The Historic Entrance and the Bear Legend

There is a great dark mouth in the hillside near the Green River where cool air pours out even on the hottest summer day. This is the Historic Entrance, the natural opening people have walked through for thousands of years. The old settler legend says the first European to find it, around seventeen ninety-seven, was a hunter named Houchin who was chasing a wounded bear through the woods when the animal led him straight to this yawning cave mouth.

Historians treat the tale with caution, since the details of who exactly and exactly when do not all line up, but the story stuck to the place anyway. Just inside is the Rotunda, the first great chamber, an enormous circular room with a broken dome arching overhead. It was rooms like this, wide and long and seemingly endless, that earned the cave its name.

In the old sense of the word, mammoth simply meant huge, and that is what awed every early visitor who stood in that echoing space. From this single entrance, guides like Stephen Bishop launched the explorations that revealed the largest cave on Earth.