The First Explorers, Thousands of Years Ago

Long before any European saw this cave, Native American people were walking its passages by torchlight. Archaeologists say indigenous explorers knew Mammoth Cave for around five thousand years. Carrying bundles of burning cane reed for light, they pushed deep into the dark.

They were not sightseeing. They were mining. By roughly twelve hundred years before the common era, they were scraping minerals from the cave walls, gypsum, mirabilite, and epsomite, using mussel shells they gathered from the nearby Green River.

The dry, still air of the cave preserved the evidence with astonishing care. Modern explorers have found the burnt stubs of their cane torches and even woven fiber sandals left behind in the cave. These were among the first cave explorers in human history, and they mapped these corridors with nothing but firelight and courage, generations before written record reached this valley.

Their work was only the beginning of the cave's story. In the eighteen forties and fifties, an enslaved guide named Stephen Bishop helped map the cave and named many of its features. Today more than four hundred twenty-six miles of passage have been surveyed, which makes Mammoth Cave the longest known cave system in the world, by more than one and a half times the length of the second longest, Ox Bel Ha in Mexico.

The national park was established in nineteen forty-one, and the cave was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in nineteen eighty-one.