Wyandotte Caves: Eight Thousand Years Underground

The limestone hills along the Ohio River in southern Indiana hide one of the most used underground spaces in North America. Wyandotte Caves have drawn people inside for roughly eight thousand years.

Native Americans quarried chert here, the flint-like stone used to knap tools and arrowheads, and mined aragonite for pipes and ornaments. European settlers found the caves around seventeen ninety-eight and quickly recognized a different resource: saltpeter, a key ingredient in gunpowder. During the War of eighteen twelve, the caves supplied the American army, and old wooden vats used to leach the mineral from cave sediment are still visible.

The cave system holds about nine miles of surveyed passages, and in nineteen sixty-four explorers found the remains of a prehistoric giant short-faced bear inside, adding a paleontological chapter to an already layered story.