege of making the entire underground journey in a single day. This is refused, because it would fully expose the trick, and give an opportunity for victims to advertise the fraud.
You may grumble—that is the privilege of every free-born citizen—but you can’t help yourself. The public house employs the guides, and the guides will do nothing contrary to the annoying and cheating customs it has established. The hotel, the coachmen, and the guides, are in league one with the other, and as there is only one Mammoth Cave, and only one way of getting into it, if you are really determined to see it, you may growl and swear as much as you please, but you must conform to the rules that have been laid down for the private benefit of the little ring, and for your own disadvantage.
DISCOVERY OF THE CAVE.
A NARROW AND MISTAKEN POLICY.
The cave was accidentally discovered some seventy years ago by a hunter, and ten years later was worked for the purpose of procuring saltpetre; the company so engaged finding it unprofitable, and at last abandoning it to curiosity-seekers. The property belonged originally to a Dr. Croghan, who died some years since, leaving it to the heirs of the [General] Jessup estate. These heirs are so anxious to make money out of it, and so narrow at the same time, that they have adopted a penny-wise and pound-foolish policy. They will not lease the hotel for a period of more than five years, and, consequently, no lessee can be had who will make such improvements in the house and grounds as are needed. They are very fearful that a new entrance to the cave, beyond the limits of their real estate, will be discovered; and for this reason all visitors are forbidden to carry compasses, or make topographical observations upon the bearings or directions of the great natural tunnel. They have purchased, since 1860, some three thousand acres in the immediate vicinity of the cavern, from their apprehension that on the land which they so acquire another gateway might be found. They realize, I have been told, from fifteen thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars per annum from the fees (two dollars each for the short, and three dollars each for the long route) charged inflexibly to every tourist. They might make more than twice as much by putting up a good hotel, building a railway to Cave City, and dealing fairly with travellers. Numerous capitalists have tried in vain to buy the cave property; but its owners, or the executors, will not sell. They refuse themselves to do anything for the benefit of the public, even when their interest prompts, and they refuse to allow anybody else the desirable privilege. This cannot very long continue, however. Time removes hunkses as well as difficulties, and cures meanness by putting it under ground.
The region about the cave is very high,—four hundred feet above Cave City,—and is said to be superlatively salubrious. The neighborhood is very sparsely settled, but dwellers in it, according to popular report, are compelled to move away when they wish to die; and hence it happens that wealthy old uncles and disagreeable mothers-in-law are always informed that Edmonson County is one of the most unhealthy localities on this continent.
Game, such as quail, rabbits, wild turkey, and even deer, is abundant there, which, with the good fishing in the Green River, less than a mile distant from the public house, should recommend the vicinity to sportsmen, and would unquestionably, if the accommodations were what they ought to be. As it is, most visitors get so vexed with the obnoxious arrangements appertaining to the Cave that they hurry off after exploring it, and seldom go back. Even their memories of its grandeur are infected with the Little Peddlington spirit of its management, and the poetry of the place overlaid with the prose of its accompanying sordidness.